TELEVISION

Ralph & Alice & Ed & Trixie

James Wolcott

It's a major archaeological find. Excavated from the dust and vapor of television's sacred vaults are longunseen chapters of The Honeymooners—chapters which predate the 1955 series, whose thirty-nine episodes have become couch-potato classics. The battleroyal saga of Ralph and Alice Kramden,

The Honeymooners was first hatched in the fall of 1951 on Cavalcade of Stars, a variety show hosted by that rolling boulder of showmanship Jackie Gleason. (Alice was played by Pert Kelton.) When Gleason became ringmaster of his own variety hour in 1952, he brought along The Honeymooners, but with a new Alice— Audrey Meadows. Once she tied on Alice's apron, an immortal comic partnership was bom. As Ralph Kramden, a bus driver with a heavy lunch pail, Gleason is a bragging tyrant, a blue-collar volcano always threatening to boom. To his fire, Meadows's Alice is lined with asbestos, thwarting and implacable. The irreplaceable third member of this team is Art Carney's Norton, an angel-sweet goofball who wears a striped vest over his T-shirt and refers to his fellow sewer workers as "the denizens of the deep." En these early Honeymooners, which Showtime is knitting together for a two-hour August special (and which Viacom will syndicate this fall), the actors all appear as young and glossy as kittens. Gleason's sloping belly has yet to become a monarch's paunch.

And how do the shows themselves hold up? Sturdily. Along with all the familiar, cherished riffs ("Bang... zoom!"), there are rediscovered bits of brilliant slapstick and great comic mixups, as when Ralph overhears Alice rehearsing a scene for an amateur theatrical and mistakenly thinks she's plotting his murder. ("Why does she want to kill me now?" asks Ralph, to which Norton sensibly replies, "You'd think she'd done it years ago.") In one installment, Ralph, forced to diet, complains, "I've seen more food dragged down holes by ants!" In another, he poses for an ad, thinking that he will represent men who are "slim, trim, and thirty." It turns out that he will be the model for "fat, flab, and forty."

But for true Honeymooners devotees, the chief revelation is the segment in which Ralph and Alice adopt a baby, a sketch which not only supplies a vital missing footnote to the history of the Kramden household but brushes up against difficult, tearing emotions. (Audrey Meadows makes a pale-death entrance in one scene that is truly silencing.) Watching this comedy-drama, you can't help but notice that painted over the Kramdens' sink are parallelograms of sunlight. Given the close, shabby confines of their lives, that detail seems strangely poignant. These rediscovered Honeymooners, too, are slants of painted sunlight, patches of wished-for happiness on a wall of peeling gray. What is there left to say? Baby, you're the greatest.