remembering-mary-cha.. - Puppeteers of America

In the early years of commercial television, Mary Chase Lombard (then
Mary Chase) was among the first to recognize the new medium as a golden
opportunity for puppets.
D
uring the lean years of the Depression a young girl received a Christmas present that changed her life. It
wasn’t a doll or a new pair of shoes but a small
scrapbook her mother had made of articles
clipped from the Christian Science Monitor
on how to make marionettes. The scrapbook
would launch Mary Chase on a
thirty-five year career in puppetry,
and secure her a place in history
as a television pioneeer.
Mary’s expertise grew as
she gave puppet performances
for children’s camps, schools and
civic groups. These performances
were usually vaudeville routines
in which the music was provided
by phonograph records, operated
by her mother who functioned
as clothes designer and general
factotum for Mary’s budding puppet troupe.
programming.
In l945 Chase landed her first major
professional job on WNBT an NBC affiliate
in New York. At that time the Borden company had launched an experimental twenty six
week series and hired Mary to do a program
called “Elsie’s Little Show,” starring their
business documentaries and owner of Films
for Industry. Together they would do a series
of campaign films for the community chest
starring an elf named Red Feather.
Mary had studied sculpture for a year,
enabling her to create marionettes so lifelike
they seemed able to breathe and was particularly adept at making marionettes of well
known celebrities. Indeed, her creation of
Bing Crosby and Bob Hope marionettes had
been instrumental in getting her professional
work. Chase also excelled in the creation of
imaginative special effects for film. For her
Seven-Up films, for example, she created marionettes that seemed to perform the impossible
feat of playing ping pong, an illusion created
through sound effects and the fast movements of the puppet’s paddles. “That effect
required some fancy stringing,” she recalled.
“The marionettes had to be strung from the
side so their arms would cross over.” Mary’s
expertise in sculpting believable personalities
and creating novel special effects
would become hallmarks of her
later work.
The highlight of Chase’s
career was her creation of an
NBC television series named
after Al Capp’s famous comic
strip character Fearless Fosdick.
The show debuted on June 15,
1952 and lasted thirteen weeks.
Other than announcements about
its premiere, few articles about
the series have been written and
its unavailability for viewing has
led television historians largely to
ignore it. Those who originally
watched it, however, remember
it as one of the wittiest and most
imaginative children’s programs
of its time.
Mary had an unshakable
conviction that marionettes were
a natural for television. She knew
instinctively what television programmers would later learn: that
Mary’s involvement in that
a puppeteer could bring a whole
program
resulted from a mariElsie
the
Cow,
Bob
Hope,
and
Al
Capp’s
Mammy
Yokum
cast to the television screen at a
onette
performance
she gave at
fraction of the cost of the same
the
Brooklyn
Academy
of Music
number of human actors. Chase
trademark character Elsie the Cow. Of her in New York. Paul Dozdoff, her late husband,
also knew that marionettes had a universal performance a Billboard reviewer remarked,
audience appeal. Not only did children love that it was “the first NBC marionette act that was a concert pianist and played the musical
them, their playfulness, creativity, and sponta- was good video” concluding that Mary’s show accompaniment to an act they had created.
By chance, the director of the Academy was
neous joy appealed to the child in every adult. was “okay plus.”
friends with a young salesman who was tryConvinced of the validity of her mission, in
ing to sell Jerry Capp, Al Capp’s brother and
Soon
afterwards,
Chase
was
hired
by
the
l94l Mary went to Chicago’s first television
business manager, on the idea of doing a Li’l
J.
Walter
Thompson
advertising
agency
to
do
a
station, WBKB, and talked them into putAbner marionette show on television. The
series
of
Seven-Up
commercial
films
that
were
ting her marionettes on the air. These were
director told the young man that he knew just
shown
in
theaters.
After
breaking
into
the
film
some of television’s first puppet shows, Chase
the right person for the series and introduced
medium,
Mary
formed
a
partnership
with
pioneering a whole new avenue of television
Hyland Chesler, an independent producer of him to Chase.
the strip-within-a-strip
format in which Abner
followed the daily adventures of his “ideel” in the
newspapers. Modeled
on the famous gumshoe, Fosdick wore a
yellow fedora, black
suit, and had the sharpedged jaw which had
been Tracy’s trademark.
Because she molded her
marionette after Capp’s
design, Chase’s version of
Fosdick also resembled
Tracy. However, Jerry
Capp thought that the
television Fosdick might
be considered a copyright
infringement, and asked
Chase to renovate the
Daisy Mae and Li’l Abner, Al Capp’s leading comic strip characters
marionette. The trick
was to depart from the
At this time Al Capp was at the pinnacle
Tracy
profile
and
costume,
while retaining the
of his success. He was a frequent guest on
basic
resemblance
to
Fosdick.
Chase solved
television, Sadie Hawkins Day had become
the problem by replacing Fosdick’s chin with
a blockier, lantern jaw, changing his black suit
to a natty tweed, and jettisoning his fedora for
the derby hat that he began to wear in Capp’s
strips of the fifties.
Like Fosdick, other characters in the show
bore a resemblance to those in Li’l Abner but
were essentially new characters Mary had to
design herself. Fosdick’s “faithful assistant”
was a human character named Schmoozer
who closely resembled a schmoo with a small,
bulbous head, no nose, a rotund body, and the
characteristic schmoo whiskers. The Chief,
whose appearance changed from story to story
in the strip, was solidified into an Irish cop
who was perpetually frustrated and angered
by the antics of the thick-headed Fosdick.
Rounding out the cast was Sen-Sen O’Toole,
a sexy brunette who was a take-off on the voluptuous women that peopled Li’l Abner.
The pilot convinced Capp that a Fosdick
puppet show was a viable idea and he placed
the responsibility for supervising the project in
the hands of his brother. However, as Charles
part of the national folklore,
the schmoo a merchandising
bonanza, and Li’l Abner’s wedding to Daisy Mae a subject of
a Life cover story. Capp was
very particular about how others would make his characters
look. Before he would grant
permission for a Li’l Abner
television show, Capp asked
Chase to make marionettes
of the Yokum clan. Closely
following Capp’s art , Mary
made a trio of Li’l Abner, Daisy
Mae, and Mammy Yokum
marionettes so authentic that
they seemed to have stepped
out of the comic strip. These
puppets convinced the artist
that Chase would be able to
bring his characters to television. However, Capp did not
want to give her and Chesler
the rights to Li’l Abner. “He
thought that Li’l Abner was
too big for a novelty like a TV
puppet show,” Chase recalled,
“so he gave us the rights to do
Fearless Fosdick instead.”
Fosdick was Capp’s parody of Chester Gould’s comic
strip Dick Tracy , and followed
The cast of Fearless Fosdick: left to right, front, a wrestling promoter, Evil-eye Fleegle, Schmoozer,
Herman the Ape-Man; back, Sweeny,The Chief, and Fearless Fosdick.
Photos provided by Mary Chase Lombard, except as indicated
Guggenheim, later producer of the show,
notes, “Jerry Capp didn’t seem able to bring
it off. He had no experience with producing a television show.” Consequently, Capp
brought in veteran radio and television producer Louis G. Cowan. Cowan had created
a number of highly successful radio programs
like Quiz Kids, Stop the Music, and The Herb
Shreiner Show. In the late forties he brought
these programs to television, becoming an
important independent producer. Cowan
became partners with Chase and Chesler on
the Fosdick show and was instrumental in
selling it to NBC.
Charles Guggenheim was an inexperienced twenty-five-year-old who had been
director to direct the series. “But when the
time came and he was faced with the marionettes on stage,” Chase recalled, “he didn’t
know how to direct them.” The director
had made the mistake of trying to direct
the marionettes as if they were a live cast;
Mary was brought in to solve this problem
because, as a puppeteer, she knew that it was
the puppeteers, not the puppets, that should
be guided.
While Chase directed the action, Guggenheim supervised the recording of dialogue
and blocked out scenes for filming. All the
dialogue on the show was pre-recorded so that
the biggest problem in filming was in trying
Mary Chase, Fosdick and Charles Guggenheim
working as a messenger boy on The Herb Shriner Show. But now Cowen, busy with other
things, gave Guggenheim the job of producing the Fosdick show. “I always tell people I
started from the top down,” Guggenheim later
admitted, “I knew nothing about filmmaking.
The cameraman had to tell me what to do. I
used to take him out to lunch everyday and
ask him questions.” Guggenheim went on
to become one of the foremost documentary
filmmakers in America, and has won three
Academy Awards,
Initially there were problems in filming
Fosdick. Jerry Capp hired a Hollywood film
Dick Tracy had routinely featured bizarre
villains, and Capp occasionally parodied them
in the Fosdick strip. However, grotesque villains became an integral part of the Fosdick
TV series and showcased Chase’s genius
at character design. Many of these were
take-offs of movie monsters like “Batula,” a
Dracula parody, which featured a vampire bat
who hung upside down and stole men’s toupees, and “Frank N. Stein,” a monster who
has springs for legs and jumps over houses.
Perhaps the most ingenious of Fosdicks’
villains was “Evil-Eye Fleegle,” the master of
the whammy, a zoot suited, Brooklynesespeaking hood who shriveled opponents by
zapping them with the evil eye To suggest
Mary inside the set, positioning Fosdick
to synchronize the movements of the puppets’
mouths with the sound track. “We would
record the audio,” Guggenheim explains,
“then transfer it to sixteen millimeter film
which was played back on a projector over the
stage. The sound and the camera were going
at the same speed so that we could maintain
lip sync.” Operating the marionettes from a
nine foot platform, the puppeteers were able
to monitor their performance by watching a
large mirror placed in front of the set. Chase
herself manipulated the puppets in close-ups
to ensure the the final synchronization.
the intensity of Fleegle’s gaze, Chase gave him
“light bulbs that lit up and came out of their
sockets.” When Fosdick tries to duplicate the
power of the whammy in his lab, constructing
a mock-up of Fleegle’s head, he reduces the
entire room to rubble in a burst of smoke,
giving Chase the chance to create one of the
series’ most spectacular special effects.
Fosdick had been a summer replacement,
a time slot network programmers utilized as
a trial run to determine the commercial and
popular interest in a program, and whether it
merited becoming a regular series. Due to lack
Mary Chase Lombard gave a presentation
on her career at a regional festival
in Columbus Ohio in 1996. She
demonstrated many of her characters,
including this one, a rod puppet of
television’s “Bat Masterson”.
A barbershop quartet, one of Mary’s “teletheaters”; the characters are animated from
below by motors, cams and rods.
of commerical interest the network decided
not to pick it up and the show lasted only a
scant thirteen weeks. It aired its last episode
on Sept. l2, l952. Guggenheim claims that
a major reason for the series’ failure was that
neither Cowan nor NBC was much
interested in it and misconstrued its
audience. “NBC did not know what
to do with it, and mistakenly saw it as
a children’s show, putting it on the air
on Sunday afternoons. Li’l Abner was
an adult comic strip and a satire. The
writers and I always looked at Fosdick
the same way.”
Mary Chase went on to a successful
career producing a series of films for the
State Department, then for commercial
advertising. Her mechanical ingenuity
was perhaps best displayed in a series of
motorized exhibits humorously depicting the history of the telephone and
communicatuions technology that she
produced for Southwestern Bell. These
so-called “teletheaters” toured five states
over the course of three years. Mary
devised a means of animating the figures by
means of rods connected to hidden motors beneath the floor. By this means she was able to
create what were startling effects for the time,
such as a barbershop quartet in which the sing-
Mary’s “alter ego”, Judy Witch
ers mouths moved, their mustaches twitched,
and the man in the barberchair kicked his feet
in time to the music. Mary’s last commercial
puppetry job was for Kroger Groceries for
whom she created a boyscout character called
“The Buy Scout” and his bespectacled pooch,
“Little Bill.” She retired in 1976. However,
she keeps her puppetry skills honed by performing for friends and family with her
alter ego, the irrepresible Judy Witch.
A deeply religious person, Mary credits
her success to “praying for inspiration”
when confronted with new projects
and deadlines. Summing up her career
Mary comments: “it’s been a wonderful
experience bringing fun and laughter to
so many people for so many years.”
Tom Andrae is senior Editor and
co-founder of Discourse: Journal
for Theoretical Studies in Media
and Culture. He has taught at the
University of California, Berkeley
and San Francisco State University.
He is the author of numerous
articles on film, popular culture, and
cultural studies.