Portland Hoffa
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Portland Hoffa (25 January 1905, Portland, Oregon – 25 December 1990, Los Angeles, California), an American comedienne, actor, and dancer, is remembered best as the stage and radio partner of her first husband, legendary humorist Fred Allen.[1]
A veteran of vaudeville and Broadway-level stage productions, Portland Hoffa met Fred Allen while performing in The Passing Show in 1922 and joined him in his vaudeville routines (centered around his clever jokes spun off his weakness as a juggler); the couple married before Allen began his long-running radio work in 1932, with Hoffa taking instruction in the Roman Catholic Church prior to the marriage. Hoffa became familiar for her high-pitched voice, her brief routines involving jokes bounced off or from her mother, and, later, strolling Allen's Alley with her husband, after asking him what his question of the week for the Alley denizens would be. Although Hoffa performed under her real name on her husband's show, the character she portrayed as "Portland Hoffa" in the radio broadcasts was not Allen's wife; instead, she depicted an enthusiastic girl of indeterminate age, somewhere about thirteen years old. One of Fred Allen's sponsors loathed the character played by Hoffa, and kept urging Allen to drop her from the show. Allen ignored these requests for as long as he could, then finally — in an angry outburst at a sales meeting — told the executive that the broadcasts were bearable only due to Hoffa's presence, and that if she were removed from the program then Allen would quit.
Fred Allen's declining health was the main reason why he ceased hosting his own show after 1949, but Hoffa often joined him as a semi-regular on Tallulah Bankhead's radio variety show, The Big Show (1950–52). She also appeared as the "mystery guest" on one episode of television's What's My Line, on which Allen had become a panelist from 1954 until his death in early-1956. Hoffa and Allen had also appeared in such films as Is Everybody Listening? (1947) and the Jack Benny vehicle, Buck Benny Rides Again (1940).
Hoffa re-married in 1959, to bandleader Joe Rines, later an advertising executive. Hoffa and Rines lived long enough to celebrate a silver wedding anniversary, allowing Hoffa an unusual second such anniversary in one lifetime. In 1965, Hoffa rounded up a large volume of her first husband's correspondence to be edited into Fred Allen's Letters. Rimes died in the mid-1980s. One of three sisters, Hoffa died Christmas Day in 1990. Like her first husband, Portland Hoffa has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Laurie, Joe, Jr. Vaudeville: From the Honky-tonks to the Palace. New York: Henry Holt, 1953. p. 21.
[edit] References
- Fred Allen, Much Ado About Me (Boston: Atlantic, Little Brown, 1956)
- Frank Buxton and Bill Owen, The Big Broadcast: 1920–1950 (New York: Flare Books/Avon, 1972).
- The New York Times, 30 December 1990.
