The Perennial Steve Allen

Minutes after he kicked off the first-ever “Tonight” show back in 1954, Steve Allen peered into an NBC camera, shuffled some white note cards on the desk and cracked his opening joke:

“I want to give you the bad news first, folks,” he told a national audience. “This show is going to go on forever.”

He was talking about the program’s late hour, but on that historic fall evening in New York, Allen was more clairvoyant than he knew. His casual remark--flip, hip and genial--just as easily could have applied to his own career.

Some 44 years later, “The Tonight Show” has become a fixture in American pop culture, and Allen seems equally perennial. Beyond his credentials as a comic and pioneer of late-night talk TV, he is a respected jazz pianist, a poet, songwriter, novelist, dramatist, political pamphleteer, recording artist, actor and philanthropist. At 76, he shows no signs of slowing down.

Indeed, Allen’s prolific qualities are almost irritating.

Books, essays and polemics seem to pour out of him, as though he were a modern-day Voltaire. He recently published his 48th title and wrote his 6,000th song. With his wife, actress Jayne Meadows, he appears at concerts, charity dinners and debates. The couple have appeared on “Homicide” and “St. Elsewhere,” and they were cast in a highly praised production of A. R. Gurney’s play “Love Letters.”

“In some ways, I feel more active now than I did many years ago,” Allen says on a quiet morning in his large, gated Encino home. “I feel like I always have. Energetic. Very, very involved.”

Yet there is a telling difference between the graying Steve Allen of today and the brainy prankster of the ‘50s, who jumped into vats of Jell-O and broke up viewers with bizarre man-in-the-street interviews, long before Letterman and Leno.

Avant-garde in his 30s, he’s on guard in his 70s, railing against a decline in America’s cultural and intellectual life. He has become an increasingly conservative voice on some issues, even though many of his views remain firmly left of center.

Allen once talked like a populist; now he decries the growing stupidity and gullibility of the American public. He crusaded against the Vietnam War, but blames the counterculture for contributing to the moral decline of our national life.

These days, he speaks out on the declining civility of TV sitcoms; he denounces stars like Madonna, who he says flaunt vulgarity. He dismisses much of rock ‘n’ roll as an art form inferior to American music of the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s.

It’s a remarkable evolution for a man who was once on the cutting edge of liberal politics. Long before it became fashionable, for example, Allen protested and wrote about the plight of migrant farm workers. He publicly debated William F. Buckley in 1963, holding his own against the conservative author.

Standing apart from such mainstream comics as Jack Benny, George Burns and Milton Berle, Allen introduced many young, iconoclastic artists to TV--including Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, the Smothers Brothers, Steve Martin and Billy Crystal.

Behind his trademark owlish glasses, he projected a smart but surreal sensibility. He was a jazzman loose in prime-time, the thinking person’s comic, one step ahead of the censors.

But that was then. Now, the seemingly unthinkable question is asked: Has Steverino become just another angry old man?

“Hardly,” answers Allen, amused by the thought.

“The sea in which I swim has changed greatly,” he says, suggesting that shifting cultural standards are to blame. “So I don’t feel that I’ve changed much at all. I just got a hell of a lot older.”

*

He can still make an audience gasp with laughter.

During an appearance at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in April, Allen was irked that no one had been officially assigned to present him to the overflow crowd in a UCLA lecture hall.

“I’d like to thank the powers that be for that very flattering introduction,” he said dryly, as the crowd roared. When he finished, Allen used the same gag to say goodbye:

“It seems to me I’ve been talking for hours and there must be some plan for me to stop,” he deadpanned. “Or maybe that decision was left to the guy who introduced me.”

As the talk turns serious, though, Allen speaks in complex, compound sentences that sometimes meander. Armed with a pocket tape-recorder, he’ll stop in mid-spiel to dictate the fragment of an unrelated idea or something about his show biz career. His answers can take forever, but you forgive him: When it comes to looking back, he’s got a lot of material to rummage through.

By now, the rough outlines of Allen’s life are well known. His parents were vaudeville performers, but he was raised by other family members in Chicago after his father died and his mother, an established star, continued performing on the road.

As a teenager, he developed a taste for comedy and the piano. His youth was unhappy and chaotic, but his fortunes improved after he won a journalism scholarship to Drake University in Iowa, where he became interested in radio broadcasting. Eventually, he found steady work in Phoenix.

Allen rose from one job to another until he was hosting successful radio shows in Los Angeles during the late ‘40s. He attracted the attention of CBS executives who lured him to New York and gave him the chance to do television work. When he landed the “Tonight” job, his career took off.

For 30 years, he had a string of network TV hits, including the much-honored “Steve Allen Show.” In 1952, his first marriage ended bitterly in divorce. He married Meadows in 1954 and the couple have one son. Allen has three older sons from his first marriage.

Asked how her husband has changed over 44 years, Meadows says he has evolved from a painfully shy man into a confident and outspoken one. At cocktail parties, she says, he used to camp out at the piano or in the library, but not anymore.

When they first began dating, Meadows recalls, “he was so shy, I had to maneuver the first kiss.” Most comedians, she adds, are at ease in social settings but petrified on stage. With her husband, it has always been the opposite.

Comics have long praised Allen’s work. Using primitive technology, he pioneered many of the staples of late-night TV, such as taking cameras out of the studio and into the streets. Carl Reiner calls him a legend--as well as a friend who provided crucial career advice.

“It was Steve Allen’s idea for Mel Brooks and I to do an album based on the ‘2,000-Year-Old Man,’ ” Reiner says. “We performed it at many parties, and at one big party Steve said, with great excitement: ‘You have to do an album. . . . I’ll pay for the session. If you don’t like it, you can burn it.’

“We recorded it at World Pacific Jazz,” Reiner continues. “Thirty-seven years later, Steve Allen proved to be right.”

It may sound like ancient history to younger TV comics, many of whom belittle the tame material and slower pace of their predecessors. But Allen rarely gets such criticism.

“You have to watch the old Steve Allen shows,” says Steve O’Donnell, who writes for “Seinfeld” and was previously the head writer for David Letterman. “They’re like the comedy equivalent of jazz, almost Salvador Dali-like surreal images.”

Allen “is more genteel now,” says O’Donnell, “but back then it was far-out, daddy-o. . . . It was really great stuff on TV.”

Yet even with such tributes, Allen’s life has hardly been a comedy fairy tale come true. “I had an intellectual awakening at 30,” Allen says. “My first marriage collapsed, and I didn’t think that could happen to a nice fellow like me. I was shattered by the perception that I was no better than anyone else.”

The breakup, he explains, was his fault: “I became involved with, as we say, another woman. I didn’t want to, and it was such a shock to me that I ended up trying to ‘work it out’ by writing a novel. . . . And I began to read compulsively.”

Soon, books were pouring out of him. He wrote novels; an autobiography, “Mark It and Strike It;” plays; books on comedy, religion, crime, ethics, politics and other topics.

Some critics sniff that none of them is very deep. And Allen’s amazing gift for pop songwriting--his 6,000-and-counting is in the Guinness Book of Records--also has drawn fire.

Once, irritated that a rival network had more “quality” shows than his own, the late NBC chief Brandon Tartikoff snapped: “It’s like Steve Allen. He’s written 1,000 songs. Name one.”

Well, try “This Could Be the Start of Something Big,” a hugely successful song. Or “Picnic,” “Gravy Waltz” and “(I Would Have Said) Impossible,” a hit for Nat “King” Cole in 1958. Allen’s songs have been recorded by Mel Torme, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Judy Garland, Sarah Vaughan, Hoagy Carmichael and others.

To be sure, the vast majority of his songs do not enjoy such acclaim. Many were written as snippets, others simply to demonstrate the composer’s odd prowess. Still, 6,000 tunes is an extraordinary body of work for a man who doesn’t even read music.

Andy Williams joked that Allen does so much, his name could appear on each one of the Yellow Pages. There’s a temptation to simply celebrate him. But he has stirred his share of controversy.

*

Let’s begin with Elvis.

In 1956, Allen’s Sunday night comedy hour was up against Ed Sullivan’s variety show and there was fierce competition for new acts. As Presley began to catch fire, Allen booked him first.

But it was not simply to play music. Looking for laughs, Allen had Presley sing “Hound Dog” in top hat and tails. Next to him was a mournful basset hound--also in top hat and tails.

Years later, many rock aficionados have yet to forgive Allen for that. More provocative, though, have been his comments that Presley’s talent, while considerable, had its limits, and that rock music in general--including the great majority of songs recorded by the Beatles--is generally inferior to jazz.

“The music of the true golden age--the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s--was simply superior to most of what you hear on the air today,” he told the Times Festival of Books audience. “To put it in more specific terms, ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is better than ‘Switchblade, Baby, I’m Going to Stab You Tonight.’ ”

How about the ‘60s youth culture?

“I will never to my dying day look back on Woodstock as some great point in American history,” Allen says. “I think it was a national embarrassment. People stoned. People peeing, you know, next to some stranger. People screwing in the grass.

“I mean, I’m all for peeing and screwing. I’m not trying to get ‘em made illegal. But in public? I don’t think so.”

Allen is not angry at teenagers alone. In 1991, he published “Dumbth,” a scathing look at how ignorance and lazy thinking have polluted American life. He laments what he sees as the erosion of rational thought in the body politic, and he has no use for superstition.

On a recent episode of “Politically Incorrect” on television, host Bill Maher said: “I believe in ghosts, I believe in numerology, I believe in astrology. Does that make me stupid?”

“Yes,” Allen answered.

No subject riles him more, however, than the state of American pop culture. In a recent speech at a Canadian television festival in Banff, he unloaded on the media.

“We’re not just talking about television here,” he said. “Much of modern entertainment--films, recordings, radio, comedy clubs--already involves vulgarians addressing barbarians. . . . If you think our society is sick now, stand by.”

He has come a long way from the night when he shocked TV big shots by putting Lenny Bruce on his show. Or the time he told viewers that his next guest--a scowling, unkempt singer named Dylan--would one day make a big noise in the world.

As Allen sees it, he simply has adjusted to changing times. He has gotten older and, he hopes, wiser, and he has tried to be open-minded. What remains intact is his gift for comedy. He can still bang out punch lines with the best of them.

Question: “What do you think about sex on TV?”

Answer: “I’d be careful of the antenna.”