The Brief on Bud Abbott

Thanks, Bob Greenberg for the very good idea to do a solo post on Bud Abbott (William Alexander Abbott, 1897-1974). The reasons for doing one (and doing one now) are multiple: 1) the many posts I’ve done on Abbott and Costello are all about the team as comedians; I’ve never done a biographical post per se on either of them, or on their career together for that matter, which is quite an omission. I guess I got carried away with looking at them as a critic. 2) Abbott had a close connection to Coney Island, and I write and speak about Coney Island all the time, so, again, quite an omission; 3) Abbott is my favorite of the two; and 4) this year marks the 50th annniversary of when he passed away. So here goes!

October 2 was Abbott’s birthday — the same as Groucho Marx and Spanky from Our Gang. Quite a calendate date for anchors of comedy teams! Abbott’s parents were circus people; they met while working for Barnum and Bailey. The dad, Harry Abbott had deep American roots (the family was originally from Pennsylvania) and had run off and joined the circus as a kid. He was a concessionaire. The mother (Rae Fisher), of German-Jewish descent, was a bareback rider. Bud and his siblings were born in Asbury Park. The family later moved to Harlem, briefly, then finally to Coney Island. During the summer Harry worked at Dreamland Park (until it burned down in 1911). The rest of the time, he worked at the Casino Theatre in downtown Brooklyn. The Casino was on the Columbia Burlesque Wheel, for which the elder Abbott also worked as an advance man.

Bud began working at the Casino as an assistant treasurer as a teenager. It was through that connection that he met his wife, burlesque dancer and comedienne Betty Smith (Jenny Mae Pratt, 1902-1981), who toured the Columbia circuit. While working at the Columbia, Abbott met many performers who later became famous, such as W.C. Fields, Fanny Brice, Bert Lahr, Jack Pearl, Sophie Tucker, and Clark and McCullough. The glamor of it all was surely infectious. Abbott studied the acts closely. It was perhaps inevitable that one day he’d seek to be one of them himself.

Billy Gilbert claimed to have been the one to first hire him as a straight man for his own act, in 1916. In another version, Abbott produced a vaudeville tab show on the small time Gus Sun Circuit, called Broadway Flashes in 1923 and joined the act as a straight man to save money. He then began working as a producer and performer on the Mutual Burlesque Wheel (where he first worked with Harry Steppe) and finally Minsky’s, where he first met and worked with Lou Costello. The pair were formally teamed in 1936.

Abbott was widely regarded as the best straight man in the business. Even Groucho said so, apparently forgetting that two of his brothers had been straight men. Abbott’s older brother Harry Abbott, who was also in the biz as a producer, became Bud’s business advisor when the team went into the movies. (If he was the one who advised him not to pay his taxes, he had a lot to answer for). The kids of Bud’s sister Olive, Norman and Betty Abbott were also hired to work in various capacities on the team’s pictures.

It was just over 20 years later when Abbott and Costello broke up, followed by Costello’s death just a couple of years later in 1959. Abbott was already in his sixties, by this point. For a while he tried a team with Candy Candido, which wasn’t a success (can you imagine how shaggy an act like that would have seemed in the early ’60s, the age of Lenny Bruce and Nichols and May?) In 1967 he supplied his own voice on The Abbott and Costello Cartoon Show. He was 78 at the time of his passing.

For more about show business historyconsult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.