Here’s What Happened to Jim Backus Before, During and After ‘Gilligan’s Island’ and Mr. Magoo

At the website tralfaz.blogspot.com, they report, “The earliest mention I can find of Backus in radio isn’t on a radio show. It’s in a 1940 print ad for bourbon. Backus is billed as ‘radio announcer’ and his home address in Cleveland is listed, making it appear like an endorsement from an ordinary guy. He soon headed to New York and by February 1942, he was stooging on Kay Thompson’s [radio] show on CBS.”

In May of 1942, he narrated the radio documentary The Nation at War, followed by the previously-mentioned The Jim Backus Show, which, despite the enthusiasm of The Democrat and Chronicle, was pretty much ignored by almost everyone as it only lasted three weeks on NBC. But that cancellation didn’t deter him as he began appearing on many other shows. On one called Gaslight Gaieties, he introduced the same sort of voice he would eventually use as Mr. Howell, but was released when an exec thought — according to Backus’ autobiography, Rocks on the Roof — that the voice contained “homosexual overtones.”

During this period, Jim had gotten married twice. First in 1939 to Betty Kean, an actress who, in the 1950s, became part of the comedy duo the Kean Sisters. The marriage lasted until 1942. Then he married Broadway showgirl Henrietta “Henny” Kaye in 1943 and the two of them were together until his death. They costarred in the late 1960s version of Blondie as Mr. and Mrs. Dithers, the TV show based on the comic strip of the same name (PR still of them in character above).

Actor Alan Young, best known as Wilbur Post on the ’60s TV series Mister Ed, starred in his own radio show between 1944 and 1949. Jim became a part of it, bringing his “snobbish” character, who was more clearly defined by writer Sherwood Schwartz (later to create both Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch) as Hubert Updike III, who would ultimately be the inspiration for Thurston Howell III. On September 17, 1947, New York’s Dunkirk Evening Observer commented, “Jim Backus is a radio comedian who has appeared on as many as 15 radio programs a week under the name of the character he creates for specific shows. He’s probably best known as Hubert Updyke of The Alan Young Show than he is as Jim Backus.”

In 1947 he would also begin hosting his own radio show again, offering up comedy bits and recorded music. Said the Daily News, “It’s a fast-paced half hour of clever funning combined with the playing of records — a kind of Henry Morgan of the disc jockeys. Some of Jim’s material is breezy and the entire show has about it a refreshing air. Backus, formerly a stooge on The Alan Young Show, seems like a sure bet for fall sponsorship.” That didn’t happen, but finding guest work on other radio shows proved not to be a problem, which was fine with him as he felt the life of radio performer was a relatively easy one.

“Recently,” he said, “I did a guest shot with Bob Hope. We drove to Palm Springs through the California sunshine. We had a wonderful dinner. After the show we wandered leisurely around the town and visited a few casinos. For this I got a fat check.”

Between 1948 and 1951, Jim began appearing in a wide number of films, ranging from One Last Fling to I Want You, oftentimes playing the best friend or a policeman in a gangster film. “Even watching movies I was always on the wrong side,” he related to the Visalia Times-Delta in 1949. “In Revolutionary War pictures, the British always were the better-dressed and better actors. I was on their side. Washington always looked to me like a second-rate ham in a toupee. I was always on the side of the Romans, because the Christians got such awful actors. In Civil War films, they always hired a fine actor from the Theater Guild to play General Lee, but General Grant was some guy they found in a drug store.

“And the gangster are the best actors; the fellows you remember,” he added, now speaking from experience. “I’m a policeman. I’ve got one suit, a broken-down apartment and no girlfriend. The gangster, George Raft, has three carloads of suits, a penthouse and 40 dolls. Do you blame me for wanting to be a gangster instead of a cop?”

Between those movies, Jim took on a role that would not only change his life, but impact on it — both positively and negatively — for much of the rest of his days: the near-sighted Quincy Magoo (aka Mr. Magoo) in the animated theatrical short “Ragtime Bear.” The connection with the audience was immediate. Comments mercurie.blogspot.com, “The bear of the title was supposed to be the star of the short, but instead, it was nearsighted Quincy Magoo and his nephew Waldo who stole the show. As a result, UPA launched an entire series of Mr. Magoo shorts. Mr. Magoo proved extremely popular in the fifties and sixties. Two of the theatrical shorts won Oscars (‘When Magoo Flew’ and ‘Magoo’s Puddle Jumper’) for Short Subject (Cartoon). Mr. Magoo would appear in his own feature film (1001 Arabian Nights from 1959) and three TV series (the syndicated Mr. Magoo Show, the NBC primetime series The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo, and the CBS Saturday morning show What’s New, Magoo?).”

Speaking to the Independent Press-Telegram, Jim detailed his take on the character: “Magoo’s voice was taken from the character I play in my nightclub act — the man in the club car [train where alcohol can be purchased]. You know, the loud-mouth traveling salesman who shows pictures of his family to everybody in the club car, belongs to all the clubs and tells dirty jokes. It was the same with Magoo in the beginning. He was a dirty old man. Half the time you couldn’t understand what he was saying, he just used to mumble. I will say one thing for Magoo: he’s saved a lot of marriages. In New York bars, guys who missed the last train to suburbia catch hell from their wives on the phone. Then they get me to say hello to the dames using Magoo’s voice. The wives die laughing, the marriage is saved and the kids go to college.”

He added to The Times of San Mateo, “You had to have a ‘double’ in radio days; a voice you used if you happened to play two roles on the same show. My radio double was similar to the voice that became Mr. Magoo. I added his laugh when I was entertaining friends at parties, then locked in on the whole thing when they asked me to do the voice for Magoo.”

“Here’s an example of a Magoo I met the other day,” he added. “I was in this restaurant, resplendent in a tuxedo, ruffled shirt, gold studs and a Homburg. I never looked better. And this guy comes up and says, ‘Gee, Mr. Backus, you look just like you do on TV.’ Now that’s a Magoo. I wanted to do him on The Ed Sullivan Show and the Magoo people made a whole big thing about it. Seems they own the character of Magoo and if there’s any tie-in, they’ve got to have a say in it. But I could do a saloon date without too much trouble, I guess.

“When my contract was up, they tried other guys for the voice. But even if the others could match my voice, they couldn’t match my ad-libs. When I do Magoo, I’m always saying something under my breath. If they ever figure out what I was saying, I’d be in a jam.”

Jim costarred with actress Joan Davis on I Married Joan, which ran from 1952 to 1955. He plays Judge Bradley Stevens, who is married to the scatterbrained Joan, who in turn finds herself involved in many I Love Lucy-like predicaments. As to how he got cast in the show, he joked with the Oakland Tribune, “It’s all because of one suit. Some years ago I was in a dog of a film where the studio outfitted me with a $150 suit. You know, the kind that makes you look like a Wall Street banker. It was tailored for my exact measurements, so the studio let me have it for $25 after the picture was finished. So far I have worn it on 22 different interviews and screen tests. It always gets me those distinguished parts.”

By the time the show finished its run in 1955, it was obvious that the experience had been something of a turn-off to him for a number of reasons. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t do a TV series again,” he explained to Appeal-Democrat. “But I tell you, I wouldn’t do one unless I owned it. A series like I Married Joan dissipates you as a personality. I played a judge on the show and after awhile, every time my name would come up, everyone would think of me as just that — that kindly judge on the Joan Davis show. If I’d wanted the role of, say, the drunken father in Peyton Place, they’d say, ‘Oh, no, not Backus. He’s the kindly judge.’ Or if I was in a movie like Rebel Without a Cause, which I was, when my face would come on the screen, you could hear the audience whispering, ‘That’s the kindly judge.’ I was so lovable for a while there, it was kind of sickening.”

He reflected to the Los Angeles Times in 1967 that I Married Joan was made at General Service Studios, which he viewed at that time as something of a matriarchy in that the majority of stars that were there were women. “There was Our Miss Brooks starring Eve Arden,” he said, “I Love Lucy starring Lucille Ball, The Ann Sothern Show starring Ann Sothern, Burns and Allen starring Gracie Allen (sorry about that, George), and, of course, I Married Joan starring Joan Davis. They didn’t even have a wall around the studio, they had a giant girdle. Since Joan owned the show, I can tell you that I am the only man who ever came home with lipstick on his paycheck.”

David C. Tucker, author of Joan Davis: America’s Queen of Film, Radio and Television Comedy, comments, “I Married Joan gave Jim three years of steady work and made him better-known to television audiences, but in some ways it was a frustrating experience. He wanted to be Joan Davis’ full-fledged co-star in the series, but the scripts put the comic emphasis on her. Playing her wacky character’s level-headed husband didn’t allow him full range to be as funny as he could be. The reruns played for years afterward, and he worried that he would be typecast in a role that he wanted to move beyond.

“I Married Joan,” he adds, “wasn’t entirely a one-woman show, but it was designed to be a vehicle for Joan Davis’ comedy. She owned the show and called the shots. Like many men in that era, Jim didn’t seem entirely comfortable with a woman boss. During her lifetime, he maintained a cordial relationship with her, and spoke admiringly of her comic gifts. After she was gone, Jim and his wife Henny wrote a memoir that wasn’t kind to Joan.”

While shooting I Married Joan and appearing in a number of big screen features (including the aforementioned James Dean classic Rebel Without a Cause), and voicing Mr. Magoo for dozens of theatrical shorts, it was back to radio regularly from 1957 to 1958 with the new Jim Backus Show, a variety series. There Jim felt he was being given an opportunity that he couldn’t find on television. “Radio can do things that TV can’t do,” he related at the outset of that show. “A show like this gives me a chance to take a crack at topical things. We can make jokes about a party the day after it happens. Another thing radio does that TV can’t is paint a word picture. I still think, for example, that Jack Benny is funnier on radio than TV. Your mind creates a much funnier picture of Benny’s fabulous vault than your eye ever can give you. And radio gives you a chance to experiment more. You don’t have to worry if you miss once in a while. The world doesn’t collapse.”

“The only successful people on TV are those who admit they have nothing to bring to it,” he added to the Appeal-Democrat of Marysville, California. “You know the ones I’m talking about; the ones who go on and on, yet have no specific talent. You take that one singer who doesn’t even bother to learn the lyrics, he just reads them off his teleprompter. It’s a crazy medium. The kind where if you forget the lyrics, everybody gives you a big hand. And those things called musicals where the relaxed girl singer comes out and sings a couple of songs and then they have a couple of relaxed guests come out and read the teleprompter. This is a musical? The strangest thing about TV to me is that the best people are always canceled. They don’t last. Like Sid Caesar. He’s great. So he’s canceled. Naturally. What else is new?”

While speaking to the Independent Star-News, you certainly could sense his continuing frustration with television as a medium, noting that his type of comedy had pretty much vanished from TV. “The comedians are all gone from television,” he said in 1957. “I feel the only people with talent, like Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason, have been taken off. Now you have the relaxed school exemplified by Perry Como, which says, ‘Look at me, I can do nothing.’ In Hollywood, I heard a man saying that television would be all musicals this season. I was with Gene Kelly at the time and I thought he meant they’d be doing a lot of Broadway musicals on TV. But he didn’t mean that. He meant Perry Como and Dinah Shore. In the charcoal gray world, those shows are musicals.”

Needless to say, all of this did not mark the end of his association with TV. Between 1960 and 1961 he starred in The Jim Backus Show (also known as Hot off the Wire). In it, he plays Mike O’Toole, the owner and operator of a second-rate news service that he is struggling to keep alive. Nita Talbot and Bill McLean play reporters on the comedy. “It was syndicated around the country, not on a network,” he related to the Oakland Tribune. “When I told my relatives I was syndicated, they thought I was tied up with the Mafia. They’ve changed their names and won’t talk to me. He added elsewhere, “I sword I’d done my last television series even though they keep coming to me with parts like the lovable uncle who’s a veterinarian and loves kids. Besides, I know all the storylines: the emcee for the ladies’ club who doesn’t show up, or the fellow who saves stamps and the wife mails the letter with a valuable issue and do they get the letter out of the box? I’m like the gambler who says ‘Just one more roll.’ So now I’m back with the dice. One more series.”

Well, that series would eventually come in 1964 in the form of Sherwood Schwartz’ Gilligan’s Island, which, surprisingly Jim didn’t actually have a hard time agreeing to do. Prior to being told about that show, the William Morris Agency called him with a series called Kibby Loves Fitch, about a pair of firemen. He said he would look at a script, but it turns out they had no script, though it was emphasized that it was being written by Neil Simon, who had a big hit on Broadway at the time with Barefoot in the Park — so Jim was told he didn’t need a script. “I said I didn’t care if they dug up George S. Kaufman and Shakespeare, I still had to see a script,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “Then they said, ‘But Don Rickles will be your neighbor,’ and I yelled back, ‘Don’t throw names at me. I’ve gotta know more than that about somebody I’ll be spending more time with than my wife.'”

“Later,” he continued the scenario, “somebody came to me with a script on a show about making movies in the Twenties, but I wanted to talk with Barry Shear, the producer. ‘We’re sorry,’ his secretary told me, ‘but Mr. Shear is on the Grindl set and can’t be disturbed.’ Can you imagine not disturbing somebody on the Grindl set? Hell, when I was filming I Married Joan, I used to get tattooed and sell jewelry on the side between takes. You could even get to George Stevens when he was doing The Bible.”

He broke the “script rule” when it came to Gilligan’s Island, because of the fact that Sherwood, who had created Jim’s Hubert Updyke character for radio years earlier, was the creator of the series. He called one afternoon when Jim was apparently “sitting around looking at my bank statement,” and when he asked for a script was told that if he read it, he wouldn’t want to do the part. “He was right,” Jim said, “but his description of the series sounded so ridiculous, I figured it couldn’t miss … We succeeded against some of the worst reviews of all time. They weren’t reviews, really; they were character assassinations. What the reviewers didn’t realize was that our show was a put-on. Critics were accustomed to the Ozzie and Harriet/Donna Reed Show sort of thing. They took us literally.”

As to the show itself, he mused, “I’ve got ties older than Bob Denver. A very talented boy. I only saw him on Dobbie Gillis once or twice, and all I remember is they dyed Dwayne Hickman’s hair so white, I thought he was Hopalong Cassidy. And Mr. Howell, he’s a rich, idiotic jerk. He wants to subdivide the island! But if you get angry at him, we’ve lost the point of the whole thing. There are only seven of us, nobody else. In a way, it’s a relief. None of that, ‘Guess who’s stopping by next week?’ stuff.”

The show’s cancellation in 1967 after three seasons, he always believed, cost him a lot of money. “The fourth year of a series,” he related to the Valley Times, “is when it really pays off. That’s when they try to buy you out of your residuals when the show goes into syndication, but that didn’t happen.”

In a story written up in the Pasadena Independent, it was stated that Jim had once formed a mock organization called Millionaires Anonymous for actors who would live off their residual payments from old series, promising never to make another one. Said Jim, “If a guy gets up in the middle of the night with an idea for a new series, he phones Millionaires Anonymous and three of us will go to his house and talk him out of it.”

After Gilligan’s Island, Jim went on to appear in a number of feature films and guest-starred on television series (including three episodes of Bob Denver’s The Good Guys). From 1968 to 1969 he costarred on the TV series version of Blondie, which only lasted 14 episodes. In 1970, he reprised the voice role of Mr. Magoo for the first time since the 1964 TV movie Mr. Magoo in Sherwood Forest and the 1964 to 1965 TV series The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo. It seems like the actor and the little guy had something of a falling out. “Magoo cost me dramatic parts,” he told the Valley Times of North Hollywood. “I walk into the producer’s office and he falls on the floor. He can’t believe I could do dramatic parts. He says, ‘Do Magoo for me! Say hello to my children on the phone.’ At a Christmas party, somebody said, ‘Zanuck would like to say a word.’ I get all excited. A big studio executive. Maybe a role in Island in the Sun. But the man says, ‘Do me a favor. Do Magoo.’ You feel like such an idiot. Then there are the kids on the street who imitate Magoo. And parties are impossible; there’s always the man who puts the lampshade on his head and starts talking like Magoo.”

“I swore off Magoo, because he was an occupational hazard,” he told The Fresno Bee. “I was having a problem of identity. The same thing happens with ventriloquists. They develop a split personality. One ventriloquist tried to burn his dummy and finally committed suicide. The puppet had stolen his personality. Take Edgar Bergen; he isn’t funny without Charlie McCarthy or one of the other dummies. I became so identified with Magoo, that when I played Las Vegas a year ago, I had to bring forth the Magoo voice for the brown shoe trade and the surgical stocking crowd at the dinner show.”

The project that brought him back to the character was the 1970 animated TV movie Uncle Sam Magoo. The reason? As he related to the Independent Press-Telegram at the time, “I got tired of seeing and hearing America bum-rapped everywhere I travel around the world. It’s a cliché that our system isn’t perfect, but it’s still the best I’ve seen. So I decided to do a show based on the history of our country. What better format than to have Mr. Magoo turn into Uncle Sam Magoo and be present at every great historical event? And with fast cuts and montages, we trace all the exciting things leading up to Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon.”

As life moved into the 1970s, Jim was very much aware of the impact that Gilligan’s Island was still having on the audience so many years later. “It may be the most popular children’s show ever made,” he suggested to the News-Pilot of San Pedro, California. “My wife says I’m very big with the ruled-paper set. I’m sort of a Pied Piper. The letters are always very polite, mostly requests for pictures. It’s strange, but the fans all seem to have gotten my home address and write me there.”

And Gilligan remained an important part of his life. He voiced the character in the 1974 to 1975 Saturday morning animated series, The New Adventures of Gilligan and then again in 1982 for Gilligan’s Planet. On top of that, he played Thurston Howell III in three TV movies, Rescue from Gilligan’s Island (1978), The Castaways on Gilligan’s Island (1979) and (in a cameo due to illness) The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island (1981).

The final years of Jim Backus’ life were not easy, spending much of them fighting back against severe hypochondria that turned him into a near-recluse, having convinced himself that he was suffering from Parkinson’s disease. He grew more paranoid, believing that he was doomed.  “My problem was a long time in coming,” he explained to the Petaluma Argus-Courier in 1984 while in the midst of it all. “I was working terribly hard. I was going full barrel and I was suffering the classic overwork symptoms of dizziness, light-headedness, irascibility. Then I started to faint and fall down a lot. They put me in the hospital and gave me the works and evaluated it as Parkinson’s. Psychosomatic is an overused word. To me, the physical problems were very real and still are. There is no accurate evaluation of what I have. I haven’t been out of this house in almost six years. I was terrified when the doorbell rang.

“I’m trying to get over acute panic right now as we talk,” he added. “It’s a matter of mind over matter and I’m determined to get well.”

Jim Backus died of complications from pneumonia on July 3, 1989, at the age of 76. He left behind his wife of 33 years, Henny, and a pop culture legacy in the form of Mr. Howell from Gilligan’s Island and, of course, Mr. Magoo, both of whom have wonderfully connected with one generation after the other and likely will continue to do so for years to come.