DETROIT — Soupy Sales, the rubber-faced comedian whose anything-for-a-chuckle career was built on 20,000 pies to the face and 5,000 live TV appearances across a half-century of laughs, died Thursday. He was 83.
Sales died at Calvary Hospice in the Bronx, New York, said his former manager and longtime friend, Dave Usher. Sales had many health problems and entered the hospice last week, Usher said.
At the peak of his fame in the 1950s and ’60s, Sales was one of the best-known faces in the nation, Usher said.
“If President Eisenhower would have walked down the street, no one would have recognized him as much as Soupy,” Usher said.
At the same time, Sales retained an openness to fans that turned every restaurant meal into an endless autograph-signing session, Usher said.
“He was just good to people,” said Usher, a former jazz music producer who managed Sales in the 1950s and now owns Detroit-based Marine Pollution Control.
Sales began his TV career in Cincinnati and Cleveland, then moved to Detroit, where he drew a large audience on WXYZ-TV. He moved to Los Angeles in 1961.
The comic’s pie-throwing schtick became his trademark, and celebrities lined up to take one on the chin alongside Sales.
During the early 1960s, stars such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Shirley MacLaine received their just desserts side by side with the comedian on his television show.
“I’ll probably be remembered for the pies, and that’s all right,” Sales said in a 1985 interview.
His greatest success came in New York with “The Soupy Sales Show” — an ostensible children’s show that had little to do with Captain Kangaroo and other kiddie fare. Sales’ manic, improvisational style also attracted an older audience that responded to his envelope-pushing antics.
Other Deaths
Collin Wilcox-Paxton, 74, the actress who portrayed the false accuser in the movie “To Kill a Mockingbird,” died Oct. 14 of brain cancer in North Carolina, her husband, Scott Paxton, confirmed Thursday.
Her part in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” based on Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-winning novel, was brief and memorable. She played Mayella Ewell, the young white woman who accuses a black man of rape. She angrily breaks down as defense attorney Atticus Finch, played by Gregory Peck, suggests she lied to avoid abuse from her racist father. The black defendant is convicted anyway.
