Ernie Kovacs - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Kovacs' father Andrew immigrated from Hungary at age 13. He worked as a policeman, restaurateur, and bootlegger; the last so successfully that he moved his wife Mary, and sons Tom and Ernie, into a 20-room mansion in the better part of Trenton.

Though a poor student, Kovacs was influenced deeply by his Trenton Central High School drama teacher, Harold Van Kirk, and received an acting scholarship at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1937 with Mr. Van Kirk's help. The end of Prohibition and the Depression brought hard financial times to the family. When Kovacs began drama school, all he could afford was a fifth floor walk-up apartment on West 74th Street in New York City. During this time, Ernie managed to see a lot of "Grade B" movies (admission was only a dime); many of them were the spark of his routines later on.

A 1938 local news story shows him as a member of the Prospect Players, not yet sporting his trademark mustache. Like any aspiring actor, Kovacs used his class vacation time to pursue roles in summer stock companies. While working in Vermont in 1939, he became so seriously ill with pneumonia and pleurisy that his doctors didn't expect him to survive. Over the next year and a half, his comedic talents emerged as he entertained both doctors and patients with his antics during stays at several hospitals. While hospitalized, he also developed a lifelong love and understanding of classical music through the gift of a radio, which he kept tuned to WQXR. By the time he was released, his parents had separated, and he went back to Trenton, living with his mother in a two-room apartment over a store.

His first paid entertainment work came in 1941, as a disc jockey on Trenton's WTTM radio. Ernie spent the next nine years with WTTM, becoming the station's director of Special Events along the way; in this position he did things like trying to see what it was like to be run over by a train (leaving the tracks at the last minute) and broadcasting from the cockpit of a plane for which he took flying lessons. Kovacs was also involved in local theater; a news clipping from a local paper ran a photo and the news that he was doing some directing for the Trenton Players Guild in early 1941. The Trentonian, a local weekly newspaper, offered him a column in June 1945; Ernie called it "Kovacs Unlimited".