(2 of 2)
That one refers to Mrs. Montfort's Boardinghouse, a fleabag theatrical hotel, which was Allen's first miserable beach head on Broadway's Great White Way. It was 1914, World War I had top billing, and Allen's arrival in New York had "created as much commotion as the advent of another flounder at the Fulton Fish Market." But the day would come (The Little Show and Three's a Crowd) when Broadway would be Allen's alley.
ALLEN : What character do you portray?
PORTLAND : I'm a chorus girl. I have no character.
Fred Allen met Portland Hoffa when she was a chorus girl in The Passing Show of 1922. They were married in 1927 in the Actor's Chapel (Manhattan's St. Malachy's Church). "Portland had been a herd thespian; as a member of the chorus she had participated, unnoticed, in group singing and bevy dancing," but Allen made room for her in his vaudeville act. Portland later became the perky, indestructible nitwit on Allen's radio show. Of the early days, Allen fondly recalls that she not only fed him jokes but also quantities of salmon loaf and macaroni & cheese.
This theater is so far back in the woods the manager is a bear. The audience is so low the ticket-taker is a dwarf to make the people feel at home.
Such were Allen's tributes to vaudeville. But he loved it, despite its leeching managers and overnight hops, shoebox lunches and tank-town audiences. To him, it was a school of inventive self-reliance peopled with lovable oddballs. A gaudy branch of human botany, vaudeville finds in Fred Allen an affectionate and scrupulous botanist who cherishes every last contortionist, hypnotist, iron-jawed lady, human xylophone, one-armed cornetist, rube comedian, Hindu conjurer and clay modeler who ever played a split week east of Lompo,. Calif. or west of Maiden, Mass.
Part of the charm of Much Ado About Me is its period-piece Americana. It tells of the last fun Fred Allen had being funny. To the radio years, he brought his nagging instinct for perfectionism. TV he merely lip-serviced waspishly. To Much Ado About Me (finished shortly before his death nine months ago), Allen brought not only the fondness of his memories, but the rueful tone and the hint of deri sion that, years before, led him to write:
Hush little bright line
Don't you cry
You'll be a cliché
Bye and bye.