Jane Ace

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Jane Ace bigraphy, stories - American entertainer

Jane Ace : biography

October 12, 1897 – November 11, 1974

Jane Ace (October 12, 1897 – November 11, 1974) was the high-voiced, malaprop-mastering wife on legendary, low-keyed American radio comedy Easy Aces (1930–45). Playing herself opposite her real-life husband and the show’s creator-writer, Goodman Ace (1899–1982), she delivered clever malaprops over the air in each episode of the urbane serial comedy, and many became part of the American vernacular.

Death

Jane Ace died in New York City in 1974 from cancer, aged 77. Goodman Ace composed a eulogy in a Saturday Review column:Now alone at a funeral home … the questions … the softly spoken suggestions … repeated, and repeated … because… because during all the arrangements, through my mind there ran a constant rerun, a line she spoke on radio … on the brotherhood of man … in her casual, malapropian style … "we are all cremated equal" … they kept urging for an answer … a wooden casket?… a metal casket?… it’s the name of their game … a tisket, a casket … and then transporting it to Kansas City, Missouri … the plane ride … "smoking or non-smoking section?" somebody asked… the non-thinking section was what I wanted … a soft sprinkle of snow as we huddled around her … the first of the season, they told me … lasted only through the short service … snow stopped the instant the last words were spoken. He had the grace to celebrate her arrival with a handful of His confetti …

That eulogy provoked hundreds of letters from current readers and old radio fans alike. With several hundred episodes of Easy Aces now circulating among old-time radio collectors (episodes the Aces syndicated through the Frederick W. Ziv Company in 1945), Jane Ace has been discovered by fans who weren’t even alive before her own death. The National Radio Hall of Fame helped make sure of that, inducting Easy Aces and its co-stars in 1990.

Radio days

Conceived and written by Goodman Ace, Easy Aces graduated within two years from a strictly local show to a network offering (first from Chicago, then from New York). When the program was still at KMBC on a local level, the couple was contacted by a sponsor offering to bring them to Chicago for a network show on a trial basis. If the ratings for the show were good, the sponsor promised to then begin paying them salaries. Ace thought it was a wonderful offer, but Jane did not, saying that if the sponsor considered their show good enough for a network, it was also good enough for a salary. She went on to say that they needed $500 per week for their services and no less; the sponsor honored all of Jane’s demands.

Goodman played himself as a put-upon realtor, and Jane played "his awfully-wedded wife" (and used the name Sherwood as her on-air character’s maiden name) with an endearing mixture of sweet-natured meddlesomeness and language mangling. Her husband once swore that she was a natural malapropper, but in radio character Jane became the unchallenged mistress of the kind of malaprops that (unlike Gracie Allen’s "illogical logic") substituted words in seemingly ordinary phrasing and still made perverse sense, after a fashion. And, after a listener laughed hysterically and invariably. The Aces signed with Educational Pictures to make Easy Aces two reel comedies in 1934. Dumb Luck made its debut January 18, 1935, with the couple on the screen in their radio roles.

Many years after Easy Aces ended, Goodman Ace revealed his wife had never had acting experience before the show. The Aces tried a short-lived, expanded revival on CBS Radio in 1948, known as mr. ace and JANE, before trying a television version of the original Easy Aces style on the DuMont Television Network from December 1949 to June 1950.

While doing Easy Aces, Jane was offered other radio roles in addition to the one on the couple’s show. A radio producer wanted her to play the lead in a production of Dulcy, but she declined, reportedly believing she was unable to play other roles, because she did not consider the radio work she did as acting.