– Alexander King – Alex In Wonderland – December 9, 1959 – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
Of all the personalities who made an indelible impression on early Television, Alexander King would most likely rank high. Perhaps not so much as a milestone performer but as someone who came to epitomize the art of “late-night talk” which became the staple of television “after the kids went to sleep”.
Alexander King was an Austrian-born American author, illustrator, and editor. During his career, his job was associated with such periodicals as The Big Stick, Call, Americana, Stage and Vanity Fair. In the 1950’s he became a visitor to the Tonight show with Jack Parr.
In 1945 King took morphine to relieve persistent kidney stone pains. He became addicted. For nine years he struggled against the addiction, spending fourteen months at the Federal narcotics hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. Eventually, he was cured. He vividly described the drug addict’s subculture in his memoirs. He published his first book, Mine Enemy Grows Older, in 1958. But he had received no appreciable public recognition until his explosive appearance on the Jack Paar television show on January 2, 1959. He captivated the audience. Witty, sardonic, and irreverent, he delivered an incessant flow of commentary on art, life, sex, drugs, women, literature, and other topics engaging his interest. “He was the greatest conversationalist I ever met, ” said Paar, who described his guest as “a frail but fierce little man with the air of a delinquent leprechaun. ”
King later had his own show, “Alex in Wonderland, ” on a New York City television station (syndicated and aired in Los Angeles and other major cities). Critic John Lardner, who was not greatly impressed, found King “so fluent as to make what he says implausible. His talk abounds in bon mots and other meaty observations that were uttered to him personally, he tells you, by famous men, most of them now extinct. ” When King first appeared on the Paar show, Mine Enemy Grows Older had sold about 6, 500 copies. The following week it sold 26, 000. Ultimately, it sold more than 175, 000. The book was described accurately as “less autobiography than memoirs, less memoirs than a series of impressionistic self-portraits and wildly hilarious anecdotes done so vividly, with such zest and animal bounce, that the book all but leaps in your hands. ”
King was known to his friends as a gifted but erratic man, disarmingly gentle in appearance, who spoke five languages, wrote plays, and painted. Among his numerous dislikes were advertising (“a soggy over-ripe fungus”), abstract painting, millionaires, Life magazine, the New Yorker, the evangelist Billy Graham, and Ernest Hemingway. People generally, King said, were “adenoidal baboons” caught in “life’s erratically operated sausage machine. ”
Alexander King died on November 16, 1965 of a heart attack in New York.
As a sample of what the late-night TV audience saw and heard by way of Alexander King, here is an extended excerpt from his December 8, 1959 broadcast of “Alex In Wonderland”.
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