Benny Rubin; Vaudeville, Movie Comic

Benny Rubin, the rubber-faced comic whose flair for dialect and dance kept him active through the golden ages of vaudeville and film, died Tuesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Rubin was 87.

His career evolved into not only a living link between the entertainers who were performing at the dawn of the 20th Century but a thread that extended beyond to their children.

Born into a poor family that produced eight sons, two of whom survive, the bug-eyed Rubin learned to tap dance by watching other children perform for pennies in his Boston slum neighborhood.

With that as a base, he entered amateur shows, winning as much as $3 and as little as 50 cents.

He was spotted in a burlesque show by Lou Walters, who was to eventually run New York’s old Latin Quarter and whose daughter, Barbara, today is one of television’s best-known personalities.

Walters booked him into a series of musical revues in New England where his pay rose to $27.50 a week. With that and $150 he won in a crap game, Rubin went to New York where he found work as a dialectician and hoofer in a Brooklyn burlesque theater.

As early as 1923, according to the “The Vaudevillians,” a 1976 collection of oral interviews, he was working with Jack Benny.

By then Rubin was earning $750 a week--first in the “Blackouts” revue and then at the Palace, vaudeville’s mecca, where he teamed with Eddie Cantor.

In 1929 he moved to Hollywood where he became a supporting actor in early sound pictures, specializing in the ethnic characters that became his forte for the next 30 years.

His film credits began with “Naughty Baby” and included “George White’s 1935 Scandals”; the 1941 “Here Comes Mr. Jordan,” “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” and, finally, “Won Ton Ton--The Dog Who Saved Hollywood” in 1976.

Rubin helped George Burns and Gracie Allen get their act booked into the Palace where Cantor saw them and put them on his nationwide radio show. He returned to Broadway to appear in “Girl Crazy” and then formed a new vaudeville act with Jack Haley, who years later became the Tin Man in “The Wizard of Oz.”

Rubin and Haley were readying some new material for the Palace when Rubin was stricken with appendicitis. Rather than cancel the act, they brought in a new comedian--a young man named Milton Berle then working the Catskills circuit.

Later when Rubin was offered a radio show originating in New York, he suggested instead his old friend Benny whose show went on the CBS network in 1932 and then moved to television.

Benny later repaid the favor by hiring Rubin in a series of comedic supporting parts. He also appeared regularly in other TV series, including “Gunsmoke.”

When show business did not pay the rent, Rubin ran a dress shop or sold barbecues to his old friends who had moved from the stages of burlesque to the mansions of Beverly Hills.

Vaudeville, however, remained the primary pleasure of his six-decade career:

“Big-time vaudeville. . . . Yes, it was show business.”