By Jiminy!

Cliff Edwards’ distinctive voice and ukulele strumming are worthy of rediscovery by a new generation. Most folks of a certain age now recall him only as the voice of Jiminy Cricket in Walt Disney’s Pinocchio. His voice is the only one I want to hear singing “When You Wish Upon a Star.” But Edwards had a long career before that 1940 animated hit that children still view with delight, generation after generation. We have to rely on YouTube and Netflix to see and hear his earlier performances.

He was born Clifton A. Edwards (June 14, 1895 – July 17, 1971) in Mark Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, at a time when Twain was still alive, though not living in his boyhood home by then. Edwards left school at age 14 and moved to St. Louis and nearby St. Charles, Missouri, where he entertained in saloons. He taught himself how to play the ukulele (or ukelele, as it often was spelled in those days), and soon took on the moniker “Ukelele Ike.”

Edwards got his break in Chicago in 1918 and played the vaudeville circuit, moving into the big time at the Palace in New York City and later performing in the Ziegfeld Follies. He was a headliner at the Palace in 1924.

Ukelele Ike made his first record in 1918. In 1924 he was featured along with Fred Astaire and Fred’s sister Adele in the Gershwin brothers’ first Broadway musical, Lady Be Good. Edwards had a number one hit with “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” in 1928, followed by another number one in 1929: “Singin’ in the Rain.” Gene Kelly, who parlayed that song into a hit movie by the same name in 1952 was only 17 when Edwards’ version was a sensation on the airwaves.

Edwards went on to play a variety of character roles in movies, including His Girl Friday, the Howard Hawks remake of the play, The Front Page, a screwball comedy about a hard-boiled newspaper editor and his eccentric star reporter. The film starred Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Edwards even had his own television show in 1949 and made film and TV appearances throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

Sadly, Edwards fell into alcoholism and drug addiction toward the end of his life. Broke and largely forgotten by the public, he succumbed to a heart attack in 1971. But for me and kids across the ages who have lost themselves in the Disney story of the puppet who wanted to be a “real boy,” we’ll always hear Edwards with fondness in that singing cricket.

Stray Lamb

“I always suspected,” says protagonist T. Lawrence Lamb, “that an investment banker and a second-story man had a great deal in common.” The line is from a 1929 novel. It’s prescient, considering what happened in late October that year—the Wall Street Crash. That debacle tipped the United States into a ten-year Great Depression, echoed most recently in the crash of 2008, from which the U.S. economy is still recovering. Mr. Lamb is an investment banker. He has a point. The banker-burglars of 2008 have yet to be held fully accountable for the financial hardships they and their conservative political backers imposed on the American people. Recovery is still incomplete, and rightwing politicos seem bent on ensuring that it ever will be.

Mr. Lamb, however, is a comic character, and the novel by Thorne Smith in which he appears is merely a bit of fun. It’s called The Stray Lamb. I stumbled on it when I pulled a long-neglected volume from a dusty corner of my bookshelf, The Thorne Smith 3-Decker, a Doubleday, Doran and Company edition from 1939. I don’t recall where I picked it up, some book sale or other, I suppose. But it’s a delightful dive back into the murky madcap humor of a bygone era.

Thorne Smith

James Thorne Smith, Jr. (March 27, 1892 – June 21, 1934), who wrote under simply Thorne Smith, may be best remembered for two Topper novels. The original Topper (1926) and its sequel Topper Takes a Trip (1932) starred another banker, Cosmo Topper. Smith’s bankers, saddled with unsatisfactory wives, invariably get into outrageous scrapes. These novels led to a series of film and television versions. The first film, Topper, was a Hal Roach vehicle for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1937, featuring Roland Young and Billie Burke, with a cast that included Cary Grant and Constance Bennett, who were the bigger stars. An American television series of the same name began in 1953 and starred Leo G. Carroll as Cosmo Topper. The pilot and several early episodes were written by Stephen Sondheim.

Thorne Smith’s urbane, zany novels are redolent of the abandon of the Roaring Twenties. There’s an abundance of sex and alcohol. Whether sex figured in Smith’s own life, I don’t know. Alcohol certainly seemed to, by all accounts. He died of a heart attack at age 42.

Mr. Lamb’s tale is the first novel in The Thorne Smith 3-Decker, which also includes the novels, Turnabout (1931) and Rain in the Doorway (1933). The last broadcast episode of the original Star Trek television series, “Turnabout Intruder” (1969), was based on Turnabout. Perhaps I’ll read that one next.