Acting like a dummy

He just sat there like a dummy, looking aimlessly off into space, his mouth half-open. He wore a putrid green cotton suit that hung off his skinny frame and a red polka-dot tie that was jarringly askew. His red hair was plastered flat to his head.

On his arm was a tag that read:

Paul Winchell’s “Jerry Mahoney” Ventriloquist Doll

The doll was sitting alone against the wall at one of my favorite auction houses a few weeks ago. It was the second dummy I had seen at auction in the last year; the other was in a dusty basement of a couple who had sold collectibles for the last 50 years.

This new one, though, was in good shape – his outfit, awful as it was, was wrinkled but not dirty, and his face was clean. Not many people appeared interested in him. I didn’t see anyone pick him up, force him to speak or make him feel welcome. Click on photo above to get a full view of the doll.

My knowledge of ventriloquist dolls is limited. I recall watching  acts on TV when I was growing up and always wondered how they got those dummies to speak. As I grew older, I started watching the ventriloquists’ lips to see if they moved. Most times they did as he (it was usually a man) “threw” his voice into the dummy. By the way, that’s what the word ventriloquism means – the act of throwing your voice. Click here to learn how you can do it.

I wasn’t sure how authentic this Mahoney doll was or who made it. There apparently are a lot of fakes out there: I found an eBay guide that offered tips on how to identify true ventriloquist dolls.

Was the Mahoney doll at the auction the real thing? I’m not sure, but I followed the guide’s instructions on how to test for authenticity:

1. Hair parted on the left? Yes
2. Red or orange hair? Yes
3. Eyes pointed to the side? Yes
4. Date on back of neck? Didn’t check.
5. Plastic or composition body? Not sure.

The site also provided photos of some Mahoney dolls from the 1950s and 1960s. It was hard to tell, but the auction doll looked similar to the two deluxe models.

The original Mahoney and another of Winchell’s dolls, Knucklehead Smiff, are in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution. Two other Winchell-owned copies of Mahoney belong to David Copperfield, the illusionist. (In the photo below, Winchell is flanked by Mahoney on the left and Knucklehead on the right.)

Jerry Mahoney refers to the doll that Winchell made famous. As a teenager, Winchell won an amateur-hour radio competition with a puppet named Terry. It evolved into a 42-inch wooden dummy created by carver Frank Marshall that Winchell modified. Mahoney was made of wood, metal and rubber with glass eyes, and weighed 25 pounds.

Winchell’s first TV show with Mahoney was in 1948, followed by several other shows over the next 20 years. One of the most popular, the Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney show, got its start in 1950, and it was there that he created Knucklehead Smiff. In1965, his best-known and most successful children’s show, the Winchell-Mahoney Time, saw its debut.

In a 1954 interview, Winchell noted that he was becoming Mahoney’s “straight man,” with letter-writers forgetting that it was him controlling the doll and not vice versa. That reminded me of the 1962 Twilight Zone episode called “The Dummy” with a creepy doll that came alive and terrorized its owner.

The team of Winchell and Mahoney was not the first ventriloquist act. As a form of entertainment, ventriloquism has been around since vaudeville when the Great Lester made his dummy Frank Byron Jr. speak. In the 1930s, Edgar Bergen created his famous Charlie McCarthy dummy while in high school. McCarthy – who’s in the Vent Haven Museum for ventriloquism in Fort Mitchell, KY – became a familiar figure in his trademark tuxedo and monocle.

With ventriloquism having such a rich history, I wondered if African Americans had practiced the craft early on. I found out that the museum had info on a black ventriloquist named John W. Cooper, who was the subject of a segment on the PBS series History Detectives. The museum does not have his dummy but does have a sound recording of his act, photos and more. Cooper’s doll, Sam Jackson was an older brother to Bergen’s McCarthy; both were made by a Chicago puppet-maker named Theodore Mack. (The photo at left is of Cooper and his doll Sam.)

Cooper started out as a ventriloquist with a black minstrel show, and jumped to the mainstream vaudeville circuit  in 1901 when white ventriloquists went on strike. Here’s a story about one of his “Fun in a Barbershop” routine. Years later when he was in his 80s, he gave pointers to ventriloquist/puppeteer Shari Lewis who’d show up at a park where her father performed.

In one of my earlier posts about magicians, I found that Richard Potter, the country’s first black magician, was also a ventriloquist and hypnotist. More recent was comedian Willie Tyler and his buddy Lester, who were regular performers on the TV show “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” from 1972-1973.

Besides his TV shows with the dummies, Winchell also patented an artificial heart in the 1960s (there are plenty of websites that both credit and debunk him as its “inventor”) and a car that ran on batteries, among other things.

As for Mahoney, he didn’t invent anything. Just didn’t have the heart for it, I suppose.