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September 25, 1939
Time Magazine
Radio Tintype
Old Joe Howard, the Gay Nineties song-&-dance man who wrote I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now and 500 other whilom favorites, is 72. His shuffle-off-to-Buff alo is not what it used to be, but he can still plug a song. Last Christmas, parsimonious Showman Billy Rose, whose cabaret career is paved with old music-hall favorites hired for a song, hired old Joe to sing his old songs at Manhattan’s rhinestony Diamond Horseshoe. For Joe Howard, the job was a welcome hitch along his comeback trail—which last week looked promising indeed.
In Manhattan nightspots, boaters, bustles and high-wheeler emotions of the last century have been surefire entertainment for the last several years. CBS’s young President William S. Paley, an occasional nightowl, thought the radio audience might like a whiff of the same. CBS Producer Al Rinker finally decided Diamond Horseshoe’s Joe Howard was just the tintype to headline the show.
A Little Old New York saloonkeeper’s son, born in slummy Mulberry Bend, orphaned at seven, a runaway (from Father Drunogie’s orphanage) in his ‘teens, Joe Howard had been on the boards for 60 years. His runaway took him to St. Louis where, still in short pants, he got a job with McNish, Johnson & Slavin’s Refined Minstrels, singing A Boy’s Best Friend Is His Mother. This job was the making of him. He became a protege of the late, bully-built William Muldoon (later T.R.’s sparring partner), who was then touring the minstrel circuit with Charley Mitchell, the little man who wouldn’t stay down for the great John L. Sullivan. Joe learned to box (well enough to claim the bantamweight championship in 1886, and troupe later with Bob Fitzsimmons); and he learned the tricks of tunesmithing. This trade paid. In his time he has turned out 28 musical comedies, has written, among his 500 songs, such daisies as Goodbye, My Lady Love, What’s the Use of Dreaming?, Central, Give Me Back My Dime. Married seven times, he made—and spent—$1,500,000. Somewhere in France Is the Lily, a World War occasional, brought him $50,000. I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now, his most-famed favorite, sold 3,000,000 copies, still brings in royalties.
Around Joe Howard, Producer Rinker built up for CBS a show called Gay Nineties Revue, in which, every Sunday evening since July, grey old Joe has been barking up the gaslit atmosphere of Tony Pastor’s and the spirit of Maggie Cline. Joe sings his own songs, hails such ghostly patrons as Lillian Russell, Diamond Jim Brady, Lily Langtry, David Warfield, Lew Dockstader and the Madison Wheelmen, while a good, corny music-hall ensemble vamps till the performers are ready with standbys like Daisy Bell, By the Light of the Silvery Moon, Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl. The working-girl songs, and also such alley classics as She Is More to Be Pitied than Censured, My Mother Was a Lady, Throw Him Down Mc-Closkey, etc., are brayed with proper bathos by a chanteuse named Beatrice Kay, who can take off anybody from Eva Tanguay to Anna Held.
Gay Nineties Revue was originally scheduled as a summer substitute. But last week, with the fall season ready to start, Joe Howard’s boom-de-ay sounded too good to lose. So last week, with several sponsors nibbling at the show, CBS decided to make a regular thing of it. Henceforth, old Joe Howard will carry on his new career Saturday nights during the fall, picking up the living-room royster-ers where the football broadcasts leave off.
Meanwhile, the author of last war’s Somewhere in France Is the Lily has lost no time doing his bit for this one. Already on the sheet-music racks is his (and Bob Randolph’s) Let’s Stay Over Here, the lyric burden of which seems to be: We’d like to stay here, but if we have to come over there—Look out!
Old Time Radio Bulletin 