40 Eye-Opening Facts About The Honeymooners’ Jackie Gleason

Contrary to what you might think, The Honeymooners wasn’t a runaway hit during its initial run. The show aired 39 episodes between October 1955 and September 1956, but by the end of this stretch it had fallen to 19th in the ratings. According to The Honeymooners’ Companion by Donna McCrohan, Gleason and CBS then mutually agreed to cancel the show, rather than commit to a potentially subpar second season.

The key to The Honeymooners’ eventual success was its second life in reruns. The show was filmed with the state-of-the-art ElectroniCam, as opposed to the kinescope method used by other shows of the day. This meant it looked much better than its competition and re-runs didn’t suffer from a lack of picture quality, even as the years and technology moved on.

The somewhat problematic catchphrase, “Pow! Right in the kisser!” has been indelibly associated with Ralph Kramden over the years. Similarly, “Baby, you’re the greatest!” is commonly linked to the show, too. It may surprise you to learn, though, that these lines were delivered merely once and nine times respectively in the 39 episodes of The Honeymooners. Wait, what?!

Gleason wasn’t an actor who enjoyed rehearsals. In fact, he hated them intensely – so he just didn’t do them. Perhaps as a method of downplaying the need for his presence at rehearsals, he claimed an ability to look at an episode’s script only once and immediately memorize all his lines. This would have meant he had a photographic memory, which is pretty rare.

In practice, though, Gleason’s supposed photographic memory must have had a few gaps. If you ever see Ralph tap on his belly in The Honeymooners, it’s reportedly because Gleason couldn’t remember his line. It usually then became the responsibility of Audrey Meadows, who played Alice, to come to his rescue and get things going again in the scene.

In 2013 Joyce Randolph, who played Trixie Norton, told the National Enquirer, “Working with Jackie was the toughest challenge an actress could face. You never knew what he’d say or do. He often ad-libbed and you had to think lightning fast to keep the laughs coming.” She said this made her break out in cold sweats, but admitted that he always delivered on his end of the bargain by being funny.

Gleason and Art Carney played one of TV’s most beloved comedy duos on The Honeymooners – Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton. But in real life they reportedly didn’t get along, with many observers believing Gleason was jealous and insecure about the idea of Carney’s fierce comic talents stealing the limelight away from him. In turn, Norton allegedly felt Gleason didn’t treat his craft with the seriousness he thought it deserved.

In 1961 Gleason’s game show You’re in the Picture debuted on CBS. The very next week, in the same time slot, Gleason appeared with the set stripped back to a brick wall. He then spent half an hour ripping apart the terribly-received episode, even wondering out loud how so many trained industry professionals could create such a flop. It was the kind of honesty you rarely see in showbiz.

Gleason starred in 1977’s Smokey and the Bandit as Sheriff Buford T. Justice, a stereotypical comedy lawman from the South. Interestingly, the character was partly based on an officer that co-star Burt Reynolds’ dad knew when he was the chief of police in Florida’s Riviera Beach. Several of Justice’s tendencies supposedly came from this cop.

Gleason played Minnesota Fats in The Hustler and required no Hollywood magic to perform the trick shots. Why? Because he had operated as a real-life pool hustler from the age of 12, when he was hired to rack balls in a Brooklyn watering hole. Director Robert Rossen was therefore able to position the camera in such a way that audiences knew it was really Gleason accomplishing the shots himself.

In Westchester County there is a house. A very special house. A round house. It was affectionately known as “The Mothership” by its owner, who specified that everything about the structure had to be circular – inside and out. No right angles anywhere. To be fair, looking at it from above, it does look like a flying saucer – fitting when you consider the homeowner was UFO fanatic Jackie Gleason.

In August 2000 Gleason’s most famous creation was immortalized forever at the 40th Street and Eighth Avenue Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown Manhattan. A statue of Ralph Kramden was unveiled there by Joyce Randolph, his co-star on The Honeymooners. The plaque below the statue read, “Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden: Bus driver, Raccoon Lodge treasurer, dreamer.”

In 1986 Gleason starred in his final film Nothing In Common, a fairly well-received and profitable comedy drama. Most importantly, though, it was a hell of a lot better than 1983’s Smokey and the Bandit Part 3, which had tanked critically and commercially. Director Garry Marshall reportedly used the horrifying notion of Gleason’s career ending on a turkey like Smokey 3 as fuel to convince him to sign on for one last picture.

Biographer William A. Henry III claimed, “Jackie Gleason had a lifelong fascination with the supernatural. He would spend small fortunes on everything from financing psychic research to buying a sealed box said to contain actual ectoplasm, the spirit of life itself.” Henry also claimed the insomniac comic amassed hundreds of books on the paranormal, which he’d stay up all night reading.

Yes, you read that right. In a 1974 Esquire magazine interview, Gleason’s second wife Beverley McKittrick claimed that the then president Richard Nixon had personally shown her husband proof of alien life. She said Nixon took his buddy to Florida’s Homestead Airforce Base to show him glass cases with the tiny, mangled bodies of aliens from a crashed UFO. It allegedly upset Gleason deeply, but he never spoke about the matter publicly.

Amazingly, despite being nominated five times over the course of The Jackie Gleason Show and The Honeymooners, Gleason never took home an Emmy. To add insult to injury, his frenemy Art Carney won five for his work on both shows. To avoid any kind of unwanted confrontation, Carney would reportedly hide the trophies whenever Gleason came over to his house.

What do The Exorcist and Speed 2: Cruise Control have in common? They both star Jackie Gleason’s family members! Gleason’s daughter Linda married actor and playwright Jason Miller, who starred as Father Damien Karras in William Friedkin’s horror classic. They had one son, Jason Patric, and he also grew up to become an actor. Perhaps his biggest role was when he took over from Keanu Reeves on the ill-advised Speed sequel.

Pert Kelton played Alice Kramden for the first seven episodes of The Honeymooners, but she lost her job when her husband was linked to communism. Basically, he had sponsored an advertisement in communist newspaper The Daily Worker in 1948. Gleason reportedly fought to keep Kramden on the show, but when that failed he tried to spare her public outrage by spreading a false story that she left because of heart issues.

When The Flintstones began airing in 1960, Jackie Gleason was not a happy man. He felt the prehistoric animated sitcom was ripping off The Honeymooners, especially with how the two main couples were presented. He was so annoyed that he reportedly considered suing Hanna-Barbera Productions, but he was talked out of it by his publicist. They allegedly exclaimed, “Do you want to go down in history as the man who killed Fred Flintstone?”

In the early ’50s, Gleason began diversifying his talents into another arena: music. Over the course of his career, he released nearly 40 albums and was credited with composing the songs and conducting an orchestra. In reality, Gleason couldn’t read or write music, but found a workaround – he dictated his vision to someone who could do both those things.

Music for Lovers Only, Gleason’s debut “mood music” album, holds a prestigious record. It remains the album that spent the most consecutive weeks in the Billboard 200 Top 10, with a mind-boggling 153. That’s nearly three years! In fact, Gleason’s music was so huge that at one time in 1954, his albums held three of the Top 10 spots in the chart.

The Baltimore Sun once claimed that trumpet player Bobby Hackett was the man who truly did the lion’s share of composing, arranging, and conducting on Gleason’s albums. Perhaps “The Great One” wasn’t quite the musical prodigy people thought he was. The paper also alleged Gleason only paid Hackett union scale, meaning he didn’t see a single dime of the millions the albums generated for his famous employer.

Gleason was born in 1916 to Herbert and Mae Gleason. He was named after his insurance auditor father at birth – Herbert Walton Gleason, Jr. But by the time he was baptized, his parents had changed their minds – at this point, he was named John Herbert Gleason. It was Mae who first gave him the nickname “Jackie,” and it stuck throughout his life.

328 Chauncey Street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn was the address Gleason lived in as a kid. It was a tenement building and the Bed-Stuy area was extremely impoverished at the time. Gleason then ensured art reflected life in The Honeymooners – the Kramdens also lived at 328 Chauncey Street, though in the show the apartment was in Bensonhurst.

Gleason said that he could pinpoint the moment he knew he wanted to be an actor. According to his official website, when his father took him to a matinee vaudeville performance that also included silent films, he was hooked. He was only six-years-old at the time, and in later years reflected that he responded to the feeling of friendship generated by the viewing audience.

Gleason’s childhood was extremely rough. When he was three, his older brother Clement died of spinal meningitis. Six years later, his father abandoned the family. Ten days before Christmas in 1925, Herbert Gleason left the offices of the insurance company where he worked, and the family never saw him again. They then discovered that, before he left, Herbert had destroyed any family photographs in which he appeared.

Gleason’s mother kept a close eye on him after her older son died and her husband left them. If anything, though, she held the young boy too close. He once said, “I could never go out on the street and play with the other kids. I used to watch them with my face pressed against the window. I think that’s how I developed my ‘poor soul’ look.”

Gleason’s mother died of a bacterial skin infection when she was only 49. At the time, Gleason was 19 and worth a grand total of 36 cents. He told New York Magazine in 1985 that his girlfriend’s family suggested he stay with them, but instead he used the money to get a train to New York. Within weeks he’d landed a job that paid him $25 per week.

Even though his father’s abandonment badly affected Gleason, he still always wanted to see him again one day. Poignantly, he once said, “I would always wonder whether the old man was somewhere out there in the audience, perhaps a few seats away.” He added, “Then one day I realized that, wherever he was, it would be easy for him to contact me – if he really wanted to.”

In 1934 the teenage Gleason was already making a name for himself in the low-rent nightclubs of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. He initially tried stand-up, but he was apparently pretty terrible at it. He mostly pilfered Milton Berle jokes, in fact. He soon found he was a natural at interacting with the audience, though, and this table-hopping style helped him shape his comic persona.

Gleason tied the knot with Genevieve Halford in 1936, and by 1942 they had two daughters named Geraldine and Linda. The couple’s union was rocky, though, with Halford wanting a quiet family life, while Gleason preferred to live large. Gleason eventually made it to a second and then a third wife named Marilyn Taylor.

Gleason desperately wanted to be with Taylor, but Halford wouldn’t divorce him because of her strict Catholicism. Tired of waiting, Taylor married someone else and when Halford was eventually worn down into a divorce, so did Gleason. Second wife Beverley McKittrick would be left in the lurch in 1973, though, when Gleason found out Taylor was on the market again. Third time’s the charm – this marriage lasted the rest of his life.

The nickname most synonymous with Jackie Gleason has always been “The Great One.” But where did it come from? Well, he was reportedly given the moniker by Citizen Kane director Orson Welles. The story goes that Welles phoned Gleason the day after the two men drank each other under the table on a crazy night out. The funnyman’s ability to put away liquor impressed the legendary filmmaker.

Gleason enjoyed the power his celebrity gave him. It led to insane contract stipulations, such as being provided with the longest limousine in the world. He forced a move for his TV show from New York to Miami, purely so he could golf at all times of the year. And he allegedly demanded an entire train car for himself, his buddies, and prostitutes. The rest of the show’s production staff had to pay their own way to NYC.

While performing in New 1943 Hellzapoppin on Broadway in the early ’40s, Gleason became infamous for having loud after-parties back at his New York hotel room. In fact, his get-togethers were so noisy that the hotel soundproofed his room as best they could. They wanted the up-and-coming star to stay, of course, but didn’t want his antics upsetting the other guests.

Gleason wasn’t just someone who enjoyed a party – he was an alcoholic who would even drink on the job. Joyce Randolph told the National Enquirer that she knew he was pouring whisky into his coffee while filming The Honeymooners, and that it affected his mood. In fact, it was reportedly pretty well known in the industry that Gleason was a mean, nasty drunk.

In his biography The Great One: The Life and Legend of Jackie Gleason, William A. Henry III revealed that Gleason’s drinking badly affected the time he spent with his family. He’d allegedly only spend around 30 minutes with his wife and children on Christmas Day, for example, with the rest of the day spent boozing with his friends instead. It put a huge strain on his first marriage.

In 1987 Gleason’s years of over-indulgence caught up with him. He died at 71, having suffered from a litany of health issues he’d managed to keep mostly hidden from the public. He reportedly had diabetes and vein inflammation for years, but colon cancer was what killed him in the end. “And away we go,” one of his many catchphrases, was carved into the stairway leading to his mausoleum.

After getting off a plane forced to land by mechanical failure, Gleason walked into a hardware store in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He asked the owner for $200 to buy a train ticket to New York. The owner didn’t want to lend money to a stranger, so Gleason took him to a local theater to see one of his movies. An hour into it, Gleason showed up on-screen and the owner knew he’d be good for the money.

Every comedian gets heckled. It’s a rite of passage. But spare a thought for the time Gleason was taunted so badly in New Jersey that he challenged the fan to a fight outside. Naturally, he thought it was simply some drunk idiot wanting to seem big in front of his buddies. But it turned out the fan was boxer “Two Ton” Tony Galento and he knocked Jackie flat out with one punch. Ouch.