"Frankenstein" Sued... For Being Scary!

From The Billboard of 24 October 1942 — with bandleader Kay Kyser on the cover — an article about performers and exhibitors’ liabilities reveals “the recent dropping” of a lawsuit brought against comedian Billy De Wolfe by “a woman patron for scaring her when doing his Frankenstein bit in the aisles of a Milwaukee theater”. The article goes on to say that the law regards patrons as “going into a place of amusement at their own risk”, including sports events and the risk of getting beaned by flying baseballs and hockey pucks. Artists and venue operators are essentially immune from prosecution for mishaps, save for cases of demonstrable negligence.  

Billy De Wolfe was a song, dance, impersonation and comedy performer whose Frankenstein act had him putting his coat jacket on backwards, slicking his hair down onto his forehead, sucking his cheeks in and affecting The Movie Monster’s grunts and stiff-limbed walkabout. The bit was immortalized in glorious Technicolor in Blue Skies (1946). See my previous post for a video clip.

As an interesting aside to this story, here are two ads from The Montreal Gazette of February 27, 1939. Son of Frankenstein was playing at The Princess while Billy De Wolfe was kicking off a stand a few blocks away at the très swanky Chez Maurice dinner club. Was the Frankenstein bit already part of De Wolfe’s show?

Note how the Massachusetts-born artist is billed as “England’s Magnificent Entertainer”, on the assumption that Canadian patrons would appreciate a Commonwealth connection. Misleading, certainly, but not an outright lie: De Wolfe had just returned from a long and very successful tour of England.

Related:
The Frankenstein Special: Blue Skies (1946)

The Frankenstein Special: Blue Skies (1946)

Call it ‘Astaire and Crosby Meet Frankenstein’ as comic Billy De Wolfe mimics the Monster in Blue Skies, a Paramount musical from 1946.

The Frankenstein cameo comes at 8:40 into the film. Bing Crosby, who runs a high-toned supper club, has to deal with a boisterous drunk. He signals his sidekick, waiter De Wolfe…

Here’s the clip:

Bulked up in his backwards coat, hair smoothed down, cheeks sucked in, De Wolfe transforms into a convincing Karloffian Frankenstein Monster, sans makeup save for a green light on his face. The stunt is all body language.

Blue Skies is Hollywood fluff rendered in gorgeous Technicolor, it’s flimsy romantic triangle plot a vehicle for a generous catalog of Irving Berlin songs and dazzling dance numbers that included Fred Astaire’s classic Puttin’ On the Ritz — later famously parodied in Young Frankenstein (1974).

Billy De Wolfe (1907-1974) honed his song and dance act in Burlesque, graduating to musical theater, Broadway, and on to a relatively short but showy film career — a dozen film in the Forties — perfecting his signature foppish, fastidious character in pencil mustache. He was much busier in television as a sitcom foil, talk-show raconteur and variety performer, often appearing in drag as “Mrs. Murgatroyd”. Through it all, De Wolfe toured extensively on the nightclub circuit. There is no record of his act, but as an impressionist, he may very well have originated the Frankenstein routine for his one-man show.

The extremely inebriated gentleman in the clip is Jack Norton (1889-1958), a ubiquitous bit player whose specialty was the comic drunk. He appeared wild-eyed, weaving perilously across the set, fumbling cigarettes, bumping into furniture and slurring his lines in countless film, with notable tanked turns opposite The Marx Brothers (A Day at the Races, 1937), and W.C.Fields (The Bank Dick, 1940). He also appears perfectly plastered in James Whale’s The Great Garrick (1937) and blotto in The Ghost Breakers (1940), with Bob Hope. In real life, Norton never touched the stuff.