From the current AUTUMN 2026 Issue

Comedian, author, musician, television pioneer
The restless, creative life of STEVE ALLEN

A MAN OF MANY MINDS

By Wayne Klatt

Steve Allen might have been the first true television star. He wasn’t a joke-telling vaudeville veteran like Bob Hope or Milton Berle and he didn’t sing or dance.

He did play the piano and wrote, by his own estimation, some 8,000 songs — a claim that led actual comedian (and fellow television legend) Jack Paar to fire back “Name one.” (Actually, we can: Steve’s longtime theme song “This Could Be the Start of Something.”)

Perhaps no performer from the Golden Age of entertainment worked as much “in the moment” as Steve Allen. With Allen’s shows, there were times when no one (including Allen himself) knew what was coming. Sometimes he would take a microphone and start walking, just to see what would happen; other times, he might go to the other extreme and present a premise so ridiculous — such as forcing Elvis Presley to sing “Hound Dog” to a Basset hound — that one had to acknowledge its audacity.

He was also a prolific writer and a self-described “philosophy fanatic” with a serious side that showed itself in everything from essays to, of course, television shows. No less than Noel Coward described Steve Allen as “the most talented man in America.”

As should be clear, Steve Allen had a restless, inventive, open mind that took him— and in the process, took the media in which he worked — in a lot of directions that were new to both of them.

As the old saying goes, Steve was “born in a trunk,” the child of vaudevillians Billy and Isabelle Allen. (Apparently Milton Berle considered Isabelle the funniest woman in vaudeville.) He was delivered in New York City the day after Christmas 1921; tragically, his father died before his son had even turned two.

In an effort to provide for her son, Isabelle went back out onto the road while young Steve was turned over to his mother’s middle-to-lower-class family in Chicago.

Years later, Allen recalled the family’s sense of humor was “sarcastic, volatile, sometimes disparaging, but very funny.” The child was not a jokester or grade school cut-up, but he really enjoyed it when other people were funny.

Steve ran away from home at age 16 and, in his own words, “faced severe hunger” as he “bummed around the country.” Eventually, he made his way to Arizona State Teachers College in Tempe, but dropped out sophomore year to take a job at KOY/Phoenix. His duties included a commercial for Alka-Seltzer, during which he would take a tablet from a bottle and drop it into a glass of water for the fizz.

One day, while on the air, he found the bottle of tablets was empty. He couldn’t interrupt the commercial to get more; instead, he bent close to the microphone and imitated the sound. No one noticed the difference, but that moment was Allen’s one-second introduction to show business.

In 1943, Allen spent a brief stint in the Army (he was eventually discharged due to asthma) and got married to Dorothy Goodman; the marriage lasted nearly a decade and produced three children. The couple eventually moved to Los Angeles, where Allen found gigs as a lounge pianist and singer and began writing what turned into hundreds of songs.

More importantly, he took an announcing job at local station KFAC, before moving across town to Mutual affiliate KHJ. It was here that he and fellow announcer Wendell Noble launched Smile Time, a 15-minute daily comedy show (featuring a young June Foray) that lasted two years.

Another piece of the Allen mosaic was placed in 1949 when he moved to CBS’ Los Angeles affiliate KNX and began hosting a nightly, hour-long, after-hours program dedicated to music and spontaneous conversation that could be delightfully unpredictable (it was during this show that Allen took a microphone into the crowd for the first time, something he would do often throughout his career) and equally off-kilter. One night, Allen welcomed the legendary Al Jolson and declared that he’d written out some questions in advance. The first one: “Al, how are you?”

Audiences loved Allen’s ad-libbed, informal approach and flocked to attend the broadcasts. Eventually, CBS brought him to a national audience by hiring him as a summer replacement for Eve Arden and Our Miss Brooks. (On that first show, Allen told a joke about attending a party at Jack Benny’s house, where “water flowed like champagne.”)

Allen might have enjoyed radio, but his rise to prominence coincided with the dawn of the new medium of television. Ironically, his first job in the new medium involved making color commentary (and sometimes inventing new terminology) for wrestling broadcasts.

CBS took a chance and brought Allen to New York for a 30-minute show, beginning on Christmas Day 1950. It didn’t last long but a month later he was pressed into service as a substitute host for Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. Allen created a sensation during a live commercial for Lipton when he made both their tea and their instant soup on camera — then poured them into Godfrey’s ukelele.

It should have been a rocket to the stars, but the fact was that rocket took a little time getting off the ground. In 1953, he became a panelist on the game show What’s My Line? and hosted a late-night talk/variety show for NBC’s New York affiliate. As NBC president Sylvester “Pat” Weaver contemplated offering late-night programs for the whole network, he launched a new show in September 1954 and asked Allen to host.

The new show would become known as Tonight.

In 2026, the Tonight Show is in its eighth decade on the air and is known as a tight one-hour show that hews to a specific format of comedy monologue, conversation and music. Allen’s Tonight, on the other hand, was a 90-minute variety show that featured regular singers (starting with future husband-and-wife Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme), a band (led by pianist Skitch Henderson), occasional guest stars and the likable Allen doing whatever came into his head. On the first show, Allen warned his audience “You think you’re tired now — wait until one o’clock rolls around!”

In the style of his radio show, Allen divided his time between a desk and a piano. That said, he didn’t follow a formula, because there was no formula to follow: He might tell a few jokes, read (and comment on) a newspaper article, turn a camera on for a view of the street (sometimes offering commentary on each passer-by as though he was covering a parade) and then take a break by bringing Steve and/or Eydie on for a song.

Of course, there were guests as well, even if the format was still more variety show than conversation show. The first week of Tonight featured comedian Wally Cox, singer Lena Horne, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans and baseball great Willie Mays. Years later, Allen recalled one show where he sang three-part harmony alongside actor Charles Coburn and poet Carl Sandburg.

As one might imagine from someone as thoughtful as Steve Allen, there were also times when he felt the need to step away from the comedy. When Life magazine ran a feature about the brutality of the New York Mafia, Allen was particularly disturbed by a photo of a man who’d been beaten virtually from head to toe. His offense? Speaking out — at a Lutheran church meeting — against a pinball machine in a candy store near a school.

Allen had the camera stay on the photo as he expounded about the problem. Eventually, he worked with the New York Anti-Crime Committee to produce an entire show about organized crime in New York — at a time when speaking aloud about such things could literally be hazardous to your health. The show featured a panel of experts that included a labor columnist and a narcotics agent, and Allen brought a touch of mordant humor to the proceedings when he said “Ours is a government of checks and balances. The Mafia and crooked businessmen make out checks, and the politicians and other compromised officials improve their bank balances.”

The story of how this special program was made and aired reads like the plot of a John Grisham novel. At one point, a lawyer who had written a book about the problem suddenly backed out of the show rather than risk offending “people in power.” Allen also got a call from a leading figure in the garment industry who had somehow seen the script. The caller was especially concerned about a mention of Benjamin “Boom Boom” Levine, who had been convicted of extortion a decade earlier.

When the segment aired that late Tuesday night in 1954, Allen spoke about a certain man’s “evil influence” but omitted the name. The garbage had hit the fan by the time a newspaper identified Mr. X as Levine, who was later arrested for planning a narcotics set-up. (Years later, this conflict inspired the character of gangster “Boss” Rojak in the movie My Favorite Year.) Allen survived the experience but claimed that some mob-run clubs and theaters refused to book him for years afterward.

One might wonder how Allen had time to live a life given the demands of television, but in July 1954 he found time to marry actress Jayne Meadows.

On paper, it seemed like a case of opposites attracting; they came from different religious backgrounds and had different political affiliations, but both of them were sharply intelligent and had a great sense of fun. (They also had television in common; she’d been working on the game show I’ve Got a Secret while he’d been appearing on What’s My Line?)

While Steve was hosting Tonight and starting a new family with wife Jayne, he still found time to star in a movie, 1956’s The Benny Goodman Story. Playing the legendary jazz clarinetist marked the beginning and end of Allen’s movie career; the real highlight of the film was the presence of numerous Goodman band alumni, including Lionel Hampton, Harry James, Gene Krupa, Martha Tilton and Teddy Wilson.

For the most part, Allen mimed playing to recordings of Goodman’s clarinet work, with one delightful exception. It happens early in the film, when young Benny is just beginning to learn to play. At this point in his career, Goodman was unable to sound like an amateur musician. Allen — having never played the clarinet in his life — could, and that’s his playing you hear in the first part of the film.

If you’re starting to believe that there was nothing Steve Allen couldn’t do, well, NBC was thinking the same thing. In the summer of 1956, they made him the star of a weekly variety show that would air Sunday evenings, opposite the enormously popular Ed Sullivan Show. It might have felt like a suicide mission but not only did Allen accept the job, but did so while continuing to host Tonight three nights a week. (He finally gave up the latter in early 1957.)

Allen loved laughing as much as he loved making people laugh and stocked his cast with great young comic talent. The show’s regulars included stage actor Tom Poston (usually playing an intelligent, well-dressed man who could barely remember his name), Louis Nye (whose character Gordon Hathaway greeted the host with a glib “Heigh-ho, Steverino!”), Don Knotts (playing a high-strung, jittery character he had developed when performing for troops during World War II), Pat Harrington (as Italian golf pro Guido Panzini) and writer Bill Dana, whose skill with dialect made him a hit as the character Jose Jiminez.

Of course, The Steve Allen Show had plenty of big-name guests, including Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Martha Raye and a solo Lou Costello. There were also a number of visits from new performers who hadn’t otherwise found a place on television. Allen had no use for rock & roll — indeed, he was known to spoof the lyrics of songs like “Be Bop a Lula” by reading them as though they were deathless poetry — but his was the first national show to book Elvis Presley, while also giving early exposure to the likes of Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis. On a 1959 show, Allen played piano while renowned Beat poet Jack Kerouac read an excerpt from his book On the Road.

Then there was the time that the statuesque beauty Anita Ekberg gave Allen an unexpectedly amorous kiss on the air. As the host remembered later, “the awareness that millions are watching is a great aid to virtue.”

By the start of the 1960s, audience tastes were changing and both Allen and Sullivan were struggling against a new Western drama called Maverick. NBC responded by cancelling The Steve Allen Show after four seasons; ABC picked it up in the fall of 1961 but it was gone after three months.

Undaunted, Allen went back to California in 1962 and launched a new Steve Allen Show, a syndicated daily affair for Westinghouse Broadcasting. During its two-year run, this new series continued Allen’s traditions of wild, unpredictable stunts and one-of-a-kind guests, including comedian “Professor” Irwin Corey, jazz legend Miles Davis and a young musical maverick named Frank Zappa, who “played” a bicycle. This syndicated show proved a formative influence on the next generation of comedians, including David Letterman, Steve Martin, Harry Shearer and Robin Williams.

On a 1964 episode, Allen got to do something he’d dreamt of doing for years; a roundtable discussion featuring actors as historical figures, coming together to exchange ideas for the first time. Westinghouse wasn’t necessarily thrilled about it and asked him to remove the segment. Allen refused, citing that he had creative control over the series. Ultimatums were presented and eventually Allen quit the show (Westinghouse turned it over to a young man named Regis Philbin) and went back to New York, where he replaced Garry Moore as the host of I’ve Got a Secret.

Although Jayne had left Secret some years earlier, the show had continued on successfully with a panel that included Bill Cullen, Henry Morgan, Bess Myerson and Betsy Palmer. Regrettably, Allen’s smartly comical presence wasn’t the fit the show had hoped for; as Morgan recalled, Allen “thought the panel’s function was to be ‘straights’ for his personal idea of what was funny. This approach was so wrong, and the chaos so complete, that the show tumbled rapidly out of the top ten.”

Thankfully, there would be other incarnations of The Steve Allen Show (including another syndicated series and a summer replacement series for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour) but there was one more show that would top them all, 1977’s Meeting of Minds. Allen’s prototype of this idea had led to him quitting his show in 1964; now, thanks to public television, his idea could flourish.

Allen had become famous for breaking down television barriers; for Meeting of Minds, he went one better and broke down the barriers of time and space. Here, he moderated discussions about topics ranging from religion to slavery to women’s rights, as examined by historical figures from past years and past centuries.

The first show featured actors playing Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Paine and Queen Cleopatra (one of several historical figures on the show who looked suspiciously like Jayne Meadows). Subsequent shows featured such “guests” as Karl Marx, Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Jefferson, Mahatma Ghandi, Leonardo Da Vinci and William Shakespeare. Allen initially strove to limit the dialogue to things his guests had actually said, but for some figures — like Cleopatra or Attila the Hun — he was forced to imagine their views on a given subject, since “there is no record of anything they ever said or wrote.”

Even Allen was surprised at how well the series was received by both critics and academics. During its four-year run, Meeting of Minds won a Peabody Award, a national Emmy, the TV Critics Circle Award, and the Encyclopedia Britannica Award. Allen also published the scripted discussions in a four-volume set of books.

In his later years, Allen made numerous guest appearances on everything from St. Elsewhere (where he and Meadows played the birth parents of Ed Begley Jr.’s Dr. Victor Ehrlich) to The Simpsons. He wrote a number of books (more than 50 in all), devoted to everything from comedy to religion to white-collar crime to vulgarity in popular culture.

So well-known was his reputation as a renaissance man that in 1993, the television series Mystery Science Theater 3000 honored him by introducing the “Steve-O-Meter,” an invention that allowed users to know if their latest brainstorm had already been conceived by Steve Allen. (Eventually, the cast discovers that Steve Allen had already thought of the Steve-O-Meter.)

Tragedy struck in October 2000, when the 78-year-old Allen was en route to visit his son and his car was struck by another auto that was backing out of a driveway. Although it was later discovered that Allen had suffered a ruptured blood vessel, he didn’t register his injuries as serious; instead, he continued to his son’s house, whereupon he laid down for a nap. He never woke up.

Jayne Meadows recalled her husband as “the dearest, sweetest man,” but all of us can remember him as the man who changed the face of television with his pioneering talk shows, while also giving American humor a chance to loosen up. That’s not even counting his efforts as an author, composer, musician and actor. No wonder Newsday once described him as “quite simply one of the most talented people in the world.”

“I’m always busy,” Allen once noted, “but always doing things I enjoy… not many of us are allowed to live for kicks and get paid for it.”

To hear Steve Allen on radio, tune in to Those Were the Days on November 7.

SUBSCRIBE RIGHT NOW!  CLICK HERE: Nostalgia Digest Magazine.