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Red Buttons: Audience
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For British audiences, it is on screen that Buttons will be remembered (he has recently been in ER), notably in 1962 as a paratrooper hanging from a clock tower in the D-Day movie The Longest Day. It was a part that few who saw it have forgotten, least of all Buttons himself, who told me, in his luxurious house in Beverly Hills: "Whatever I do, I'll always be remembered for that goddamned clock tower."
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In real life, Buttons shared his life with three. Whether he was the proverbial clown who evoked laughs on the outside while weeping on the inside isn't widely known, partly because he escaped the gaze of such modern-day peepholers as People magazine. He apparently was considered too old for the audience to care about.
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CBS gave Mr. Buttons his own half-hour variety program, which began Oct. 14, 1952. Later that evening, switchboard operators at the network reported one of the biggest and most enthusiastic responses to a single program they had ever received. Audiences enjoyed his sketch comedy routines and his characters. He was Rocky Buttons, a punch-drunk prizefighter with a heart of gold; Muggsy Buttons, a juvenile delinquent with a core of kindness; Keeglefarven, a German military officer presented in dialect, and the Kupke Kid, a child laborer who aroused in others a compulsion to pick him up after first knocking him down.
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Endearingly fearless, or so it appeared, Red Buttons rarely met an audience he couldn't conquer. Sides were split, guts busted and that quintessential merry little man invariably left crowds happier than he'd found them.
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