Comedy actor Bracken dead at 87

Eddie Bracken, 87, an actor who was the embodiment of sweet befuddlement for seven decades, from two glorious Preston Sturges comedies in the 1940s to “National Lampoon’s Vacation” in the 1980s, died Nov. 14 at a hospital in Montclair, N.J., of complications from surgery for a crushed disk in his neck.

Bracken was a child performer and appeared in Kiddie Troupers silent comedies, modeled on Hal Roach’s “Our Gang” formula. After success as a juvenile lead on Broadway, he came to Hollywood to repeat his part in one of them, the musical “Too Many Girls” (1940). He introduced the classic Rodgers and Hart pop ballad “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was.”

With a baby face and an unruly forelock of hair, he was an ideal choice for several light, wartime comedies as an appealing all-American male. His films included “Caught in the Draft” with Bob Hope and “Happy Go Lucky” with Betty Hutton, a whirlwind of energy whose style contrasted well with the insecure Bracken.

He and Hutton were cast in Sturges’ “Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” (1944), a saucy comedy in which Hutton finds herself impregnated after a spree with soldiers. Bracken played the infatuated boy-next-door who assumes the paternal role when Hutton cannot identify the father.

That same year, in Sturges’ “Hail the Conquering Hero,” he was Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith, the son of a small town’s greatest hero from World War I. The Marine Corps rejects him because of his chronic hay fever, but through a misunderstanding the townspeople celebrate him as a hero.

Those two movies, controversial in their day, are often rated among the greatest satires ever made. Bracken said he initially turned down Sturges for “Miracle” based on past experience with Hutton. He told a reporter that she was dating the producer and songwriter Buddy DeSylva, who kept adding songs for Hutton in pictures after they had finished shooting.

“So when I got this script for a movie, and I heard Betty was going to be the co-star, I said, ‘no thank you,'” he said. “I turned it down without reading it.”

Sturges, at his peak of power, called to ask why anyone would say no to him. After Bracken explained, Sturges assured him there would be no problem this time.

His film career went into decline after the mid-1940s. He returned to New York and dived back into stage work – giving more than 13,000 performances over the decades, by his estimate. In 1978, he was nominated for a Tony Award as a musical actor in “Hello, Dolly!”

He played Roy Walley, the kindly theme-park proprietor, in “National Lampoon’s Vacation” (1983) and a toy store owner in “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York” (1992).

He also founded a chain of theaters, but it lost more than $2 million.

“I could never be just an actor,” he told The Washington Post in 1980. “That would be like having the rest of the day to die in. . . . I’m in other businesses, most of them failures. Failures don’t scare me. You make it or you don’t.”

Edward Vincent Bracken was born into an impoverished family in Astoria, N.Y., and his parents entered him in baby beauty contests. He delighted audiences on the Knights of Columbus singing circuit, and that led work in the Kiddie Troupers series in New York.

Later, he tried to break into films in Hollywood and was on the verge of starvation when he wired his mother for bus fare back to New York.

He said he was in 16 stage flops before director George Abbott noticed him and cast him in the Broadway hit “Brother Rat,” about high jinks at a military academy. He worked with Abbott again on “What a Life” and “Too Many Girls.”

His wife of 63 years, actress Connie Nickerson, died in August.