Jackie Gleason & Two Kinds of Anger

Anger and Sweetness

In his lecture "Poetry and Anger," Eli Siegel speaks about opposites every man is trying to put together:

The energy which is our anger ought to find a form which goes along with our benevolence, our sweetness, our warmth.

These opposites are what we find in the various characters Jackie Gleason played—anger and sweetness, toughness and sentiment. For example he played The Poor Soul who is described as a "saintly, wide-eyed innocent...his button eyes as imploring as a beagle's. Then there is Reginald van Gleason III:

That devil may care playboy [with] a top hat tall enough for a stovepipe, a cape as sweeping as draperies... he drinks relentlessly...He can be as rude as he likes to whomever he wishes to abuse...Reggie wants to be alone with his.hostility, his anger oward the world.

A beagle's eyes and a hostile playboy—that is sweetness and anger. And he didn't know it but through his work Jackie Gleason was trying to make sense of his two attitudes towards the world: where he wanted to be sweet to it—though even in the sweet characters there was a bent towards being hurt; and where he wanted to stick out his tongue at everything and be a tough guy.

In the movies he played Minnesota Fats, the steely pool shark in The Hustler; and then the title role in the movie Gleason himself wrote—Gigot, the mute, gentle street person of Paris, abused by ruffians and loved only by the cats and dogs, who takes in the child of a prostitute and cares for her.

I think the anger and sweetness of Jackie Gleason are most successfully one in his lovable, irascible bus driver, Ralph Kramden, who shows these two feelings as he clenches his fist and says to his wife, "To the moon, Alice!"; and then says at the end of so many episodes, "Baby, you're the greatest."

In his life Jackie Gleason had a purpose that weakened him terrifically—he wanted to conquer the world through show business and he cultivated acquaintances with persons in power like then President Richard Nixon. Yet even when he did get all the trappings of success—fame, money, the affection of America—Gleason felt like a failure to himself. He once said to an interviewer:

You can be ruined by success....Believe me, pal, I know..You no longer have the incentive to give your best. You no longer mix with people who are living real, struggling lives. You are out of it, and life takes its revenge....Success ruined me.

Jackie's fellow artist on The Honeymooners, Art Carney, once said: "It used to make me miserable to see how little joy he got out of everything he had achieved." Jackie Gleason needed criticism of his contempt.

There were times he did have an anger that strengthened him. In Self and World, Mr. Siegel writes: "When we have anger which comes from an awareness of ugliness, injustice, this anger we are proud of. It integrates us." Once Gleason was on a promotional stop of a train taking the cast of a show to the South. In the cast was a black dancer, Mercedes Ellington. When photographers began taking pictures and saw her, one shouted demeaningly, "What are you doing here?" Gleason was furious. He proudly pulled Mercedes Ellington to his side and stood with her for the entire shoot—forcing photographers to take her picture with every one they took of him.

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