Jean Carroll, on the right circa 1953 - Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries

Take it From Me aired from November 1953 until January 1954 on ABC.

Stand-up Comedienne Jean Carroll stared as an "average" New York City housewife, complete with bumbling husband ( Alan Carney) and moppet daughter ( Lynn Loring), in this comedy. She opened each show with a monologue, then spiced the night's sketch with comic asides to the audience. Many of the stories involved her sly schemes to trick husband Herbie into doing whatever she wanted. The action took place in the couple's apartment and the surrounding neighborhood, which, though never identified, was presumably in Brooklyn or the Bronx. This New York orientation may have limited the show's appeal west of the Hudson River, and it lasted less than three months.

Also known as The Jean Carroll Show.

An Article from The New York Times

November 5, 2006
Television
Milton Berle, With Charm and a Mink

By JANE WOLLMAN RUSOFF

WEARING a glittery cocktail dress and a mink coat, with her hand propped on her hip, the comedian Jean Carroll would take the stage of “The Ed Sullivan Show” and regale viewers with stories about her “miserable idiot” husband, her “rotten kid” and the women she met at Florida hotels who would “sit around the pool telling lies.”

Arguably America’s first female stand-up star, the monologist with take-charge charm and bubbly delivery began doing solo comedy in the 1930s. She wrote most of her own material, and by 1949 she had become the first comedian to play the Copacabana, Paramount Theater and Capitol Theater in New York all within six months. One critic called her “woman’s answer to man’s superiority.” In 1953 she was starring in her own ABC comedy series, “Take It From Me.”

She retired 37 years ago, and many of her fans might have assumed she was gone by now. But at 95 she is a remarkably vibrant, Scrabble-playing grandmother who lives by herself in a Westchester County condominium and goes by her legal name, Celine Howe. She still does her own cooking, her own dusting and her own eye makeup.

Now a feature-length documentary, “Jean Carroll: I Made It Standing Up,” to be narrated by Lily Tomlin, is in the works for the 2007 film festival circuit.

On Monday fellow comedians will pay tribute to Ms. Carroll at a New York Friars Club toast in her honor. Set to appear are, among others, Ms. Tomlin and the event’s host, Joy Behar. The proceedings will be filmed for the documentary.

Ms. Carroll, 5 feet 1 inch tall, has short silver hair and a hearty laugh that punctuates most of her conversation. Dressed in a striped sweater and taupe pants and seated at her round dinette table, she described one of the bridge games that typically take place there. “One woman is 93 and is totally deaf. So she can’t hear. I can’t see. Another player is always quietly stoned. She falls asleep while we’re waiting for her to bid: ‘Hey! Wake up! It’s your turn!’ We have a hilarious time.”

During television’s Golden Age, when female comedians like Lucille Ball, Imogene Coca and Martha Raye were doing sitcoms or sketches, Ms. Carroll strode onstage and, as herself, told funny stories and jokes. She painted word-pictures in a breezy, friendly style about her family or everyday folks going about their business.

“Other women doing comedy were scatterbrained, fat or homely,” said Ms. Tomlin, citing Ms. Carroll as a major comedic inspiration. “Jean was very attractive. She was in control but not aggressive. She was her own person, and she was funny. Standing up and talking about their family was something you’d see only men doing. You never saw a woman comedian with that kind of command, but she was good-natured and light-hearted.”

She was heralded as “the female Milton Berle,” “a female Bob Hope” and “a distaff Joey Faye.” In the 1950s Ed Sullivan signed her to an exclusive contract that paid $10,000 a show, almost inconceivable in those days.

“Jean was ahead of her time,” recalled the comedian Jack Carter, who was a close friend of Ms. Carroll in the ’50s. “She was the forerunner of woman stand-ups, very smart and sophisticated. You didn’t see the joke coming.”

Her most famous routines involved purchasing a mink coat wholesale and spending a day at the racetrack, and her husband jokes struck a special chord with women: “The other night my husband came home — it was novelty night. ...He’s a wonderful man, a regular do-it-yourselfer. I say, ‘Honey, help me.’ He says, ‘Do it yourself!’ ... The thing that attracted me to my husband was his pride. I’ll never forget the first time I saw him, standing up on a hill, his hair blowing in the breeze — and he too proud to run and get it.” One of her funniest riffs concerned a high-pressure saleswoman: “It’s stunning! It’s gorgeous! That dress is you!”

At the time Ms. Carroll was often accused of competing with male comics. “It never occurred to me that only men were supposed to talk,” she now said dryly, paging through a thick scrapbook of clippings. Some dated from the time she was still a vaudeville singer-dancer.

She pointed to a cheesecake shot taken when she was 29. “That’s my old nose. It wasn’t too bad. I started doing comedy by saying what I was thinking. I’d tell the band, ‘Wait! Wait! I’ve got something to tell the people.’ And I’d walk down to the footlights: ‘You know what happened? I went into this restaurant,’ or whatever.”

In the middle of the interview Ms. Carroll disappeared into her den and brought out another big album. She was looking for a Variety obituary of her husband, Buddy Howe, who died in 1981. In vaudeville the two worked as a comedy team. He was Ms. Carroll’s straight man. When he was drafted into the Army, she carried on as a solo act. Upon his discharge, he refused to return to the act, insisting he’d only be holding her back.

He became a talent agent instead and rose to the title of vice chairman of International Creative Management. The pair had a somewhat rocky 45-year marriage, Ms. Carroll said. “He was my soul mate,” she admits, “but he was a control freak. I couldn’t stand his constantly criticizing me.” Her relationship with Ed Sullivan had its rough spots too. During the term of her exclusive contract, she found him possessive. And she recalled, “Just before I’d go on, he’d whisper in my ear to cut four minutes.”

Born Celine Zeigman in Paris, she arrived in America at the age of 18 months after her father, a Russian political prisoner who had been jailed in Paris, found a bakery job in the Bronx. Ms. Carroll was 8 when she saw her father, an abusive alcoholic, “hurl burning-hot food” at her mother. “She was up against the wall like a trapped animal. I thought: ‘She’s not fighting back because she has no place to go. He pays the bills. I have to grow up in a hurry and work, so I can take care of my mother.’ I decided that I’d never be beholden to a man.”

At 11 she entered an amateur contest, then joined the vaudeville circuit. By the next year, a professional singer-dancer, she was supporting her family of seven. Eventually moving into comedy as a solo performer, she met Mr. Howe, a dancer, and the two teamed up onstage.

After 12 weeks of her own TV series, she recalled, she had an announcement for the network. “I didn’t want to do the show anymore,” she said, because she felt that the actor playing her husband was badly miscast. “I was making much more money, anyway, just doing my stage act. But all I really wanted was to stay home and be a wife and mother.”

Mr. Carter remembered it simply: “I don’t think Jean was very happy with her success. Offstage she was kind of serious. She was always searching, it seemed.”

Now, in her tenth decade, she said: “I don’t feel differently inside, like there’s an old woman living in there. Who determines when you should stop enjoying life, that you should stop enjoying a raunchy joke or mixed company?

“O.K., I look like they just dug me up for the poker game, which I think they will do when I’m gone: ‘What do you mean you can’t play tonight? Get up out of there,’ they’ll say. And you know what?” She burst out laughing. “I’ll get up!”

For a Biography of Jean Carroll go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Carroll