Audrey Meadows as Alice Kramden of ‘The Honeymooners’ ‘Always Gave as Good as She Got’: Book Excerpt
Audrey Meadows was born on Feb. 8, 1922. We look back at Meadows’ career in this excerpt from “The REAL Brooklyn of Jackie Gleason and The Honeymooners: The Early Life of the Funniest Man on Television.”
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“Audrey as Alice was probably the first women’s libber on television,” Jackie Gleason told the San Rafael (CA) Independent Journal in 1976. “She always gave as good as she got. Many times, she had the last word.”
Audrey Meadows was born in New York City in 1922. Meadows and her sister Jayne hoped to break into show business as the singing Meadows Sisters. Jayne became a respected film and television actress and married comedian Steve Allen in 1954.
Meadows sang in the Broadway musical Top Banana and was a regular on TV’s Bob and Ray Show when she auditioned for the role of Alice Kramden. Gleason dismissed her as too young and pretty for the role despite Meadows’ insistence that she could look like a dowdy, harassed housewife.
“I told a photographer to come my apartment at dawn the next morning and take pictures of me when I got out of bed,” Meadows told United Press International. “My eyes were puffy, my hair was a mess and I didn’t wear a speck of makeup.
“Jackie took one look at the photographs and said, ‘This is just the kind of broad I’m looking for!’”
“You would not have believed how The Honeymooners show was put together,” Meadows told the Tampa Tribune. “No rehearsals, just read the lines. I remember one time when Gleason said, ‘We’ll do it Civil War style, just shoot who speaks.’ It was great fun working with Art Carney and Gleason.”
Meadows provided a glimpse into Gleason’s working style in an article she wrote for the Newspaper Enterprise Association in 1955. “The first time I ever worked with Jackie Gleason, I got a taste of what it would be like.
“The script called for him, as Ralph Kramden, to complain about the fact that I, as Alice Kramden, always served frozen food. To emphasize his point, he was to take a frozen steak and slam it on the table. We hadn’t rehearsed with a prop. We seldom do. So, on the air, he slammed the meat down — and it broke into a thousand pieces.
“This was a surprise to all of us, and I could see Jackie looking to see what I would do. He was used to acting ad lib; I could tell he was wondering whether I’d be able to do it. So I got into the spirit of things.
“‘Now see what you’ve done,’ I said, in my dirty-look voice. ‘You’ve ruined our supper.’”
“‘Don’t steam me, Alice,’ he said, and we went on from there. We’ve been going on from there for three years since then. That is the normal course of events on The Jackie Gleason Show. That is the way he prefers to operate.
“He thinks he gives a better performance with a minimum of rehearsal. He feels the whole program has an air of reality when unexpected things happen, when people say things naturally, on the spur of the moment. Too perfect a performance, Jackie thinks, would kill that flavor. So we only rehearse one day.”
“What people don’t know,” Meadows explained on the Pat Sajak Show, “is that back then you did 39 shows and you had 13 weeks off. We did our 39 shows, two a week, and we never had to reshoot one single shot or word.
“There was one show called ‘Chef of the Future,’ where Ralph and Ed go on television and are trying to sell some dreadful kitchen equipment. A piece of it broke off and it flew off the set and the two of them just kept going. You never did it over; Jackie wanted it fresh.”
Audrey Meadows died in 1996 at the age of 73.
Frank Mastropolo is the author of “The REAL Brooklyn of Jackie Gleason and The Honeymooners: The Early Life of the Funniest Man on Television.”
