Comedian Red Buttons Dies at 87
By MERVYN ROTHSTEIN
Red Buttons, the Borscht Belt comic who rose to instant television stardom on his own variety show in 1952, descended to obscurity three years later after his program was canceled and then rebounded to win an Academy Award for his dramatic performance in the 1957 film “Sayonara,” died yesterday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87.
The cause was vascular disease, his publicist, Warren Cowan, said.
To television watchers in the mid-1970’s, Mr. Buttons was perhaps best recognized as a witty regular and master of the gentle barb on the NBC comic tribute series “The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast.” But it was his Oscar, for best supporting actor, that brought him his greatest renown almost 20 years earlier.
The award was for his portrayal of Airman Joe Kelly, an American serviceman in Japan after World War II who is ostracized by the military for marrying a Japanese woman. Miyoshi Umeki, who played his wife, received the best supporting actress award. The movie starred Marlon Brando and was based on the James A. Michener novel.
Five years earlier, CBS executives, looking for a show to compete with Milton Berle’s “Texaco Star Theater” on NBC on Tuesdays at 8 P.M., turned to Mr. Buttons. At the time he was a 33-year-old comedian who had made guest appearances on the Berle show and won some acclaim for his acting in a 1951 episode of the “Suspense” television series.
CBS gave Mr. Buttons his own half-hour variety program, which began Oct. 14, 1952. Later that evening, switchboard operators at the network reported one of the biggest and most enthusiastic responses to a single program they had ever received. Audiences enjoyed his sketch comedy routines and his characters. He was Rocky Buttons, a punch-drunk prizefighter with a heart of gold; Muggsy Buttons, a juvenile delinquent with a core of kindness; Keeglefarven, a German military officer presented in dialect, and the Kupke Kid, a child laborer who aroused in others a compulsion to pick him up after first knocking him down.
“I’m a little guy, and that’s what I play — a little guy with a little guy’s troubles,” said Mr. Buttons, who stood 5-foot-6 and weighed 140 pounds in his prime.
Between bits this puckish, almost elflike comedian would cup his ears and sing, “Hey-hey, ho-ho, strange things are happening,” providing different strange things each week. Soon “Strange things are happening” became a catch phrase among the nation’s teenagers.
The success didn’t last. As the second season began, television audiences lost interest in Mr. Buttons, and his ratings dropped. Frantically seeking to rediscover a winning format, he hired and fired writers almost every week, among them Larry Gelbart and Neil Simon. The revolving door for writers — 163 of them over two years — became a standing joke in show business. Nothing helped. The ratings kept plummeting, and his CBS show was canceled.
NBC, however, picked him up, and in the third year a situation-comedy format was tried in a new time slot. But the ratings didn’t approach their first-year levels, and in May 1955, his sponsor, Pontiac, ended the show.
For the next two years, Mr. Buttons appeared mainly in nightclubs, although he made an occasional television guest appearance. He was 36 and rich, but newspaper articles at the time called him a has-been.
But then the director Joshua Logan, after some initial misgivings about using a comedian in a dramatic role, asked him to join the cast of “Sayonara.” An eager Mr. Buttons went off to Japan. While on location, he sent his agent a postcard of Kyoto’s snow-covered hills. On the front, harking back to his early stand-up days playing the Catskills, he wrote, “Hey, look, you’ve got me working in the mountains again.”
Red Buttons was born Aaron Chwatt on Feb. 5, 1919, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was the son of Michael Chwatt, a millinery worker, and Sophie Chwatt, a housewife. Aaron and his family — there was an older brother, Joe, and a younger sister, Ida — lived in a tenement apartment on Third Street between Avenues A and B. It was a tough neighborhood. “On my block, you either grew up to be a judge or you went to the electric chair,” he often said.
He first attended P.S. 104 on East Fourth Street, but then his family moved to the Bronx, to 176th Street and Marmion Avenue. He made his first stage appearance at age 12 under the name Little Skippy, dressed in a sailor suit and singing “Sweet Jennie Lee” in an amateur contest at the Fox Corona Theater. He won.
While attending Evander Childs High School, Aaron got a job as a bellhop and singer at Ryan’s, a bar on City Island in the Bronx, where he got the name Red Buttons: since he wore a bellhop uniform, he was, naturally, called Buttons, and at the time his hair was red. The name stuck, even though his hair turned dark brown as he got older. (Mr. Logan had him dye it red for “Sayonara.”)
His first job in the Catskills was in the summer of 1935, as a singer at Greenfield Park. “My voice cracked, so they made me a comedian,” he recalled. He began working in burlesque, at Minsky’s, at the Gaiety on Broadway and 46th Street, and in Western Wheel, the Midwest burlesque circuit, doing comic numbers like “Sam, You Made the Pants Too Long.” In 1940 he married a stripper known as Roxanne, but the marriage was annulled two years later.
In 1941, José Ferrer discovered him and cast him in a Broadway-bound comedy called “The Admiral Takes a Wife.” The play received good out-of-town reviews, came into New York on a Sunday in December and was scheduled to open the following day. The comedy, however, was a satire on life at a naval base in Hawaii: Pearl Harbor. The Sunday it arrived was Dec. 7, 1941, and the show never opened.
Mr. Buttons joined the Army in 1943 and spent the rest of World War II in its entertainment unit, appearing in a hit show called “Winged Victory,” which was written and directed by Moss Hart. It was turned into a movie in 1944. Other future stars in the show included Mario Lanza, Karl Malden, Barry Nelson, Louis Nye, Peter Lind Hayes, John Forsythe and Gary Merrill. They were recruited by Irving Lazar, who would acquire the nickname “Swifty” and become one of Broadway and Hollywood’s leading agents.
After the war, Mr. Buttons returned to nightclubs and appeared in an occasional Broadway flop. Then came the “Suspense” episode, stardom, his descent and the Oscar.
In 1966, he starred on a short-lived television series, “The Double Life of Henry Phyfe,” as a meek accountant-turned-spy. His other movies included “Imitation General” (1958), “Hatari!” with John Wayne (1962), “The Longest Day” (1962), “A Ticklish Affair” (1963), “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969), “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972), “Gable and Lombard” (1976) and “It Could Happen to You” (1994).
After his run with “Dean Martin’s Celebrity Roast” in the 1970’s, he landed other television roles, portraying the White Rabbit in the 1985 musical miniseries “Alice in Wonderland” and, in 1987, playing the recurring role of Al Baker on “Knots Landing.” He also made guest appearances on “Roseanne” and “E.R.”
In 1995, he celebrated his 60th year in show business by presenting a one-man show, “Buttons on Broadway,” at the Ambassador Theater. Writing in The New York Times, Ben Brantley said Mr. Buttons was “trim and agile at 76” and “able to command a stage for nearly two hours with a medley of Borscht Belt and burlesque shtick, songs and impersonations.”
In his later years he was a sought-after entertainer for Friars Roasts and other testimonial dinners with his “Never had a dinner” routine, identifying famous people who had never been so honored. Example: “Abe Lincoln, who said ‘A house divided is a condominium,’ never had a dinner.”
He also remained in the public eye as the spokesman in an advertising campaign for the Century Village retirement communities in Florida. Of his three marriages, two ended in divorce early in his career. His third wife, Alicia, died in 2001. They had a daughter, Amy Norgress, and a son, Adam, who survive him, as do his brother and sister.
“I’ve been a performer all my life,” Mr. Buttons once said. “It’s a very satisfactory profession. You get paid off on the spot. When they cheer, that’s payment.”
By MERVYN ROTHSTEIN
Red Buttons, the Borscht Belt comic who rose to instant television stardom on his own variety show in 1952, descended to obscurity three years later after his program was canceled and then rebounded to win an Academy Award for his dramatic performance in the 1957 film “Sayonara,” died yesterday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87.
The cause was vascular disease, his publicist, Warren Cowan, said.
To television watchers in the mid-1970’s, Mr. Buttons was perhaps best recognized as a witty regular and master of the gentle barb on the NBC comic tribute series “The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast.” But it was his Oscar, for best supporting actor, that brought him his greatest renown almost 20 years earlier.
The award was for his portrayal of Airman Joe Kelly, an American serviceman in Japan after World War II who is ostracized by the military for marrying a Japanese woman. Miyoshi Umeki, who played his wife, received the best supporting actress award. The movie starred Marlon Brando and was based on the James A. Michener novel.
Five years earlier, CBS executives, looking for a show to compete with Milton Berle’s “Texaco Star Theater” on NBC on Tuesdays at 8 P.M., turned to Mr. Buttons. At the time he was a 33-year-old comedian who had made guest appearances on the Berle show and won some acclaim for his acting in a 1951 episode of the “Suspense” television series.
CBS gave Mr. Buttons his own half-hour variety program, which began Oct. 14, 1952. Later that evening, switchboard operators at the network reported one of the biggest and most enthusiastic responses to a single program they had ever received. Audiences enjoyed his sketch comedy routines and his characters. He was Rocky Buttons, a punch-drunk prizefighter with a heart of gold; Muggsy Buttons, a juvenile delinquent with a core of kindness; Keeglefarven, a German military officer presented in dialect, and the Kupke Kid, a child laborer who aroused in others a compulsion to pick him up after first knocking him down.
“I’m a little guy, and that’s what I play — a little guy with a little guy’s troubles,” said Mr. Buttons, who stood 5-foot-6 and weighed 140 pounds in his prime.
Between bits this puckish, almost elflike comedian would cup his ears and sing, “Hey-hey, ho-ho, strange things are happening,” providing different strange things each week. Soon “Strange things are happening” became a catch phrase among the nation’s teenagers.
The success didn’t last. As the second season began, television audiences lost interest in Mr. Buttons, and his ratings dropped. Frantically seeking to rediscover a winning format, he hired and fired writers almost every week, among them Larry Gelbart and Neil Simon. The revolving door for writers — 163 of them over two years — became a standing joke in show business. Nothing helped. The ratings kept plummeting, and his CBS show was canceled.
NBC, however, picked him up, and in the third year a situation-comedy format was tried in a new time slot. But the ratings didn’t approach their first-year levels, and in May 1955, his sponsor, Pontiac, ended the show.
For the next two years, Mr. Buttons appeared mainly in nightclubs, although he made an occasional television guest appearance. He was 36 and rich, but newspaper articles at the time called him a has-been.
But then the director Joshua Logan, after some initial misgivings about using a comedian in a dramatic role, asked him to join the cast of “Sayonara.” An eager Mr. Buttons went off to Japan. While on location, he sent his agent a postcard of Kyoto’s snow-covered hills. On the front, harking back to his early stand-up days playing the Catskills, he wrote, “Hey, look, you’ve got me working in the mountains again.”
Red Buttons was born Aaron Chwatt on Feb. 5, 1919, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was the son of Michael Chwatt, a millinery worker, and Sophie Chwatt, a housewife. Aaron and his family — there was an older brother, Joe, and a younger sister, Ida — lived in a tenement apartment on Third Street between Avenues A and B. It was a tough neighborhood. “On my block, you either grew up to be a judge or you went to the electric chair,” he often said.
He first attended P.S. 104 on East Fourth Street, but then his family moved to the Bronx, to 176th Street and Marmion Avenue. He made his first stage appearance at age 12 under the name Little Skippy, dressed in a sailor suit and singing “Sweet Jennie Lee” in an amateur contest at the Fox Corona Theater. He won.
While attending Evander Childs High School, Aaron got a job as a bellhop and singer at Ryan’s, a bar on City Island in the Bronx, where he got the name Red Buttons: since he wore a bellhop uniform, he was, naturally, called Buttons, and at the time his hair was red. The name stuck, even though his hair turned dark brown as he got older. (Mr. Logan had him dye it red for “Sayonara.”)
His first job in the Catskills was in the summer of 1935, as a singer at Greenfield Park. “My voice cracked, so they made me a comedian,” he recalled. He began working in burlesque, at Minsky’s, at the Gaiety on Broadway and 46th Street, and in Western Wheel, the Midwest burlesque circuit, doing comic numbers like “Sam, You Made the Pants Too Long.” In 1940 he married a stripper known as Roxanne, but the marriage was annulled two years later.
In 1941, José Ferrer discovered him and cast him in a Broadway-bound comedy called “The Admiral Takes a Wife.” The play received good out-of-town reviews, came into New York on a Sunday in December and was scheduled to open the following day. The comedy, however, was a satire on life at a naval base in Hawaii: Pearl Harbor. The Sunday it arrived was Dec. 7, 1941, and the show never opened.
Mr. Buttons joined the Army in 1943 and spent the rest of World War II in its entertainment unit, appearing in a hit show called “Winged Victory,” which was written and directed by Moss Hart. It was turned into a movie in 1944. Other future stars in the show included Mario Lanza, Karl Malden, Barry Nelson, Louis Nye, Peter Lind Hayes, John Forsythe and Gary Merrill. They were recruited by Irving Lazar, who would acquire the nickname “Swifty” and become one of Broadway and Hollywood’s leading agents.
After the war, Mr. Buttons returned to nightclubs and appeared in an occasional Broadway flop. Then came the “Suspense” episode, stardom, his descent and the Oscar.
In 1966, he starred on a short-lived television series, “The Double Life of Henry Phyfe,” as a meek accountant-turned-spy. His other movies included “Imitation General” (1958), “Hatari!” with John Wayne (1962), “The Longest Day” (1962), “A Ticklish Affair” (1963), “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969), “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972), “Gable and Lombard” (1976) and “It Could Happen to You” (1994).
After his run with “Dean Martin’s Celebrity Roast” in the 1970’s, he landed other television roles, portraying the White Rabbit in the 1985 musical miniseries “Alice in Wonderland” and, in 1987, playing the recurring role of Al Baker on “Knots Landing.” He also made guest appearances on “Roseanne” and “E.R.”
In 1995, he celebrated his 60th year in show business by presenting a one-man show, “Buttons on Broadway,” at the Ambassador Theater. Writing in The New York Times, Ben Brantley said Mr. Buttons was “trim and agile at 76” and “able to command a stage for nearly two hours with a medley of Borscht Belt and burlesque shtick, songs and impersonations.”
In his later years he was a sought-after entertainer for Friars Roasts and other testimonial dinners with his “Never had a dinner” routine, identifying famous people who had never been so honored. Example: “Abe Lincoln, who said ‘A house divided is a condominium,’ never had a dinner.”
He also remained in the public eye as the spokesman in an advertising campaign for the Century Village retirement communities in Florida. Of his three marriages, two ended in divorce early in his career. His third wife, Alicia, died in 2001. They had a daughter, Amy Norgress, and a son, Adam, who survive him, as do his brother and sister.
“I’ve been a performer all my life,” Mr. Buttons once said. “It’s a very satisfactory profession. You get paid off on the spot. When they cheer, that’s payment.”
