The western Ohio town of Springfield has received a good deal of unwanted publicity over the past couple of months. Something a lot of folks are not aware of is that the city was the birthplace/hometown of two notable early movie duos. Silent screen siblings Dorothy and Lillian Gish are the best-known pair now, but just as big in its 1920s and early ‘30s heyday was the comedy team of Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough, lifelong friends who found success in nearly every field of entertainment until a shocking tragedy ended their partnership.
Born in Springfield in 1883, Paul McCullough befriended Bobby Clark, five years his junior, when both attended the same grammar school. A shared love of acrobatics and the circus led the boys to a tumbling class at a local YMCA, and as they left their teens the pals set their sights on performing for a living. Their career path took them from minstrel shows in the early 1900s to putting on the greasepaint as clowns for various circuses, including the Ringling Bros. show, between 1906-1911. During this time the pair created an elaborate routine involving a chair and table that always brought down the house and also taught them to add comedy to their acrobatic antics.
Clark and McCullough left the big top in 1912 for the vaudeville circuit, where they found both success and the performing attire that would become their trademarks: painted-on eyeglasses, a pork-pie hat, and that favorite comedian’s prop, a cigar, for Bobby; and a fur coat and toothbrush mustache for Paul. Their stage personae also became more established, with Bobby becoming the more talkative of the pair and Paul settling down into a secondary role. As Clark once said in a telling look at their partnership, “If a question arises as to how a certain piece of business should be done…we don’t talk and argue about it like so many people. We sit down quietly and talk it over pro and con. I listen to McCullough’s version, and he listens to mine, and then I go out on the stage and do it my way.”
Blackballed from vaudeville after the White Rats Strike of 1916 (an early attempt to form a stage performers’ union), the duo shifted to the comedy burlesque stage without missing a beat. Tapped to appear in London, they joined the hit stage show Chuckles of 1922 until Irving Berlin convinced them to come back to America and make their Broadway debut in his Music Box Revue. The boys followed that up with 1926’s The Ramblers and Strike Up the Band in 1930. In between, Fox Pictures signed Clark and McCullough to come to Hollywood and headline a series of comedy shorts. They made 14 films between 1928-29 for Fox but were generally unhappy with the results and gladly returned to New York. In a review of their 1931 show Here Goes the Bride, critic Brooks Atkinson wrote, “With the Marx Brothers gone, Clark and McCullough are the logical First Actors of the Stage.” Like the Marxes before them, though, Bobby and Paul wouldn’t stay East for long.
In 1931 RKO Radio Pictures, who had already locked up funnymen Wheeler and Woolsey to appear in feature films, brought Clark and McCullough back to Hollywood to star in two-reel comedies for the studio. The duo wound up making 21 RKO shorts from 1931-35, working with up-and-coming director Mark Sandrich (Top Hat, Holiday Inn) and a supporting repertoire that including Laurel and Hardy regular James Finlayson; Three Stooges foils Vernon Dent, Bud Jamison, and Dorothy Granger; Mack Sennett veteran Tom Kennedy; and future triple Oscar-winner Walter Brennan. These efforts offered a more proper showcase for the team’s rapid-fire banter and often risqué dialogue (often added by Clark to the scripts). A prime example of the latter came in 1932’s The Iceman’s Ball, where Clark attempts to woo beautiful Shirley Chambers by saying, “It’s women like you who make men like me make women like you make men like me.”
The third film in the series, 1932’s Scratch-As-Catch-Can, found the fellas’ efforts to sell life insurance turn into a series of impromptu wrestling bouts and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Subject, Comedy (it lost to L & H’s The Music Box). The following year, they spoofed Prohibition in Kickin’ the Crown Around, in which the fictitious kingdom of Jugo-Jaggon bans the selling and eating of salami and international diplomats Clark and McCullough are hired to find out who’s been smuggling “4 percent garlic salami” into the country. 1934’s Bedlam of Beards found them as barbers (a setting which would take on a macabre irony two years later) trying to track down a kidnapped businessman.
That same year the duo made what is considered by many to be their best short, Odor in the Court, playing conniving streetfront lawyers (“See us once, make our home Europe!”) hired to represent a man in an alimony case. The duo arrive at the courtroom with their own fan club, marching band, and peanut vendor and proceed to confound the judge, the opposing attorney, and even their own client with their shenanigans (“It’s a lie, but I don’t object,” declares Clark during the testimony). There’s even a “woman standing over an air vent” gag that predates Marilyn Monroe in The Seven-Year Itch. Their final RKO entry, 1935’s Alibi Bye-Bye, has the boys working as Atlantic City photographers who provide wayward husbands and wives “alibi snapshots” to send to suspicious spouses. A wacky chase scene through adjoining hotel rooms is on a par with the Marx Brothers’ similar routine in A Night at the Opera.
After finishing Alibi Bye-Bye and completing a cross-country tour in George White’s Scandals, McCullough checked himself into a Massachusetts sanitarium for “nervous exhaustion.” His seemingly easygoing screen presence was said to belie a number of personal issues, including the death of his beloved sister several years earlier and, allegedly, fears that Clark was going to launch a solo career. Released from the facility in March of 1936, he asked the friend driving him home to stop at a local barber shop so he could get a shave. While there, McCullough grabbed the straight razor and slashed his wrists and throat. Hospitalized in critical condition, he died from his wounds two days later at the age of 52. “I think it was just something Paul couldn’t help,” a heartbroken Clark said in a rare statement about the incident, “Something that had been with him all the time and he didn’t even know it.”
Following several months of retreat at home, a tentative Clark returned to Broadway as Bob Hope’s replacement in The Ziegfeld Follies of 1936. Unsure of working as a solo comic, the warm reception he received quickly alleviated his concerns, and Bobby would become a popular co-star in several 1930s and ’40s productions. At the same time he took a scholarly interest of the works of Congreve and Sheridan, appearing in revivals of Love for Love, The Rivals, and other Restoration comedies. His only film turn after McCullough’s death was a supporting role in 1938’s all-star musical flop The Goldwyn Follies, where–for some reason–he was forced to abandon his usual painted-on eyeglasses for actual spectacles.
Clark popped up in the early days of television, hosting several episodes of The Colgate Comedy Hour and appearing in two adaptations of Alice in Wonderland (one as the King of Hearts, the other as the Ugly Duchess!), and made his performing swan song starring as “Mr. Applegate” in the 1956 touring company of the hit musical Damn Yankees. In February of 1960 Bobby passed away at his New York City home at 71.
Because they eschewed feature films, unlike Abbott and Costello or Wheeler and Woolsey, and only made a handful of shorts compared to Laurel and Hardy or the Three Stooges, Clark and McCullough’s Hollywood work received little TV play (the racier parts of their pre-Code wordplay didn’t help matters). To watch these pictures now is to get a taste of what classic vaudeville comedy must have been like, thanks to two childhood pals who seemed to be having the time of their lives…until one of those lives took an unforeseen dark turn.
Oh, and the phrase “Omnia Cafeteria Rex” in this article’s headline? That was, according to Bobby Clark, the duo’s official motto: “We eat all we can carry.”