(6 of 7)
Butterfly's Belch. At every step down the Alley, Fred has to fight the network censors. About these hapless blue-pencilers play the full, fanged lightnings of his wit. "The Molehill Men," he calls them. "A radio censor is a man who comes into his office every morning and finds a molehill on his desk. His job is to build that molehill into a mountain before he goes home." It still gets his sinus in an uproar to recall that during the war he was forbidden to refer slightingly to the Ubangi —because, the censors explained, the Ubangi might be holding captive some U.S. airmen, and take offense.
"If radio ever gets a Pulitzer Prize," he once said, "it will be pinned to the censor's wastebasket."
After boiling up over radio's censors, Fred's cup of wrath floods the entire industry. "The scales have not been invented," he says, "fine enough to weigh the grain of sincerity in radio." And, "Everything in radio is as valuable as a butterfly's belch." Network vice presidents are his favorite dish. They are "a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference." Their conferences are "meetings of men who singly can do nothing, but collectively agree that nothing can be done."
At the mention of Allen's name, most network executives get a drawn look about the eyes; but over conferential desks, they gleefully repeat this one: "Allen doesn't dislike radio. He just resents having to work all week long for only $20,000." He does indeed, as he once ruefully admitted in seven words that catalogue his complete attitude toward his work: "This drudgery, this sham, this gold mine." Actually, after the tax collectors and the 60 members of his cast are paid off, Allen's gold mine yields him closer to $2,000 a week.
A Shrinkage of Values. Allen does not spare his fellow comics. "Midgets," he calls them, "living on borrowed minds." This attitude has precluded for Allen hundreds of friendships. His only real intimates are two rusty old iron men of vaudeville, "Uncle Jim" Harkins and "Doc" Rockwell. Uncle Jim acts as his social secretary and general Man Friday; Doc has retired to Southport, Maine, where he tends lobster pots.
But Fred is a panhandler's dreamboat. For ten years an old vaudevillian named Wilbur used to rap at the door of the Allen apartment every Sunday afternoon. Every time, Fred lectured him sternly, finally gave him $10 "for the last time." Portland once caught Wilbur before he knocked, told him Fred was out of town. Fred waited, got more & more restless. When he had worked himself into a nervous lather, Portland relented, confessed. Next Sunday Fred lectured Wilbur twice as hard, gave him $20.
Touch artists are not the only ones to see the color of Allen's dough. He refuses to talk about his charities, but close friends estimate that they cost him at least $500 a week. Fred says only: "I was poor once myself." Except when absolutely necessary, he gives no thought to money. He saves his thinking for his work.