By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 14, 2006; B06

Red Buttons, 87, a burlesque-trained comedian who became an early television star and won an Academy Award for his dramatic portrayal of a star-crossed lover in "Sayonara," died July 13 at his home in Los Angeles. He had vascular disease.

Mr. Buttons was sometimes called an heir to two silent-era comedians equally capable of mischief and pathos, Charlie Chaplin and Harry Langdon. "I'm a little guy," Mr. Buttons once said, "and that's what I play all the time -- a little guy and his troubles."

He had risen from performing in vaudeville and burlesque houses to gaining minor parts in legitimate theater and television. He found himself a sudden celebrity in 1952 with his own televised comic skit show. Among his character creations were punched-out prizefighter Rocky Buttons, teenaged truant Muggsy Buttons and a bumbling German named Keeglefarven.

He temporarily ignited a national craze with his show's ditty, "Ho, Ho, Ho, Strange Things Are Happening!" His inoffensive brand of zaniness made him, for a few years, a competitor to Milton Berle, but "The Red Buttons Show" lost its momentum and went off the air in 1955.

In danger of returning to obscurity, Mr. Buttons was saved by an admirer, director Joshua Logan. He had once seen Mr. Buttons in a straight dramatic television role as the troubled nightclub comedian Joe E. Brown and cast him as a persecuted Air Force sergeant in his 1957 film version of James A. Michener's novel "Sayonara."

The story is about a forbidden romance between U.S. servicemen and Japanese women during the Korean War. The film's star was Marlon Brando, who played a friend of Mr. Buttons. Mr. Buttons and Miyoshi Umeki, who played his wife, won best supporting actor Oscars playing lovers who take their own lives.

From then on, Mr. Buttons was in demand as a supporting actor in comedies and dramas. Memorably, he was a paratrooper stuck on a church steeple during the Normandy invasion in "The Longest Day" (1962) and played a luckless hoofer named Sailor in the Depression-era dance marathon tragedy "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" (1969) starring Jane Fonda.

Mr. Buttons also became a frequent guest on television shows. At celebrity roasts, he was known for his punch line about famous people who, like him, never got such a dinner.

"Abe Lincoln, who said, 'A house divided is a condominium,' never had a dinner," he once said. There was also Lot, "who said to his wife when she was turning into a pillar of salt, 'Stop shaking!' Never got a dinner."

Sometimes the material turned bawdy, showing his burlesque roots. He once said of Playboy magazine publisher Hugh Hefner, "When he was a kid, he kept a copy of Good Housekeeping under his mattress."

Mr. Buttons, the son of Eastern European immigrants, was born Aaron Chwatt on Feb. 5, 1919, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Growing up in a neighborhood overrun by bullies, he said he developed an early defense by crying out that he was an orphan.

"It was the only responsive chord you could hit," he told the New York Times. "The only kind of love this little gonif recognized was mother love. All the kids used that gimmick in a pinch."

At 12, at which point his family had moved to the Bronx, he won an amateur-night contest at a local theater, singing "Sweet Jennie Lee." Diminutive even as an adult, he continued performing for many years as Little Skippy.

In school, he was known less for academics than for excellent soccer skills, namely showing off French postcards in the huddle to lift his team's morale.

In 1935, he began working summer jobs in Catskill Mountain resorts. Initially hired as singer, his voice cracked, "so they made me a comedian," he said.

He supposedly got his stage name while working as a singing bellhop. His carrot-shaded hair, along with his uniform featuring 48 buttons, turned him into Red Buttons.

During the next several years, he devoted his life to performing, playing at bar mitzvahs, nightclubs, lodge meetings and burlesque houses. A talent scout for burlesque impresario Harold Minsky booked him for the Gaiety Theatre in New York, a big break.

More burlesque and stage work followed, as did a brief marriage to a stripper known only as Roxanne.

Actor José Ferrer noticed Mr. Buttons and brought him to the legitimate theater in a short-lived 1942 farce called "Vickie." Soon after, he won a part in Moss Hart's "Winged Victory," which starred servicemen entertainers and was designed to sell war bonds. In the Marine Corps at the time, Mr. Buttons was billed as Pvt. Buttons. He went to Hollywood in 1944 for the film version of "Winged Victory" and continued to tour in the play.

He once described going AWOL between Detroit and Cincinnati. When he presented himself to face the charges, he said he walked up to a dim colonel from Texas, showed him a big poster of a stripper, saluted and said proudly, "Guilty, sir!" He said he received the Good Conduct Medal.

In the late 1940s, he appeared in two minor Broadway musicals. One was "Hold It!," about which he joked that a critical response could have been " 'Hold It'? Fold It!"

CBS created "The Red Buttons Show" in 1952 to compete with Berle's comic antics on rival network NBC. The program later switched to NBC and was transformed from a variety show to a situation comedy with Mr. Buttons as a hapless TV comic and Phyllis Kirk as his wife.

When the show was canceled, Mr. Buttons could barely find work. He worked in nightclubs and had three guest dates on "The Perry Como Show."

"I found out how tough show business can be," he told a United Press reporter in 1957.

After "Sayonara," Mr. Buttons appeared with Glenn Ford in "Imitation General" (1958) and was the voice of a cat named Robespierre in the animated film "Gay Purr-ee" (1962).

He also was in the John Wayne African adventure film "Hatari!" (1962), an Ann-Margret remake of the Western "Stagecoach" (1966) and the shipboard disaster film "The Poseidon Adventure" (1972). His film work thereafter was sporadic, but he made several guest appearances on TV's "ER."

In 1995, he briefly played the Ambassador Theater in New York for a one-man show called "Buttons on Broadway." Commenting on his likely audience, he began the show saying, "Good evening, fellow members of AARP." Another joke was about attending "a New York garment-center lunch for business partners who trust each other. I was lonely, but I was there."

His marriages to Roxanne and a former beautician named Helayne McNorton ended in divorce. His third wife, Alicia Pratt Buttons, died in 2001.

Survivors include two children from his third marriage; a brother; and a sister.