“The Benny of the air was a fraud, a myth, a creation. It should have surprised no one to learn – after years of toupee jokes that played so well into the vanity theme – that Benny never wore one. He overtipped in restaurants, gave away his time in countless benefit performances, and was lavish in his praise of almost everyone else. “Where would I be today without my writers, without Rochester, Dennis Day, Mary Livingstone, Phil Harris, and Don Wilson?” he asked a Newsweek profiler in 1947.”
