Art Carney, Ed Norton on 'The Honeymooners,' Dies
MuckTheDuck
The Associated Press
Tuesday, November 11, 2003; 5:48 PM
HARTFORD, Conn. -- Art Carney, who played Jackie Gleason's sewer worker
pal Ed Norton in the TV classic "The Honeymooners" and went on to win
the 1974 Oscar for best actor in "Harry and Tonto," has died at 85.
Carney died in Chester, Conn., on Sunday and was buried on Tuesday after
a small, private funeral. He had been ill for some time.
The comic actor would be forever identified as Norton, Ralph Kramden's
bowling buddy and not-too-bright upstairs neighbor on "The
Honeymooners." The sitcom appeared in various forms from 1951 to 1956
and was revived briefly in 1971. The shows can still be seen on cable.
With his turned-up porkpie hat and unbuttoned vest over a white T-shirt,
Carney's Ed Norton with his exuberant "Hey, Ralphie boy!" became an
ideal foil for Gleason's blustery, bullying Kramden. Carney won three
Emmys for his role and his first taste of fame.
"The first time I saw the guy act," Gleason once said, "I knew I would
have to work twice as hard for my laughs. He was funny as hell."
In one episode, Norton and Ralph learn to golf from an instruction book.
Told to "address the ball," Norton gives a wave of the hand and says,
"Hellooooo, ball!" In another episode, Norton inadvertently wins the
award for best costume at a Raccoon Lodge party by showing up in his
sewer worker's gear. Another time, the loose-limbed Norton teaches Ralph
a finger-popping new dance called the Hucklebuck.
Carney told a Saturday Evening Post interviewer in 1961 that strangers
were always asking him how he liked it down in the sewer. "I have
seasonal answers," he said. "In the summer: 'I like it down there
because it's cool.' In the winter: 'I like it down there because it's
warm.' Then I've got one that isn't seasonal: 'Go to hell."'
After "The Honeymooners," Carney battled a drinking problem for several
years. His behavior became erratic while co-starring with Walter Matthau
in the Broadway run of Neil Simon's "The Odd Couple" in the 1960s. He
dropped out of the show and spent nearly half a year in a sanitarium.
His career resumed, and in 1974 he was cast in Paul Mazurksy's "Harry
and Tonto" as a 72-year-old widower who travels from New York to Chicago
with his pet cat. He stopped drinking during the making of the film.
When it won him his Oscar, Carney wisecracked: "You're looking at an
actor whose price has just doubled."
"Art was, and is one of the most endearing men I have ever met," the
late actress Audrey Meadows (the caustic Alice Kramden on "The
Honeymooners") wrote in her 1994 memoir "Love, Alice." She called him a
"witty and delightful companion who went out of his way to help each new
actor find his niche" on the show.
Carney was born into an Irish-Catholic family in Mount Vernon, N.Y., on
Nov. 4, 1918, and baptized Arthur William Matthew Carney. His father was
a newspaperman and publicist.
After appearing in amateur theatricals and imitating radio
personalities, Carney won a job in 1937 traveling with Horace Heidt's
dance band, doing his impressions and singing novelty songs.
"There I was, an 18-year-old mimic rooming with a blind whistler," he
told People magazine in 1974. "He would order gin and grapefruit juice
for us in the morning, and it was great. ... No responsibilities, no
remorse. I was an alcoholic, even then."
Later he won a job at $225 a week
imitating Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and other world
leaders on a radio show, "Report to the Nation."
He was drafted into the Army in 1944 and took part in the D-Day landing
at Normandy. A piece of shrapnel shattered his right leg. He was left
with a leg three-quarters of an inch shorter than the other and a
lifelong limp.
Carney returned to radio as second banana on comedy shows, then ventured
into television on "The Morey Amsterdam Show" in 1947. That brought him
to the attention of Gleason.
Among his movie credits: "W.W. and the Dixie Dance Kings," "The Late
Show," "House Calls," "Movie Movie," "Sunburn," "Going in Style,"
"Roadie," "Firestarter," "The Muppets Take Manhattan" and "Last Action
Hero."
Around Westbrook, where he and his wife had a waterfront home, Carney
was known around town as "Mr. C."
Family friend Janice Buglini remembered how Carney came to cheer up her
11-year-old daughter, who had leukemia. "He would bring ice cream over
for her, and a lobster -- anything she wanted," Buglini said.
Carney married his high school sweetheart, Jean Myers, in 1940. After
the marriage broke up, Carney married Barbara Isaac in 1966. They
divorced 10 years later, and in 1980 he and his first wife remarried.
"We always kept in touch because of our three children," he said in a
1980 AP interview. "After our second divorces, it was sort of like the
puppy coming home: 'Oh, it's you, come on in.' We decided to give it a
go again."
© 2003 The Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27142-2003Nov11.html?referrer=emailarticle
MuckTheDuck
Obituaries
November 12, 2003
Art Carney, 85, Lauded 'Honeymooners' Actor, Dies
By RICHARD SEVERO
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/12/obituaries/12CARN.html?ex=1069615777&ei=1&en=bc3b498a495115fd
Art Carney, the Academy Award-winning comic actor who first gained fame
as the guffawing, slightly off-center sewer worker Ed Norton in the
early 1950's television series "The Honeymooners," died on Sunday at a
convalescent home in Chester, Conn. He was 85.
Mr. Carney's talents were by no means confined to "The Honeymooners." He
won an Oscar for his performance in the 1974 film "Harry and Tonto," in
which he portrays a widower who is evicted from his New York City
apartment and who embarks on a cross-country odyssey with his pet cat.
Over the course of his career he repeatedly won critical acclaim for the
depth and breadth of his talent, even when he appeared in movies that
critics did not like.
But it is as Ed Norton that he will be remembered by the many fans who
have kept "The Honeymooners" in reruns for decades. Norton was no
ordinary sewer worker. He called himself an "underground sanitation
expert." Every chance he got, he raided the refrigerator of his
downstairs neighbor and friend Ralph Kramden, the irascible Brooklyn bus
driver played by Jackie Gleason, and his appetite knew no bounds. Norton
always wore a vest over his grungy T-shirt, wore a battered fedora
indoors and out and always said the wrong thing at the wrong time.
Although Mr. Carney, who was painfully shy, would tell interviewers that
he was the opposite of Norton and not at all like him in his personal
habits, viewers sensed and his friends confirmed that he was more like
Norton than he cared to say. Mr. Carney's stomach really was a
bottomless pit, and he always took two helpings of everything, just as
Norton did. For dessert, he would wolf down sundaes and chocolate bars.
He had a keen sense of the absurd and relished the outlandish, but he
always insisted that he had never been a comedian, only an actor.
Audrey Meadows, who played Alice Kramden on the show, summed him up as
"a genuinely nice guy" and added, "He hasn't got a nasty, conniving hair
on his head."
Arthur William Matthew Carney was born on Nov. 4, 1918, in Mount Vernon,
N.Y., the youngest of six sons of Edward Michael and Helen Farrell
Carney. He loved doing impersonations as a boy, won a talent contest in
elementary school and another at A. B. Davis High School, in Mount
Vernon, from which he graduated in 1936. He sought no further formal
education and never took an acting course. Instead, he talked his way
into a job with the popular Horace Heidt Orchestra and went on the road
for more than three years, doing impersonations and novelty songs. He
also did some announcing for Heidt's "Pot O' Gold" radio show. In 1941,
when the orchestra was asked to make a movie called "Pot O' Gold," Mr.
Carney had a bit part.
Mr. Carney then left Heidt and tried nightclubs and vaudeville, but he
was not very good at them and did not do well. He did succeed in getting
bit parts on radio, specializing in roles that required dialects. One
show, "Man Behind the Gun," won a Peabody Award in 1942.
At one point a CBS executive who was looking for someone who could
imitate the voice of Franklin D. Roosevelt was struck by Mr. Carney's
ability and hired him. His career was interrupted by World War II. He
was sent to France as an infantryman, but was wounded in the leg by
shrapnel almost immediately and was hospitalized for nine months. He
walked with a limp for the rest of his life.
In 1949 he appeared on a television show that starred the cello-playing
comedian Morey Amsterdam. By 1951 he was a regular on "Henry Morgan's
Great Talent Hunt."
It was in the early 1950's that Mr. Carney began shaping the character
of Ed Norton. It happened for the first time in a skit on Mr. Gleason's
"Cavalcade of Stars," which was shown on the old DuMont network. When
Mr. Gleason was beckoned by CBS, Mr. Carney went with him as second
banana.
At first he played a variety of roles: the rabbitlike Clem Finch;
Sedgwick Van Gleason, the aristocratic father of the wastrel son, Reggie
Van Gleason (Mr. Gleason); and Ed Norton. They were all funny, but it
was Norton who captured the hearts of a nation and soon Mr. Carney was
being offered honorary memberships in associations of sewer workers in
Texas, California and Florida. Look magazine assessed what he had done
with the role of Norton and concluded that Mr. Carney "brings to comedy
all the deftness, imagination and pathos of yesterday's most eloquent
loser, Charlie Chaplin."
New Yorkers were convinced that Mr. Carney, because of his accent, was
from Brooklyn, but he insisted that he learned to speak that way by
listening to the people around him in the Westchester of his childhood.
He spent much of his social life with the friends he made while he was
growing up. Even after he became wealthy, he avoided social commitments
with other stars, preferring to stay home.
His contract with Mr. Gleason allowed him to do some acting in
television outside his Norton routine, and his performances were
memorable, although few were repeated. Among them was his appearance in
1957 in "The Fabulous Irishman," in which he played Robert Briscoe, a
Jew who had been elected Mayor of Dublin, and in 1960 he performed in
Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" as the philosophical New England Stage
Manager. In 1960 he also appeared in "Call Me Back," a one-man drama
about a divorced alcoholic.
Mr. Carney also won praise for his work in a number of television dramas
during the 1950's, for such series as "Studio One," the "Kraft
Television Theater" and "Omnibus."
Later on, he made guest appearances on "Star Trek," "The Defenders" and
"All in the Family."
His Broadway credits included "The Rope Dancers," in which he co-starred
with Siobhan McKenna in 1957. His films included "The Greatest Show on
Earth" (1952), "The Silencers" (1966), "Gambit" (1966), "The Venetian
Affair" (1967) and "The Late Show" (1977), in which he played an aging
private detective in seedy Los Angeles.
In 1965 he appeared on Broadway in Neil Simon's comedy "The Odd Couple,"
originating the role of the obsessively neat Felix Unger to Walter
Matthau's slovenly Oscar Madison.
It was during his run in "The Odd Couple" that he had a breakdown over
the end of his 25-year marriage to the former Jean Myers. He fought
addictions to alcohol, amphetamines and barbiturates for years and had
conquered them all by the time he made "Harry and Tonto."
After his divorce from Miss Myers, Mr. Carney married Barbara Isaac.
When that marriage ended in divorce, he remarried his first wife. She
survives him, as do their children, Eileen, Bryan and Paul.
Originally Mr. Carney did not want the role in "Harry and Tonto" because
he thought that the film sentimentalized old age. Besides, he argued, he
was only 55, not nearly old enough to play the 72-year-old title role.
Paul Mazursky, the director, talked him into it by suggesting that this
particular person was a young 72. Mr. Carney used his own voice, used
little makeup, grew a mustache, whitened his hair and stopped masking
his limp.
In the 1980's and 90's, Mr. Carney appeared in some lesser films,
including "The Muppets Take Manhattan" (1984) and "Last Action Hero,"
with Arnold Schwarzenegger (1993). But he reached a new audience through
reruns of "The Honeymooners," still denying that he was actually like
Norton.
"I love Ed Norton and what he did for my career," Mr. Carney once said.
"But the truth is that we couldn't have been more different. Norton was
the total extrovert, there was no way you could put down his infectious
good humor. Me? I'm a loner and a worrier."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company