Lou Costello

Born in Paterson, New Jersey on 6th March, 1906, Louis Francis Cristillo was honoured by that city almost ninety years later with a life sized bronze statue and a park dedicated in his name, Lou Costello Park.

One half of one of the greatest comedy pairings of all time, Lou Costello never forgot his home town and contrived to mention Paterson, New Jersey at least once in almost every movie or tv skit he performed in.

As a young man, Louis Cristillo was a sportsman favouring basketball (and playing it so well that he once even outplayed once of basketball's earliest pioneer pros, Nat Holman) and boxing. Fighting under the name Lou King, he won eleven bouts and drew on the twelvth. Thankfully for comedy fans, the young prizefighter was not discovered by a boxing manager but by his father who gave him a dressing down and forbade him from the fighting circuit.

Heading for Hollywood at the age of 21, Cestrillo's athletic abilities enabled him to secure some work as a stuntman and he can be seen uncredited in several movies from 1926 to 1929.

By 1930, Cestrillo was tired and discouraged. Though he had appeared in several movies, he was only playing bitparts or as a stuntman and it wasn't enough. He decided to hitch hike home, making it as far as St. Joseph, Missouri before running out of money.

To get back on his feet, Louis took a job in a burlesque house. Again his athletic abilities came in handy as no one could handle a prat fall with quite the same aplomb as young Cestrillo. At this time, Cestrillo also stood out the relative 'cleanness' of his humor in the often bawdy and smutty world of burlesque.

While Cestrillo was learning the ropes in St. Joseph, Bud Abbott had been involved backstage in the burlesque circuit for many years already, running his own acts and working in the box office. One fateful night, Bud Abbott stood in for a sick comedian and his career at front of house took off.

Abbott was the consummate straight man and initially he was the foil for his wife, Jenny Mae Pratt whose stage name was Betty Smith, or veteran burlesque comedians like Harry Steppe and it is Harry who is credited for introducing Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in 1934 although it was not until 1936 that the pair officially became a comedy team.

Working together on the burlesque circuit, ABbott and Costello had the opportunity to hone their double act - straight man Bud always looking to take advantage of bumbling innocent Lou - as well as to perfect the Who's On skit that would make them famous.

Their first break was being signed as summer replacements in the Kate Smith Radio Show and following that appearing in the Broadway show, Streets of Paris. Returning to radio in 1938, they performed Who's on First for the first time over the airwaves. The listening public loved it and it became ABbott and Costello's signature sketch.

In 1939, Universal Studios signed them up for a 'test' movie called 'One Night in The Tropics'. This was intended to be a typical B movie with contract players in key roles. Abbott and Costello were not intended to be the stars and yet the studio kept the cameras rolling because the pair had the camera crew falling about laughing. Never known to let a good thing slip through their fingers, the studio immediately got to work on the next movie 'Buck Privates'.

By 1942, Abbott and Costello were voted number 1 box office stars and by 1957, when they filemed their last movie together 'Dance With Me Henry', ABbott and Costello had made 36 movies. The prolific pair also appeared on radio and live on stage.

Watching the smooth interaction of Abbott and Costello in any of their movies today it is hard to imagine that the pair were anything other than the greatest of friends and that their lives were not always a barrel of laughs.

In fact, in the early '40s, Lou first suffered a terribly debilitating bout of rheumatic fever which kept him of work for a year and then on the night of his first come back performance he suffered a further blow from which he would never entirely recover - the death of his infant son.

During rehearsals for the show Lou had been called to the phone and told that Lou junior had fallen into the family pool and drowned. He rushed home and comforted his wife, Anne as best he could. Several famous comedians of the day immedaiately volunteered to take Lou's place on the radio show that night but Lou insisted he would do the show himself and later was to explain, '...not because I was following the tradition of show business that "the show must go on." No, indeed. I wanted to do the radio show so that my voice would go out into the air, with the hope that Lou, Jr., might hear it wherever he was.

That night as Abbott and Costello performed the classic Who's on First sketch tears ran down Costello's face and he fled from the theatre as soon as the sketch was over. Abbott then broke the news of the tradgedy to the listening public.