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| Steve Allen • Movies/TV • Music | ||||||||
 The
1980s and '90s have been the busiest in the more than 50-year career
of Steve Allen, who in 1986 was inducted into the TV Academy's Hall
of Fame. In the '50s and '60s, when involved with weekly or nightly
TV series, his extraneous activities were necessarily limited. Today,
although he continues to appear as a guest on network and syndication
programs, Allen now finds more time to write books, star in occasional
dramatic shows, play major concerts, legitimate theatres, and nightclubs
around the country, compose more songs and record more albums. During
the 1980's, Allen starred in two limited prime-time series for NBC
— The Big Show and The Steve Allen Comedy Hour — produced the fourth
season of his Emmy and Peabody award-winning Meeting of Minds for
PBS, and garnered critical acclaim for his hosting of the 32nd annual
Emmy Awards Show, stepping in at the last minute during an ongoing
SAG-AFTRA strike (and contributing his fee to the unions' strike
fund). In New York, his comedy musical Seymour Glick is Alive But
Sick was greeted with critical raves during its limited five-week
stand at the St. Regis Hotel. Throughout '80s and '90s, Allen has
turned out 27 new books bringing his total to 53 published works.
Click here for new titles during this period. The multi-talented
comedian, writer, composer, lyricist, actor, concert artist, lecturer
(ad infinitum) is a tall (6'3"), 200-pound man, married for
44 years to the beautiful and versatile actress Jayne Meadows. They
have lived for more than 40 years in a comfortable hillside house
overlooking the San Fernando Valley. Frequent visitors are their
son, Bill, former president of MTM Television in Hollywood, and Steve's
three sons by his first marriage: Steve Jr., a doctor in Ithaca,
New York; Brian, a real estate executive in Portland; and David,
a songwriter in San Francisco. (Allen's eight-year marriage to the
late Dorothy Goodman, whom he met while attending Arizona State Teacher's
College, ended in divorce in 1952.) Steve's favorite role in life
is Grandpa, one he gets considerable practice playing as he has 12
grandchildren. Allen's clear and open mind enable him to move lightly
from the most complex subjects to nutty comedy. He uses it on a 24-hour-a-day
schedule, finding ideas literally while waking and sleeping. Always
ready to extract them, Allen has small tape-recorders everywhere:
in his pockets, in the bathroom, by his bed, in his car. This system
supplies the raw material for the numerous Allen activities. "I'm
always busy," he notes, "but always doing things I enjoy.
I rarely occupy myself with things that bug me. I'm very fortunate
in that not many of us are allowed to live for kicks and get paid
for it." But it is sometimes difficult for the observer to get
the man in focus. Allen is, for example, a television comedian of
nearly 50 years' standing who has written a scholarly treatise on
migratory farm labor titled The Ground is our Table, which sold over
25,000 copies. He recounts white-collar crime in Ripoff: The Corruption
that Plagues America. Steve Allen, the actor who starred in Universal's
The Benny Goodman Story, is the same man whose poems have appeared
in Atlantic Monthly and Saturday Review, and who has had two books
of poetry published. Steve Allen, the composer of more than 7,900
songs, is the same man who wrote the popular novel Not All of Your
Laughter, Not all of Your Tears. Allen, the lyricist of such popular
songs as "South Rampart Street Parade," "Picnic," "Gravy
Waltz," "Mary Hartman-Mary Hartman" and "This
Could be the Start of Something Big," also starred on the Broadway
stage in The Pink Elephant. Steve Allen, the author of 53 published
books, ranging in subject matter from poetry through short stories,
humor, autobiography and politics, is also the composer and lyricist
of the stage musical Sophie, about the late Sophie Tucker; and, in
1986, he composed the score for the CBS-TV version of Alice in Wonderland.
Steve Allen is the composer of the background score of the MGM film,
A Man Called Dagger, and yet the same man who wrote and produced
an award-winning TV documentary on organized crime. As Allen's good
friend Andy Williams says, "Steve does so many things, he's
the only man I know who's listed on every one of the Yellow Pages." Steve's
taste for both high and lowbrow comedy comes naturally — his mother
was the popular vaudeville comedienne Belle Montrose. (His father,
Billy Allen, Belle's straightman, died before Steve was two.) Though
he was raised in and around show business, traveling from city to
city, he would usually wind up in Chicago, the home of his mother's
Irish-Catholic, lower-middle-class family whose humor Steve describes
as "sarcastic, volatile, sometimes disparaging, but very funny." Steve
was later to write a semi-autobiographical drama based on reminiscences
of his early childhood. the Wake had its world premiere at the Masquers
Theatre in Hollywood during the Fall of 1971. In 1978, The Wake enjoyed
a successful run on the Eastern theatre circuit, with Allen himself
in one of the starring roles. It garnered the acclaim of both critics
and the public, and was nominated by the Los Angeles TV Critics Circle
in Best Play category. The Wake was produced, in 1991, by a theatrical
company in Milwaukee, and in 1992 completed a successful run at the
Celtic Arts Center in Los Angeles. Steve also adapted the story to
novel form, which was published by Doubleday. |
Maude Adams |
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