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TV host Steve Allen is no more

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November 1, 2000 

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Steve Allen, the bespectacled pioneer of late-night television and a comedian-actor-author who wrote more than 4,000 songs, including ``This May Be the Start of Something Big,'' has died of an apparent heart attack. He was 78.He died Monday night at the Encino home of his son, Bill Allen, relatives said Tuesday. His wife of 46 years, Jayne Meadows, rushed from their nearby home.

``He said he was a little tired after dinner,'' Bill Allen said. ``He went to relax, peacefully, and never reawakened.'' Besides starting the ``Tonight Show,'' Allen starred as the King of Swing in the 1956 movie ``The Benny Goodman Story.'' He appeared in Broadway shows, on soap operas, wrote newspaper columns and more than 50 books, commented on wrestling broadcasts, made 40 record albums and wrote plays and a television series that featured ``guest appearances'' by Sigmund Freud, Clarence Darrow and Aristotle.

``I've known him for almost 60 years. ... He is one of the great renaissance figures of today,'' comic Art Linkletter said Tuesday.

Said entertainer Dick Clark: ``He had a magnificent mind. He was a kind, gentle, warm man. He would be embarrassed for me now, because I can't put into words the way I felt about this man. I loved him.''

His ad libbing skills became apparent in his early career as a disc jockey. He once interrupted the music to announce: ``Sports fans, I have the final score for you on the big game between Harvard and William & Mary. It is: Harvard 14, William 12, Mary 6.''

Allen's most enduring achievement came with the introduction of ``The Tonight Show'' in 1953. The show began as ``Tonight'' on the New York NBC station WNBT, then moved to the network on Sept. 27, 1954.

Amid the formality of early TV, ``Tonight'' was a breath of fresh air. The show began with Allen noodling at the piano, playing some of his compositions and commenting wittily on events of the day.

``It was tremendous fun to sit there night after night reading questions from the audience and trying to think up funny answers to them; reading angry letters to the editor; introducing the greats of comedy, jazz, Broadway and Hollywood; welcoming new comedians like Shelley Berman, Jonathan Winters, Mort Sahl and Don Adams,'' he once said.

Allen's popularity led NBC in 1956 to schedule ``The Steve Allen Show'' on Sunday evenings opposite ``The Ed Sullivan Show'' on CBS. A variation of ``Tonight,'' the prime-time show was notable for its ``Man in the Street Interview'' featuring new comics Louis Nye (``Hi-ho, Steverino''), Don Knotts, Tom Poston, Pat Harrington and Bill Dana. The show lasted through 1961, the last year on ABC.

Among his TV routines: parodying juvenile rock 'n' roll lyrics by reading them as if they were sublime poetry, and ``The Question Man,'' in which someone would give him an answer and he would guess the question — forerunner to Johnny Carson's ``Karnac.''Allen cut back his ``Tonight' duties to three nights a week when the prime-time show started. He left even that in 1956. He was replaced for a season by Ernie Kovacs, then NBC tried a new format in 1957, ``Tonight! America after Dark.'' It failed, and ``Tonight'' resumed with Jack Paar, followed by Carson in 1962.

``All of us who have hosted the `Tonight Show' format owe a debt of gratitude to Steve Allen. He was a most creative innovator and brilliant entertainer,'' Carson said.

Over the years, Allen maintained a busy career, making appearances in movies and TV series, often with Meadows, sister of the late ``Honeymooners'' star Audrey Meadows.

He wrote great quantities of songs, and several were recorded by pop vocalists. His books ranged from autobiography (``Hi-Ho, Steverino: My Adventures in the Wonderful Wacky World of TV''), to philosophy (``Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion and Morality'') to murder mystery (``Die Laughing.'')

A self-styled advocate of ``radical middle-of-the-roadism,'' Allen often spoke out on political matters such as capital punishment, nuclear policy and freedom of expression. He once considered running for Congress as a Democrat.

Toward the end of his life, he spoke out and ran newspaper ads to rail against the increase of sexual content on television, including one ad that ran the day after his death in the Los Angeles Times.

In a speech last year, he said tabloid television talk shows have ``taken television to the garbage dump.''

Allen was proudest of his ``Meeting of Minds'' series, which appeared on PBS from 1976 to 1979. He moderated a panel of actors impersonating historic figures such as Galileo, Emily Dickinson, Cleopatra (played by Meadows), Charles Darwin and Attila the Hun, who explained their diverse philosophies.

Steve Allen came by his humor naturally; both his parents, Billy Allen and Belle Montrose, were vaudeville comedians. Steve was 18 months old when his father died, and his mother continued touring the circuits as a single.

Allen won a partial scholarship to study journalism but dropped out of college to work as a disc jockey and entertainer at radio station KOY in Phoenix.

Drafted in 1943, he was soon released because of asthma. He returned to KOY, and married his college sweetheart, Dorothy Goodman. They had three sons, Steve Jr., David and Brian, and divorced in 1952.

Allen moved to Los Angeles, where a midnight show on KNX brought him a small but enthusiastic audience and attracted national attention in 1950 when it was carried on the CBS network as a summer replacement for ``Our Miss Brooks.'' The networks were converting to television and he was invited to New York for ``The Steve Allen Show,'' which appeared five evenings a week on CBS.

At a dinner party in 1952, Allen was seated next to Meadows. Uncharacteristically, he was speechless. At the end of the evening, she turned to him and said: ``Mr. Allen, you're either the rudest man I ever met or the shyest.'' His reddened face indicated the latter. They married in 1954.

Besides his wife and children, Allen is survived by 11 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

When an interviewer asked Allen in 1985 how he managed to do so many creative things, he replied: ``I never asked myself that question. It would be like asking how my hair grows. The mystery of creativity is just that: It is a mystery, and particularly mysterious to me about myself.''