Clark, Bobby (16 June 1888–12 February 1960), clown, was born Robert Edwin Clark in a church rectory (his grandfather was the church sexton) in Springfield, Ohio, the son of Victor Brown Clark, a railroad conductor, and Alice Marilla Sneed. His father died when Bobby was six. As a young boy Clark sang in the church choir and played the bugle. His fascination with outlandish costumes, which became one of his theatrical trademarks, was apparent at an early age. When he was in the fourth grade Bobby met Paul McCullough, four years his senior, and a close friendship was formed that lasted over thirty-five years. The two boys soon put together a bugling and tumbling act that they performed at the local YMCA. Clark and McCullough’s act was received so favorably by the residents of the area that, at the ages of seventeen and twenty-one, respectively, they decided to embark upon a career in show business. They began to place advertisements in various theatrical publications. The response was favorable and Clark and McCullough, as they now called themselves, were hired by a minstrel troupe as tumblers, buglers, and handymen, with a combined weekly salary of twenty-five dollars. They were on their way....
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Clark, Bobby (16 June 1888–12 February 1960), clown
Charles W. Stein
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Errol, Leon (1881-1951), stage, vaudeville, and screen comedian
Stephen M. Archer
Errol, Leon (03 July 1881–12 October 1951), stage, vaudeville, and screen comedian, was born in Sydney, Australia, the son of Joseph Sims-Errol and Elizabeth Adams. He was educated at St. Joseph’s College and Sydney University, where he took premedical courses in preparation for becoming a physician. An early propensity for comedy, however, stimulated Errol to write, direct, and appear in comedy revues produced by college groups. His parents, upon seeing him in a college operetta, capitulated to his desire to pursue acting as a profession. Errol dropped out of school to make his professional debut in 1896 at the Standard Theatre in Sydney, playing vaudeville. For the next decade he toured Australia, playing everything from Romeo to Macduff to low comedy. As he later said, “whatever success I’ve had in comedy I owe to my training in tragedy. In fact, you can’t play low comedy at all without an understanding of tragedy.”...
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Fay, Frank (1897-1961), comedian and master of ceremonies
William Stephenson
Fay, Frank (17 November 1897–25 September 1961), comedian and master of ceremonies, was born Francis Anthony Fay in San Francisco, California, the son of William Fay and Molly Tynan, actors. He was carried on stage in Quo Vadis? (1901) and briefly had a role in ...
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Fields, W. C. (1880-1946), comedian in vaudeville, film, and radio
Joseph Boskin
Fields, W. C. (29 January 1880–25 December 1946), comedian in vaudeville, film, and radio, was born William Claude Dukenfield in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the eldest son of James Dukenfield, an Englishman, and Kate Felton of Philadelphia. (A number of different dates have been reported for Fields’s birth; the one given here is the most widely accepted.) His background was working-class poor. Fields’s earliest recollections revolved around a sense of deprivation that despite his later affluence and popularity constantly gnawed at him. He always suffered from the knowledge of poverty and once wrote: “I was the oldest child. We were all very poor, but I was poor first.” In his early years, especially after separating from his family, Fields often engaged in petty thievery and scams, which occasionally landed him in jail. His fear of being penniless, an anxiety heightened by the stock market crash of 1929, led him to deposit his earnings under various pseudonymous accounts in different banks around the country, some of which have never been located. In contractual negotiations with small-town theater managers as well as with Broadway impresarios, Fields was known as an especially hard bargainer, even after becoming one of the highest paid performers in the business....
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Fields, W. C. (1880-1946)
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Ford, Whitey (1901-1986), vaudeville and country musician and comedian
Patrick Joseph O’Connor
Ford, Whitey (12 May 1901–20 June 1986), vaudeville and country musician and comedian, also known as the Duke of Paducah, was born in DeSoto, Missouri, fifty miles from St. Louis. The names and occupations of his parents are unknown. When he was one year old his mother died, and he was sent to Little Rock, Arkansas, to be reared by a grandmother. Ford attended Peabody Grammar School, acting in school plays and performing in talent shows. He ran away at age seventeen to join the navy during World War I and served four years. During this time he practiced on the tenor banjo, at that time a competitor with the guitar, until he became an accomplished performer. ...
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Holtz, Lou (1893-1980), vaudevillian and ethnic comedian
James Fisher
Holtz, Lou (11 April 1893–22 September 1980), vaudevillian and ethnic comedian, was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Asher Holtz and Olga Levine. He began his theatrical career in his early teens singing in roadhouses in the San Francisco area. As he later recalled it, “That town had the greatest entertainers I’ve ever seen.” Holtz played on a few Orpheum vaudeville bills with ...
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Howard, Willie (1886-1949), theatrical performer
Charles W. Stein
Howard, Willie (13 April 1886–12 January 1949), theatrical performer, was born William Lefkowitz in Neustadt, Germany, the son of the Reverend Leopold Lefkowitz, a cantor, and Pauline Glass. In 1886 the family emigrated to the United States, settling in Harlem, New York City. Howard was educated in the New York City public schools. Expelled from school in 1897 for telling jokes, he decided to follow in the footsteps of his older brother Eugene and pursue a career on the stage. Owing to his great comic talent, Howard was soon picking up nickels and dimes clowning and singing his way from one end of the city to the other. He obtained his first regular job at the age of fourteen, as a boy soprano for ...
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Jessel, George (1898-1981), entertainer
Charles W. Carey Jr.
Jessel, George (03 April 1898–24 May 1981), entertainer, was born George Albert Jessel in New York City, the son of Joseph Aaron Jessel, a playwright and traveling salesman, and Charlotte Schwartz. He began his singing career when he was nine years old by serenading customers in his maternal grandfather’s tailor shop. Later that year, using the stage name “McKinley,” he began singing baritone with the Imperial Trio at a Harlem theater where his mother worked as a ticket-taker and soon was appearing solo as Little Georgie Jessel. After his father died in 1908, he cut short his formal education after only six months to join Gus Edwards’s School Boys and Girls, a traveling vaudeville troupe. He toured with a number of Edwards’s shows until 1914, when his voice changed and he lost his boyish appeal, whereupon he went to England to perform as a singer and comedian for the next three years....
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Langdon, Harry Philmore (15 June 1884–22 December 1944), vaudeville and motion picture comedian
Donald W. McCaffrey
Langdon, Harry Philmore (15 June 1884–22 December 1944), vaudeville and motion picture comedian, was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, the son of William Wiley Langdon and Levina Lookenbill, both of whom worked for the Salvation Army, an occupation that left the family in a state of poverty almost on the level of the indigents they helped. As a child Harry Langdon had little formal education, spending most of his time taking odd jobs, selling papers, and running errands. In his teens he entered the world of show business, participating in many amateur nights on the local vaudeville stage of the Doheney Theater in his hometown. At the age of twelve Langdon displayed some of the pantomime skills that would develop as the quintessence of his humorous character, and he attempted to be a magician and a ventriloquist. However, he was most adept as a comedian. Mental and physical ineptitude provided the core of a routine that won favor with audiences as early as 1896, thirty years before Langdon became a leading actor for the studios of the producer ...
