Jackie Gleason, alongside Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, and Hoosier Red Skelton, dominated, and to some degree invented, early television. An accomplished actor, writer, composer, orchestra leader and comedian, Gleason was truly the last of the big spenders. Always meticulously dressed with a flower in his lapel, Gleason was a consummate professional. He was quick with a story, even quicker with a comeback and a lot deeper than he looked. Gleason devoured books the same way he devoured steaks. Raised an Irish Catholic, Gleason was not devout by any means, but he could debate religion competently with theologians from all fields.
Physically, comedically and even mythically, he was larger than life. He dressed extravagantly, smoked and drank to excess, picked up every tab and exploited every luxury he could enjoy. Gleason knew the potential consequences to his health — physically and financially — he just didn’t care. The truth is, if you’d grown up as Jackie did, you too may not have cared much about consequences.
Gleason’s only brother died when Jackie was three years old and his dad abandoned the family five years later. His mother died when Jackie was still a teenager and he never graduated from high school. All that combined to drive Jackie Gleason’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Religion, spirituality, and questions of the unknown would haunt Jackie Gleason for the rest of his life. And oh, what a life it was!
Jackie was the talk of show business in 1955 when his $11 million deal with Buick and CBS to make two years of The Honeymooners (78 episodes that would run over 39 weeks) was announced. One of the perks Gleason received from CBS was the network’s picking up the tab for his Peekskill, New York Round Rock Hill mansion. Set atop a hill on six acres, the complex was a post-modern shrine to all things round. Gleason planned the design of the house for two years; it was completed in 1959.
The roundness continued on the interior with round rugs, round chairs, round couches, round beds. Everything was round, except the pool table of course. The donut-shaped main floor — which doubled as his broadcasting studio — featured a 40-foot-tall, three-headed round marble fireplace suspended from the center of the room. The property included a guest house and a round storage building that looked exactly like a UFO. (Google it and see for yourself.) The precious wood interior required custom crafting by Swedish carpenters who were brought to the U.S. for a year to work on the house. It also contained a basement disco and one of the very first in-home video projection systems. Ironically, despite state-of-the-art design work, the house was continuously plagued with a leaky wooden roof.
Gleason was greatly interested in the paranormal , buying and reading numerous books on the topic, as well as on parapsychology and UFOs. Gleason purportedly built the round house to acknowledge his interest in UFOs. He called the house “The Mother Ship” and referred to the garage as the “Scout Ship.” He also claimed a spiritualist had once told him that ghosts could not hide in corners and, leaky roof notwithstanding, the house had no corners. Gleason rarely spoke about his interest in ghosts mostly because he was too busy pursuing his interest in UFOs. During the 1950s he was a semi-regular guest on a paranormal-themed overnight radio show hosted by John Nebel on New York City’s WOR radio.
Gleason was a well known insomniac; a habit developed during his nightclub days. He often stayed up all night reading (or re-reading) some of the hundreds of UFO and paranormal phenomena volumes in his library. Nebel’s show was popular among New York’s night-owls and early risers. Unidentified flying objects were discussed almost daily, alongside topics like voodoo, witchcraft, parapsychology, hypnotism, conspiracy theories, and ghosts. Nebel’s radio show is unique in that it was the first to use a 7-second tape delay system, giving engineers a chance to edit unacceptable language before it was broadcast — perhaps owing more to the colorful listeners phoning in than to Nebel’s personal ingenuity. When Nebel died in 1978, his time slot was taken over by Larry King.
Jackie was a frequent show guest. On one show, Gleason famously offered $100,000 to anyone who could offer physical proof of aliens visiting Earth. Gleason later upped the amount to $1 million. The reward was never claimed. Gleason wrote the introduction to Donald Bain’s biography of Nebel. Jackie wrote: “Why is [Nebel] so strangely entertaining?… because the best entertainment is entertainment that opens your mind and tells you the world is bigger than you thought it was.”
He was a subscriber to the newsletter of the group Just Cause (Citizens Against UFO Secrecy) and made no attempt to hide his fascination on the subject of UFOs. Gleason spent small fortunes on everything from financing psychic research to buying a sealed box said to contain actual ectoplasm, the spirit of life itself. He corresponded with everyone from back-alley mediums to serious researchers like J.B. Rhine of Duke University, treating them all pretty much the same way. All this is very interesting in a “Waiting for Godot” sort of way, but the capstone to Gleason’s interest in UFOs comes in an alleged meeting he had with President Richard Nixon in 1973 where Nixon took his pal Jackie to a secret location to look at the bodies of dead aliens.
By the time of the alleged meeting with the President, Gleason had sold the round house and relocated to Miami, in favor of a more conventional house on three large lots adjoining the country club of a Miami golf course. The 6,000-square-foot lakefront home (named Glea Manor by the Great One himself) featured 6 bedrooms and 8 bathrooms. Besides the choice golf course location, the home included waterfalls, a sauna, a library and an exercise room. Nixon’s oft-used “Florida White House” Presidential retreat was located in Key Biscayne, a short drive from Gleason’s home. Rumors persist that aside from Nixon’s shared celebrity and love of golf, the unlikely duo shared an interest in UFOs.
What is known is that on February 19, 1973, according to White House records, the President met Jackie on the 18th green at the Inverness Golf and Country Club. The president had come to help to open a charity golf tournament run by Gleason. Jackie was a well-known supporter of the Republican party and a longtime Nixon ally.
Legend claims that Nixon returned to Florida in 1973 to show Jackie Gleason the alien bodies. Gleason’s second wife, Beverly McKittrick, stated that one night Gleason had returned home very shaken. She said that President Nixon had taken Jackie to a top secret area at Homestead Air Force Base where he had viewed the remains of small aliens. McKittrick related this story in an unpublished manuscript called “The Great One.” The story is unconfirmed and likely to remain so but it continues to fuel a fire among “Ufologists” to this day.
After his death, his large book collection was donated to the University of Miami library. The collection includes approximately 1,700 volumes of books, journals, proceedings, pamphlets, and publications in the field of parapsychology. The collection offers materials on such topics as witchcraft, folklore, extrasensory perception (ESP), unidentified flying objects (UFOs), reincarnation, mysticism, spiritualism, mental telepathy, the occult, clairvoyance, cosmology, demons, hypnosis, life after death, mediums, psychical research, voodooism, and ghosts.
The bulk of the ghost books in the Gleason collection are simply assemblages of ghost tales, both popular and personal. Some limit themselves to recounting the tales, while others seek to explain them, either by upholding their veracity or seeking to provide rational interpretations. Others represent a serious-minded and vigorous argument for the existence of ghosts. Others are more fanciful and tend to romanticize the idea of ghosts and occult beings. You can find the complete list of titles online.
But my favorite Jackie Gleason “leftover” story comes shortly after his death in 1987. When Jackie died, he apparently left two of the original “Ralph Kramden” bus driver uniforms he wore on The Honeymooners TV show hanging in the closet as a gift for whomever ended up with his beloved house. In 1999, Kramden’s 1955 bus driver’s uniform, consisting of a blue wool jacket with matching pants, fetched $64,100 at Sotheby’s auction house in New York City. What would jackie have thought of that? Well, I think he would have gotten a giggle out of it. After all, the inscription on his Miami tomb sums it all up pretty nicely. It reads: “And away we go.”
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest book is “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View.” Contact al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
