Sunday School: Forgotten Faces of Flushing #56 -- Leon Janney and the Rheingold Rest

Welcome back to Sunday School: Forgotten Faces of Flushing, our weekly rummage through the Mets’ attic, where we brush the dust off the bubble-gum cards, flip through curling yearbooks, and rediscover the names that once made you stop mid-knish and say, “Hold on… he was a Met, right?”

               This week’s installment is a logical follow-up to last week's, when we focused on Kathy Kersch, the first woman crowned Miss Rheingold during the Mets era. And, actually, this week’s segment should be renamed Forgotten Faces of Coogan’s Bluff, because it didn’t survive the Mets’ move from the Polo Grounds to Shea Stadium. But it was way ahead of its time.

Before Ralph Kiner offered guests a seat his Korner, and before Sam Malone served Norm and the gang at Cheers, Leon Janney held sway at the Rheingold Rest.

               A beer commercial in interview show’s clothing, the Rheingold Rest aired during Mets telecasts in 1962 and 1963, the length of time that the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency held the Rheingold account.

Leibmann Breweries, the company that produced Rheingold, hired the Thompson agency after it shocked the advertising world in November 1961 by outbidding rival Schaefer for the broadcast rights to Mets games. Schaefer, which had rights to Knicks and Rangers games and was best known for its Schaefer Circle of Sports, was widely viewed as a lock to get the Mets' rights, and the company felt it had submitted a competitive bid.

               "Schaefer bid what it considered the package deal to be worth," Tom Villante, head of sports and syndicated programing for the advertising agency B. B. D. O., which represented Schaefer, was quoted as saying in the New York Times. "This evaluation was based on what Ballantine Beer has paid to the New York Yankees for broadcast rights. Then Rheingold came along with so many dollars that we dropped out. We didn't think it was a legitimate price. If Rheingold wants it that badly they can have it."

               How much did Rheingold bid to win the five-year contract? An unheard-of-at-the-time $1.2 million a year, with an agreement that the brewery would also purchase 100,000 tickets to Mets games.

               So with all that money on the line, the JWT folks knew they had to be creative to keep fans’ interest during the eight minutes of Rheingold commercials that would run during each of the 130 Mets telecasts (not all games were televised back then).

“Ranked among all the audiences that exist in tv’s vast homeland, the baseball fan is perhaps the most persistent, and skeptical, and irascible, and loyal,” was the characterization of the audience in a 1962 company newsletter.

               And that’s how the Rheingold Rest was born.

               The agency built a replica of a neighborhood tavern at the Videotape Center, a collection of recording studios on Manhattan’s West side created by Ampex and 3M, the manufacturers of videotape. It was, in essence, the forerunner of the modern sports bar.

               Of course, every good neighborhood bar needs a friendly proprietor to hold sway, spin stories, greet guests and make everyone feel at home.

               Leon Janney was hired to be the Rheingold Rest’s Sam Malone.

               Janney was an actor by trade, had been since he was two years old, when he made his vaudeville debut in 1919 at the Pantages Theater in Ogden, Utah, reciting the poem "Winken, Blinken, and Nod" before a live audience. He continued working in vaudeville through his childhood before heading to movies in the 1920s. As movies transitioned from silents to the talkies, Janney’s diction skills put him in relatively high demand.

               Janney could have had his big break, and steady work, after he played Spud in Hal Roach’s Our Gang short, Bear Shooters, which featured Jackie Cooper as Jackie, Alan Hoskins as Farina, Petey the dog, Dinah the mule and a guy in a gorilla suit. But Janney never made it to the other films in the series as Roach felt he was too old for the rest of the little rascals.

Instead, it was another Hollywood legend who gave the teenage Janney his big break. William “One Take” Beaudine managed to direct 179 films in his career by, as his nickname suggests, not wasting time with trivialities such as redoing a scene to get the perfect outcome. He may be best known for directing half of the Bowery Boys films.

               Beaudine directed Janney in a starring role in a film entitled Father’s Son, based on a Booth Tarkington novel, followed by even greater acclaim in the film adaptation of another Tarkington novel, Penrod and Sam, also directed by Beaudine. Janney was Penrod.

               The onset of adulthood moved Janney into radio, where he appeared in serials and provided voice-overs for dramatizations of real crime cases. He was in particular demand because he had mastered over 20 distinct accents and dialects. In the 1940s, he starred as Dick Cole in The Adventures of Dick Cole (1942), Chick Carter in Chick Carter, Boy Detective (1944–1945) on Mutual, and Number One Son in Charlie Chan (1944–1948).

               The 1950s brought him to television and back to the stage. Most notably, he played the role of Jonathan Jermiah Peachum,  the controller of the beggars, in a  famous off-Broadway revival of the Threepenny Opera. When Janney left the production, succeeding him in the role was a pre-Lou Grant Edward Asner. He would also go on to appear on Broadway with Robert Preston in a Hollywood/television satire entitled Nobody Loves an Albatross, a play most remembered now for its mention in the film Rosemary’s Baby.

               Janney also found consistent work in television soap operas. He appeared regularly in Another World, playing multiple supporting roles across dozens of episodes, and took on two distinct characters in The Edge of Night, a Procter & Gamble-produced serial known for its crime-drama elements.

               So hosting the Rheingold Rest was just another role for Janney, although possibly the only one since his childhood vaudeville days in which he appeared as himself. Think of his part in the Rheingold Rest spots as Jimmy Fallon or Jimmy Kimmel, standing behind a bar instead of sitting at a desk.

               As the JWT employee newsletter noted, “A friendly place to drop in between innings, the format of the rest was entirely flexible. Host Janney interviewed celebrities and baseball experts, introduced the six beautiful candidates for Miss Rheingold 1963, conducted Rheingold Riddles (tricky baseball situations for armchair umpires), commented on the Mets, introduced players’ wives, and, occasionally leaned across the bar for some straightforward talk about Rheingold.”

               Janney used Rheingold botttlecaps to represent bases or baserunners as he diagrammed plays.

The taping was a grind – as many as 10 different episodes were taped in a day, to be aired during the next day’s games, with a priority of being as timely as possible, including comments on that day’s game.

               Among the notables who dropped by for a quick pour (although no drinking on television, that wasn’t allowed under 1962 standards) was Ralph Kiner himself, perhaps looking for pointers on how to liven up Kiners Korner.

And on one occasion, Janney even managed to get more from a guest than Ralph did from her husband on Kiner’s Kiner.

               Kiner famously asked Mets catcher Clarence “Choo-Choo” Coleman, “What’s your wife’s name and what’s she like?” To which Choo-Choo replied, “Her name is Mrs. Coleman and she likes me, Bub.”

               Janney, however, got Mrs. Coleman to open up at the bar of the Rheingold Rest.  She told Janney she had met Clarence at the public tennis courts in Orlando, FL, and described him as a wonderful tennis player.

               “Response from Mets fans was tremendous,” JWT told its employees. “Ladies enjoyed meeting the players’ wives, men were interested in the experts’ commentary on baseball, and tavern owners saw their own places of business happily represented right on the tv screen.”

               Alas, the Rheingold Rest only had a limited run. When Liebmann Breweries switched back to its old advertising agency after the 1963 season, the Rheingold Rest closed its doors. Among the many who were disappointed was Janney, who was in line for season tickets to the Mets’ new ballpark, under construction in Flushing.

               Janney returned to acting, including a key role in the 1968 film Charly, as the doctor who treated the title character, a role that won Cliff Robertson a Best Actor Oscar. Janney also appeared as an assistant district attorney in six episodes of the television series Hawk, starring Burt Reynolds as a New York City detective, and as a psychiatrist in the famous barbershop quartet episode of Car 54, Where Are You? He also was active as president of the New York chapter of AFTRA, the television and radio actors' union.

Janney died in October, 1980, in Guadalajara, where he had gone for cancer treatment – 10 days before a more famous actor, Steve McQueen, also died in Mexico, which at the time was a popular destination for experimental cancer treatments not then available in the U.S.  (Think: coffee enemas. Look it up).

               It’s unclear if any videos still exist of the Rheingold Rest. At the time, videotapes were routinely reused by taping over old programs. Rheingold beer also disappeared. But the concept of the sports bar lived and thrives. So the next time you hoist one while watching a game at Miller’s Ale House or Buffalo Wild Wings, think of the Rheingold Rest and its genial host, Leon Janney, this week’s Forgotten Face of Coogan’s Bluff.