Scornful bosses nearly reined in Rudolph… but he won by a nose
The heart- warming story of how our festive favourite’s creator had to fight for his flying hero
RUDOLPH the Red- Nosed Reindeer is a beloved part of Christmas tradition. Guiding Santa’s sleigh one foggy Christmas Eve, he inspired one of the most successful Yuletide songs ever recorded, and was immortalised in an animated TV classic.
But behind the hero who lights the way as Santa delivers gifts to children across the globe lies a poignant true- life tale. Rudolph was created to sell children’s toys at a department store by a hard- up advertising copywriter struggling to pay his sick wife’s medical bills. Then he had to wait 10 years to see Rudolph’s story turned into a song that finally became a hit.
Today, 81 years after the reindeer with the shining schnozzle was invented, it feels as if he has always been there – one of the festive season’s best- loved characters, second only to Father Christmas, and way out in front of Frosty the Snowman and Santa’s elves.
The catchy song that tells his story is a festive hit topped only by White Christmas, and has been performed by stars from Bing Crosby to Frank Sinatra, the Supremes, the Jackson Five, and Destiny’s Child, selling more than 150 million copies.
First recorded by singing cowboy Gene Autry in 1949, it remains a classic, and in 2018 Autry’s original recording again hit the Billboard Top 40.
The song inspired the 1963 stop- motion animated TV special Rudolph the RedNosed Reindeer, featuring the voice of Burl Ives, which has become an annual Christmas event.
Poor old bullied and bewildered Rudolph, shut out from any reindeer games by stablemates who laughed and called him names, became a cultural sensation.
His story offers the promise that any underdog, no matter how different they look or feel, can become a
success.
“Rudolph’s story embodies the American Dream,” wrote Ronald Lankford in his cultural history of American Christmas songs.
These days, the doe- eyed wonder has become a multi- million pound commercial juggernaut, featured on Christmas scarves, socks, sweaters, pyjamas, T- shirts, blankets, bath- mats, face- masks, shower curtains, cuddly toys, ornaments, cards, and much, much more – fitting for a flying ruminant created to cash in on Christmas.
Rudolph was invented in 1939 to boost holiday season sales for America’s second largest department store chain, Montgomery Ward, by the firm’s low- paid in- house advertising copywriter Robert May, a Jew who didn’t celebrate Christmas.
He was tasked with creating a 32- page seasonal poem of rhyming couplets to help sell children’s toys: an assignment that would take him the next eight months, working in his spare time. May was less than thrilled as he was in no mood for merriment. “My wife was suffering from a long illness and I didn’t feel very festive,” he confessed.
“Here I was, heavily in debt at age 35, still grinding out catalogue copy,” he lamented.
“Instead of writing the great American novel, as I’d once hoped. I was describing men’s white shirts. It seemed that I’d always been a loser.”
May proposed a poem about a reindeer: his four- year- old daughter Barbara’s favourite animal at the local Chicago zoo. But when he presented his idea at the office, it was greeted with scorn.
“For gosh sakes, Bob,” his boss grumbled, “can’t you do better than that?”
The store manager took exception to Rudolph’s red nose, claiming it reminded him of a crimson- nosed drunk, not the image he had hoped to convey.
Undeterred, May took a friend from the store’s art department to the zoo to sketch some deer, and the adorable scarlet- snouted oddball was finally given the go- ahead.
“Spring slipped into summer,” recalled May, struggling to evoke festive Noel cheer as his wife Evelyn began to lose her battle with cancer. “My wife’s parents came to stay with us to help,” he recalled. “Suddenly her condition grew worse. Then in July she was gone.”
His boss offered to hand the Rudolph assignment to another writer, but May wanted to keep going. “I needed Rudolph now more than ever,” he confessed. “I buried myself in the writing.” May saw himself in the bullied, beleaguered reindeer, explaining that he had been a small and shy child, and “knew what it was like to be the underdog.”
He finished writing in August, and at Christmas 1939 Montgomery Ward distributed 2.4 million copies of the poem. Among its admirers was May’s brotherin- law, songwriter Johnny Marks, who in 1949 condensed the lengthy poem into two sleek verses, whose ugly ducklingturned- hero fable appealed to a rising postwar America.
Corporate commercialism again drove Rudolph’s success, when manufacturing giant General Electric invested $ 500,000 in 1963 to create a stop- motion Christmas TV special. The film, narrated by Burl Ives as Frosty the Snowman, with its visit to the Island of Misfit Toys, and hit songs including A Holly Jolly Christmas, cashed in on American sentimentality. It also provided a belated windfall for struggling copywriter Robert May. After Montgomery Ward had given away more than 6 million copies of his Rudolph poem, the store took pity on May, still deep in debt from his late wife’s medical bills, and in 1946 gifted him the copyright to Rudolph. He recorded the poem in an
‘ Today children all over the world read about the little deer who started out a loser just as I did’