Remembering Jack Thum

We are about to retire, or retreat – thank God – from the jungle of New York City, the exciting jungle I ought to say, to our cottage out in the Atlantic at the end of Long Island and the pleasant prospect is that of renewing contact with our acquaintances out there.

They're very few but living, as we do, so close at hand and shopping in the same village, we see them all the time. This is very different from our experience with much closer friends in New York. You know how it is in a big city. A friend is like a museum. They're always there to be called on or called up any time, so you don't do it for months on end, just as, I'm ashamed to say, I haven't been in one of the most exquisite of New York museums, the Frick which is just down Fifth Avenue, for, I should guess, a dozen years.

Not long ago, I, who avoid big parties and cocktail parties as I would a fire or a riot, I ran at a party into a couple who, for a year or two, we used to see fairly regularly. Not for years now, not because any frigidity set in, just that we knew they were close at hand and could be seen any time. They constitute a pair that must be very rare, if not unique, in the life of the theatre.

The husband is a dramatic critic. At one time, the dramatic, the daily dramatic, critic of the New York Times. The one and only critic who can, by his next morning's notice, guarantee the death or the prosperous life of any play. His wife is a very funny woman and the author of several, very successful Broadway comedies. And, a year or two ago, they collaborated on a musical comedy, a take-off, a spoof or parody, of a 1920s musical comedy. It ran and ran and ran. Finally, I think, about 18 months, two years later, it closed. I ran into the lady shortly afterwards at this party and the first thing I did was to congratulate her on her, well, their, well-deserved success. She looked blank. 'Success?' she said, 'We lost something short of $300,000!'

This is simply the most vivid example I can think of of a dreadful truth these days about Broadway. Your show, play, musical, whatever, however interesting, however worthwhile, cannot have a respectable run – say, four, five, six months – and emerge with even a small profit. It's either a smash hit or a bomb. I hasten to say that a bomb in America is a loud and total flop.

A theatrical lawyer I know figures that the average Broadway musical costs now about $2 million to mount and that to break even, as they say, the theatre has to take in $250,000 a week. So doesn't that mean that at the end of eight weeks if they made anything like it, they'd break even? By no means. That 250,000 is gross. By the time you've paid out the enormous costs of sets, theatre rent, orchestra, stage-hands, staff and the salaries of the cast, my man tells me you'd be extremely lucky to clear 20,000 of those 250,000 in profit.

All this assumes the necessity of having the money put up in the first place by an angel or angels, almost always these days by a few owners of a whole raft of theatres, who pick up ballast from movie companies willing to gamble that the show might turn into a profitable movie. If it doesn't or is never made, there are several compassionate havens which can be used as tax write-offs.

In the past few weeks, we've seen a play called 'Frankenstein' and a musical, miles and miles away from Dickens' original, called 'Copperfield'. We've seen them, I ought to say, only if we were very speedy off the mark. Copperfield ran a week. Frankenstein ran for a full two nights. Between them, they lost over $3 million.

Well, there is one happy or safe way out of this trap. It's the so-called 'special' two-hour drama or musical, made exclusively for television. Just as big stars, just as pretentious a script, but the finances are heart-warming. The networks, a network, puts up the money and makes it. It then doesn't beg for a sponsor in the usual American way. The sponsors are at the mercy of the network. They're eager to buy minutes as you buy inches of space in a newspaper, which is the British commercial TV system. They pay vast sums for the privilege of being exposed to ten or twenty millions of an audience. Consequently, the networks make a handsome profit on a show which, like any single production in television, has an opening night and a closing night in one day.

This week, we had such a... such a special which might well, and then again might not, have been a great success on Broadway. As far as I'm concerned, it was as memorable as any play I've seen on Broadway in a long, long time. It was called, 'Leave 'em laughing' and never was there a more misleading title. 'Leave 'em wracked and weeping' would have been truer but, of course, it would have lost millions of viewers at the start.

It was the dramatisation of the true story of one Jack Thum, T-H-U-M – a lifetime professional clown in Chicago, a lifetime failed clown in any professional sense who once auditioned for Barnum and Bailey, never made it and spent 50 years performing for very small pay at children's birthday parties and all the time performing without any pay for children, handicapped children especially, in hospitals.

He and his wife had a rambling apartment in a seedy section of Chicago and they had one other lifetime hobby which was to take in waifs from the streets or orphan children. Down the years they housed 37 such children. Jack Thum was, evidently, one of those brave failures who bridle at the first whiff of charity. He refused ever to accept support from the government or from the city and, if the apartment began to bulge a little from an extra child or two, he simply went out in the public parks and passed the hat.

About 18 months ago, he started to wheeze and pant a little more than usual. One day, he failed to blow up a balloon that was part of his act. He had cancer of the lung, went into the hospital and they couldn't excise it all. The Mayor of Chicago, Jane Byrne, declared October 31 1979 Jack Thum Day and two months later he died.

Well, this sounds like, it was, a local variation on Pagliacci. It was slow in the beginning, every turn of the plot could be guessed a mile away. It was a predictable weeper. It was the sort of exercise in pathos that drenched the handkerchiefs of any Victorian audience and, I should guess, the handkerchiefs of millions of viewers. Edgy people proud of their taste in drama, the intelligentsia, I'm sure, switched off after 15 minutes but the cast included such experts as Red Buttons, an unrecognisably dour and brilliant performance as a bed-ridden crouch, Anne Jackson, the wife of Eli Wallach, Elisha Cook who was unforgettably the trigger-happy side-kick of Sydney Greenstreet pushed around by Bogart in 'The Maltese Falcon, and Jack Thum was played by Mickey Rooney, in a marvellous vintage Rooney performance.

What was heart-rending about him was not his pathos, it was his plucky front, his air of trying to handle a problem not a tragedy. His determined avoidance of pathos. Well, by one of those freaks of ESP, I went to bed considerably shaken and in my bed book, within half an hour, came on a passage in my favourite bedside companion, the late James Agate who, remember, loved nothing so much as Shakespeare and the French theatre. In his diary, under the entry of June 9 1946, I find this:

'What is the reason for the extraordinary Rooney resistance of which I've been conscious for some time, this dead-set-against-Mickey not by the public but on the part of the highbrow critics? Of this young man's technical accomplishment, there can be no doubt. His sense of humour is generally conceded, his overpowering pathos, in 'Boys Town' and half a dozen other films, must be obvious to anybody who is not blind, deaf and dumb in the worst sense. Yet there is no doubt, to my mind, that Mickey is a great actor. He can keep still, he can listen, he can let you know what's going on in his mind without pulling faces. He has geniality. Nature and not the sound director has put the tears in his voice and he has the one quality by which all great actors are known that you can't keep your eyes off him. Is he pocket size? Then, this snub-nosed little tough is a great actor in miniature.'

Now that was written 35 years ago when no serious critic, except one in the United States – none in England – looked on Rooney as anything but a raucous jumping jack of a child actor. Well, today, Mickey Rooney is 60 with a barrel of a body and a face like a ravaged cauliflower, yet he is incapable of being ungainly, he moves like quicksilver, his tiny hands and feet keep him gliding and weaving – an inflated Fred Astaire. He has, above all, that quality Agate mentioned. Half a dozen moods can drift across his rumply mug for 15 seconds while he says nothing. In a word, star quality. Star quality may be defined as what makes you look at a man when he's doing nothing.

Peter Ustinov once said, 'It was useless to have the best and longest speech in a movie and say it in the foreground so long as Bogart was there in the background, filtering smoke through his nostrils.' Rooney has it and it's a pleasure to salute it so late in this great man.

I'd meant to talk about Reagan before Congress, food stamps and school lunches, the threat of the president's economic programme to the poor – the poor children in particular – of the cities. Chicago is as deeply concerned as any city about the effect of drastic cuts in these programmes and one man taking waifs off the street is obviously, pathetically, no solution, nothing.

But for one fleeting evening, Chicago could believe it was something.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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