Wayne Cresser

By Michael Stevenson

The most memorable song from Walt Disney’s Pinocchio, “When You Wish Upon a Star” was the very first Disney song to win an Academy Award in 1940. The song, written by Leigh Harline with lyrics by Ned Washington, is performed in the film by a cute and acutely conscientious top hat-wearing insect named “Jiminy Cricket.” 

“Like a bolt out of the blue

Fate steps in and sees you through

When you wish upon a star

Your dreams come true”

Jiminy’s warm, reassuring voice (with just the hint of Midwestern drawl) was supplied by singer/actor Cliff Edwards. Edwards was the possessor of high natural tenor voice with a three-octave range. The purity of his final note of “When You Wish Upon a Star” (appropriately landing on the word “true”) is nothing short of sublime.

Cliff Edwards was born June 14, 1895 in Hannibal, Missouri – the birthplace of Mark Twain, whom Edwards remembered once passing on a city street. Edward’s professional life didn’t so much resemble a story of Twain’s, but more a chapter from Nathaniel West’s nightmarish depiction of 1930’s Hollywood “The Day of the Locust.”

Not long after the successes of Pinocchio, Edwards found himself in financial ruin due to unpaid taxes, gambling losses, multiple bankruptcies, cocaine and alcohol addictions, and three failed marriages. Today, a resume like this might belong to a GOP presidential candidate, but the 1940s were not as forgiving a time. “Cliff made millions,” said famed Disney animator Ward Kimball , “and he lost it all.”

When you get in trouble and you don’t know right from wrong,
Give a little whistle!
Give a little whistle!
When you meet temptation and the urge is very strong,
Give a little whistle!
Give a little whistle!
– “Give a Little Whistle” (Leigh Harline and Ned Washington)

BEGINNINGS

Cliff “Ukelele Ike” Edward’s fans once included both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Decades after his death, both James Taylor and Paul McCartney covered his ukelele songs on their records. According to Van Dyke Parks, the brilliant Harry Nilsson (who knew a little about self-destructive behavior himself), regarded Cliff Edwards as “his favorite singer.” The man and legend had humble beginnings.

Growing up in the Midwest, Cliff Edwards worked as a youngster in a Hannibal, Missouri shoe factory. He ran away from home before finishing school. By age 16, he was singing in St. Louis saloons where he learned to play the ukulele to provide his own accompaniment since many of the bars had no piano.  He acquired the nickname “Ukelele Ike” when a barkeeper couldn’t remember his name.

Moving from St. Louis, to Chicago, and eventually New York, in 1924 he graduated from carnivals and vaudeville shows to Broadway when George Gershwin picked him to join the cast of Lady, Be Good. Sharing the bill were a young Fred and Adele Astaire. Lady, Be Good was a Broadway success and Astaire later recalled it was Cliff Edwards who regularly “stopped the show” with his rendition of Gershwin’s “Fascinating Rythym.”

After his Broadway success, Edwards had his first recording success with “It’s Only a Paper Moon.” The song later was recorded by all the greats, Crosby, Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole, but Cliff Edwards’ record, with his trademark sweetness and vulnerability, remains the gold standard version of the song.

Music critic Imogen Sara Smith observed: “No one has ever sung “Paper Moon” more beautifully . Edwards (backed by the exquisitely spare guitar of Dick McDonough) brings a pitch-perfect blend of wistful longing and rueful world-weariness to this great Yip Harburg-Harold Arlen song about searching for something real amid the phony dazzle of stage scenery, lighting effects, circus ballyhoo, parades, jingles, penny arcades and honky-tonks.” 

Some 40 years after Edward’s recording, director Peter Bogdanovich changed the name of his 1973 film (originally titled Addie Prays) to Paper Moon, while choosing music for his film.

Along with pop songs of the “crooner” variety, Edwards recorded a number of novelty-jazz hits such as “Ja Da,” which included the irresistible lyric I myself sing nearly every time good fortune comes my way:

“Here’s a funny little melody
It’s so soothing and appealing to me
It goes Ja-Da, Ja-Da,
Ja-Da, Ja-Da, Jing, Jing, Jing”

There was also “Hard Headed Hannah,” “I Want to Call You ‘Sweet Mama,” and the delightful “Hang On To Me,” (below) from the 1935 short film Starlit Days at the Lido. In this colorized scene from the film, Cliff plays his uke and mugs alongside “slight of hand artist” Suzy Wandas. If you knew Suzy like I knew Suzy, indeed

Edwards left New York and headed west for The Hollywood Revue of 1929, one of MGM’s earliest sound films. The film marks the debut of the song “Singin’ in the Rain”, performed by Cliff Edwards as “Ukulele Ike.” When not credited as himself, Edward’ gathered over a hundred acting credits; mostly small “character” parts with names such as Froggy, Owly, Pooch, Snipe, Bumpy, Screwy, Sleepy, Shorty, Runty, Speed, Tips, Hogie, Handy, Happy, Minstrel Joe, Banjo Page, Bones Malloy, and (… wait for it …) “Squid Watkins.” In Howard Hawks’ classic His Girl Friday (1940) Edwards plays a reporter named Endicott who delivers snappy one-liners like, “Is there any truth in the report that you’re on Stalin’s payroll?”

On stage and on record, Edwards performed one of the earliest examples of scat singing, or as Edwards called it, his “Effus.” He imitated the wa-wa trumpet with growls and purrs, sounding like a cross between Louis Armstrong and Baby Snooks. No one has ever sounded quite like it, before or since.

BUSTER KEATON AND A BEAR IN A LADIES’ BOUDOIR

Between 1923 and 1933, Edwards recorded more than 120 sides for records, and one account claims that during his career, he sold more than 74 million records, including what was then described as “party” records with suggestive titles such “Bear in a Ladies’ Boudoir” and “I’m Gonna Give It To Mary With Love.” Had he lived long enough to work with the Coen Brothers, I can imagine Ukele Ike singinging “How Ya  Gonna Keep ’em Down Once They’ve Seen Karl Hungus?”

One of my favorite clips of Edwards “efussing” was in the film Doughboys a 1930 talkie-comedy film starring Buster Keaton, who was a close friend of Edwards’ and fellow hell-raiser in the hills of Hollywood. In  Doughboys Edwards beats the strings of a ukelele  with drumsticks while a deadpanned Keaton frets the chords on the song “You Never Did That Before.” It is a hilarious and extraordinary musical performance by both actors, and one can imagine the two pals developing their schtick over a drink or seven.

Keaton recalls in his autobiography, My Wonderful World of Slapstick (1960), “all my weekends were lost weekends. … I had as much fun with my land yacht as a man can whose purpose is to forget his whole private world has fallen apart.”

PINOCCHIO AND DUMBO

Edwards continued partying hard while gambling away his earnings. A case can be made that the success of Pinocchio served only to accelerate Edward’s eventual decline. Along with his drinking and cocaine binges, he was now using heroin.

He managed to stay afloat with his novelty and “party” songs” while taking dozens of small parts in Hollywood films, including his portrayal of a “Reminiscent Soldier” in Gone With the Wind.

In 1941, Edwards again landed a memorable role in a Disney animated classic Dumbo, portraying the regrettably-named “Jim Crow” who sings in ‘hokum’-style, “When I See an Elephant Fly.”

It was Disney animator Ward Kimball cast Edwards as Jim Crow in Dumbo: “We were recording the track for the Black Crows, and we got Hall Johnson’s Black Choir from the Methodist church in Los Angeles for it. Cliff was the only white guy among them. He actually sounded more black than the blacks we had backing him up.” (The tremor you just felt is Hall Johnson rolling in his grave.) But let us remember – this was 1941, when even Left-Wing lion Woody Guthrie was performing Amos n’ Andy-style ebonics on his Pasadena KFVD radio show. (Woody eventually abandoned the hokum and offered an on-air apology.)

MICKEY MOUSE CLUB and UKELELE IKE’S DECLINE

By the 1950s, the Disney Studio used Edwards as the voice of Jiminy Cricket on several animated short segments on the original Mickey Mouse Club show and aging actor appeared in person several times to entertain the Mouseketeers, including Annette Funicello, the teenage actress soon to appear in the idiotic Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) which sadly featured a cameo by Edward’s drinking buddy, Buster Keaton (somebody cue broadcaster Raymond Morrison, “Oh, the humanity!”)

As Jimmy Johnson, the man in charge of Disneyland Records remembered:

“Cliff was declining right before our eyes—I made some work for him on records which we really didn’t need. Toward the end, royalties from records were his only source of income. The last time he came into my office, he didn’t seem to know where he was or who I was. It  brought tears to my eyes. He was a warm and wonderful man with never a sour word about anything or anybody. I cherish my memories of him.”

“Ukulele Ike Sings Again” was a 1956 Disneyland record, suggested by Walt himself, to remind the public of Edwards’ musical legacy. I’m one of the proud owners of this album, which I pulled from the bargain bin of my local record shop, along with Procol Harum’s “A Salty Dog,” for a dollar apiece! “Ja-Da, Ja-Da, Jing, Jing, Jing!“

“We recorded the whole album in six straight hours on one night,” remembered Disney producer Jimmy Johnson. “There were no written arrangements. With an assist of ‘John Barleycorn’ (booze), we made one of the most spontaneous and musical albums I have ever been associated with … We cut ‘Singin’ In The Rain’, Darktown Strutters Ball’, ‘Ja Da’ … we had a ball! Unfortunately, the album didn’t sell well and there wasn’t much in the way of royalties for Cliff.”

ONLY CRICKETS HEARD UPON HIS PASSING

Cliff Edwards was no longer officially employed by Disney when he entered a nursing home in Hollywood in 1969 as a charity patient supported by the Actor’s Fund. At the time of his death from a heart attack on July 17, 1971, at the age of 76, Edwards’ passing wasn’t reported to the public for several days because hospital officials didn’t consider it newsworthy since they didn’t know he had ever been famous. 

His body was initially unclaimed and donated to the UCLA medical school. When Walt Disney Productions eventually discovered news of his passing, they offered to pay for the burial. Instead, the Actors Fund of America and the Motion Picture and Television Relief Fund paid for the burial.

Thirteen years after Edwards’ death, Disney provided a marker for the performer’s grave when the lack of a proper headstone was reportedly brought to the company’s attention by the Ukulele Society of America. In addition to his name and years of life, the marker simply reads, “In loving memory of Ukulele Ike.”

“It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are. But it is easy to sigh.”

― Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust

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Listen to Cliff Edwards’ music, and more music from Disney’s Golden Era of Animation at WRIU‘ Radio’s Picture This, hosted by friend of The Hobbledehoy, Wayne Cresser.