No More Mr. Nice Guy

Origins of Mr Nice Guy

0:00From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm Bob Garfield with Mike Volo, and today we'll talk about a guy who wore cardigan sweaters to endear himself to his audience. Hey, Mikey. Hey, Bobby. How you doing? Splendid. Thank you. And your own self? I'm great. I'm great. You aren't talking about yourself, are you? Don't you have a cardigan? No. I have two cardigans. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and how's that working out for you, you know,

0:33endearment-wise? Eh, not super, but nice of you to ask. This is the third in a series of three bonus episodes, each one featuring a different phrase involving the word nice, and each phrase commonly associated with a specific person. For example, we talked previously about nice work if you can get it, associated with Ira Gershwin, though he did not coin the phrase. We talked about nice guys finish last, associated with baseball manager Leo DeRocher, who sort of coined the phrase. Go back and listen

1:11if you haven't already, and that'll make more sense. Next up is Mr. Nice Guy, associated with whom exactly, Bob. Easy one for those of us of a certain age. That was the nickname of a famous crooner and TV star of the 1960s, Perry Como. Yeah, you know, Perry Como is one of those entertainers who is out there on the margins of my awareness. I think of him in the same way that I think of Arthur Godfrey. These are

1:44guys that I lump into what I call the three H's category. Go ahead. Hokey, Wholesome, and Hawking, probably Chesterfield or some other brand of cigarettes.

1:57Put a smile in your smoking by Chesterfield. So smooth, so satisfying. Chesterfield. The Perry Como Show, all the top tunes on TV and radio, brought to you by Chesterfield. Yeah, well, those were different times. Como was world famous, and he had a lot of big hit songs,

2:31and he had his own television show, but he wasn't Axl Rose. He did not get his name in the paper for doing really outlandish things like throwing hotel furniture out of a window. He was too nice a guy. Yeah, so if you remember, when we talked about the expression, nice work, if you can get it, we mentioned that the Oxford English Dictionary, the OED, cites the Gershwin song of the same name as the earliest example of that phrase. But as we pointed out, the phrase, in fact, predates the

3:06song by at least seven years, probably more. Similarly, the OED cites an article about Perry Como as the earliest example of someone being called Mr. Nice Guy. Now, Como is, I should say, less on the margins of my awareness since watching a few of his old television programs recently. He had a screen persona, as you intimated, that was easygoing and relaxed, and he had a behind-the-scenes

3:40reputation that was more or less the same. He was characterized in the press often as sort of unpretentious or casual, not easily rattled or annoyed. So actually, not the anti-Axel Rose, so much as the anti-Frank Sinatra. Yes, more a contemporary of Perry Como. Axel Rose came a little bit later. A new Hershey's chocolate is loading in. One, two, one, two, three. Introducing the new Hershey's Creme Bars.

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4:44And clicks. For all the kids who love to stack and play, choose a Lego Duplo set. A gift that always clicks. This article that the OED cites is the cover story from a 1950s issue of Look Magazine. Talk about things that are on the periphery of my awareness. I don't know if you were a subscriber. We were subscribers. Remember, as I've so often had to remind listeners, I went to high school with Franklin Pierce.

5:17Yes, I am a senior American, and yes, our family subscribed to Look Magazine, which was kind of a poor man's life magazine. Similar kind of general interest content featuring large pictures to look at. And I remember one particular edition that we saved forever in the attic about the shooting death of John F. Kennedy. So I looked at Look. Well, you know, I happen to have a couple of issues of Look from 1963 because my dad, as well, collected newspapers and magazines in the weeks after President Kennedy was assassinated.

6:00But aside from those two issues, I had never read a single Look magazine until a few days ago when I read the one from April 16th, 1957. There's a large picture of Mr. C., as he was also known, on the cover, next to the headline, Perry Como. Is he really Mr. Nice Guy? I won't keep you in suspense, but what do you think the answer is? Well, knowing Look Magazine's non-reputation for hard-hitting investigative journalism, I'm going to speculate that it came up with, no, really, he really is Mr. Nice Guy.

6:42The answer is, yeah, sort of, he's nice, he's kind, but he's not happy-go-lucky. He's not unconcerned or unruffled by the business of show business, which was how he was often portrayed. So the really revealing part of the profile, which was by a journalist named Joe McCarthy, not that Joe McCarthy, of course, the fascinating part for me was when Perry Como says, he was interviewed for the piece, he says, quote,

7:16I get annoyed with that Mr. Nice Guy bit. Sure, I try to keep my voice down and get along smoothly, but I'm very much aware of what's going on around me. He was talking about the business of his show. No problems? I'm bothered by plenty, especially by a problem named Jackie Gleason. Who was his competitor in the time slot? Exactly. He and Jackie Gleason were apparently friends, but Gleason's show, The Honeymooners, ran in the same time slot as Perry Como's show, and it was huge.

7:53It was competing with him for ratings. Well, and I'm assuming that in this case, nice guy or no nice guy, he finished, if not last, definitely not first. Honeymooners was a runaway hit from its very introduction. Yeah. So the point is that Como refers to that Mr. Nice Guy bit, implying that was something that was already out there, right? That this wasn't the first article to refer to him as Mr. Nice Guy. And sure enough, I was able to find references to Como as Mr. Nice Guy as early as 1952.

8:30That same year, but even earlier, I found a sports columnist referring to the baseball player Ted Williams as Mr. Nice Guy. Now that was ironic because Ted Williams was infamously a total prick. Well, sort of ironic. He was referring to the kind of new and improved Ted Williams who was Mr. Nice Guy, nothing like the Buster he'd allegedly been before. And Buster is capitalized, as is Mr. Nice Guy.

9:01Yes, he was known as, as you put it, a prick. I don't know that the press necessarily used that word at the time. Well, if he became a little bit more, I don't know, copacetic to inspire that article, that passed as well. He remained quite thorny, acerbic, and just plain grouchy for the rest of his life. Ted Williams, of course, played his entire 20-plus year Major League career for the Boston Red Sox. This column was in a Massachusetts newspaper.

The First Mr Nice Guy

9:35Now, neither Ted Williams nor Perry Como was the original Mr. Nice Guy. The claim to that distinction may very well belong to Grover Parker. Who is Grover Parker? Hold on a second, Mike. Come on. You basically did the heavy lifting in this show, but my job is to ask questions. So, I will, again, butt in to ask the question. Who is Grover Parker?

10:06He owned a bicycle store on Mechanic Street in Red Bank, New Jersey in the 1930s and 40s. Of course. Okay. Red Bank, New Jersey, obviously. In July of 1939, he gave a set of wheels to a 13-year-old kid named Herbert Ewing to use with the soapbox that Ewing would be riding in the local derby. Now, after Herbert won the race, qualifying him to compete, by the way, in the International

10:39Soapbox Derby later that summer, he was reported to have personally thanked Grover Parker, who refused to accept any money for those wheels he gave him. A columnist for the Red Bank Daily Standard referred to the bike shop owner as Mr. Nice Guy Parker. And yes, Nice and Guy are both capitalized. Now, I haven't sifted through every old issue of Look Magazine. I have those two in my closet from 63.

11:11I read the one from 57. But I suspect there is no expose out there asking the question, Grover Parker, is he really Mr. Nice Guy?

11:24I mean, maybe the tongues were wagging in the greater Red Bank area, but nor do I know of any such journalism breaking out about this shop owner. Well, in case you're wondering, Herbert Ewing did travel the following month to Akron, Ohio to compete in the International Soapbox Derby. I was rooting for him as a fellow New Jersey native, but as you can hear from this newsreel announcer, he did not win. In the final, Cliff Hardesty of White Plains, New York, rolls to a new record as 50,000 cheers.

11:59Cliff Hardesty, winner of a college scholarship, and he's only 10 years old.

No More Mr Nice Guy

12:07Okay, now hold on, because, yeah, we've spoken about Mr. Nice Guy, but I think it's fair to say that most often when we hear the term, we are hearing the negative of it, or at least the past of it, with the phrase, no more Mr. Nice Guy, which suggests some sort of change in demeanor. When did that first pop up? Well, we think we know. I was reluctant to bring this up because the earliest known example of that phrase comes from a joke that appeared in 1960.

12:40The joke goes something like this. Hitler is in his bunker when one of his aides rushes in and tells him that all is lost. The Russians are advancing on us, he says, and the American bombers have set Berlin on fire. There's no escape. Hitler bangs on the table and shouts, that does it from now on. No more Mr. Nice Guy. Now, that doesn't sound like a line from Downfall, the Bruno Gantz movie about Hitler's final

13:14days. It sounds like a line from Mel Brooks in The Producers. I can hear Dick Shawn saying it with the big peace symbol dangling from a chain on his neck and flower power clothing. Well, you know, we should say, in case people don't know, although the producers is certainly out there, there is a tradition among some Jews of telling Hitler jokes. That's a thing. The person who told this joke, the person who was credited with coining No More Mr. Nice

13:48Guy in his syndicated newspaper column and who was, in fact, Jewish, was none other than the infamous Walter Winchell. The ultra-powerful gossip columnist turned conscience of the nation for decades beginning in the late 40s.

14:12It's time, America. Time for Walter Winchell of the New York Daily Mirror and the Washington Post. Mr. and Mrs. North and South American, all the ships at sea, let's go to press. The new Collier's Magazine has a nifty bit of fiction about the Star Club in New York with an attractive double spread on a typical Star Club New Year's Eve midnight. That's Dorothy Kogallan to the extreme left. Next is Arthur Godfrey, Tallulah Bankhead, Morton Downey, Mr. Billingsley, Louis Calhoun, and W.W. without his hat. You said the infamous Walter Winchell. Oh, he was. For one thing, he was pretty mobbed up with crime bosses.

14:46He used his column and later his broadcasts to destroy the lives of people whose politics, right and left, he disapproved of. And he died a wretched recluse crushed by his 1970s irrelevance. But, good joke. Yeah, good one. Lexicon Valley is produced by Livia Bloom Ingram, who is technically no Mr. Nice Guy, hasn't an un-nice bone in her body.

15:18Or cartilage. All of the soft tissue is quite kind. Lymphatic system that works. Nicely put. You think so? No. All right, Mike, are we done here? Yeah, we are done. Later, Gator.

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