Shelley Berman's Success Came After Struggle

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30214, 20 August 1963, Page 8

Shelley Berman's Success Came After Struggle

With Shelley Berman now at the peak of his fame as a recording artist, television

personality and night-club comedian, it is difficult to imagine that he once sold pots and pans in a Chicago department store to help pay the household bills. For Berman, who will appear in Christchurch on August 23 and 24 in the course of a New Zealand tour, there was no “overnight success.” He spent many years as a struggling young actor with a wife to support, tackling every sort of job from taxidriving to assistant behind the counter of a drug store to

keep him going between occasional acting roles. He first became interested in the theatre after wartime service in the United States Navy, and enrolled as a student in the Goodman Theatre. There he met, and subsequently married, an aspiring young actress, Sarah Herman.

Together they tackled all manner of odd jobs while Shelley struggled for his niche in the entertainment business. He felt his talent lay in lighter roles, but all too often the directors of the stock companies in which he worked cast him as a “heavy.”

Frustrated, and usually close to being broke, he set out in 1949 with his young wife on a cross-country, hitchhiking jaunt in search of work in the theatre. He worked for a time as a social director at a resort hotel in Florida, then they thumbed their way west to Hollywood. Still success was slow in coming. He played a few television roles and stage parts, but between those, time lay heavily upon him. He decided to make himself busier writing material for the “Steve Allen Show.” That was the turning point. He decided to write somiething for himself, and that was the beginning of his now famous solo act, sitting on a high stool and speaking into an imaginary telephone. His debut at Chicago’s ’Mister Kelly” Club, was an immediate success. A guest appearance in the Jack Paar television show followed and that was a hit. too. In rapid succession came night-club engagements across the country and numerous guest spots on top television spectaculars His first record album, “Inside Shelley Berman.” broke sales records and became the first non-musical album to be awarded a gold record. His record sales now total millions. But today. 37-year-old Berman, whose New Zealand tour will be under the direction of Harry M. Miller, still remembers those early years.

"Vaughan Williams always seemed to me to have come from a very old, old race. Of course, he tea* half Welsh; that may have been why But in his music I felt the ancient happenings of long ago I think he told the story or the world in music —unconsciously." Harriet Cohen, the pianist, who recently presented the manuscript of a piano concerto Vaughan Williams wrote for he*to the New York Lincoln Centre, speaking in the BBC "Women’s Hour ”