Robert Clary - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Born in 1926 in Paris, France, Clary was the youngest of 14 children. At the age of twelve, he began a career singing professionally on French radio and also studied art at the Paris Drawing School. In 1942, because he was Jewish, he was deported to the Nazi concentration camp, Ottmuth. He was later sent to Buchenwald where he was liberated on 11 April 1945. Twelve other members of his immediate family were sent to Auschwitz. Clary was the only survivor. When he returned to Paris after the war, he learned that some of his siblings had not been taken away and had survived the Nazi occupation of France.

He returned to the entertainment business and began making songs that not only became popular in France, but in the United States as well. Clary made his first recordings in 1948; they were brought to the United States on wire and were issued on disk by Capitol Records. He went to the U.S. in October 1949. One of Clary's first American appearances was a French language comedy skit on The Ed Wynn Show in 1950. Clary later met Merv Griffin and Eddie Cantor. This eventually led to Clary meeting Cantor's daughter, Natalie Cantor Metzger, whom he married in 1965. Cantor later got Clary a spot on the Colgate Comedy Hour. In the mid-1950s, he appeared on NBC's The Martha Raye Show and on CBS's Appointment with Adventure, a dramatic anthology series.

Clary's comedic skills were quickly recognized by Broadway, where he appeared in several popular musicals including New Faces of 1952, which was produced as a film in 1954. In 1952, he appeared in the film Thief of Damascus which also starred Paul Henreid and Lon Chaney Jr. In 1958, he guest starred on NBC's The Gisele MacKenzie Show.