William Ray sent me a link to this real estate listing. Someone is selling 196 Furnace Dock Road in Cortlandt Manor, NY and they're asking $5.5 million for the place. What's so special about it? Well, apart from its unusual "space age" design, it was owned for a time by Jackie Gleason before he decided to relocate his life down to Miami Beach. Did you know the Miami Beach audiences were the greatest audiences in the world? That's what Jackie screamed at the end of almost every show he did from that fair city.
Among the many interesting photos of the home on the realtor's site, we find this…
I have no idea if that picture was there when Mr. Gleason occupied the premises or if a subsequent owner put it there but it prompted William to ask this question of me…
Among all of the interesting things about the house, I'm as curious with Gleason being a pal of Nixon as I am of the side by side photos of Fred Flintstone and Gleason. That leads to my question – do you know if Mr. Gleason was flattered by the Flintstones or was he miffed by the blatant "homage" of the Honeymooners?
What I always heard — and I even heard this from Joe Barbera, not that he was an unimpeachable source — was that Gleason was initially pissed. He felt that, first of all, it was weakening his ownership of the Honeymooners property to have it so visibly infringed upon. He also thought that he oughta get a hefty percentage of the profits from the stone-age knock-off.
But, as the story is told, by the time he got around to addressing the matter with his attorneys, The Flintstones was a hit show beloved by children and adults everywhere. Gleason's handlers/agents/whoever advised him that to sue would be to make headlines and he'd come off as The Bad Guy. So he decided to be flattered instead of litigious.
As I've mentioned here before, I made a comment to Mr. Barbera one day — probably the day he told me his version of the events — about how Barney Rubble had obviously been named as a sly way of saying "Carney Double." Mr. B, as most of us called him, looked startled and told me I was the first person he'd ever heard point that out. You can believe that if you like but I don't.
By the way, it's worth pointing out that Henry Corden, who was the second voice of Fred Flintstone, was occasionally hired to do a Gleason imitation to dub dialogue for Jackie. For at least one of the Smokey and the Bandit movies, he revoiced lines for Gleason's character, Sheriff Buford T. Justice, for the prints shown on airplanes, TV and other places where naughty words were verboten. I asked him if he got the job because of his Flintstones connection and Henry said, "Probably." That, I believe.
