REMEMBERING THE GREAT ONE

The deaths of Fred Astaire and Jackie Gleason within a few days of each other have prompted a number of cultural observers to look for parallels in their careers. Both were masters at what they did. Both were sui generis figures. Astaire was not only an incomparable dancer--and an impeccably stylish singer--but he defined a sort of American ‘30s figure whose romantic cosmopolitan buoyancy would never be managed quite as well by anyone else. With Astaire, the illusion was the reality, and it added to our lives a lovely grace note.

Gleason was another matter. He was so gifted at what he did that no one asked him for more, and the how-sweet-it-is memories took on such a lilt that no one wondered aloud why, long before his health gave out and with it his energies to perform and invent, he was getting away with giving so little. In his relatively recent credit card commercial on TV, for example, his allusion to savoring the best of everything seemed a reference to someone else, almost as though he were the salesman and not the buyer.

You saw it first in “Smokey and the Bandit” in the mid-’70s, and wherever else he re-emerged in comedy films such as “Sting II,” and “The Toy”--a dead-eyed, lizard-hard face that harbored a spirit worn down to peevishness and heavy plaint. It was a face that had lost its eye for the sensual sweet and the flicker of wit.

The title “The Great One” was never borne by Gleason with disingenuous reluctance, like Caesar’s crown. It’s almost impossible for a comedian to come on with with Gleason’s epicurean extravagance and self-satisfaction without making you look for a discreet exit (how grim it is to hear Jerry Lewis tell us how great he is).

But in his prime Gleason’s arrival, even on a little TV screen, heralded event. You appreciated his girth, not because he played off it with an Oliver Hardy-like fastidiousness, or because it satisfied our stereotypical notion of the jolly fat guy, but because it seemed an embodiment of his lust for more--more booze, more women, more great and good times, more life.

In the ‘50s, Sid Caesar offered his brilliant and inspired “Show of Shows,” but Jackie Gleason was Mr. Saturday Night, the prime minister of show time for the working man. We were more innocent about alcohol in those days, so his manifest love of the sauce was less a harbinger of ruin than it was a signal about cutting loose from America’s postwar corporate consolidation (this was the era of Sloan Wilson’s “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit”) or of coming in from out of the Cold War for a little nip.

The booze was a symptom of Reggie van Gleason III’s irreverence, and it gave America a cozier image of its wealthy. Gleason’s Chaplin-esque Poor Soul represented our mystification over technology, and our comic fallibility and even uselessness before the inscrutable machine. Joe the Bartender gave us the security of neighborhood (“You want the usual?”).

“The Honeymooners,” of course, gave us the working class at home and in the trenches of domestic warfare. What redeemed Ralph’s bluster was that you knew it was a cry--his route was a rut and the world was making him breathe his own bus fumes. Gleason was smart enough to give Alice and Ed all the best lines, but the thing that redeemed “The Honeymooners” most was the clear depiction that for all the claustrophobic gray they lived in, the Kramdens loved the hell out of each other. The majority of other sitcom couples may occasionally exchange a perfunctory peck at the end of their domestic day; Ralph gave Alice a smooch. They lacked our post-modern sexual meagerness.

Gleason was also a superb character actor. All the great stories need a pivotal witness, like Hamlet’s Horatio, in whose face we read the drama. In “The Hustler” you knew exactly what was at stake when Gleason’s imperturbable Minnesota Fats looked at Fast Eddie and said quietly, “Better pay the man, Eddie.” And he was a piercingly melancholy Joe in Saroyan’s “The Time of Your Life.” (He was critically well-received as well in 1986’s “Nothing in Common.”)

Like all veteran entertainers, Gleason was adroit at self-invention; that is to say, you never knew what was biographically true of him. He told one interviewer of his stint as a circus platform diver, and offered another a poignantly funny image of slowly climbing up the ladder of 100-foot diving tower, taking one glimpse at the tank below that looked the size of a turquoise pinkie ring, and lumbering back down. One account of his orphaned youth cites his mother dying when he was 11. Recalling Gleason’s all-consuming ambition, a less-than-sympathetic acquaintance alleged that a post-adolescent Gleason played cards with friends while his mother lay dying in an adjacent room.

It’s often the case that characters like Gleason, formed early in life in deep terror and loneliness, arrive at their conclusions of the world faster and hold onto them with infinitely more tenacity than kids who grow up under the mediating influence of affectionate parents. But who knows? In his work at least, it appears Gleason was rarely able to reconcile his deep capacity for feeling with his hard-eyed view of the scrabbling evils of everyday life. His role of Mache in “Requiem for a Heavyweight” felt like one of his truest--this was a character who knew how people stink. When Gleason tried at major emotion, he came out corny and dewy-eyed.

Nobody really knew why Jackie Gleason became less inventive as time went on, and instead chatted up the good work he did 30 years ago. Health may have been more of a factor than we know. Or it may be that the comedy muse is one of the most fickle and heartbreaking, and that one day Gleason woke to find a note on the dresser.

What F. Scott Fitzgerald said of Ring Lardner could be said of Gleason: “Toward the end, he agreed with himself to speak only a small portion of his mind.” For a long time Gleason was the fabulous life of the party, and that memory should more than suffice. But to our sadness over the loss of a great entertainer and a protean talent is an extra wrinkle of mystification: There was much unseen in the heart of The Great One.