CHARACTER ACTOR J. CARROL NAISH AS "LUIGI BOSCO" .
THE SHORT BUT HAPPY LIFE WITH LUIGI
Cy Howard dealt in stereotypes and successfully so.
The young producer’s first subject for a radio sitcom was the hackneyed target of traveling salesman jokes the world over - the dumb blonde. His take on her was the delightfully dim-witted My Friend Irma in 1947, which immediately attracted audiences and began its string of four consecutive Top Ten seasons for CBS. (See My Friend Irma and Monday‘s All Time Top Ten.)
Given Irma’s quick success, he commanded the attention of network executives when he pitched his next idea, steeped in the broken English gags attempted by amateur jokesters everywhere - only in his concept those gags would written and delivered by professionals as linguistic incidental humor to the show’s basic theme. Howard’s proposed program, The Little Immigrant, centered on the adventures of a recent arrival from Italy, Luigi Bosco, and his struggles to establish a new life in the Little Italy section of Chicago.
Cy Howard displayed his true genius as a producer by insisting that the title role be given to veteran actor, J. Carrol Naish, 53, who, like My Friend Irma’s Marie Wilson, had limited radio experience. But unlike Wilson, Naish had appeared in over a hundred films and had established credentials as a believable impersonator of Europeans, Asians and all nationalities between without appearing cartoonish in voice or looks. He had appeared in so many different foreign characterizations that by 1949, Hollywood circles called him “The One Man U.N.”
In reality, Naish, the son of an Irish immigrant, left school for vaudeville as a teenager. He was stranded in Los Angeles in 1925 and found work as a minor supporting player in several silent films including the classic What Price Glory. It was the beginning of a distinguished 50 year career in motion pictures. (1)
To support radio newcomer Naish, Cy Howard smartly reached into his My Friend Irma cast for Alan Reed to play Luigi’s ever present landlord and nemesis, Pasquale, and Hans Conried as his heavily accented night-school civics classmate, Schultz, the German. Adding to the internationality of Luigi‘s radio schoolroom were Joe Forte as Horowitz, the East European and Ken Peters as Olson the Scandinavian. Ringmaster of this frequent display of mangled English and malapropisms was their patient civics teacher, Miss Spaulding, played by Mary Shipp. (2)
But despite their language difficulties and ethnic differences, all of Miss Spaulding’s students proved by their regular attendance their strong determination to assimilate into their new country and become American citizens. Humor aside, that devotion to freedom and patriotism was the continuing theme of Life With Luigi as evidenced in its first broadcast on CBS at 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, September 21, 1948.
Variety’s review the next week expressed its concern that cheap stereotyping and gags might overtake its patriotic goals; “CBS’ talented idea man, Cy Howard, originator of the sock ‘My Friend Irma,’ has come up with another promising series to bolster the network’s Tuesday night lineup. ‘Life With Luigi,’ a dramatic series based on the adventures of a newly arrived Italian immigrant who settles in Chicago, has a pleasant, serio-comic flavor that is likely to deepen with familiarity. Howard, however, will have to exercise firm control at all times to prevent this show from falling into a pattern of pure-and-simpleton dialectician gagging, despite the temptations offered by J. Carroll Naish’s Italio characterization.
“On the kickoff stanza a tendency to pull in opposite directions almost tore the show apart. On one hand, the script attempted to build a genuine personality out of Luigi, depicting him as a warm and patriotic immigrant who finds that earning a living in Chicago sometimes runs counter to his ideals. On the other hand, however, Luigi was trimmed down to a lower case Chico Marx with phony, straining gags that bartered the character’s long range value for an immediate laugh. This defect will probably be erased as the scripters find a road to natural integration of gag and situation.”
Life With Luigi created enough fans in its initial Tuesday night run against NBC’s Fibber McGee & Molly that CBS moved the still sustaining sitcom to Sunday nights at 8:30 on January 9 1949 following the new CBS string of hits beginning with Jack Benny at 7:00 p.m., followed by Amos & Andy and The Adventures of Sam Spade. But that only lasted for two weeks.
When the established, (and sponsored), Lum & Abner took Luigi’s timeslot on January 23rd, Cy Howard’s sitcom was moved up 90 minutes to Sunday at 10:00 p.m. opposite NBC’s Take It Or Leave It and Theater Guild On The Air at ABC. It was moved back to Sunday at 8:30 on July 3, 1949, with this patriotic special and remained in that timeslot until September 25th.
Two nights later, September 27, 1949, the much traveled Life With Luigi was moved to Tuesday nights at 9:30 where it would eventually make history against the giant of NBC’s Tuesday night comedy block, Bob Hope. (If this broadcast sounds familiar, it was a repeat of Luigi’s premiere 53 weeks days earlier. )
Internal CBS research gave the network the confidence it needed to move its sitcom, (still described as “new” in the show’s opening), to half an hour earlier at 9:00 p.m. against Bob Hope, on November 22, 1949. Hope’s Tuesday night program on NBC was once considered unbeatable, but the 46 year old comedian’s radio popularity had since suffered from his overexposure in television and movies. His string of eleven straight Top Ten seasons, was now seen as vulnerable by CBS, if it could counter the globe-trotting, patriotic Hope with its own mixture of comedy and patriotism.
It took another three months but CBS finally landed a sponsor for Life With Luigi in January 1950 when Chicago’s Wrigley Gum Company began its association with the show which opened at a modest production cost of $6,500 per week, less than half of Wrigley’s weekly expenditure of $15,000 for Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch on CBS.
Luigi's first Wrigley broadcast is posted here from Tuesday, January 10, 1950. The episode titled, Luigi’s First Citizenship Papers, again stresses the program’s patriotic theme - only now with a sponsor’s endorsement, emphasized each week in the show’s opening sponsor credit:
“Y’know, friends, Wrigley’s Spearmint Chewing Gum is a typically American product, that appeals to people of all ages and all nationalities in all parts of our country. And the Wrigley people feel that Life With Luigi is a typically American radio program, a friendly, enjoyable show that sort of symbolizes the American spirit of tolerance and goodwill….”
The January broadcasts were the first in Life With Luigi’s two year existence that the program was rated. It registered a surprising, double-digit 12.9 Nielsen rating for the month opposite Bob Hope’s 17.4. The gap continued to narrow until May, 1950, when Life With Luigi accomplished what was once considered impossible - it beat Bob Hope in the monthly Nielsens 10.5 to 9.3. The two shows tied with 7.7 ratings the following month, but the trend was obvious. Lever Brothers cancelled its twelve year sponsorship of Bob Hope’s once dominant Tuesday night show in June.
Luigi returned from a short summer hiatus on August 15, 1950, to its newly established Tuesday timeslot on CBS at 9:00 p.m., getting a head start on Bob Hope who was in Korea entertaining troops. (3) When Hope returned to his familiar NBC show in early October with guests Bing Crosby and Dinah Shore, Luigi had already built a growing audience and countered with this patriotic offering from October 3, 1950.
By the next week, it was a battle of guest stars: Hope repeated with Crosby and Shore on October 10, 1950 and Luigi countered with Frank Sinatra on the same October 10, 1950 night. (4) The resulting October, 1950, Nielsen ratings were embarrassing to NBC, Hope and his new sponsors, Liggett & Myers’ Chesterfield cigarettes. Luigi outscored the comedy legend, 12.6 to 10.0. To make matters worse, Chesterfield paid Hope's production price of $25,000 per week compared to Wrigley's $7,000 for its inexpensive CBS sitcom.
The Nielsen averages for the 1950-51 season continued the trend, crediting Life With Luigi with an 11.1 rating and Bob Hope with a 9.6. Worse yet, Bob Hope was driven from the Annual Top Ten for the first time in twelve years to 32nd place while Life With Luigi pushed nearer the Top Ten at a tie for 13th place with another former Tuesday NBC powerhouse, Fibber McGee & Molly, which dropped from the Top Ten for the first time in twelve years.
As Network Radio ratings tumbled beneath the wave of television popularity in the 1951-52 season, Luigi won each of the eight months in which it opposed Hope on Tuesday night, resulting in a season average of 9.1 against 7.8. Life With Luigi was a tied for tenth place in the season’s standings and the Bob Hope Chesterfield Show was 25th. Bob Hope left his Tuesday night forever on June 24, 1952. (5) A happy episode from this season titled Luigi Takes A Date To The Antique Dealers’ Dance, is posted from April 22,1952.
On Oct 7, 1952, Cy Howard became King of Tuesday Night Comedy with Life With Luigi at 9:00 and My Friend Irma at 9:30 against the surprisingly weak Martin & Lewis Show and the aging Fibber McGee & Molly on NBC. The season’s final averages credited Luigi with a 7.7 (in eighth place) against Martin & Lewis' 5.9 (27th place) and Irma’s 6.5, (19th place) versus FM&M’s 6.3 (22nd place).
Howard adapted his hit sitcom to television in the fall of 1952 and CBS obliged by scheduling it’s radio hit in the 9:30 half hour immediately following its runaway Number One program in all of television, I Love Lucy, and its ratings in the high 60’s. The drop to Life With Luigi’s 38.5 rating and 13th place for the season plus pressure from activist groups claiming dispariging characterizatons of Italian born Americans was cause for CBS-TV to cancel the television sitcom after 39 weeks.
That ethnic sensitive pressure spread to radio, where despite its ratings success, Life With Luigi was dropped by Wrigley Gum and left the CBS Tuesday night schedule on March 10, 1953. The show was gone but stars J. Carrol Naish, Alan Reed, Hans Conried and producer Cy Howard continued on their paths to success. Meanwhile, produced Network Radio programming continued its slide into eventual antiquity.
(1) By the time J. Carroll Naish retired in 1977, he had amassed over 200 film credits, (including two Academy Award nominations), and over a hundred television appearances, (including two recurring roles as Chinese detective Charlie Chan in the 1957-58 series and the conniving American Indian Hawkeye in the 38 episode sitcom series Guestward Ho in 1960-61.)
(2) Rounding out the Life With Luigi cast were Gil Stratton as Luigi’s young antique store partner, Jimmy O‘Connor, and Jody Gilbert as Pasquale’s daughter, Rosa.
(3) The final 90 seconds of this broadcast are garbled.
(4) The Luigi cast was flown to New York City for Sinatra’s guest appearance. In return, J. Carroll Naish appeared with his key supporting Luigi actors on Sinatra’s Saturday night CBS-TV show in a preview of Cy Howard’s extension of Life With Luigi into television.
(5) Bob Hope didn’t return to NBC Radio until Wednesday, January 7, 1953, at 9:00 p.m. under General Foods’ sponsorship against the weak competition of The Lineup on CBS and local programs on ABC. His six month Nielsen average rating for the season was 5.0 which placed him in tie with Red Skelton for 46th place.
Cy Howard dealt in stereotypes and successfully so.
The young producer’s first subject for a radio sitcom was the hackneyed target of traveling salesman jokes the world over - the dumb blonde. His take on her was the delightfully dim-witted My Friend Irma in 1947, which immediately attracted audiences and began its string of four consecutive Top Ten seasons for CBS. (See My Friend Irma and Monday‘s All Time Top Ten.)
Given Irma’s quick success, he commanded the attention of network executives when he pitched his next idea, steeped in the broken English gags attempted by amateur jokesters everywhere - only in his concept those gags would written and delivered by professionals as linguistic incidental humor to the show’s basic theme. Howard’s proposed program, The Little Immigrant, centered on the adventures of a recent arrival from Italy, Luigi Bosco, and his struggles to establish a new life in the Little Italy section of Chicago.
Cy Howard displayed his true genius as a producer by insisting that the title role be given to veteran actor, J. Carrol Naish, 53, who, like My Friend Irma’s Marie Wilson, had limited radio experience. But unlike Wilson, Naish had appeared in over a hundred films and had established credentials as a believable impersonator of Europeans, Asians and all nationalities between without appearing cartoonish in voice or looks. He had appeared in so many different foreign characterizations that by 1949, Hollywood circles called him “The One Man U.N.”
In reality, Naish, the son of an Irish immigrant, left school for vaudeville as a teenager. He was stranded in Los Angeles in 1925 and found work as a minor supporting player in several silent films including the classic What Price Glory. It was the beginning of a distinguished 50 year career in motion pictures. (1)
To support radio newcomer Naish, Cy Howard smartly reached into his My Friend Irma cast for Alan Reed to play Luigi’s ever present landlord and nemesis, Pasquale, and Hans Conried as his heavily accented night-school civics classmate, Schultz, the German. Adding to the internationality of Luigi‘s radio schoolroom were Joe Forte as Horowitz, the East European and Ken Peters as Olson the Scandinavian. Ringmaster of this frequent display of mangled English and malapropisms was their patient civics teacher, Miss Spaulding, played by Mary Shipp. (2)
But despite their language difficulties and ethnic differences, all of Miss Spaulding’s students proved by their regular attendance their strong determination to assimilate into their new country and become American citizens. Humor aside, that devotion to freedom and patriotism was the continuing theme of Life With Luigi as evidenced in its first broadcast on CBS at 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, September 21, 1948.
Variety’s review the next week expressed its concern that cheap stereotyping and gags might overtake its patriotic goals; “CBS’ talented idea man, Cy Howard, originator of the sock ‘My Friend Irma,’ has come up with another promising series to bolster the network’s Tuesday night lineup. ‘Life With Luigi,’ a dramatic series based on the adventures of a newly arrived Italian immigrant who settles in Chicago, has a pleasant, serio-comic flavor that is likely to deepen with familiarity. Howard, however, will have to exercise firm control at all times to prevent this show from falling into a pattern of pure-and-simpleton dialectician gagging, despite the temptations offered by J. Carroll Naish’s Italio characterization.
“On the kickoff stanza a tendency to pull in opposite directions almost tore the show apart. On one hand, the script attempted to build a genuine personality out of Luigi, depicting him as a warm and patriotic immigrant who finds that earning a living in Chicago sometimes runs counter to his ideals. On the other hand, however, Luigi was trimmed down to a lower case Chico Marx with phony, straining gags that bartered the character’s long range value for an immediate laugh. This defect will probably be erased as the scripters find a road to natural integration of gag and situation.”
Life With Luigi created enough fans in its initial Tuesday night run against NBC’s Fibber McGee & Molly that CBS moved the still sustaining sitcom to Sunday nights at 8:30 on January 9 1949 following the new CBS string of hits beginning with Jack Benny at 7:00 p.m., followed by Amos & Andy and The Adventures of Sam Spade. But that only lasted for two weeks.
When the established, (and sponsored), Lum & Abner took Luigi’s timeslot on January 23rd, Cy Howard’s sitcom was moved up 90 minutes to Sunday at 10:00 p.m. opposite NBC’s Take It Or Leave It and Theater Guild On The Air at ABC. It was moved back to Sunday at 8:30 on July 3, 1949, with this patriotic special and remained in that timeslot until September 25th.
Two nights later, September 27, 1949, the much traveled Life With Luigi was moved to Tuesday nights at 9:30 where it would eventually make history against the giant of NBC’s Tuesday night comedy block, Bob Hope. (If this broadcast sounds familiar, it was a repeat of Luigi’s premiere 53 weeks days earlier. )
Internal CBS research gave the network the confidence it needed to move its sitcom, (still described as “new” in the show’s opening), to half an hour earlier at 9:00 p.m. against Bob Hope, on November 22, 1949. Hope’s Tuesday night program on NBC was once considered unbeatable, but the 46 year old comedian’s radio popularity had since suffered from his overexposure in television and movies. His string of eleven straight Top Ten seasons, was now seen as vulnerable by CBS, if it could counter the globe-trotting, patriotic Hope with its own mixture of comedy and patriotism.
It took another three months but CBS finally landed a sponsor for Life With Luigi in January 1950 when Chicago’s Wrigley Gum Company began its association with the show which opened at a modest production cost of $6,500 per week, less than half of Wrigley’s weekly expenditure of $15,000 for Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch on CBS.
Luigi's first Wrigley broadcast is posted here from Tuesday, January 10, 1950. The episode titled, Luigi’s First Citizenship Papers, again stresses the program’s patriotic theme - only now with a sponsor’s endorsement, emphasized each week in the show’s opening sponsor credit:
“Y’know, friends, Wrigley’s Spearmint Chewing Gum is a typically American product, that appeals to people of all ages and all nationalities in all parts of our country. And the Wrigley people feel that Life With Luigi is a typically American radio program, a friendly, enjoyable show that sort of symbolizes the American spirit of tolerance and goodwill….”
The January broadcasts were the first in Life With Luigi’s two year existence that the program was rated. It registered a surprising, double-digit 12.9 Nielsen rating for the month opposite Bob Hope’s 17.4. The gap continued to narrow until May, 1950, when Life With Luigi accomplished what was once considered impossible - it beat Bob Hope in the monthly Nielsens 10.5 to 9.3. The two shows tied with 7.7 ratings the following month, but the trend was obvious. Lever Brothers cancelled its twelve year sponsorship of Bob Hope’s once dominant Tuesday night show in June.
Luigi returned from a short summer hiatus on August 15, 1950, to its newly established Tuesday timeslot on CBS at 9:00 p.m., getting a head start on Bob Hope who was in Korea entertaining troops. (3) When Hope returned to his familiar NBC show in early October with guests Bing Crosby and Dinah Shore, Luigi had already built a growing audience and countered with this patriotic offering from October 3, 1950.
By the next week, it was a battle of guest stars: Hope repeated with Crosby and Shore on October 10, 1950 and Luigi countered with Frank Sinatra on the same October 10, 1950 night. (4) The resulting October, 1950, Nielsen ratings were embarrassing to NBC, Hope and his new sponsors, Liggett & Myers’ Chesterfield cigarettes. Luigi outscored the comedy legend, 12.6 to 10.0. To make matters worse, Chesterfield paid Hope's production price of $25,000 per week compared to Wrigley's $7,000 for its inexpensive CBS sitcom.
The Nielsen averages for the 1950-51 season continued the trend, crediting Life With Luigi with an 11.1 rating and Bob Hope with a 9.6. Worse yet, Bob Hope was driven from the Annual Top Ten for the first time in twelve years to 32nd place while Life With Luigi pushed nearer the Top Ten at a tie for 13th place with another former Tuesday NBC powerhouse, Fibber McGee & Molly, which dropped from the Top Ten for the first time in twelve years.
As Network Radio ratings tumbled beneath the wave of television popularity in the 1951-52 season, Luigi won each of the eight months in which it opposed Hope on Tuesday night, resulting in a season average of 9.1 against 7.8. Life With Luigi was a tied for tenth place in the season’s standings and the Bob Hope Chesterfield Show was 25th. Bob Hope left his Tuesday night forever on June 24, 1952. (5) A happy episode from this season titled Luigi Takes A Date To The Antique Dealers’ Dance, is posted from April 22,1952.
On Oct 7, 1952, Cy Howard became King of Tuesday Night Comedy with Life With Luigi at 9:00 and My Friend Irma at 9:30 against the surprisingly weak Martin & Lewis Show and the aging Fibber McGee & Molly on NBC. The season’s final averages credited Luigi with a 7.7 (in eighth place) against Martin & Lewis' 5.9 (27th place) and Irma’s 6.5, (19th place) versus FM&M’s 6.3 (22nd place).
Howard adapted his hit sitcom to television in the fall of 1952 and CBS obliged by scheduling it’s radio hit in the 9:30 half hour immediately following its runaway Number One program in all of television, I Love Lucy, and its ratings in the high 60’s. The drop to Life With Luigi’s 38.5 rating and 13th place for the season plus pressure from activist groups claiming dispariging characterizatons of Italian born Americans was cause for CBS-TV to cancel the television sitcom after 39 weeks.
That ethnic sensitive pressure spread to radio, where despite its ratings success, Life With Luigi was dropped by Wrigley Gum and left the CBS Tuesday night schedule on March 10, 1953. The show was gone but stars J. Carrol Naish, Alan Reed, Hans Conried and producer Cy Howard continued on their paths to success. Meanwhile, produced Network Radio programming continued its slide into eventual antiquity.
(1) By the time J. Carroll Naish retired in 1977, he had amassed over 200 film credits, (including two Academy Award nominations), and over a hundred television appearances, (including two recurring roles as Chinese detective Charlie Chan in the 1957-58 series and the conniving American Indian Hawkeye in the 38 episode sitcom series Guestward Ho in 1960-61.)
(2) Rounding out the Life With Luigi cast were Gil Stratton as Luigi’s young antique store partner, Jimmy O‘Connor, and Jody Gilbert as Pasquale’s daughter, Rosa.
(3) The final 90 seconds of this broadcast are garbled.
(4) The Luigi cast was flown to New York City for Sinatra’s guest appearance. In return, J. Carroll Naish appeared with his key supporting Luigi actors on Sinatra’s Saturday night CBS-TV show in a preview of Cy Howard’s extension of Life With Luigi into television.
(5) Bob Hope didn’t return to NBC Radio until Wednesday, January 7, 1953, at 9:00 p.m. under General Foods’ sponsorship against the weak competition of The Lineup on CBS and local programs on ABC. His six month Nielsen average rating for the season was 5.0 which placed him in tie with Red Skelton for 46th place.