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Myrrh Was Twit's. Allen comes honestly by the common touch. He was born John Florence Sullivan, 52 years ago, on the lace-curtain-Irish fringe of Cambridge, Mass. His father was a bookbinder. His mother died when he was three, and he and his brother Bobby went to live with her sister,"Aunt Lizzie" Herlihy, in Allston, Mass. He was a scrawny kid, all arms, legs and adenoids. The tough little Micks in his new neighborhood took one look at his pinched, birdlike face, nicknamed him "Twit," and let him play alone. To pass time — and attract attention — Johnny started juggling whatever came to hand. "That," says Fred, "was my first and biggest mistake." At six, he had performed his way into St. Anthony's choir, rose to be a Wise Man in the Christmas play. His first stage lines: "Myrrh is mine; its bitter perfume breathes a life of gathering gloom." Every week after school, Fred went to Keith's to see the new show and pick up jokes and routines. He even began making up a few of his own. An early Allen (from algebra class): "Let X equal my father's signature."
One day Fred's father, "a kind of homemade wit," had a little joke of his own. As a 14th-birthday present for Fred, he marched him down to the Boston Public Library, put him to work three hours a night as a stack boy—at 20¢ an hour.
There was considerable doubt among Fred's superiors that he was worth the money. He spent most of his time with an inkwell on his chin, a pencil on his nose, and four or five books flying from hand to hand. When not so occupied, he would shatter the institution's leathern hush by bawling: "Say, did you hear about the man who dreamed he was eating Shredded Wheat and woke up to find the mattress half gone? HAW! HAW! HAW!"
Flea-Bag Years. When the library staff put on a show, Fred was ready. He had rounded up all his jokes and jugglery into an act. "I was a smash," Fred recalls. "They all told me I ought to be on the stage. The bastards. I believed them." At 17, he broke into Sam Cohen's Amateur Night circuit—50¢ a night. One night a noisy M.C. heckled him: "Where did you learn to juggle?" Allen tried his first onstage ad lib: "I took a correspondence course in baggage-smashing." Soon he got a chance to fill in for a professional juggler—at $2 a night. He took his first stage name: "Paul' Huckle—European Entertainer."
It wasn't long before Fred started thinking: "What the hell's a juggler? A pair of hands. And you never get anywhere working with your hands." Since people insisted on laughing at him, why not be a comic and get somewhere—maybe even as high as the Keith circuit? Fred changed his billing to "Freddie James —The World's Worst Juggler," and headed for New York. The next year was a time of flea bags, dime dinners and very little work. After that, he traveled—and gained comic breadth. On a tour of Australia he developed a riotous "vent" (ventriloquial) act and a trunkful of stage tricks "to get laughs without doing anything."