1966 Obituary
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Ed Wynn
LesterFester — 12 years ago(January 03, 2014 05:32 AM)
New York Times, June 20, 1966
ED WYNN, 'THE PERFECT FOOL,' DIES ON COAST AT 79
Stage, Vaudeville, TV Star Was Radio's Fire Chief
By United Press International
BEVERLY HILLS, California, June 19 Ed Wynn, "The Perfect Fool" of stage, radio and television for more than 60 years later won success as a dramatic actor, died at his apartment here today. He was 79 years old.
Mr. Wynn underwent surgery for cancer of the neck six months ago, but the specific cause of his death was not announced.
Survivors include his son, the actor Keenan Wynn, and five grandchildren, Hilda, and Edwina, Tracy, Emily and Ned.
The setting was a speakeasy. A burly gangster stepped in and asked the waiter a nervous, giggling waiter played by Ed Wynn what there was to eat.
Mr. Wynn hesitantly suggested jellyroll, or maybe some ladyfingers.
"Ladyfingers!" They gangster boomed. "My God, I'm so hungry I could eat a horse!"
Mr. Wynn ran through some swinging doors, and in seconds returned with a live, fully grown, whinnying horse.
The eat-A-horse joke, in the 1927 musical comedy "Manhattan Mary" may have been too old, too corny, too absurd, but it produced one of the biggest laughs b68in Broadway history. It took at least 40 seconds for Mr. Wynn's next immortal line.
"Will you have mustard or catch up?"
For more than 60 years, Mr. Wynn told jokes, danced, sang and laughed in a style that was zany and outrageous. "I'll be back in a flash with more trash," was his celebrated exit line.
In one show, he introduced a cast of graduates from a showboat with "I bred my cast upon the waters." He invented an 11 foot pole for people he wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole. He came up with a windshield wiper to be served with grapefruit, a typewriter carriage for eating corn on the cob, a cash drawer that closes before you can open it, a non-wrinkling nightgown and a cuckoo clock fiddle.
"No one can exceed him in a solid, impenetrable asininity," wrote Joseph Wood Krutch in The Nation. "But no one can, at the same time, be more amiable, well-meaning and attractive. Nature gave him a large and solemn face which seemed to promise an unending series of well-intentioned blunders, and his art, succeeds, somehow in giving the impression that his career has been more the result of following with an admirable consistency Polonius's excellent advice "To
thine own self be true."
Mr. Wynn, who was acclaimed as "The Perfect Fool," from the 1921 show of that name, one of his greatest successes, was as quiet and self-doubting offstage as he was giggling and befuddled on stage. He spoke intensely.
Of humor, he once said: "I can't give you a definition of it. It is too subtle to be pinned down, I can say that it differs from wit, which exaggerates the truth, while in humor presents the truth in an original way."
His lisping jokes, his bizarre inventions, his weird costumes, were never haphazard or careless. They involved a severe regimen of work.
"Wasn't it Whistler," Mr. Wynn once said. "Who said that a great painter was one who could hide the effort which he put into his work 3/4. The same thing goes for gags. It often takes hours to think up something that is said in seconds."
"Good clean humor is always new," he said at another point. "Mark Twain is still read. Real jokes seem to improve with age."
And yet Mr. Wynn, who had 300 funny coats, 800 bizarre hats and a set of hilarious routines that placed him in the front rank of comedians with WC Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Bobby Clark, Willy Howard and the Marx Brothers, found during the 1950s that his jokes had not quite improved with age, and that his style of visual comedy was somewhat outdated.
"I don't know why, but the curtain seemed to come down on me," he remarked in 1957. "Ed Wynn, after all, was quite an important comedian. I kind of felt I had given a lot of contentment to a lot of people. Sudden111cly, due to progress or what you call it, no one was breaking down the door to get me back."
Slowly and painfully, Mr. Wynn changed from the madcap comic to a dramatic actor. With Keenan's help, he got a role in "The Great Man," and played a trainer in the television drama "Requiem for a Heavyweight."
OFF WITH MASK
"This transition," he observed, "has caused quite a mental upheaval. If every time you left the dressing room to go on stage, you wore funny hats and clothes well, suddenly after 54 years to come out and be a human being that gives me a good deal of apprehension."
In the next few years, Mr. Wynn appeared in numerous character roles. In the Walt Disney films "The Shaggy Dog" and "Mary Poppins" and in "Marjorie MorningStar" and "The Greatest Story Ever Told." Perhaps his most memorable role, though, was as the old Dutch dentist in "The Story of Anne Frank," for which he was nominated for an Academy Award.
Isaiah Edwin Leopold (stage name is derived from the two syllables of his middle name) was born in Philadelphia on November 9, 1886. His father, Joseph, was a moderately successful retailer of women