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Steve Allen on Being Dirt Poor and His Las Vegas Show

Steve Allen was born to a pair of Vaudeville performers. Recorded in 1989, in this clip Steve Allen, actor, comic, writer, musician, Las Vegas headliner, and creator of The Tonight Show talks about life during the Depression, on being so poor he had to beg for money and food.

“At one point, thank God only one point, I ran away from home. I was 16 at the time and I bummed around the country for a few weeks. I literally faced severe hunger. I had 7 dollars they lasted exactly 7 days. After that no money and pretty quickly that translated into no food. If you knew where there was a soup kitchen I guess you could go there but I was on the road, I didn’t know where I was much less where other things were.

“I would beg, very quickly you turn into a beggar. You think you would never do that but you’re wrong, all you have to do is be hungry enough and you beg your brains out.” Steve Allen goes on to say what the reaction to that was, “By and large you get ignored or you get contempt. The only people who ever treated me, well not the only people, but almost the only people that treated me kindly were the Mexican-Americans I ran into in the southwest states. One guy I remember opened his own pockets pockets to show me they were empty and he shrugged. I liked that, we had a nice moment together because he was saying, ‘I’m no better off that you are.’ Another man said, ‘Wait señor,’ and he went into a little hovel and came out with a tortilla filled with beans, I loved hi for that.”

Allen goes on to explain why he felt like he wasn’t a good father to his first 3 kids.

Of course, Steve Allen went on to be fabulously wealthy in show business. His first network TV show, The Steve Allen Show, premiered at 11 a.m. on Christmas Day in 1950, the program was later moved into a thirty-minute, early evening slot. In 1954, he achieved fame as the co-creator and first host of The Tonight Show, the very first late night television talk show. He wrote more than 8,500 songs and won the 1964 Grammy Award for Best Original Jazz Composition.

When Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows signed on to perform at the Flamingo in 1961 they had never been to Las Vegas. One night they took in a show to see what the Vegas experience was all about. “We just looked at each other,” wife Jayne Meadows remembered. “We both sat there horrified, me particularly. With Steve it didn’t matter, he was a brilliant comedian and all. But I thought, ‘What in the world am I going to do?’ when I saw all those girls, half-naked most of them!”

Both Allen and Meadows both had successful careers long before they appeared in Las Vegas. Headlining the Flamingo during Easter week 1961, they broke house records and were held over.

“It was my idea to use Steve’s mother at the Flamingo for that first show,” Meadows said. “Steve had been raised very poor, and his parents were never there. His mother sometimes acted jealous of his success. But there was no denying the fact that she was a brilliant comedienne. That woman was such a genius.” Steve Allen’s mother would wander on to the stage like a bag lady from the heartland that had gotten lost looking for the ladies’ room.

Steve Allen was killed in 2000 after being bumped by a car which broke three of his ribs and caused internal bleeding at 78 years old.

See a variation of the act that Steve Allen did with his mother, just as they performed it on the Vegas Strip:

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