Soupy Sales | |
|---|---|
 Sales onLunch With Soupy Sales in 1960 | |
| Born | Milton Supman (1926-01-08)January 8, 1926 |
| Died | October 22, 2009(2009-10-22) (aged 83) The Bronx, New York, U.S. |
| Notable work | Lunch with Soupy Sales |
| Spouses | |
| Children | |
| Comedy career | |
| Years active | 1949–2009 |
| Medium |
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| Genres | Slapstick,word play,improvisation[1] |
Milton Supman (January 8, 1926 – October 22, 2009), known professionally asSoupy Sales, was an American comedian, actor, radio-television personality, and jazz aficionado.[2] He was best known for his local and networkchildren's television series,Lunch with Soupy Sales (later titledThe Soupy Sales Show) (1953–1966), a series of comedy sketches frequently ending with Sales receivinga pie in the face, which became his trademark. From 1968 to 1975, he was a regular panelist on the syndicated revival ofWhat's My Line? and appeared on several other TV game shows. During the 1980s, he hosted his own radio show onWNBC in New York City.
Milton Supman was born inFranklinton, North Carolina, to Irving Supman and Sadie Berman Supman. His father, a Jewishdry goods merchant, emigrated fromHungary in 1894. His was the only Jewish family in town; Sales joked that localKu Klux Klan members bought the sheets used for their robes from his father's store.[3]
According to an interview with the Television Foundation, his nickname originated in his youth from a mispronunciation of his last name, Supman, as "Soupman" and "Soupbone", being shortened to "Soupy".[4]
When he became a disc jockey, he began using the stage name Soupy Hines. After he became established, it was decided that "Hines" was too close to the Heinz soup company, so he chose Sales, in part aftervaudeville comedianChic Sale.[1] He graduated from Huntington High School inHuntington, West Virginia, in 1944. He enlisted in theUnited States Navy and served onUSS Randall in theSouth Pacific during the latter part ofWorld War II. He sometimes entertained his shipmates by telling jokes and playing crazy characters over the ship's public address system. One of the characters he created was "White Fang", a large dog that played outrageous practical jokes on the seamen. The sounds for "White Fang" came from a recording ofThe Hound of the Baskervilles.[citation needed]
Sales enrolled atMarshall University, known as Marshall College at that time, where he earned a master's degree in journalism. While there, he performed in nightclubs as a comedian, singer and dancer.
After graduating from Marshall, Sales began working as a scriptwriter anddisc jockey at radio stationWHTN (nowWVHU) in Huntington. He moved toCincinnati, Ohio, in 1949, where he was a morning radio DJ and performed in nightclubs. He began his television career onWKRC-TV in Cincinnati withSoupy's Soda Shop, TV's first teen dance program, andClub Nothing!, a late-night comedy/variety program.[5]
Sales is best known for his daily children's television show,Lunch with Soupy Sales. It was originally called12 O'Clock Comics, and later known asThe Soupy Sales Show.[6] Improvised andslapstick in nature, it was a rapid-fire stream of comedy sketches, gags and puns, many of which resulted in Sales receiving a pie in the face, which became his trademark. He developed pie-throwing into an art form: straight to the face, on top of the head, a pie to both ears from behind, moving into a stationary pie, and countless other variations. He claimed that he and his visitors had been hit by more than 20,000 pies during his career.[1] He recounted a time when a young fan mistakenly threw a frozen pie at his neck and he "dropped like a pile of bricks".[1]
Lunch with Soupy Sales began in 1953 from the studios ofWXYZ-TV, Channel 7, in the historicMaccabees Building in Detroit. Sales occasionally took the studio cameras to the lawn of theDetroit Public Library, across the street from the studios, and talked with local students walking to and from school. Beginning no later than July 4, 1955, a Saturday version of Sales' lunch show was broadcast nationally on theABC television network.[7] His lunchtime program on weekdays was moved to early morning oppositeToday andCaptain Kangaroo.
During the same period thatLunch with Soupy Sales aired in Detroit, Sales also hosted a nighttime show,Soupy's On, to compete with11 O'Clock News programs.[8] The guest star was always a musician, often ajazz performer, at a time when jazz was popular in Detroit and the city was home to 24jazz clubs. Sales believed his show helped sustain jazz in Detroit, as artists regularly sold out their nightclub shows after appearing on it.[8]
Coleman Hawkins,Louis Armstrong,Duke Ellington,Billie Holiday,Charlie Parker andStan Getz were among the musicians who appeared on the show;Miles Davis made six appearances.[2]Clifford Brown's appearance onSoupy's On, according to Sales, may be the only extantfootage of Brown, and has been included inKen Burns' Jazz and anA&E Network biography about Sales.[8]
Sales briefly had a third dinnertime show filmed largely in Detroit's Palmer Park area. His three shows were rumored to earn him in excess of $100,000 per year. One of his character puppets was Willy the Worm, a "balloon" propelled worm that emerged from its house and used a high pitched voice to announce birthdays or special events on the noontime show; but the character never appeared when Soupy moved to Los Angeles. In his lunchtime show, Sales always wore anorlon fabric sweater. In many of his shows, he appeared in costume, performed his dance, theSoupy Shuffle, introduced many characters such as Nicky Nooney, the Mississippi Gambler, etc., and took "zillions" of pies in the face.[citation needed]
In 1960, Sales moved to theABC-TV studios in Los Angeles. ABC canceled his show in March 1961, but it continued as a local program onKABC-TV until January 1962. It briefly went back on the ABC network as a late night fill-in forThe Steve Allen Show in 1962, but was canceled after three months. All of the puppets on the show during its Los Angeles run were also operated byClyde Adler, whom a 1962TV Guide listing describes as "West Coast disk jockey and comedian". Sales' fame was significant enough that he was hired as aTonight Show guest host in the period betweenJack Paar andJohnny Carson.[9]
On September 7, 1964, Sales found a new weekday home atWNEW-TV in New York City.[10] This version was seen locally until September 2, 1966.Screen Gems syndicated 260 episodes to local stations outside the New York market during the 1965–66 season. This show marked the height of Sales' popularity. It featured guest appearances by stars such asFrank Sinatra,Tony Curtis,Jerry Lewis,[1]Judy Garland andSammy Davis Jr., as well as musical groups likethe Shangri-Las,The Supremes andThe Temptations.[11] He was the subject of an article in the 14 May 1965 issue ofLIFE.[12]
The New Soupy Sales Show appeared in 1978 with the same format, and ran for one season. 65 episodes were briefly syndicated, through Air Time International, to local stations in early 1979. It was taped in Los Angeles atKTLA, with Clyde Adler returning to work as a puppeteer with Sales.[13]
Clyde Adler, the show's floor manager and a film editor at Detroit's WXYZ, performed in sketches and voiced and operated all puppets on Sales' show in Detroit in the 1950s and in Los Angeles from 1959 to 1962, as well as in 1978. ActorFrank Nastasi, who played the part of Gramps on WXYZ-TV's other kids' showWixie Wonderland, assumed the role of straight man and puppeteer when Sales took the show to New York from 1964 to 1966. Nastasi was originally from Detroit and had worked with Sales at WXYZ. Appearing on the show were bothpuppets and live performers.[citation needed]
The puppets were:
On January 1, 1965, miffed at having to work on the holiday, Sales ended his live broadcast by encouraging his young viewers to tiptoe into their still-sleeping parents' bedrooms and remove those "funny green pieces of paper with pictures of U.S. presidents" from their pants and pocketbooks. "Put them in an envelope and mail them to me and I'll send you a postcard from Puerto Rico", Sales instructed the children.[14] Several days later, substantial amounts of money had begun arriving in the mail; Sales stated that the total amount received was in the thousands of dollars but qualified that by stating that much of that wasMonopoly orplay money.[15] Sales said he had been joking, and that whatever real money had been sent would be donated to charity, but as parents' complaints increased, WNEW's management suspended Sales for two weeks.[16]
One of the fans of the Soupy Sales show wasFrank Sinatra. It appears Sinatra became a fan after his daughter Nancy begged him to visit the show. When Sinatra started his own record label,Reprise Records, he signed Sales to a recording contract, which produced two albums:The Soupy Sales Show in 1961 andUp in the Air in 1962.[17]
Sales' novelty dance record, '"The Mouse", dates from the mid-1960s period of his career, when his show was based in New York. The single, released on theABC-Paramount label, peaked at No. 76 on theBillboard Hot 100 chart in May 1965.[18] Sales performed "The Mouse" onThe Ed Sullivan Show in September 1965, just prior toThe Beatles' segment on the show. Sales signed withMotown Records in 1969, releasing the single "Muck-Arty Park" (a play on the 1968 hit "MacArthur Park"), as well as the albumA Bag of Soup. Soupy and Frank Nastasi also cut and recorded a comedy and song story disk, "Spy with a Pie", for ABC-Paramount. It was re-released by "Simon Says" children's records.[19]
From 1968 to 1975, Sales was a regular panelist on the syndicated revival ofWhat's My Line?. (He had been a guest panelist on one episode of the original version in 1965.) He was usually the first panelist introduced and occupied the chair on the far left side (facing the camera), next toArlene Francis. In 1969, he appeared onStorybook Squares, a children's version ofHollywood Squares, as Henry VIII.[20] In 1976, he hostedJuniorAlmost Anything Goes, ABC's Saturday morning version of their team-based physical stunt program. He was also a panelist on the 1980 revival ofTo Tell the Truth; he had appeared as a guest on the show during the mid- to late 1970s. Other game show appearances included over a dozen episodes of the originalMatch Game from 1966 to 1969 as well as one week of the revived version in 1976; a week of shows on the 1970s edition ofThe Gong Show; a couple of guest spots onHollywood Squares (December 12, 1977, and April 4, 1978) and a few appearances on the combined version(Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour) in 1983–84; and a recurring role in all versions ofPyramid from 1973 to 1988 and 1991 (in one famous episode of which he repeatedly uttered the word "bacon", trying to get a confused contestant to say "greasy things");[21] he also helped a contestant win the $50,000 grand prize on the 1981 incarnation of the show.[22] He was considered as a host inNickelodeon's game show,Double Dare, but was deemed too old (the job went toMarc Summers). He also made an appearance onPictionary in 1997.[citation needed]
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Sales hosted a midday radio show onWNBC in New York from March 1985 to March 1987. His program was between thedrive time shifts ofDon Imus (morning) andHoward Stern (afternoon), with whom Sales had an acrimonious relationship. An example of this was an incident where Stern told listeners he was cutting the strings in Sales' in-studio piano at 4:05 p.m. on May 1, 1985. On December 21, 2007, Stern revealed this was a stunt staged for "theater of the mind" and to torture Sales; in truth, the piano was never harmed. Sales' on-air crew included his producer, Ray D'Ariano, newscaster Judy DeAngelis, and pianist Paul Dver.
Sales had a sporadic film career that spanned over 40 years, including:
Sales was married twice: first to Barbara Fox, from 1950 until their divorce in 1979. They had two sons, both of whom are rock musicians: bassistTony Sales and drummerHunt Sales.[a] In 1980, Soupy Sales married dancer Trudy Carson, who survived him.[1]
Sales died on October 22, 2009, at Calvary Hospice inBronx, New York, aged 83, from cancer.[26] He is buried atKensico Cemetery inValhalla, New York.
Janet Oseroff was Sales' manager in the last years of his life, and she continues to represent his estate with Sales' wife Trudy.[27] They license reruns of over 100 shows, including the entirety ofThe New Soupy Sales Show and the extant episodes from Sales' earlier black-and-white shows. Sales' shows have aired since 2011 onJewish Life Television[28] and since 2013 onRetro Television Network, the latter airing once a week.[29] As of 2025, JLTV offers a 24/7free ad-supported streaming television channel devoted to Sales's programs.[30]
Informational notes
Citations
In 1955, the show was picked up by ABC as a summer replacement for "Kukla, Fran and Ollie" and renamed "The Soupy Sales Show."
Photo caption: Linda Henning (center), 15, Sioux Falls, S D. [South Dakota], is crowned Miss Teen USA at Pacific Ocean Park in Santa Monica, Calif., by television comedian Soupy Sales.
Further reading
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