The Tom Mahoney Centennial

I have absolutely zero recollection of why I assigned myself to celebrate the centennial of the birth of fairly obscure character Tom Mahoney (1923-1982), but what the, hell I’m going to go through with it. I know nothing more than his screen credits — I’d love to know what he did prior to his first film, which came out when he was nearly 50 years old.

There are two probable ways Mahoney may have initially caught my attention:

The more likely of the two is that I saw him as the emcee in the magic-themed movie The Escape Artist (1982) and got curious.

The other possibility is that I knew of his recurring character on the sit-com Alice, whose name, like mine, was “Travis”.

Mahoney was built something like the silent comedian and western character actor Slim Summerville, very tall and very thin. He kind of registered as a sight gag, and was often cast in small parts in ensembles, often playing Skid Row types.

Mahoney’s first film was the 1971 comedy Made for Each Other, written by and starring the husband-wife team of Joe Bologna and Renee Taylor, with Paul Sorvino, Ron Carey,Peggy Pope,Olympia Dukakis, and a teenage Adam Arkin. Among his dozen or so other credits are Maneaters Are Loose (1978) with Tom Skerrit and Steve Forest (about a bunch of zoo tigers running amok in a small town); On the Nickel (1980), a film written and directed by and starring Ralph Waite of The Waltons, with Donald Moffat,Hal Williams, Jack Kehoe,Lane Smith, and Ellen Geer; Paul Bogart’s Fun and Games (1980) with Valerie Harper, Cliff de Young,Max Gail, and JoBeth Williams;John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row with Nick Nolte,Debra Winger, Audra Lindley, and M. Emmett Walsh (narrated by John Huston); and Ron Howard’sNight Shift (1982) with Michael Keaton and Henry Winkler.

Mahoney’s last film was the very interesting sounding House of God (1984), reportedly a satire about a hospital (specifically the inhumanity of internship training) that sounds like it had things in common with M*A*S*H, The Hospital, and St. Elsewhere. Written and directed by Donald Wrye and based on a novel by Samuel Shem, M.D., it starred Tim Mathieson of Animal House, Charles Haid of Hill Street Blues, Lisa Pelikan, Bess Armstrong, George Coe,James Cromwell, Ossie Davis, Malachy McCourt, Joe Piscopo,Michael Richards,Gilbert Gottfried, Sandra Bernhard, Loretta Tupper,Tom Clancy (yes, the author) and Peter Gerety. The film was apparently not released to theatres. Aspects of the tv show Scrubs were based on the same book.

Our man is a different guy from the Tom Mahoney (1924-1995) who was a dancer and choreographer on The Alan Young Show,The Red Buttons Show, and The Mickey Mouse Club, who was from Minnesota. Today’s Tom Mahoney was born in Jersey City and died in Englewood. That’s the location of the famous Actor’s Fund Home, where many a famous actor spent his last days. I’m going to go ahead and speculate that he was living there at the end.