What can you add to the list??? Put it in the comments below.
1) When Jackie Gleason met Audrey Meadows for the first
time, he thought she was all wrong for the part of Alice Kramden—she was too
pretty, too young and much too charming.
So Meadows went home and had several pictures taken in her apartment
wearing old clothes and curlers sans make-up.
When shown the pictures, Gleason didn’t even recognize her, but
exclaimed: “That’s our Alice! Who is
she?”
2)
‘The Honeymooners’ was broadcast from New York
City at Studio 50 on 53rd Street and Broadway. ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ also aired from Studio
50 and the place has since been renamed ‘The Ed Sullivan Theater’, where David
Letterman worked for many years. It is
now on the National Register of Historic Places.
3)
‘The Honeymooners’ originally began as a small
segment of ‘The Jackie Gleason Show’, which first aired in 1952. Brooklyn bus driver Ralph Kramden became so
popular that three years later, Gleason stopped filming his variety show and
began the half-hour situation comedy—and those are the 39 episodes seen most
often.
4)
The first Alice Kramden was played by Pert Kelton
who was blacklisted during the Red Scare and let go by the network. In deference to the actress, Gleason told his
team that Kelton was ill.
5)
Prior to one show, Meadows had an allergic
reaction to some shrimp—her eye swelled up.
Gleason, ever the improviser, wrote four lines of dialogue to cover the
problem:
Trixie:
What happened to your eye?
Alice: I
forgot to do the laundry.
Trixie: So?
Alice: Ralph threw his socks at me.
6)
As the show grew more and more popular on
Saturday nights, the fan mail increased.
Letters poured in from all over the country with fans enclosing hundreds
of kitchen curtains and aprons hoping to cheer up Alice who was stuck in that dingy
apartment. One woman even enclosed a
dime instructing Alice to buy a new curtain rod as it would be too cumbersome to
send in the mail.
7)
The Kramdens lived at 328 Chauncey Street in Bensonhurst,
a borough of Brooklyn. Growing up, Gleason
also lived in an apartment on Chauncey Street, but in Brooklyn’s Bushwick area—a
poor section of town. He modeled the Kramdens’ apartment after his own
boyhood residence.
8)
After each performance, Gleason sent one dozen roses
to every woman appearing in the show.
9)
Audrey Meadows always wore flats when playing
Alice Kramden so she would appear shorter than her onscreen husband. She was five foot six to Gleason’s five foot
nine.
10)
Art Carney claimed that his dramatic hand
gestures were based upon his own father’s hand motions whenever the senior
Carney had to sign one of his son’s bad report cards.
