A Salute to Chester Clute

February 18 is the birthday of Billy DeWolf, Adolphe Menjou, “Little Angie” Rossitto, Hugo Haas,Allan Melvin,Edward Arnold, George Givot, George Kennedy, George Kirby, Jerry Fujikawa, Jack Palance, Queenie Leonard, Yoko Ono, Little Caesar, Milos Forman, and Bill Cullen — but we’ve already done posts about them. And while there are several other (even more famous) people I could write about today, it seems like high time to give some attention to character actor Chester Clute (1891-1956).

I vouchsafe to say that this will be the best online article about Clute available; most of those I’ve encountered have been incomplete in terms of appreciation. That said, I haven’t been able to run down any professional credits prior to 1926, when Clute was 35 years old. That was the Broadway play She Couldn’t Say No, with Florence Moore. Now, no one just turns up in a Broadway play when they’re 35 years old. It’s likely that by that time Clute had spent at least 15 years either in vaudeville or with stock companies, those being the usual paths to better things. He was from Orange, New Jersey. Vaudeville or perhaps burlesque seem particularly likely, but I’ve not yet come across anything to that effect. It’s more than possible he went under another name. At any rate, Clute worked constantly on Broadway for about a decade, in such shows as The New Yorkers (1927), Oh, Promise Me (1930), Triplets (1932), Page Miss Glory (1934), and Ceiling Zero (1935). In these plays, mostly comedies, he worked with the likes of the young Jimmy Stewart, Lee Tracy, Donald Meek, and British actress and playwright Eleanor Hicks, whom he married.

During this same period, Clute made comedy shorts for Paramount at their studios in Astoria Queens on a three year contract. He was in 18 of these shorts between 1930 and 1933, and by rights it ought to be the lede in any story about him, in spite of their present obscurity because he STARRED in many of these shorts. Bald and short-statured, usually with a trim little mustache, Clute was often cast as persnickety clerks, hen-pecked husbands, and the like, equally good as a foil, or a hapless sort of hero. He might have been good as Hercule Poirot! In addition to the shorts he starred in, he frequently supported Burns and Allen, and also worked with Jack Norworth, Rudy Vallee, Mae Questel, Al. St. John, Jack Haley, Ruth Etting, Dorothy Lee, et al.

Hicks passed away in 1935, and that seems to have been the impetus for Clute’s move to Hollywood, where he played character parts in nearly 250 pictures, including You Can’t Take It With You (1938), My Favorite Wife (1940), My Favorite Spy (1942), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), the W.C. Fields sequence in Tales of Manhattan (1942), Pardon My Sarong (1942) with Abbott and Costello. With Jack Benny he was in George Washington Slept Here (1942) and The Meanest Man in the World (1943); with Red Skelton and Lucille Ball he was in Du Barry Was a Lady(1943). He was also in I Dood It (1943) with Skelton, Crazy House (1943) with Olsen and Johnson, Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), Nothing But Trouble (1944) with Laurel and Hardy, Earl Carroll’s Vanities (1945), Wonder Man with Danny Kaye (1945), Spook Busters (1946) with the Bowery Boys, and Copacabana (1947) with Groucho Marx and Carmen Miranda. He also made several appearances in series like the Joe Palooka films, as well as Scattergood Baines, Henry Aldrich, Blondie, and Jiggs and Maggie. And literally a couple of hundred others.

According to a couple of sources Clute starred in a tv pilot called Citizen Clute in 1951, produced and written by John J. Parker, who was later responsible for the 1955 horror film Dementia. Clute’s last screen credit was “Man with Spaghetti on Head” in Scared Stiff (1953) with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

How I wish he had lived until 1969 so he could star in a movie called Clute, and I could hear Jane Fonda say “What gets ya hot, Clute? Pie in the face? Three in a rumble seat? What is it that really turns you on, Chester? Ice bucket down the pants? I’ve seen it all and I’ve done it all, Clute. Jalapeno in the customer’s coffee? That’s a popular one. Is that what revs your engines, Clute?” (With apologies to Amy Stiller; she used to do a routine like this).

For more on the history of show business,consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and for more on classic comedy please check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube — now also available on audiobook!