Jimmy Durante

Jimmy Durante was born on February 9, 1893, in New York City, the son of Italian immigrants who settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He came up through the saloons and clubs of early twentieth-century New York, teaching himself ragtime piano as a teenager and eventually building a reputation in Coney Island joints before finding his way into vaudeville. What's striking is how completely Durante's persona — the gravelly voice, the outsized nose he turned into a running joke, the half-sung half-hollered delivery — emerged fully formed from that street-level apprenticeship. He didn't construct a character so much as amplify himself.

His breakthrough came through a combination of stage, radio, and early Hollywood that's hard to separate into clean chapters. By the 1930s he was working at MGM and appearing in pictures like The Passionate Plumber and The Wet Parade, playing comic supporting roles that let him riff and mug in ways that the tighter dramatic films of the era couldn't contain. Radio suited him even better — the voice alone could carry a room — and by the time television arrived in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Durante had a weekly variety show that ran for years and introduced him to audiences who'd never seen the inside of a Broadway house. He'd close every broadcast with "Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are," a sign-off that became one of the more genuinely mysterious catchphrases in American entertainment history (nobody ever fully agreed on what it meant, including Durante himself, apparently).

His collaborators over the decades ranged from Buster Keaton — they made a handful of films together in the early sound era, an odd pairing that somehow worked — to the writers and musicians who populated his radio and television productions. Durante wasn't an actor who disappeared into roles; he was always recognizably himself, which made him a particular kind of performer that Hollywood has always struggled to categorize. Comedian, yes. Singer, sort of. Pianist, genuinely. The thing nobody mentions is how technically capable he was as a musician underneath all the clowning — he could actually play, and the mugging was a choice, not a cover.

By the late 1960s, Durante had shifted into the kind of work that comes naturally to performers with his particular brand of warmth: narration, voice work, and holiday programming. His contribution to Discover the Magic of Frosty the Snowman in 1969 is probably the role that most people alive today associate with him, even if they don't consciously know it. He narrated the original Frosty the Snowman animated special, and his voice — weathered, warm, slightly cracked at the edges — turned out to be exactly the right instrument for that kind of material. Discover the Magic of Frosty the Snowman has since become a perennial, the kind of production that gets watched by people who weren't born when it was made, which is a durability most performers don't achieve.

Hard to say if Durante himself anticipated that this would be the work that outlasted nearly everything else. He was in his mid-seventies by then, decades past his vaudeville prime, and yet the performance carries no sense of diminishment. Just a voice doing exactly what it had always done.