Oh, for Heaven’s Sake

When UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television dedicated its George Burns Sound Stage in honor of the late comedian last week, fellow comics Jack Carter and Red Buttons entertained the crowd with humorous reminiscences about their old friend.

Then a surprise guest made his entrance, walking down the aisle with his familiar mincing gait.

“Now hold it,” exclaimed Jack Benny, “you didn’t talk about me yet, for heaven’s sake.”

The crowd roared at the sight of the man in the dark-blue blazer and horn-rimmed glasses. He cast one of his deadpan stares at the audience, “You have no idea what it took for me to be here tonight.”

It was “a priceless moment,” said veteran Hollywood actor Eddie Carroll, the Benny impersonator.

Carroll has been generating priceless moments for 16 years with his portrayal of the beloved comedian in a one-man show, “Jack Benny: Laughter in Bloom,” which arrives at the Curtis Theatre in Brea for two shows Saturday.

Carroll, who has toured the country playing Benny everywhere from Las Vegas showrooms to New York theaters, has amassed a string of rave reviews for his on-the-money take on the notorious skinflint.

The San Francisco Chronicle says, “Carroll captures Jack Benny’s fussy exasperated essence, inhabiting his spirit as well as his shadow.” Says Los Angeles Magazine: “Before our eyes, he truly becomes the legendary comedian.”

Carroll has the same effect on those who personally knew America’s most famous “39-year-old,” who died at age 80 in 1974. After Carroll’s UCLA appearance, Buttons embraced Carroll, telling him, “You were absolutely magnificent.”

“It’s very fulfilling [when that happens] because then I know as a performer I’ve really done my job,” said Carroll from his home in Encino, slipping easily in and out of his Benny persona.

Ask Carroll his age and you unwittingly set yourself up as straight man:

“Thirty-nine,” he replies, then laughingly adds, “I couldn’t resist. . . . I’m in my early 60s. That’s the age Benny was when he did his television series.”

The Canadian-born Carroll, who began acting in high school in Edmonton and first arrived in Hollywood at 20 in 1957, has appeared in more than 200 commercials, at least 70 TV shows and a dozen films. For 26 years he has been the voice of Jiminy Cricket for Walt Disney Studios.

But his primary work over the past 15 years has been his one-man show.

The idea of making a career out of Jack Benny happened by accident.

While Carroll was working on a film in 1982, a crew member dropped a piece of equipment that ruined a take. Carroll broke the tension on the set by saying, a la Benny, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Rochester!”

The spontaneous remark got a big laugh, and Carroll’s vocal and physical mimicry of Benny so impressed the director that he urged Carroll to talk to a producer who was looking for someone to play Benny in a one-man show.

“A Small Eternity With Jack Benny” opened at the Mayfare Theater in Santa Monica in 1983.

“It was a glowing experience for me because everybody that knew Jack Benny came to see the show,” recalled Carroll, whose favorite review came from Benny show regular Dennis Day, who said, “I closed my eyes and heard Jack; I opened my eyes and I saw him.”

Carroll, who toured with “A Small Eternity With Jack Benny” for a year and then wrote a Jack Benny tribute show, had clearly done his homework.

“I spent hours working on his walk, body language, mannerisms, hand movements and speech patterns,” Carroll recalled. “I’d listen to his radio show for hours and old television shows to watch how he did his monologue so I could create the whole persona onstage.”

Carroll said “the essence” of his one-man show “really is Jack Benny sharing his entire life story with the audience”--from his early days in vaudeville to radio and television.

Carroll, as Benny, walks out onstage as though it were 1972 and Benny was doing one of his television specials. The stage is decorated simply, with a sofa, an easy chair and a table. Props are kept to a minimum, but there’s one item Carroll couldn’t do without: a violin.

Carroll said Benny, whose real name was Benny Kubelsky, started playing the instrument at 6 and landed his first job in show business at 17 playing the violin in the pit orchestra of a vaudeville house in his hometown of Waukegan, Ill.

“Thank goodness Benny wasn’t a great violinist or I’d be in deep trouble,” joked Carroll, who walks out onstage with the violin, puts it down and says to his audience, “Don’t look so relieved; I play it later.”

Toward the end of the show, he said, he actually plays Benny’s theme song, “Love in Bloom.”

Carroll, who said he wouldn’t be mistaken for Jack Benny offstage, actually worked with the comedian twice as an actor on Benny’s TV specials.

“He was the nicest, sweetest man in the world,” he said. “I always looked up to him. He was the consummate comedian. Even Milton Berle said Jack Benny had the greatest timing of any comedian he ever knew.”

In 1997-98, Carroll did a 42-city tour with his one-man show and, he noted, “there were full houses everywhere.”

But that, he concedes, has less to do with him than with Jack Benny: After 33 years in broadcasting--23 years on his weekly radio show; 10 years on his weekly TV show--Benny left behind an “enormous legacy.”

Even today, Carroll said, a lot of young people are discovering Benny, thanks to campus radio stations that play Benny’s old radio shows and cable TV channels that run the TV series.

“Older people come for the nostalgia...and the young people come to find out what made him a legendary comedian.”

BE THERE

“Jack Benny: Laughter in Bloom” at the Curtis Theatre, 1 Civic Center Circle, Brea. 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday. $15-$20. (714) 990-7722.