Early Life and Career
Arquette was born in Toledo, Ohio, the son of Winifred (née Clark) and Charles Augustus Arquette, a vaudevillian. He was the patriarch of the Arquette show business family, which became famous because of him. Arquette was the father of the late actor Lewis Arquette and the grandfather of actors Patricia, Rosanna, Alexis (originally Robert), Richmond, and David Arquette. He was a night club pianist, later joining the Henry Halstead orchestra in 1923.
Arquette had been a busy, yet not nationally known, performer in radio, theatre, and motion pictures until 1956, when he retired from show business. At one time, he was credited with performing in 13 different daily radio shows at different stations in the Chicago market, getting from one studio to the other by way of motorboats along the Chicago River through its downtown. One such radio series he performed on was The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok Arquette and Dave Willock had their own radio show, Dave and Charley, in the early 1950s as well as a television show by the same name that was on the air for three months. Arquette performed on the shows as Charley Weaver.
The story that Arquette later told about his big break was that one night in the late 1950s he was watching The Tonight Show. Host Jack Paar happened to ask the rhetorical question, "Whatever became of Cliff Arquette?" That startled Arquette so much that, "I almost dropped my Scotch!"
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