Jackie Gleason’s Closed Casket Will Be on Public View Today

The closed casket of Jackie Gleason will be on view to the public today at Lithgow Funeral Home in North Miami, a family spokesman said Thursday.

A funeral Mass, closed except to family members, will be said Saturday, he said, and the time and place will not be made public. Burial arrangements were still not complete for the actor-comic, who died of cancer of the colon and liver Wednesday night in his home near Fort Lauderdale. He was 71.

Audrey Meadows, who played Gleason’s wife, Alice, in “The Honeymooners,” said she talked to Gleason on Monday and he sounded “wonderful.”

“I always felt that somehow Jackie was indestructible, that he would be with us for a long, long time,” she said, “and of course he will through the legacy of his work.”

Art Carney, who played Ed Norton, Ralph’s bumbling upstairs neighbor, said: “I was fortunate in being able to talk to Jackie on the telephone last Friday when he got home from the hospital. We had a little chat and Jackie didn’t complain.

“We hit it off beautifully from the beginning,” Carney said Thursday from his Connecticut home. “It was the right chemistry from the first handshake in 1950. He was 35 and I was 32. He was a helluva good actor and a very funny man. We always worked easily together.”