The Honeymooners had a short television run, but it was one of the most memorable shows of the 1950s. The comedy series aired on CBS for one season, from 1955 to 1956, per IMDb, producing 39 classic episodes spawned from sketches from the variety series Cavalcade of Stars and The Jackie Gleason Show.
The TV series starred comedy legend Jackie Gleason as Brooklyn bus driver Ralph Kramden, Audrey Meadows as his wife Alice, Art Carney as neighbor Ed Norton, and Joyce Randolph as Norton’s wife, Trixie.
The Honeymooners cast was a match made in TV heaven. “Oh God, Jackie was so marvelous to work with,” Meadows told The Washington Post in 1988. “He was really, absolutely, a comic genius. We never rehearsed.”
But Meadows nearly missed her chance to play Mrs. Ralph Kramden. In a 1993 interview with The Los Angeles Times, the actress revealed that while the network wanted her, Gleason initially rejected her for the role because she was “too young and pretty.”
Meadows, who was six years Gleason’s junior, went the extra mile to prove she had what it took to play a Brooklyn housewife. She hired a photographer to take photos of her looking less than glamorous—and Gleason didn’t recognize her in the shots she sent over.
“I had no makeup, did my hair all funny, took an old blouse and an old apron and posed in a kitchen with a frying pan,” Meadows told the outlet. “[Gleason] took one look and said, ‘Oh, my God! That’s Alice. Where is she?’ When he found it was me, he said, ‘Hire her. Any dame with a sense of humor like that deserves the job.’ Isn’t that something?”
While their partnership on The Honeymooners was short-lived, the TV husband and wife reunited for several TV specials decades later and remained lifelong friends.
Gleason died in 1987 at age 71, while Meadows lived until 1996.
Speaking with The Washington Post, Meadows revealed that she talked to Gleason on the phone days before he died of cancer. Before his wife, Marilyn, handed him the phone, she told him, “It’s your Alice.”
“I said, ‘Jackie, I just called to tell you I loved you,’ and he said something — I didn’t understand a word of it,” The Honeymooners star recalled. “And I said, ‘I never thanked you for giving me the part of Alice.’ And suddenly he said, ‘I knew what I was doing!’ The same voice as ever, clear as a bell.”