[excerpt from Woody Allen autobiography] ------------ I managed to hit Nick Kenny's column several more times, but the big hit was one school day when my first gag appeared in Earl Wilson's column.
While Nick Kenny's column was soppy and square, Earl Wilson was the voice of Broadway. His stories and gossip were about show people, plays, movie stars, showgirls, nightclubs, supper clubs. Midnight Earl was a feature, and when a quip by Woody Allen showed up in his column it was as if I was part of the flashy Broadway nightlife scene.
In reality, I was in my bedroom on Avenue K in Brooklyn, but I daydreamed myself cracking wise at Toots Shor's with a couple of Copa girls on each arm. Soon I was mailing in jokes to all the columnists and getting printed everywhere; in Bob Sylvester's column in the News, Frank Farrell's in the New York World-Telegram, Leonard Lyons in the Post, and Hy Gardner in the Herald Tribune, and still Earl Wilson and Nick Kenny....
In those days there was a Madison Avenue publicity firm, David O. Alber Associates, whose job it was to get their roster of famous clients as much publicity as possible by securing stories about them, TV and press interviews, magazine covers, and whatever gimmicks they could think of to keep their names in the public eye.
One source of publicity was to constantly have your name appear in the newspaper columns, and to be quoted you needed to say something witty.
Someone's column might read, "Overheard at the Copa..."--and then some funny remark about traffic or mother-in-laws or the president or whatever attributed to the client.
Of course, the client never made the joke and probably couldn't have if his life depended on it.
He probably wasn't even at the Copa, although both the client and the nightclub were paying for the print exposure.
It was the press agent who mailed the gag in to the columnists who foisted the myth of a scintillating nightlife on Broadway around celebrities doing one-liners in the manner of Groucho Marx or Oscar Levant.
So it was that Gene Shefrin, the dynamic motor power of the David O. Alber publicity firm, couldn't help but notice that this unknown character, Woody Allen, was appearing in Broadway columns all over the papers week after week. Shefrin calls Earl Wilson and says who's this guy?
Earl Wilson says he's some kid in Brooklyn who comes home after high school, sits at a typewriter, and mails us a few gags every few days. Next thing I get a message from Earl Wilson's office to call the Alber office.
I do and I'm invited for a job interview.
Would I be interested in coming in each day after school, sitting at one of their unstolen typewriters, and knocking out gags for them so the likes of Guy Lombardo, Arthur Murray, Jane Morgan, Sammy Kaye, and others not famous for their wit could fasten their names to my inspirations and claim them as their own?
For this, they would pay me forty dollars a week.
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{Apropos of Nothing, by Woody Allen. Copyright 2020. Arcade Publishing, New York, New York}
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