I watched Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein the night I learned my daughter died. All through that evening I had keened to the point of exhaustion. My voice was hoarse, body numb, restless and unable to sleep. I turned instead to a favorite from childhood, steeped in nostalgia for better days and comforting familiarity. It was January 16, 2015. Jess was twenty-six.
In the wake of my only child’s passing, clear thoughts proved disturbingly rare; concentration, a chimera. I revisited my Abbott and Costello collection: films, TV shows, and old radio programs. A friend assured me that this was healthy and worthwhile. “They minister to you,” he said. It occurs to me that the form such solace takes is not nearly as important as that it exists at all.
Costello also lost a child. This is his story.
While writing about mummy movies recently, I gave Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955) a quick spin. I once told Jess that the film wasn’t very good compared to their others. But Jess loved ancient Egypt as much as I do. “It’s not that bad, Dad,” she said. “Cuz Mummies!”
We may dismiss Bud Abbott and Lou Costello as Saturday morning fare, but it wasn’t always that way. In the 1940s, they were the most popular comedy team in film and radio. Their extraordinary wordplay was delivered with such exquisite timing that even now stars like Jerry Seinfeld hold them up as exemplars for aspiring comics. Carol Burnett says Abbott was the best straight man in the business.
Buck Privates, In the Navy, and Hold that Ghost, all released in 1941, were massive hits. The receipts from these three films alone bailed the nearly bankrupt Universal Pictures out of the red. Those of us reared on a TV diet of Abbott and Costello monster movies may not know what we missed, with the exception of . . . Meet Frankenstein (1948), which returns to the brilliance of their earlier features.
Costello didn’t care for the . . . Meet Frankenstein script, but his family and audiences loved it. Variety praised it on June 25, 1948 as “a rambunctious fracas that is funny and, at the same time, spine-tingling.” It was the third largest-grossing film in the world that year and is today listed in the American Film Institute’s The 100 Funniest American Movies of All Time. It has withstood the passing years, an “all-time great horror comedy [that] still works beautifully,” Leonard Maltin tells us. Filmmaker John Landis insists it “is just as funny today as it was then.” Author and pop culture historian Roy Thomas, perhaps best known for the Avengers, X-Men, and Conan series, simply calls it “one of my favorite films—period!”
Shortly after my daughter died, I came across Costello’s biography, Lou’s on First, written in 1981 by the comedian’s daughter, Chris. Happenstance? Perhaps, but as Fredrick Buechner observes, at what point does it take more effort to believe in coincidence than to accept the obvious? For me, holding this book in my hands, I sense another reminder that God—and Jess—are looking out for me. In its pages I learn something surprising.
Costello also lost a child. This is his story.
Lou was in a good mood as he prepared for his evening broadcast on November 4, 1943. He had recently recovered from a long bout with rheumatic fever. This was his first appearance in many months. Also, in two days the family had plans to celebrate his son Lou Jr.’s first birthday. They called the boy Little Butch.
“Keep Butch up tonight,” Lou told his wife Anne as he left for the NBC studios in Hollywood. “I want to see if he’ll recognize my voice over the air.” He planned on making some of the quirky comic sounds that his son so loved.
Later that day, Little Butch drowned in the Costello family pool.
Lou’s long-time manager, Eddie Sherman, took the solemn phone call. He immediately drove Costello home. “Lou was terribly heartbroken,” Sherman recalls. “He felt the whole world tumbled from under him.”
When word spread, calls came in from stars Mickey Rooney, Lana Turner, and many others offering to fill in for Lou during the broadcast. But the grieving father refused. “I promised Little Butch that he would hear me tonight,” Lou told Sherman. “Wherever God has taken him, I know he will hear me, and I want to keep my promise.”
The show was standard Abbott and Costello fare, though perhaps a bit more strained than usual. Lou wound down near the end of the program, collapsing into a chair on stage. The studio audience had only a moment to notice before Bud stepped out of character to inform radio listeners of the death. “In the face of the greatest tragedy which can come to any man, Lou Costello went on tonight,” he said, choking back tears. “I would like to take a moment to pay tribute to my best friend and to a man who has more courage than I have ever seen.”
The next few days were a torment to the bereaved father. He wasn’t home when his son needed him, Lou told himself. He was riddled with feelings of self-doubt, blame, and recrimination.
“The more you suffered, the more you wanted to bring healing to others.”
Little Butch’s funeral was held on what would have been the boy’s birthday, November 6. Silent tears streamed down Lou’s face. Platitudes offered by well-meaning friends had had no effect. During the service, the priest assured them that Butch was now with God. Somehow this spoke to Lou in ways that other words of comfort had not. He lifted his head, sat erect in the pew, and felt for the first time that he was not to blame for his son’s death.
This moment is not the end of Lou’s story. Grief lasts a lifetime. His marriage suffered but survived. It wasn’t until a year after Little Butch’s passing, over the Christmas holidays, that their family felt a small return to laughter and love, though now tempered with a sense of shared endurance and sorrow.
Lou carried his grief all of his days. Friends noticed that he was a changed man: at times impatient and temperamental, but also surprisingly sensitive, caring, and private. For years, Lou wore a bracelet with his son’s name on it, welded together so he could not take it off. Studio makeup artists were forced to camouflage it. “Butch’s death,” says Lou’s daughter Chris, “clouded everything else he did for the rest of his life.”
Others also sensed the change in Costello.
Carol Burnett, herself a bereaved parent, sees pathos in Lou’s performances in the late 40s and early 50s. “I had a particular love for Costello,” she says, not only because he so often portrayed an underdog, but also for his natural ability to combine comedy and tragedy. “Heartbreak and howls may seem far apart, but actually they are not,” she adds. “Beneath it all was this subtle layer of tragedy.” Lou may have agreed.
“I asked myself, ‘Why did this have to happen to me?’” Costello admitted years after Little Butch’s death. His son was constantly on his mind; every little boy he saw reminded him of a future he and Butch would never share. “There was sadness in my heart,” Lou wrote. “How I managed to be a funny man in pictures and on the radio, I will never know.”
When the popular television program This is Your Life featured Costello on November 21, 1956, ten minutes of their twenty-four minute running time were devoted to Little Butch’s passing—nearly half of the episode. “With a heart that came near to breaking, Lou, you’ve gone on to make the world laugh,” said host Ralph Edwards. “The more you suffered, the more you wanted to bring healing to others.”
In 1946, Lou and Bud, who was Little Butch’s godfather, founded the Lou Costello Jr. Youth Foundation. Later, on May 3, 1947, they opened a recreation center in Butch’s name. “All who come here have been created equal,” they wrote in a mission statement that was remarkable for the 1940s. “And will be given equal privileges regardless of race, color or creed.”
Within two years the foundation had provided 10,280 youngsters with free access to sports facilities, a library, workshops, and classrooms. Doctors and dentists provided free vitamins, food, and healthcare to the needy. There was also a full-sized pool. “In memory of Little Butch,” observed the host on This is Your Life, “many hundreds of boys and girls have had their lives protected by learning to swim.” In the same program, seven young recreation center members presented Lou with a watch they had all chipped in to buy. The inscription read: “Thanks for sharing your life with ours.”
The Lou Costello Jr. Recreation Center continues to serve young people in Los Angeles to this day. Little Butch’s portrait hangs in the main foyer.
Sometime after his son’s death, Costello invented a commercial ice cube maker, the first of its kind. By the late 1950s it was a common accessory in American households. The profits from Lou’s patent were an important source of income for his family. This aspect of the comedian’s personality may surprise film buffs, but not his daughter Chris. “My father loved electronics, he loved technology,” she says, adding that if he saw a modern DVD player, his first response would be: I have to have one of those.
Costello suffered a heart attack on February 26, 1959. A few days later, on March 3, Eddie Sherman stopped in for a round of jokes and quiet laughter. Later, minutes after Anne left his room, Lou was struck by a second attack. He died that afternoon, three days before his fifty-third birthday. “My God, what can I say?” sobbed Bud when he heard the news. “My heart is broken. I’ve lost the best pal anyone ever had.”
A requiem mass was held for Lou on March 7. Nine months later, on December 5, Anne died at the age of forty-seven. Today they rest near Little Butch in the Los Angeles Calvary Cemetery.
I’m watching Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein again. It’s funny, and silly, and I’m enjoying it. But amidst the clever wordplay, slapstick gags, and gentle humor, I spot an undercurrent of sadness in Lou’s eyes. I didn’t know about Little Butch the night I learned my daughter died, but even then I may have sensed something more than comforting nostalgia when I selected this particular film. Perhaps I also felt a communion of grief.
“Whenever I play in a picture or on television, I think that maybe someone whose heart is filled with sorrow will see me,” Lou said in his final years. “If even for a few moments I can make people forget their troubles, I feel that my life is worthwhile.”
