Allan Sherman was an American singer, television producer, and comedy writer.
Background
He was born Allan Copelon on November 30, 1924 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Sherman's father, Percy Copelon, was a stock-car racer, automobile mechanic, car salesman, pilot, inventor, and former bootlegger from Birmingham, Ala. Sherman remembered him as a "tough, hard-driving, hard drinking man. He was as different from what we think of as a Jewish type as an American Jew could be in 1924. "
Allan Sherman wrote of his mother, Rose Sherman, "She was what they called a 'flapper' then and what would now be called a swinger. " Sherman's parents divorced when he was six, and Percy Copelon disappeared from Sherman's life. Sherman eventually took his mother's maiden name.
Education
During Sherman's childhood, his mother moved so often that Sherman attended twenty-one public schools in four cities. Sherman entered the University of Illinois in 1941, where he wrote a humor column for the Daily Illini. There he began to concentrate on writing and performing song parodies and musicals, and "became obsessed with the idea of show business. " In 1944, Sherman was expelled from the university for a minor offense.
Career
Sherman moved to New York in 1945, with $150 in his pocket and a few letters of recommendation from Chicago entertainment figures. Sherman eked out a living as a gag writer for radio and television shows, including "Cavalcade of Stars" and "The 54th Street Revue. "
Sherman's first break came in 1951, when he and his friend Howard Merrill created the game show "I've Got a Secret. " The show was based on the idea that thousands of Americans had secrets they needed to reveal and millions of Americans longed to hear. As it happened, Merrill and Sherman's analysis of American culture was astute, and it became a top-rated show. Sherman was hired as the producer, at $125 a week. In 1958, Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, the executive producers of the show, fired Sherman because they felt he was paying too much attention to his outside projects, including specials for Victor Borge and Phil Silvers. As Sherman put it in his autobiography, "I learned to laugh very young because I had to. "
During his tenure with "I've Got a Secret, " Sherman began a pattern of addictive behavior. Sherman produced a number of shows until 1960, when he and comic Allie Singer created the game show "Your Surprise Package" for CBS in Los Angeles. Although "Your Surprise Package" was canceled in 1962, Harpo Marx invited Sherman to a series of parties for the elite of the entertainment world. Here Marx encouraged Sherman to sing his show-tune parodies, and Sherman caught the eye of Jack Benny and George Burns. While Sherman was making a splash as an amateur entertainer, his professional career came to a halt. He found himself out of work, collecting $55 unemployment checks to help pay off the mortgage on his Bel Air mansion.
After sinking into a deep depression for a few months, Sherman racked his brain and realized, "I have some crazy songs. " Using his Hollywood connections - including Bullets Durgom, who managed Jackie Gleason - Sherman made an album of folk song parodies, called My Son, the Folksinger, for Warner Brothers Records in 1962. Unabashedly Jewish in content and style, songs such as "Seltzer Boy" (set to the tune of "Water Boy") made the record the fastest selling album up to that time - it sold 500, 000 copies the first month and more than a million by 1965, earning Sherman a Gold Album. "Sarah Jackman", reached the Top Forty. Sherman's follow-up, My Son, the Celebrity, also went gold.
Beatlemania was still several years away in America, but Shermanmania was in full gear. Sam Goody's record shop in New York City had to limit customers to twelve copies; Sherman made the cover of Billboard magazine. Two weeks after issuing "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah, " Sherman played to the largest Friday-night Hollywood Bowl audience ever seen to that date. Two months later he replaced Johnny Carson for a week on "The Tonight Show. "
President John F. Kennedy counted himself a fan, and Sherman performed at benefits for President Lyndon Johnson. Sherman then gave concerts with the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra that parodied classical music.
After peaking in 1964, Sherman's career began to slide. His next two albums did not go gold. In 1965, a one-hour special on NBC flopped, reportedly because the producers asked him to excise his Jewish humor for fear of being "too ethnic. " That year, he also published his autobiography, A Gift of Laughter. The book sold respectably, but Shermanmania had played itself out. The Beatles had arrived, the Vietnam War was escalating, and the counterculture was on the way. Sherman wrote the lyrics to several musicals in the late 1960's and early 1970's but never regained his popularity.
While performing for friends at one of his many Hollywood parties, he died of respiratory failure brought on by asthma, emphysema, and obesity.
Quotations:
Sherman had written, "My life has been a yo-yo on a roller coaster. "
Personality
Sherman blamed his addictions - primarily eating, and later drinking - on his involvement with the corporate world of Goodson/Todman Productions, while ridiculing a series of psychiatrists for tracing his problems to his father.
Quotes from others about the person
Newsweek wrote, "But if Sherman's style is irritating, his Semitism too self-conscious, his jokes forced, if the reader cares little for his dreary pubescent escapades or an ego that rivals his waistline, there remains a winsome sincerity to his account--a soul-saving sense of humor in the face of all adversity. "
Connections
In 1945 he married his college sweetheart, Delores ("Dee") Chakes. In 1966, his wife Dee filed for divorce and received full custody of their son and daughter.