From the current SUMMER 2025 Issue

Seventy years ago, The Honeymooners became a series--and television would never be the same

THE LONG HONEYMOON

By Wayne Klatt

During the course of his life, Jackie Gleason established himself in movies, on Broadway, in nightclubs… he even conquered the world of music, thanks to a series of languid records. Of course, for many people, he was first and foremost a television star — and for all the roles he played, none earned the public’s affection like Ralph Kramden, the ambitious yet flawed bus driver whose big dreams never quite came true.

Jackie Gleason knew all about dreams and setbacks. He was three years old when his older brother Clement died of meningitis in 1919. His father was an insurance clerk who disappeared when his son was nine. His mother (who took a job as a subway attendant after her husband left) died when her son was a teenager. So the boy who was born Herbert Walton Gleason Jr. did what a lot of folks were doing during the Great Depression: He quit school and went into show business, honing whatever talent he had — or could create.

He worked steadily in nightclubs and went to Hollywood when he was 24. He landed character roles in a few movies, including 1941’s Navy Blues, All Through the Night (supporting Humphrey Bogart) and Orchestra Wives, where he played the bassist in Glenn Miller’s orchestra. In the summer of 1944, he even starred on his own comedy-variety radio program, with singer Andy Russell and versatile radio actor Les Tremayne as his straight man.

Although Gleason came of age when radio was the dominant entertainment medium, his flair for visual comedy made him a better fit for the knockabout world of early television. Ironically, his first television series was 1949’s The Life of Riley, based on the radio show that had starred William Bendix. Gleason wasn’t bad in the role, but he lacked both Bendix’s vocal heft and his skill for appearing overwhelmed by revoltin’ developments. The series died after one season and Gleason returned to the world of nightclubs.

A more appropriate opportunity came along in 1950, thanks to the fledgling DuMont Network, an aggregation of television stations that didn’t enjoy the same geographical reach as established networks like NBC or CBS. Dumont had a 60-minute variety series called Cavalcade of Stars and invited Gleason to serve as one of the show’s rotating hosts. After a lifetime of struggles, here was the young comedian’s big chance and he grabbed it. Within weeks, he had become the show’s full-time star.

Gleason used the program to showcase his many and varied characters: the absurdly rich Reginald Van Gleason III, the down-to-Earth Joe the Bartender (who was forever telling stories to his customer, the unseen Mr. Dennehy) and the silent, forever-beleaguered Poor Soul. Still, the character audiences liked best was Ralph Kramden.

Who can say why his portrayal of a loud-yet-loving bus driver would prove the most enduring of them all? Well, if we had to limit it to two words, we might say: The Honeymooners.

A lot of Gleason’s characters were based on people he’d known during his hardscrabble Brooklyn childhood, but the characters of Ralph and Alice Kramden were the result of a session with his writers, in which Gleason proposed a sketch involving a loud husband and his smarter, quieter wife. Inspired in part by Philip Rapp’s Bickersons (played on radio by Don Ameche and Frances Langford), the Kramdens debuted on television on October 5, 1951.

A lot of the trappings we recall from the Honeymooners series were established in these sketches. The Kramdens lived in a small, dingy tenement apartment at 328 Chauncey Street, where the door opened out to the hallway rather than into the apartment. It was a look Gleason knew well from his childhood; according to set designer Ralph Cuoco, “Anything you see on the set was very definitely the way Jackie lived.” (As it happened, Gleason grew up in an apartment at 328 Chauncey.)

Ralph was a bus driver with a short fuse, which sometimes got the better of him as he went in pursuit of the big break that would allow the couple to move out of their cramped quarters and toward a better life. Alice was his long-suffering wife who wasn’t afraid to stand up to her blustery, heavy-set husband. Still, at the end of each sketch, there was no doubt that when all was said and done, they loved one another.

On the Dumont shows, Ralph’s wife Alice was played by feisty Pert Kelton. Having played wise-cracking gals on radio as part of The Milton Berle Show and Monte Woolley’s The Magnificent Montague, Kelton’s Alice was a small, tough redhead who was more than capable of standing up to her husband. “Ever see her in a part where she gets mad at a guy?” Gleason once said. “Holy smoke!”

Indeed, the very first Honeymooners sketch sees an argument over the Kramdens’ need to buy bread escalate to the point where Alice threatens to jump out of their kitchen window. Eventually, she backs down, shouting at her husband, “I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction!”

That first Honeymooners sketch saw Art Carney playing a policeman who’d been hit by a cannister of flour that Ralph had thrown out the window. By November, the sketches were proving more popular with both Gleason and his audience and Carney was cast as upstairs neighbor (and Ralph’s best friend), the sweet-but-simple Ed Norton.

Carney had established himself as an actor in New York theater and radio on such shows as Gangbusters, The Mysterious Traveler and The March of Time (where he was one of only a handful of actors allowed to impersonate President Roosevelt). Given those credentials, perhaps it’s not all that strange that he never considered himself a comedian, despite working on radio alongside the likes of Morey Amsterdam and Henry Morgan.

In fact, everything about Carney’s Ed Norton was funny, including his costume (consisting of a crushed hat, a T-shirt and a floppy vest) and his elaborate mannerisms (which Carney copied from his father). Future Broadway legend Elaine Stritch was originally cast as Norton’s wife Trixie; after one show, she was replaced by Joyce Randolph, a stage actress who had also worked as a foil for comics.

Now the Honeymooners family was set. Well, almost…

By 1952, Gleason had left Dumont and gotten his own variety show for CBS — a bigger deal for a bigger network. He had every intention of bringing his cast from Cavalcade along with him, but the network insisted he replace Kelton, who had been blacklisted as a possible Communist sympathizer. (To spare Kelton any professional embarrassment, it was announced that she had left the show because of heart trouble.)

The search for a new Alice was getting frantic when Gleason’s manager — the wonderfully named Bullets Durgom — explained the situation to talent manager Val Irving. The two decided to solicit input from one of Irving’s clients, actress Audrey Meadows.

Meadows had appeared on Broadway in Phil Silvers’ Top Banana and on television alongside Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding (where she’d gained some experience improvising on live television). After seeing her suggestions for Alice Kramden get shot down (“There was something wrong with everybody, and I was giving them some pretty good names”), she half-seriously proposed herself.

True to form, Gleason shot that idea down as well. “She’s not Alice,” he told his manager. “She’s too attractive.” The rejection infuriated Meadows to the point where she decided the role would be hers.

She hired a photographer to come to her apartment at 7:00 the next morning and take pictures of her — wearing a housecoat, without makeup — as she washed dishes and took out trash. Gleason didn’t recognize Meadows in these photos but immediately said “That’s the girl, that’s the look.”

Viewers got to see the new Alice when The Jackie Gleason Show debuted on September 20, 1952. This new show was Cavalcade of Stars in everything but name and budget, thanks to holdovers Carney, Randolph, and the Busby Berkeley-inspired June Taylor Dancers.

Meadows’ willingness to make herself plain for the camera made her a perfect fit for the Honeymooners sketches. There was something magical about the way she delivered her lines, as if she had spent years contributing at least 75% to a marriage.

She also perfected the art of being what she called “as quiet as possible physically,” compared to the sometimes-cartoonish antics of Kramden and Norton. “I was never physical,” she recalled, “because they were physical.”

One other lesson Meadows learned quickly was that Gleason hated to rehearse. He had a quick mind and a photographic memory; what’s more, he believed multiple rehearsals compromised the chance for spontaneity. As a result, the cast learned to count on Gleason attending exactly one rehearsal, knowing that he expected everyone to have their lines down pat when the cameras went on. As a stage veteran who was used to multiple run-throughs, Meadows finally told him “We’ll all rehearse and you can come in Saturday and wherever there’s a space for you to stand, you fill in there.”

It became apparent to everyone that as funny as Gleason’s other characters were, there was something special about the Kramdens and Nortons. Writer Leonard Stern (who came to Gleason after working for Abbott and Costello) recalled “We started doing one sketch of The Honeymooners every five or six weeks and the response of people on the street was tremendous. So we started doing them every other week. Eventually, though, everyone, including Jackie, lost interest in the other characters in the different sketches, so we started to do them every week.”

There were times when the verbal jabs flew thick and fast and moments when Alice got under Ralph’s skin so thoroughly that he’d respond by cocking a fist and saying something like “One of these days…POW! Right in the kisser!” (among other threats). We can cringe at the 1950s assumption that men had a right to hit their wives but you knew he never meant it — and he never did. (What’s more, any battle of wits on The Honeymooners ended with the wives on top.) The skits were love stories in disguise and nearly every one ended with Ralph telling Alice “Baby, you’re the greatest” (and meaning it), and kissing as the curtain came down.

The Honeymooners started out as one of several short segments of the Gleason show, usually running 7-12 minutes. By 1954, the sketches were running 30-40 minutes in length without thinning the material.

One particularly famous sketch from this period was “Stand-in For Murder.” In this scenario, Gleason plays both Kramden and his double, a mobster hiding from a rival gang who decides to use Ralph as a decoy. This leads to a hilarious misunderstanding when Ralph reaches into his suit pocket and pulls out… an insurance policy.

The show actually ran long that week, truncating the sketch and forcing Gleason to explain the next week what happened. The sketch was presented in its entirety the next year and no one seemed to mind.

Given their popularity with both viewers and the cast, it made perfect sense when an ad agency executive asked “Why don’t we do a half-hour Honeymooners show?” Gleason and producer Jack Philbin agreed and inked a three-year deal for a weekly series that would begin in the fall of 1955. The plan was to shoot two episodes a week at the Adelphi Theater, which had seating for more than 1,000 audience members.

Filming the episodes gave them more permanence than live television could have offered, but Gleason had no interest in using the set-up as a crutch. Meadows recalled Gleason telling the cast “We will not do anything over.” There were no retakes and if something went wrong, they would press on for that audience, then perform the story in front of a new audience some weeks later — when Gleason felt the script would be “brand-new in our minds.”

That approach sometimes produced its own reward, as in “Better Living Through TV,” when Ralph and Norton go on television to promote the “Handy Household Helper” (which gave birth to the phrase “Chef of the Future”) and Kramden accidentally knocks over the back wall of the set. The directors — realizing that Gleason was both the star and the only one whose blocking was undetermined — told the cameramen, “Just follow him.”

The new series had the same look as the sketches from Gleason’s variety show. Most of the action took place in the Kramden’s shabby Bensonhurst apartment. (So convincing was the appearance of poverty that countless viewers sent curtains and aprons to Meadows so that she could brighten the place up a little.) Ralph, meanwhile, was driving a bus and pursuing countless get-rich-quick schemes that, had they ever worked, would’ve allowed him to be the provider he wanted to be.

“Kramden’s a dreamer,” explained senior writer Walter Stone. “He’s always hoping he can find some way to get out of that job and better himself… His basic problem was that he was always looking.”

Norton, meanwhile, was always a loyal, ice box-raiding dupe of a know-it-all who gets into trouble whenever he does things without consulting Trixie. “Ralph would talk him into these things,” Stone recalled, “and he would go along with Ralph because he was his friend.”

Carney called The Honeymooners “a comic strip come to life,” but Gleason always told his writers, “Make it real. Make it the way people really live. If it isn’t credible, nobody’s going to laugh.” That philosophy was a guiding force for the 39 episodes of that first season. That’s why people refer to them as “the Classic 39.”

“Every single situation,” Meadows explained, “was based on truth.”

Of course, everyone has their favorite episodes: Alice secretly bringing home a puppy and an oblivious Ralph accidentally feeding dog food to his boss; Norton donning his Captain Video helmet to watch television; Ralph going to a masquerade party as a Man from Mars; the golf lesson with Norton “addressing the ball” by declaring “Hello, ball!”; Ralph imagining himself owning “a string of poloponies”; responding to one of Alice’s put-downs with a sarcastic “Har-dee-har-har.” Each episode was clearly established in the first few lines, and the rest has a convincing inevitability.

So why did the series end after one year and 39 episodes? A few explanations have been offered but one of the biggest was ratings. After a decent start, the show started losing viewers to NBC’s super-successful Perry Como Show. At the same time, the writers — who’d been writing Honeymooners sketches for Gleason’s variety show that ran 35-45 minutes — were chafing at the restrictions of the half-hour format.

Then there was Gleason himself, who’d never spent this long playing a single character — and as great as those first 39 episodes were, there was some concern that maybe the show had gone as far as it could. “We were running out of ideas,” Gleason explained in 1985. “The excellence of the material could not be maintained, and I had too much fondness for the show to cheapen it.”

Instead, he stunned the sponsor and cast by announcing his decision to stop. The last episode aired on September 22, 1956. One week later, The Jackie Gleason Show returned to the air with its variety format. The new series eventually incorporated shorter Honeymooners sketches until March 1957, when an ongoing storyline had the Kramdens and Nortons winning a contest and traveling around the world. When Carney left the show that year, Gleason dropped the sketches as well.

Of course, the Honeymoon was far from over; Gleason brought the characters back intermittently (depending on Carney’s availability) on his Miami-based variety show during the 1960s. Meadows feared the travel would put a strain on her marriage, so Gleason hired Sheila MacRae and Jean Kean to play Alice and Trixie.

MacRae dyed her hair red (the color worn by Pert Kelton and Audrey Meadows), but she had her own ideas about how Alice should be played. At the first rehearsal, Gleason ordered her not to cry. “If you don’t come back and top me, the audience will hate me,” he said. Even Sheila’s friend Lucille Ball told her to make her character tougher, but this new Alice never came to life.

In the late 1970s, Gleason, Carney, and Meadows reunited (with Jane Kean) for a series of Honeymooners specials on ABC. These were the last new shows to feature the Kramdens and the Nortons.

That might have been the end of the story, except that the story of the Honeymooners never really ended. Not long after the original series ended, Gleason sold the rights to CBS for $1.5 million. The network promptly spun them off into syndication, where they’ve been seen ever since.

Then, some thirty years after the series began, Gleason edited and repackaged the kinescopes of the early Honeymooners sketches from his variety show and sold them as 22 “Lost Episodes.” Today, those compilations are available on home video and as part of the television syndication package.

It’s been seventy years since The Honeymooners made its debut — and if its run was shorter than any of its classic contemporaries, its impact might have been the greatest of them all. It’s been parodied by everyone from Stan Freberg to Looney Tunes to Saturday Night Live and inspired countless television families (including at least one animated family, The Flintstones).

It’s easy to see why these characters have resonated for so long. Here were people who loved one another — even as they risked driving each other crazy — trying to get ahead in the world and only rarely succeeding. “The problems have nothing to do with how much money a bus driver makes,” Meadows recalled years later. “The problems were all the universal kinds we all deal with.”

Of course, as Gleason explained in a 1984 interview, there’s another reason for the longevity of The Honeymooners: “It’s funny.”

To hear Jackie Gleason on radio, tune in to Radio ’s Golden Age on November 2 and to Those Were the Days on November 30.

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