A weekly feature in which my five-year-old son is let loose on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one of the most popular tourist attractions in Los Angeles, and chooses a star from among the more than 2,500 honorees. His “random” picks sometimes reveal unexplained connections such as the summer day in 2012 when he sat down on the star of actress Celeste Holm and refused to budge. We later learned that the Oscar-winning actress had died only hours earlier. There are five categories on the Walk of Fame: motion pictures, television, radio, music and theater but Charlie tends to favor the movies.
Even if the name of Charlie’s current pick, Joe E. Brown, doesn’t ring a bell, chances are you remember the iconic closing line he delivered in one of the greatest films of all time, Billy Wilder’s 1959 classic Some Like it Hot starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and Marilyn Monroe. Curtis and Lemmon, two musicians on the lam from the Chicago mob, have been masquerading as women in an all-girl band. Millionaire Osgood Fielding III (Brown) takes a shine to Daphne (Lemmon) and by the end of the film proposes marriage. Frustrated by his attentions, Lemmon rips off his wig and shouts, “But I’m a man!” Osgood’s deadpan reply ends the film: “Well, nobody’s perfect!”
Joe E. Brown was born in Ohio on July 28, 1891. As a young kid he worked as a tumbler in vaudeville and the circus but as he got older, he discovered he was also quite skilled on the baseball field. Brown worked in the Minor Leagues for several years but turned down an offer to join the New York Yankees because he dreamed of being a full-time entertainer on the stage. His first Broadway musical, Jim Jam Jems, opened at the Cort Theater on October 4, 1920 and was a big hit. Several other Broadway musicals followed until talent scouts from Warner Bros. discovered Brown and brought him to out west. With his unusual looks and strong comic sense, Joe was an immediate hit in the movies and, with his theater training, he made a smooth transition to the talkies.
Joe E. Brown made a lot of popular films throughout the 1930s, his name often appearing above the title. Many of his films capitalized on his circus and baseball past. Though largely forgotten today, his films included Elmer the Great (1933), The Circus Clown (1934), Alibi Ike (1935), and When’s Your Birthday? (1937).
Joe E. Brown’s activities during World War II proved what a mensch he was. In 1939, the actor testified before the House Immigration Committee in Washington urging them to allow 20,000 Jewish refugee children into the United States to no avail. Brown later adopted two refugee children. He was one of the first celebrities who traveled thousands of miles (at his own expense yet!) to entertain the troops at various outposts around the world, even before the USO was created. He would always return to the States with bags of letters that he would make sure got delivered. Brown put himself at great risk to perform for soldiers in miserable conditions, occasionally performing his entire show in a military hospital for a single dying soldier. On the cover of Brown’s memoir about those years, Your Kids and Mine, General Douglas MacArthur wrote, “There isn’t a man, in uniform or out, who has done more for our boys than Joe E. Brown.” The actor was one of the few civilians ever awarded a Bronze Star.
After the war, Brown toured in the play Harvey, did a lot of work on television, and had a cameo in Michael Todd’s all-star Around the World in 80 Days. But it was his role as Oscar Fielding III in Some Like It Hot that really put him back in the spotlight and for which he is best remembered today. He made a few more films including a small role in Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World before retiring from the screen in the mid-1960s. Joe E. Brown died on July 6, 1973, at the age of 81.