Don’t F**k Around With Keefe Brasselle

I think it’s safe to say that there aren’t any other show biz careers like that of Keefe Brasselle (1923-1981). By that I don’t mean he was at the top, but that he made his own journey, one not like anyone else’s. It’s almost like his career path was in parallel with more conventional ones, his way being darker, almost a parody of most others.

One logical formulation would be: “As Larry Parks is to The Jolson Story, so is Keefe Brasselle to The Eddie Cantor Story (1953)”. We wrote about the latter film here; both Brasselle and the film are too strange and obscure to find proper analogs in The Jolson Story however (and that’s taking Parks’ blacklisting into account). How the relatively anonymous Brasselle got the plum part of Eddie Cantor isn’t a complete mystery: he was a talented singer and dancer, with a voice in Cantor’s high tenor register. He was also a good-looking guy, with conceivable potential as a star in other films if the Cantor bio-pic had been a success.

Brasselle was originally from Elyria, Ohio, which reminds me that Dean Martin was originally from Steubenville. Just as Steubenville is in Greater Pittsburgh, Elyria is in greater Cleveland — Bob Hope’s town. It’s on Lake Erie. When WW2 came around, Brasselle served in the Navy. His first screen credit was a part in the 1942 instructional film U.S.S.V.D.: Ship of Shame. He was only 21 when discharged from the service and he began playing bit parts in Hollywood films, which he did for nearly a decade before The Eddie Cantor Story. Some of the pictures in which he had larger roles included River Gang (1945) with Gloria Jean,John Qualen,Sheldon Leonard, and Gus Schilling; and A Place in the Sun and It’s a Big Country, both in 1951.

While The Eddie Cantor Story did not fare well with critics or audiences, and dispite his unsual screen name and downright unsettling appearance and personality, Brasselle was cast in leading roles in pictures for the next five years. These include Three Young Texans (1954) with Mitzi Gaynor and Jeffrey Hunter; Mad at the World (1955) with Frank Lovejoy; Blake Edwards and Richard Quine’s Bring Your Smile Along (1955) with Frankie Laine; Battle Stations (1956) with William Bendix; The Fighting Wildcats or West of Suez (1957), which Braselle also co-directed; and Death Over My Shoulder (1958) with Bonar Colleano, and Arlene deMarco of the DeMarco Sisters,whom Brasselle had married in 1956. Throughout these years he also appeared on TV shows like The Colgate Comedy Hour, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Red Skelton Hour, The Phil Silvers Showand The Loretta Young Show.

The character of Johnny Fontane in The Godfather is often linked to Frank Sinatra but IRL Brasselle was even more beholden to the mafia for his career, a fact that he actually boasted about (unlike Sinatra, who publicly downplayed his own connections). An early indication of that: Death Over My Shoulder, the movie Brasselle co-directed, was co-produced the following year by Burt Pugach, the monster who hired mooks to throw lye in his girlfriend’s face after she dumped him. (In a remarkable development, she later married him after he got out of jail. I highly recommend the 2007 documentary Crazy Love). Starting in the late ’50s when movie parts dried up, Brasselle spent a lot of time entertaining in nightclubs. In 1961, one of which he was part owner in Edison, New Jersey, burned down in a suspicious fire.

Then, shortly after that, mysterious and sudden success in television. First there was his summer replacement variety program The Keefe Brasselle Show (1963) on CBS. He briefly became the right arm of a top CBS executive named James Aubrey, who green-lit three Brasselle-produced TV shows through his whimsically named Richelieu Productions (a good argument for why you should read history books. That name alone tells you everything you need to know about Brasselle’s methods and intentions). The programs he produced were The Cara Williams Show, The Reporter, and The Baileys of Balboa (with the all-star cast of Paul Ford, John Dehner,Sterling Holloway, Judy Carne, and Clint Howard!). These all ran during the 1964-65 season, but were all cancelled due to poor ratings, followed by a scandal in which Aubrey was fired. It was rumored that Brasselle and friends had made Aubrey “an offer he couldn’t refuse”. Brasselle then wrote two thinly veiled “tell all” novels about his experiences in the television business: The CaniBal$ (1968), and The Barricudas (1973). Not to be outdone, Jacqueline Susann put a character based on Brasselle in her 1969 novel The Love Machine.

Brasselle was far from finished. He had a small role in the 1972 blaxploitation movie Black Gunn with Jim Brown and Martin Landau. In 1973 he was in an episode of Adam-12. Then in 1975 the release of a film he codirected, a racy soft-core sex comedy called If You Don’t Stop It…You’ll Go Blind!!! Gene Siskel gave this movie zero stars. I’m going to go ahead and speculate that this one was mob-funded, too, in light of the monster success of 1972’s Deep Throat. It’s full of burlesque style blackout sketches and even musical numbers staged by Brasselle, along with a highly Cantor-esque performance by himself, and a song called “Don’t Fuck Around With Love” (which is available to watch on Youtube!). The film did very well on the midnight movie circuit, which was perhaps a consolation to him in his declining years. “Don’t fuck around”, indeed.

Brasselle died of a bad liver in 1981, typically a symptom of alcohol abuse. His lack of screen activity over the half decade prior suggest a long period of illness.

For more on the weirdness that is The Eddie Cantor Story go here.

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For more on variety entertainment, including television variety, please see No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous