A jolly, happy soul.
Jackie Vernon, the voice actor behind the 1969 holiday classic “Frosty the Snowman,” reportedly had multiple secret families before starting a life with his wife, Hazel, and their children.
David Vernon, one of the couple’s three kids, revealed the surprising news while remembering his late dad during the “Nostalgia Tonight with Joe Sibilia” radio show on Nov. 30.
According to David, he first learned that his famous father had “at least three” secret families when an unknown woman and her son showed up at the Vernon home sometime before Jackie’s death at 63 in November 1987.
“There was a woman there with a kid who was older than I was,” David recalled. “He was probably in his late teens and a little rough around the edges looking.”
“The woman asked to speak to my dad, and I said my dad’s on the road and he’s not home,” he continued. “Then, I remember she was very firm, she was like, ‘Well then, I want to speak to your mother.’”
After David’s mom came to the door, the unknown woman dropped the bombshell revelation regarding Jackie’s other marriages and families.
“So my mom came, and I guess she assessed what the situation was right away, but my mom told me to go upstairs and talked to her,” David shared. “But I heard a somewhat heated conversation going on, and then a couple of minutes later, they left.”
“So I had to know, I asked my mom, ‘Who was that?’ And it finally came out that before our family, my dad had been married at least three other times, which I was kind of shocked to find out,” he admitted.
That was not the only surprise that David learned about his dad, however, because it also came out that the “Frosy the Snowman” star had several other sons before his marriage to Hazel – and they all shared the same name.
“From these marriages, he had sons, and he named them all Ralph, after himself, after his original name, Ralph Verrone,” David said. “But he also abandoned all these families, moved on.”
“My mom wasn’t even sure if he’d divorced one of the women or if he was married to another one, but when my parents were married, they had a deal,” he noted.
That deal, David explained, was that Hazel “would name the boys” and Jackie “could name the girls.”
“She had sort of gotten this idea that a Ralph was an unloved kid, a kid that was left behind, and she wanted to make sure that I was never going to be a Ralph,” he said. “That’s when I realized that my mom had this plan that he stayed with our family and didn’t abandon us.”
Elsewhere during his interview with Joe Sibilia, David opened up about his dad’s “demons with depression and addiction.”
“His addiction was really kind of tranquilizers, Quaaludes and Valium,” the late comedian-turned-voice actor’s son shared. “It really took a toll on him, and he had to work very hard to kind of break free from that depression.”
“It was a hard struggle for him, and it was hard for us, seeing him go through that,” David added.
But despite his battles with depression and drug addiction, Jackie reportedly came to both accept and appreciate being famous as the voice of Frosty in both “Frosty the Snowman” and its 1976 “Frosty’s Winter Wonderland” sequel.
“One of the last Christmases that my dad was around, we all watched it together and he was so proud of it,” David remembered. “He enjoyed it, he laughed at it. He was so happy he had done it, and it became a very warm spot in his heart that I loved seeing that for him.”
“Even though my dad did so many other things – he worked with Judy Garland, Bette Midler, Frank Sinatra – it was the one thing people really remembered him for,” Jackie’s son concluded. “Newer generations found it and he really embraced it. He accepted that that was something he was going to be remembered for, and he loved it.”
