Jane Norman sought outlets for her abundant creativity, which included a penchant to perform.
In the 1950’s, she created an elfin, flying character in a wood-green costume and pointed hat, called her Pixanne, and wrote songs, skits, and stories which she entertained millions of Delaware Valley children on live television.
Later in life, in this decade, she recorded standards and Christmas music and appeared on the cabaret circuit throughout the country, the pinnacle of her nightclub career being an engagement at New York’s 54 Below, in the basement of the famous Studio 54.
I met Ms. Norman several times in the years between Pixanne and the swank glamor of the American song book. One memorable recent visit was at a Bala delicatessen where Jane was ecstatic because it was near Passover, and she could order fried matzoh. Ever slim, she ate half the huge portion presented to her.
At the time, Jane was going between her Main Line home in Philadelphia and her winter digs in Palm Springs, where she often performed at parties.
The woman led a full life that included flights of enthusiasm and lots of attention. Jane Norman, or Pixanne, a name of which she never tired, died last week at age 83. She had battled pulmonary problems and was of an age when people pass, yet somehow it’s hard to imagine a life force like Jane not living. Like Pixanne, in the memory of two generations of Philadelphia children, Jane seemed eternal.
She was a talker and her favorite subject was dreams and ambitions. No wallflower on any occasion, Jane always struck up conversations. After any party or gathering, she could recount a brief resume of everyone in the room.
Her interest in ambition, gift for gab, and sincerity in listening to others while talking about herself led to many of her opportunities. Nothing happened overnight, hut Jane has prepared for any offers than might come her way.
It was that creativity.
At age 15, while vacationing with her parents in Maine, Jane gravitated to a summer stock company in Bar Harbor. At first, she was a volunteer, running fabric from a designer to a stitcher and making herself useful in similar tasks.
That wasn’t enough. She wanted to write and perform. Her outlet was children’s programs. She devised several based on popular fairy tales such as “Cinderella.” As an adult, she would perform the title role in “Gigi” at the same theater.
This experience aside, Jane heeded her parents’ advice she find a more practical way to earn a living than show business. She became a teacher and taught kindergarten classes in Elkins Park.
“I was too creative to be a teacher,” I can hear Jane saying emphatically.
She recounted how often she spent singing for the children, making up characters for their entertainment, and telling stories while using puppets and props she designed and crafted.
“The technique worked,” Jane said. “My students became interested in stories and were good readers because of it. They saw the creativity in storytelling..”
Dissatisfied with confining her shows to a suburban classroom for an audience of 30, Jane sought another venue, something bigger.
Television!
In a brainstorm, she decided to seek a children’s show on television and immediately thought of the Pixanne character.
“I was a fan of Mary Martin,” she would say, “and I was especially taken with ‘Peter Pan.’ Pixanne was modelled after that.”
Enter the legendary Lew Klein, for whom Temple University recently named its Radio, Television, and Film school. Klein was one of Jane’s teachers at Temple, but he was also the program director at Channel 6.
Klein loved Jane’s idea, but Channel 6 was already chock full of children’s stars. This was before the days of Captain Noah. Channel 6 boasted the queen of all children’s hosts in Philadelphia television history, Sally Starr. It also produced shows starring Chief Halftown and Happy the Clown. Klein could only encourage. He had no room on his air for a flying storyteller.
But Jack Downey did. Downey was the program director for Channel 10, which had some live children’s shows early on, “Action in the Afternoon” and “The Big Top,” but at the time Jane came to see him, with an introduction from Klein, his only competitor for Sally Starr and his colleagues, and Bertie the Bunyip, Buckskin Billy, and Uncle Pete at Channel 3 was Gene London (who, ironically, landed at Channel 10 after getting a runaround at Channel 3).
Jane had no television experience, no professional resume beyond Bar Harbor, and no official appointment to see Downey. She persisted and got the job.
“You can’t imagine how I felt then,” Jane said. “In the midst of being overjoyed, I thought, ‘Jane, Jane, what have you talked these people and yourself into? Now you have to deliver!'”
Deliver she did, flying being the biggest challenge. Wing and fly space wasn’t ample, but engineers in the early days of television were problem solvers, and they devised rigging to let Pixanne fly, a skill Jane mastered in five hours, the first few of which involved some near collisions.
Consider the difference between the time Jane proposed Pixanne and now.
Today you would have trouble seeing any program manager of any station. At all stations but Channel 6, the program manager is a contract sorter dealing with syndication rights. News departments do most of the producing. There are no significant children’s shows. Channel 29’s “Good Day Philadelphia” and “The Q” are the only daily programs that involve intensive productions. To my mind, the earlier era was better. It was a time of actual local television, and of creativity. Today, beyond news, all is corporate and vendor management.
Jane got her 54 Below gig much in the same way she earned her Channel 10 program. She was at a party in Palm Springs, struck up a conversation with Broadway producer Jim Kierstead (“Kinky Boots”), and mentioned wanting to sing at 54 Below, which Kierstead books. He’d heard Jane sing and called her a few weeks later to tell her 45 Below was a go.
Jane Norman was one of a kind. Pixanne is her legacy. It was seen in New York and in other markets besides Philadelphia. Being an artist at life is the lesson she most brilliantly taught.
Another TV pioneer gone
The vitriol and partisanship of our times was in ugly evidence last week when the passing of Fox News Channel architect Roger Ailes was announced last week.
Ailes died at his Florida home following a brief illness. He was age 77.
I understand the viciousness of current politics, which I consider a plague of both houses, Republican and Democrat.
Feelings based on political leanings have become so raw, legions had the bad taste to cheer Ailes’ death as if was a good thing. Justice and retribution, they cry!
Yes. Ailes left Fox under a cloud. He resigned in the midst of allegations of sexual abuse, a serious subject that is also becoming an increasing tactical tool to discredit and remove people who are controversial and the particular target of the McCarthyist left.
Ailes certainly fit that category. Sexual harassment, if it took place, should not be ignored. Even if all allegations were proven true, which they have not been to date, they don’t say everything there is to know about a perpetrator, his or her contributions, or his or her talents. They are one cog in a more complex machine.
I am fond of repeating my favorite quote (or slight misquote, as I don’t remember it exactly). It’s from “Heartbreak House” by George Bernard Shaw when the character, Hesione, says men and women don’t have their virtues and vices in neat little sets but jumbled together in one big ball. (Hesione uses the word “anyhow” to connote the goodness and badness that is mixed in us all.)
Judgment of a person should take into account 100 percent of who that person is or was. Anything else is a convenient selection to vaunt or vilify. This age is partisan, without perspective and proportion, and proud to be so.
Not everyone could be a fan of Ailes, and that’s fine, but while celebrating a sad passing, detractors negate the genius he showed as a conceiver, innovator, marketer, and communications specialist. They discount his achievements because they don’t like the product, or products for which he’s best know, Fox News and the renaissance of Richard Nixon in 1968.
Politics have taken away any due appreciation, and that’s a shame. It smacks of inaccuracy and skewed judgment. Would the same people who take glee in Ailes’s demise express the same jubilation if one of the people who formed MSNBC dies? Would they take umbrage if someone of opposing political persuasion sang: “Ding dong” at the death of Nancy Pelosi or any progressive?
Of course, not. They’d be outraged. As people who can estimate the true and lasting accomplishments of Roger Ailes should be at listening to fools crow because an ideological adversary has fallen.
Ailes was a powerhouse in the communications industry for 50 years. Millions watch Fox News Channel, which has fallen into some disarray since Ailes’ departure last summer.
I am critical of Fox News. MSNBC, CNN, and other news outlets, but their creation is not what galls me. Their inattention to honesty does, and they’re all guilty of it.
Ailes provided and built a platform. He found talent to which an audience of a kind would respond. He developed programming and personalities that worked.
His skill at producing was so great, he could have achieved as much at a network with a different or neutral stance. Ailes understood politics, but more, he understood television. He knew how to make a program and appeal to a mass audience, the prime rudiment of broadcast communications.
He worked with Joe McGinnis of “The Selling of the President,” a best seller that told how Nixon went from seeming political obliteration to two elections as President of the United States.
Before coming to Fox, Ailes worked his way up the ladder to many major positions in television. One of his earliest stops was Philadelphia, where we worked for Group W as proucer of “The Mike Douglas Show.” It was there he met Nixon. He was also a part of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 election team.
He also worked to form CNBC and the “America’s Talking” network, the latter being one his few failures.
Roger Ailes is not a villain. He is a Hall of Fame communicator, one for the ages.
RIP, Roger Ailes.
Neal Zoran’s Television column appears every Monday.
