Cy Leonard

Cy Leonard and Happy, inscribed to a fellow ventriloquist, Toronto, November 19, 1965. Via Ventriloquist Central.

Cy Leonard's whole career started with a record player. Not a store-bought one. A homemade public address system, wired together by a Toronto teenager so he could spin 78s at a neighbor's Saturday night dances. A neighbor heard it, hired the kid to run the music, and just like that, in 1939, a high schooler had his first professional show business booking.^[1] He didn't know it yet, but that PA system was the start of a career that would put him on the first television broadcast a ventriloquist ever gave in Canada, in front of troops at the Arctic Circle, and holding a McElroy figure that would one day sell at auction for forty-three thousand dollars. Pull up a chair. This one's got some mileage on it.

From records to radio to a dummy

The PA system led to impersonations. Young Cy built a voice act, and on CFRB's Roy Ward Dickson's Fun Parade, his Winston Churchill was so dead-on that listeners called the station to complain somebody was just playing a phonograph record on the air.^[1] From impersonations, the move to ventriloquism was an easy one, especially with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy the biggest act in the country at the time. Cy taught himself the whole thing and didn't see another working ventriloquist perform until he'd already been doing it professionally for years, working a Len Insull figure and, for a while, a figure he believed was a Frank Marshall creation.^[1] Self-taught and going in blind is a hard way to learn a craft. It's a harder way still to get good at one. Cy managed both.

The war

In 1941 Cy joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and shipped out with an Air Force variety show that toured bases across England, Scotland, and Wales.^[1] For several months he emceed shows at London's Stage Door Canteen, the club where troops went to be entertained before the war sent them somewhere worse. The show followed the fighting into France, Belgium, and Holland, and after V-E Day, into Germany itself.^[1] Somewhere in England he picked up a Davenport figure of his own, working the war with borrowed partners in his hands, none of them yet the one that would matter.^[2] He came home to Canada in 1946.^[1]

The insurance policy and the figure that stuck

By 1948 Cy had his figure. He bought a McElroy from Rex Slocombe, a Toronto magician who'd ordered it new, direct from the McElroy brothers, when their shop was still new to the trade. It had barely been used.^[2][3] Cy named him Happy, and the two of them worked together for the next fifty years.^[3]

Three years later, in 1951, Cy did something a lot of performers wish they'd done and don't. He hedged his bet. Show business doesn't come with a pension plan, so he opened a hobby shop as an investment, meaning to hire a manager and keep performing full time.^[4] The shop took off instead. By 1957 the trade press was calling it flatly the largest hobby shop in the province, and Cy ran it himself, most days, with his club dates trimmed down to a hundred and fifty miles from home.^[5][4] That's the trade, folks. Sometimes the side business gets so good it changes the shape of the main one.

Then, in 1950, disaster. A stagehand backstage knocked Happy off a chair and the McElroy's plastic-wood head shell shattered into about twenty pieces. Experts who looked at it called it beyond repair.^[3] Cy spent weeks in what the trade paper at the time called anguish before he found a local model builder willing to try, and the man put Happy back together.^[2][3] For years afterward Cy told people he'd changed Happy's controls himself, and in a 1976 letter he explained exactly what he'd done and why: the original eye mechanism moved Happy's eyes automatically whenever the head turned, which worked fine until Cy needed the head to go one way and the eyes to look another, for a double take he wanted in the act. So he rewired it for full manual control, and used the parts from the nose-wiggle mechanism to do it, because on television, he said, "the crack around the nose looked like the Grand Canyon" anyway.^[6]

What sounded, to some collectors, like a performer tinkering with a museum piece turned out, decades later, to be something else. When Ray Guyll took the figure apart for a full restoration in 2005, he found that the 1950 repair had been done wrong all along: the eyes had never worked right afterward, and the wiggling nose had to be sealed shut just to hold together. Cy hadn't been vandalizing a McElroy. He'd been doing what any working performer does when the tool breaks mid-career: he adapted, and he kept the show going.^[7]

By 1983 Cy was still doing his own repairs, and still learning from the figure after thirty-five years together. A solder joint under Happy's tongue failed that February, and getting to it meant drilling two three-quarter-inch holes in the back of Happy's neck. Four days, fourteen hours a day, and he replaced a worn plastic part with aluminum, good, in his words, for "another 45 years or 10,000 jokes, whichever comes first."^[6] A few months later he admitted something rarer: after all those decades handling the figure, he still didn't fully understand why the mouth mechanism's spring tension had to be exactly right before it would work at all, and finding exactly right took him countless hours of trial and error.^[6]

Canadian television's first

On September 8, 1952, one of the earliest bookings from Canada's brand-new CBC television service put a ventriloquist on the air for the first time in the country's history, on a variety show called The Big Revue. The ventriloquist was Cy Leonard.^[8] Canadian television itself had only started broadcasting that same month, which makes the claim at least chronologically possible instead of just good advertising copy, and the trade press repeated it, credited to him by name, for the rest of his career.^[8][9]

He kept working in front of cameras for the next three decades. He landed a role in Tugboat Annie, likely the first sitcom ever produced in Canada, playing a con-man ventriloquist who tries to swindle Annie by making a talking parrot and a talking horse in an episode called "Annie's Race Horse." Happy showed up too, though only as a prop.^[2] He turned up on Troubles of Tracy, guested on The Tommy Hunter Show on both CBC and the Nashville Network, worked Bozo's Circus out of WGN in Chicago, and spent seventeen years, from 1962 to 1979, as the ventriloquist and puppeteer on CTV's The Uncle Bobby Show, alongside his own brother, Ron Leonard, another Uncle Bobby regular.^[1][10] Molson Beer put him in Hockey Night in Canada commercials and billed him exactly right: "Canada's own, Cy Leonard and his friend, Happy."^[1] Add ten return engagements at the Seniors' Jubilee Show at Roy Thomson Hall and you've got a Canadian entertainment career that ran the full stretch, from a homemade PA system in a teenager's bedroom to one of Toronto's premier concert halls.^[1]

A ventriloquist as foreign policy

Twice, Cy's own government sent him and Happy somewhere most acts never go. In 1967, Canada's centennial year, the Ontario government put together a variety show and toured it through remote parts of the province where live stage performances simply didn't reach. Cy and Happy were the comedy headliners.^[11] Eleven years later, the federal government sent a variety show to entertain UN peacekeeping troops in Egypt, Israel, and Cyprus, with a stop in Germany for NATO forces, and in both 1978 and 1980 they also played for the troops stationed at Alert, Canada's base at the Arctic Circle, which may be the coldest booking any ventriloquist in this archive has on record. They were invited back to do it again the second time because the first one went over so well.^[11] It's one thing to be popular with an audience. It's another thing entirely for your own government to decide you're what the troops need to see.

The double voice

Ask a room full of vents what the hardest thing in the act is, and somebody will eventually say the double voice: singing in the vent's own voice and the figure's voice at the same time, blended so it sounds like one performer singing in unison with himself. Cy did it, and he was honest about where he learned it and how little of it he could actually explain. "I don't think anyone can describe how it's created," he said of the technique. The best version he ever heard, in his own telling, came from the late Roy Douglas, and Cy said plainly, "I'm sure I could never have done it if I hadn't seen him."^[12] That's the whole trade in one sentence. Some of it you can teach. Some of it you can only catch, standing close enough to somebody else doing it right. A recording survives of Cy and Happy singing a duet with the double voice, the photograph of it donated to the archive by a fellow performer, Fred Anderson. An audio interview with Cy and Glenn McElroy, one of the two brothers behind the figure itself, survives with it.^[13]

The circle, and a little bit off the clock

The photo up top says as much about Cy's world as any list could. He's in his twenties, in a tuxedo, Happy tucked in front of him, and he's inscribed it to a fellow performer: "To Monsieur Brunard, a great friend and a great vent and talent," dated Toronto, November 19, 1965.^[2] Monsieur Brunard was the stage name of Dick Bruno, a working American ventriloquist of the same era, and this is how the trade actually ran: not just competitors sharing a bill, but people who signed each other's photographs and meant it. A 1967 photo puts Cy, Happy, and Edgar Bergen together at Toronto's Royal York Hotel, where both men happened to be working different rooms the same week, and Cy was also the man who took Bergen to see fellow performer Johnny Main work a Toronto burlesque house.^[14]

By 1959 Cy was married with two kids, a fourteen-year-old daughter and an eleven-year-old son, and both of them were already junior vents in their own right.^[15] His own brother, Ron Leonard, worked alongside him for years as a fellow regular on The Uncle Bobby Show.^[10] Off stage, Cy was an early computer hobbyist, too. He ran his own bulletin board system years before most people had heard the word internet, calling it Cy's Swap Shop, and friends' kids grew up logging on to it. Greg Lemon, whose father was one of Cy's oldest friends, remembers being invited on as a member.^[16] For about eight months Cy worked cruise ships, too, as assistant cruise director for Commodore Cruise Lines, with his wife serving as the ship's social director. One Sunday in St. Thomas, the visiting minister took ill, and the cruise director asked Cy to run the church service himself. He improvised the hymns with his wife on piano and found part of a sermon in a desk, and by all accounts it went over just fine.^[17]

His figures were never just Happy, either. A performer's registry from later in his career lists a small, mixed stable behind the star: Hortense, a Davenport figure; Croaky, a homemade frog character; a crow named Josie and a dog named Jo-Jo, both converted from toys; an old man rod puppet called Mario; and a rabbit named Ringo.^[18] A national television name, building half his cast out of converted toys and homemade parts anyway. That's not a contradiction. That's just what working performers do.

Happy Hazard

The McElroy figure Cy worked for fifty years. Rex Slocombe bought him new from the McElroy brothers in the early 1930s; Cy bought him in 1948. Restored in 2005 and later sold at auction as the top lot of the entire sale.

Photo via WorthPoint

The last bow

By the early 2000s the club dates were long behind him. In the winter of 2003, the trade press reported that Cy Leonard had announced his retirement and put his "wonderful McElroy figure Happy" up for sale, hoping the figure would find a good home.^[19] In November of 2005, Ray Guyll bought Happy, and found him in rough shape. Whoever had reassembled that shattered head back in 1950 hadn't fully known what he was doing, and the mismatched repair had thrown off the eye mechanics and forced the wiggling nose to be sealed shut for good. Guyll spent six months taking the whole figure apart, nut by nut, bolt by bolt, and put Happy back exactly the way the McElroy brothers built him.^[7] A year later, in November 2006, Happy joined Dan Willinger's Ventriloquist Central Collection. When that collection went to auction in 2015, Happy Hazard sold for forty-three thousand dollars, the top price of the entire sale, against an estimate of thirty to forty thousand.^[20] A figure a Toronto magician bought new as a hobby, and Cy Leonard worked for half a century, ended up the single most valuable lot in one of the largest ventriloquist figure auctions on record.

Cy Leonard died on May 20, 2008.^[21] Happy's own tribute, published under the figure's byline, put it plainly: "My partner of over half a century, Cy Leonard, has left us."^[22] The tribute named the friends waiting for him on the other side: Johnny Main and Edgar Bergen among them. Fifty-some years of a working partnership, and in the end, the dummy got the last word. For this business, that's about right.

A homemade PA system got him his first booking and a phonograph joke got him his first fan mail, but it was Happy who got the last laugh at forty three thousand dollars. Wood holds its value better than any of us do.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy