American Legends: The Life of Jackie Gleason

"One of these days... One of these days... POW! Right in the kisser!" – Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden

A lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives of history’s most influential figures, but how much of the forest is lost for the trees? In Charles River Editors’ American Legends series, readers can get caught up to speed on the lives of America’s most important men and women in the time it takes to finish a commute, while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known.

If Lon Chaney will forever be recognized as The Man with a Thousand Faces, Jackie Gleason holds a legitimate claim to being The Man with a Thousand Personas. Indeed, during his time hosting The Jackie Gleason Show on television, he developed numerous alter egos, including tough guy Rudy the Repairman, the energetic Joe the Bartender, and the alcoholic Rum Dum. Physically, there was no mistaking Jackie Gleason (the way one certainly could with Lon Chaney), but Gleason also possessed an uncanny ability to alternate between personas. In the years before the Rat Pack made the nightclub lifestyle chic and glamorous on a national scale, Jackie Gleason presided as perhaps the foremost nightclub figure in America, and nobody excelled at situation comedy as well as he. Paradoxically, the iconic element of Jackie Gleason’s persona was that he was able to maintain so many personas simultaneously, and in a sense, each of these characters bears traces of the “real” Jackie Gleason, but the fact remains that the many personas of Jackie Gleason make it difficult to figure out exactly who Jackie Gleason actually was beneath his show business facades.

Perhaps just as ironically, today Gleason is best remembered for The Honeymooners, which began as a sketch within other shows like The Jackie Gleason Show before becoming its own spinoff. Though it lasted just 39 episodes on its own, Gleason continued using The Honeymooners as sketches in other shows, and he is most closely associated with the character Ralph Kramden today, especially his recurring threat to send his wife Alice to the moon.

Gleason’s lifestyle reveals not only the glamorous perks of spending one’s life in show business but also the physical and emotional tolls that accompany needing to please an audience on a nightly basis. Moreover, even before becoming a professional, Gleason experienced great adversity, having lost his mother at a young age and having been abandoned by his father, traumatic events that heavily shaped his later career. Jackie Gleason was both an exuberant figure and a very sad one as well, and looking at his upbringing, personal life, and career demonstrate both his many achievements and the underlying drama and anguish behind it all.

American Legends: The Life of Jackie Gleason looks at both the life and career of Jackie Gleason, which were in many respects inseparable throughout much of his adult life. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Jackie Gleason like never before, in no time at all.