Henry Morgan (humorist)

Henry Morgan (born Henry Lerner Van Ost Jr.; March 31, 1915 – May 19, 1994) was an American humorist. He first became familiar to radio audiences in the 1930s and 1940s as a barbed but often self-deprecating satirist; in the 1950s and later, he was a regular and cantankerous panelist on the game show "I've Got a Secret" as well as other game and talk shows. Morgan was a second cousin of Broadway lyricist and librettist Alan Jay Lerner.
Radio.
Morgan began his radio career as a page at New York City station WMCA in 1932, after which he held a number of obscure radio jobs, including announcing. He strenuously objected to the professional name "Morgan" but was told that his birth name of Van Ost was exotic and difficult to pronounce, despite the fame of successful announcers Harry von Zell and Westbrook Van Voorhis. This began a long history of Morgan's arguments with executives.
In 1940, Morgan was offered a daily 15-minute comedy series on Mutual Broadcasting System's flagship station WOR, which he opened almost invariably with "Good evening, anybody; here's Morgan."
In his memoir, "Here's Morgan" (1994), Morgan wrote that he devised his introduction as a dig at popular singer Kate Smith, who "...started "her" show with a condescending, 'Hello, everybody.' I, on the other hand, was happy if "any"body listened in." He mixed in barbed ad-libs, satirizing daily life's foibles, with novelty records, including those of Spike Jones. Morgan stated that Jones sent him his newest records in advance of market dates because he played them so often.
Morgan appeared in the December 1944 CBS Radio original broadcast of Norman Corwin's play "The Plot to Overthrow Christmas", taking several minor roles including that of the narrator, Ivan the Terrible and Simon Legree. He repeated his performance in the December 1944 production of the play.
Morgan targeted his sponsors freely. One early sponsor, Adler Shoe Stores, came close to canceling its account after Morgan made references to "Old Man Adler" on the air; the chain changed its mind after business spiked upward, with many new patrons asking to meet Old Man Adler. Morgan had to read an Adler commercial heralding the new fall line of colors; he thought the colors were dreadful, and said he wouldn't wear them to a dogfight, but perhaps the listeners would like them. Old Man Adler demanded a retraction on the air and Morgan obliged: "I "would" wear them to a dogfight." He later recalled, "It made him happy."
Morgan moved to ABC in a half-hour weekly format that allowed him more room to develop and expand his topical, often ad-libbed satires, hitting popular magazines, soap operas, schools, the BBC, baseball, summer resorts, government snooping and landlords. His usual sign-off was "Morgan'll be here on the same corner in front of the cigar store next week."
He continued to target sponsors whose advertising copy rankled him. He is alleged to have said of his sponsor's Oh Henry! candy bar (after exhorting listeners to try one), "Eat two, and your teeth will fall out." When Eversharp sponsored his show to promote their pens and Schick injector razor blades, Morgan said during a show satirizing American schools: "They're educational. Try one. That'll teach you." He also altered the company's Schick injector blade slogan "Push-pull, click-click" to "Push-pull, nick-nick." Eversharp finally dropped him in December 1947, as radio historian John Dunning related in "On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio", citing what the company called "flabby material," to which Morgan—picked up promptly by Rayve Shampoo—replied on the air, "It's not my show, it's their razor."
Life Savers candy, another early Morgan sponsor, dropped him after he accused them of fraud for hiding the holes in their famous candy. "I claimed that if the manufacturer would give me all those centers," Morgan remembered later, "I would market them as Morgan's Mint Middles and say no more about it." Morgan described his "mint middles" flavors as "cement, asphalt and asbestos." However, Morgan enjoyed a last laugh of a sort: ABC had been founded by Life Savers chief Edward Noble—who had bought and renamed NBC Blue as ABC after NBC was forced to sell the Blue Network following a federal anti-trust ruling.
"The Henry Morgan Show" received a Peabody Award Special Citation of honor for 1946.
ABC afforded Morgan his first exposure on television as host of a low-key variety series, "On The Corner", produced at affiliate station WFIL-TV in Philadelphia (ABC's New York station and production center was still under construction) and aired on the fledgling TV network as a summer series in 1948. True to his iconoclasm, he satirized his sponsors during the short run of that show as he had often done on radio.
Morgan's friend Ed Herlihy, a veteran radio announcer, remembered him to radio historian Gerald Nachman (in "Raised on Radio"): "He was ahead of his time, but he was also hurt by his own disposition. He was very difficult. He was so brilliant that he'd get exasperated and he'd sulk. He was a great mind who never achieved the success he should have." Nachman wrote of Morgan that he was radio's "first true rebel because — like many comics who go for the jugular, from Lenny Bruce to Roseanne Barr — he didn't know when to quit."
Morgan's admirers included authors Robert Benchley and James Thurber, fellow radio humorists Fred Allen, Jack Benny and Fanny Brice, future "Today Show" host Dave Garroway and Red Skelton. Morgan claimed Allen as a primary influence; Allen often had Morgan as a guest on his own radio hit, including the final "Fred Allen Show" in 1949, in a sketch that also featured Jack Benny. ("If Fred Allen bit the hand that fed him," Nachman wrote, "Henry Morgan tried to bite off the whole arm.") Morgan's byline appeared in three 1950s issues of "Mad" magazine.
Another supporter was Arnold Stang, who worked as one of Morgan's second bananas on the ABC shows and was known later as the voice of Hanna-Barbera's "Top Cat". "He was a masochist, a neurotic man," Stang told Nachman about his former boss. "When things were going well for him, he would do something to destroy himself. He just couldn't deal with success. He'd had an unhappy childhood that warped him a little and gave him a sour outlook on life. He had no close friends." Stang also claimed that Morgan's first wife "kept him deeply in debt and refused to give him a divorce", though the divorce did occur and decades later, Morgan remarried.
Brief blacklisting.
Morgan was briefly blacklisted after his name appeared in the infamous anti-communist pamphlet "Red Channels". Morgan's connections with communism were dubious at best. Nachman noted that Morgan's listing sprang from his former wife's leftist affiliations, as Morgan himself confirmed in his memoir:
Morgan married Isobel Gibb on August 17, 1946 in Las Vegas. By 1948, they were separated. During an appearance on "Late Night with David Letterman" in 1982, Morgan told Letterman that Gibb was still trying to sue him for more money.
Morgan revealed in his memoir that one of his cousins had been a Communist Party member until the Hitler-Stalin Pact caused him to break with the party, and that this cousin had told investigators that Morgan had not been a party member. The cousin had decided to cooperate closely with investigators "when he learned that his agent, a Party member, had refused to accept assignments for him; his doctor, another Red, knowing of (his) bad heart, had recommended that he play tennis. The Party tried to rape him. It was enough to ruin his faith, it was. He decided to kill them, that was all." Morgan was cleared and he resumed his broadcasting career.
"So This Is New York" and early TV shows.
Morgan made one film as a lead actor, producer Stanley Kramer's sophisticated comedy "So This Is New York" (1948), which also featured Arnold Stang and was loosely based upon Ring Lardner's 1920 novel "The Big Town". Though Morgan and the film received favorable critical reviews, it was not as well received by the public as his radio and later television work.
In 1948, the fledgling ABC Television Network put Morgan on the air with "On the Corner", which lasted for five weeks. In 1949, NBC television gave him his own show, "The Henry Morgan Show". In 1951, Morgan had a short-lived TV show on NBC, "Henry Morgan's Great Talent Hunt", which replaced the NBC variety series "Versatile Varieties", running from January 26 to June 1, 1951. The show started out as a take-off on "The Original Amateur Hour", and featured Kaye Ballard (in her TV debut), Art Carney, Pert Kelton and Arnold Stang as Gerard, who supposedly recruited the "talent" for Morgan.
On April 20, NBC changed the show's title and format to "The Henry Morgan Show", a comedy-variety show with singers Dorothy Claire and Dorothy Jarnac providing musical numbers between the comedy sketches.
Morgan also appeared as Brooklyn assistant district attorney Burton Turkus in the gangster film "Murder, Inc." (1960) alongside Stuart Whitman, May Britt and Peter Falk. A year earlier, he hosted the short-lived syndicated television program "Henry Morgan and Company", which AllMovie has identified as a precursor to David Letterman's style of irreverent television.
Morgan's "Secret".
Morgan's longest-lasting television image began in June 1952 when he was invited to join CBS' "I've Got a Secret", produced by game-show giants Mark Goodson and Bill Todman. Morgan's tenure on the show was marked by his periodic sarcastic complaints about the working conditions. Morgan's mordant wit played well against the upbeat personalities of the other panelists, and producer Allan Sherman would deliberately stage elaborate "secrets" involving Morgan personally. On one occasion in 1958, after Sherman had left Morgan short on material and with several minutes left to fill, Morgan went on an extended rant against Sherman; Sherman was fired almost immediately thereafter. On various occasions, Morgan was:
Morgan stayed with the show for its original 14-season run and rejoined it when it was revived twice: in syndication in 1972, and on CBS once more for a brief 1976 summer run.
On and off and on the air.
Morgan continued radio appearances, most often on the NBC weekend show "NBC Monitor" (1955–70), which also afforded final airings to longtime radio favorites "Fibber McGee and Molly", until co-star Marian Jordan's death, as well as appearing as a guest panelist on other game shows produced by the Goodson-Todman team, including "What's My Line?", "To Tell the Truth" and "The Match Game". Morgan also took a turn hosting a radio quiz show, "Sez Who", in 1959; the quiz involved guessing the famous voices making memorable comments that had been recorded over the years.
Morgan had three bylines in "Mad" magazine in 1957-58, during the period when the magazine was adapting work from humorists such as Bob and Ray, Ernie Kovacs and Sid Caesar. During the early 1950's, he also wrote a weekly humor column for the New York Post. Morgan was occasionally seen on the legendary weekly news satire "That Was The Week That Was" in 1964–65. Also in the 1960s, he made numerous appearances in the early years of "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" and became a regular cast member of the short-lived but respected James Thurber-based comedy series "My World and Welcome to It" in 1969. He was also a contestant on a 1963 edition of "To Tell the Truth", in which he successfully fooled the panelists into thinking he was former Polish spy-turned-author Pawel Monat.
During the 1970s, Morgan wrote humorous commentaries for national magazines. His radio career gained an early-1980s revival in his native New York City, thanks to his two-and-a-half-minute "The Henry Morgan Show" commentaries, broadcast twice daily on WNEW-AM (now WBBR) starting in January 1981. The following year, he added the Saturday-evening show "Morgan and the Media" on WOR.
On October 13, 1972, Morgan appeared as a last-minute fill-in on "The Merv Griffin Show", and, frustrated with fellow guest Charo's interruptions and poor grasp of English, told Griffin, "...you dragged me out of bed because you said you were stuck for a guest, and I have to sit and listen to this nonsensical babble..." and walked off the set.
Morgan was a guest on the February 8, 1982 fifth episode of the nascent "Late Night with David Letterman" show along with film producer/director Francis Ford Coppola, during which Morgan gave a rambling account of his troubles with his ex-wife and left the show during a commercial break.
Later life and death.
Morgan's 1994 memoir, "Here's Morgan! The Original Bad Boy of Broadcasting", found him satirizing many of his former co-stars but not examining his professional life with much depth, as if the reader was listening to a vintage radio satire of Morgan's life. He also edited, with writer and editor Babette Rosmond, "Shut Up, He Explained", an anthology of Ring Lardner's shorter works (Scribner, 1962).
His final national television appearance was on the cable television series "Talk Live" in early 1994. A few weeks after that broadcast, Morgan died of lung cancer at age 79.