Steve Allen (December 26, 1921 – October 30, 2000) was an American television personality, radio personality, musician, composer, actor, comedian, writer, and an advocate of scientific scepticism.
Stephen Valentine Patrick William Allen was born in New York to parents who were part of a vaudeville team. His father, Carroll, worked under the name Billy Allen and was straight man to his mother, the former Isabelle Donohue, whose stage name was Belle Montrose. His father died when he was 18 months old.
Mr. Allen spent his formative years in Chicago, living with his mother's family, whom he later described as ''sarcastic, volatile, sometimes disparaging, but very, very funny.'' In 1941 he briefly attended Drake University in Des Moines on a journalism scholarship and then Arizona State Teachers College. He was drafted into the Army but was discharged after five months because of recurring attacks of asthma. After his discharge, he started working in radio, first in Phoenix, then in Los Angeles. In 1947 he was hired by KNX, the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles, to be a disc jockey. Fans were greatly attracted to his chatter, and he soon spent more time talking than he did playing records. As many as a thousand people would visit his studio broadcast each Saturday night, and Mr. Allen would interview them as well as celebrity guests.
He made a bet with Frankie Laine, the singer, that he could write 50 songs a day for a week. He remained in the window of a Hollywood music store and did it, winning $1,000 from Mr. Laine. One of the songs, ''Let's Go to Church Next Sunday,'' was recorded by both Perry Como and Margaret Whiting. CBS invited him to Manhattan and gave him his own half-hour television show from 1950 to 1952. He moved to NBC in 1953 as host of ''Tonight.'' The predecessor of what would become Johnny Carson's long-running ''Tonight,'' it began as a local program on WNBT, which was then the New York outlet for NBC. It moved to the network 15 months later.
Allen began his recording career in 1951 with the album Steve Allen At The Piano for Columbia Records. He then signed with Decca Records, recording for their subsidiaries Brunswick Records and then Coral Records. Allen would release a mixture of novelty singles, jazz recordings and straight pop numbers for Decca throughout the 1950s, before switching to Dot Records in the 1960s.
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| Allen with Elvis 1956 |
Allen's best known song, "This Could Be the Start of Something", dates from 1954, the same year he married Jayne Meadows, the actress and sister of Audrey Meadows. Though it was never a hit, the song was recorded by numerous artists, including Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Bobby Darin, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Aretha Franklin, Lionel Hampton, Claire Martin, and Oscar Peterson. Allen used it as the theme song of The Tonight Show in 1956/57, and as the theme song to many of his later television projects. He also wrote the music and lyrics for ''Sophie,'' a Broadway musical based on the life of Sophie Tucker, which ran for only eight performances in 1963.
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| Allen with Connie Francis & Frankie Avalon |
Mr. Allen cut back his ''Tonight'' schedule in the summer of 1956 to begin ''The Steve Allen Show,'' which NBC offered as a prime-time Sunday night competitor to ''The Ed Sullivan Show'' on CBS and ''Maverick'' on ABC, and left late-night television for good in January 1957. ''The Steve Allen Comedy Hour,'' with some of the ''Tonight'' regulars, ran on CBS during the summer of 1967, and Mr. Allen was host of a similar variety show on NBC in 1980 and 1981.
Mr. Allen never stopped performing, making personal appearances and doing radio broadcasts. In January 1995 he played the title role in a production of ''The Mikado'' by the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players. In his later years he began speaking out against what he saw as a rising tide of smut on television, condemning shows that he felt had ''taken television to the garbage dump.'' At the time of his death he was completing a book on the subject, ''Vulgarians at the Gate.''
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| Jayne Meadows & Steve Allen |
Although Allen was thought initially to have died of a heart attack, it was eventually determined by the coroner's office that the official cause of death was hemopericardium, a leaking of blood into the sac surrounding the heart, and that this was secondary to a minor automobile accident Allen was involved in earlier that day. He was driving to his son's Encino home about 7:45 p.m. on October 30, 2000, when his car was struck by a sport utility vehicle backing out of a driveway on the 16000 block of Valley Vista Blvd in Encino. The impact was enough to break four ribs and rupture a blood vessel in Allen's chest, which allowed blood to leak into the pericardium.
He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles. He has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame – a television star at 1720 Vine Street and a radio star at 1537 Vine Street. Jayne Meadows was buried next to Allen following her death in 2015.
( (Edited mainly from New York Times & IMDb)
Steve Allen visits the Andy Williams Show and recalls the days of the original Tonight Show with the host. Then Steve and Andy join with guests Petula Clark and Eddy Arnold for a medley of Steve's songs. Aired in living color on NBC, Sunday, October 23, 1966.