MUSTY THEATERS AND ASBESTOS CURTAINS:

THE RISE OF BURNS AND ALLEN

Nobody had believed he would ever play the Palace.

But George Burns, in a flashy new suit and clean spats, boldly strode across Broadway toward the top theater in vaudeville. He was headed for his first performance in the home of show business legends.

This show was for his mother, too sick to attend the performance, for his father, who had died so young, for Gracie, who hesitantly trailed beside him, for the nasty managers who had fired him and the audiences that had mocked him. And, though he had loved the life, this was also to make up for all those years dragging steamer trunks on trains to Altoona or Fargo only to stay in cramped hotel rooms and cook on illegal hot plates. Soon he would belong to entertainment royalty.

The Palace was a tall, narrow building on Broadway and 47th decorated in gold and crimson. Burns and Allen strode past the sidewalk out in front, nicknamed The Beach, where vaudevillians, would-be vaudevillians, and dazzled members of the public met and mingled, discussing jokes and acts, wages and sins, and the hazards and joys of the profession.

They walked past the sign backstage that read: "This Theater caters to Ladies and Gentlemen and Children. Vulgarity will not be tolerated," past the chalkboard where, at rehearsal that morning, they had learned their spot on the bill, and past the dressing room on the first floor reserved for headliners who wouldn't have to climb the stairs or enter the rickety steel elevator the management deemed perfectly suitable for newcomers. Burns and Allen, though, had to ride the shaky contraption upstairs. Their dressing room was small and old-fashioned but clean. The size of the room didn't bother Burns. He felt the exuberant surge of adrenalin, the sheer fun, that only performing gave him.

Gracie was, as always, dressed in long sleeves, careful to cover her bad arm. They each put on their make-up. It took Gracie three times before she could get her lipstick on the way she wanted. They didn't speak to each other.

The show was a Monday matinee, the traditional first performance when friends and colleagues would be there for support. Burns knew Jack Benny, Archie Leach, the good-looking British guy who wanted to become an actor but for now earned five dollars a week walking on his stilts at Coney Island, and the others would arrange for an usher to bring flowers to the stage after the show.

He would not let them down.

Burns stared in the mirror. His thirty-year old face stared back.

It had never been easy being George Burns.

He and his eight brothers and sisters had slept on one mattress in a single-room tenement apartment at 95 Pitt Street in New York's predominantly Jewish Lower East Side. Three more children would eventually join the family, so they moved to a larger-three-room-apartment at 259 Rivington Street. It was a bustling time. The Williamsburg Bridge had opened in 1903, and the first subway line began in 1904.

Burns' father, Louis, labored in a kosher butcher shop, but never made enough money. Dora, his wife, seemingly fed her family from the air. Their difficult situation grew tragic when Louis, sitting by the window reading from his prayer book, slumped over and died from influenza. He was forty-seven, and young George, then still known by his real name, Nat Birnbaum, was eight. Determined to assume his father's failed place as breadwinner, the young boy might have chosen a career in crime. Meyer Lansky, for example, had arrived with his family from Russia in 1911 and grew up on the Lower East Side.

Instead, Burns worked at Rosenzweig's candy store. There, mixing cherry and chocolate syrup, Nat and two brothers sang in harmony, a common pastime in poverty-stricken immigrant homes.

One day Lewis Farley, a postal worker determined to enter show business, came into the store and heard the boys singing. Farley urged them to add a fourth partner and form a group he offered to manage. Soon the "Peewee Quartet" was born.

Farley booked the group where he could-which meant they usually played on street corners. Burns claimed they were most successful on the Staten Island Ferry. Young couples paid them to sing somewhere else. Burns noted that "The only place they could go to avoid us was by jumping overboard."

By ten, Nat Birnbaum had lost a long struggle with arithmetic. He could barely read or write. It was torture for him to unscramble letters and recognize words. He knew his mind was faster than those of the other students, but still he could not grasp the lessons.

So he fled school and joined a dance team called The Burns Brothers. Burns claimed he took the last name from his habit of stealing coal from the Burns Brothers Coal Yard, which may or may not have been the case.

Burns had a lifelong penchant for sweetening reality, giving it what was then called a "vaudeville shine," making it funnier than it was or permitting him to separate himself emotionally from painful memories.

It is likely that young Nat acquired the "Burns" name simply by shortening "Birnbaum." It was common for immigrants entering show business to alter their birth names. They didn't want to ruin their family's reputation. Most people, after all, didn't think vaudevillians led either a dignified or a moral life.

Nat Birnbaum, though, couldn't call himself Nat Burns on stage because there was already a vaudevillian named Nat Burns who didn't want an upstart stealing his name. So Nat Birnbaum changed his first name to George. Burns' brother Izzy had chosen to call himself George, and Nat thought that sounded fine.

George Burns was born, but vaudeville didn't much notice or care about the birth. Managers quickly returned his pictures to him, the dreaded vaudeville sign that a performer's contract had been canceled. He tried acts of every kind. He danced tangos. He roller-skated. It didn't matter. Nobody wanted him, or, if they did, they didn't want him back.

He had to change his stage name frequently to trick managers into rehiring him. He was Pedro Lopez or Phil Baxter, among many others. He starred-very briefly-in the act "Maurice Valenti and His Wonder Dog." The dog was somewhat less wondrous than advertised. Burns appeared with a supposedly trained seal in "Flipper and Friend." The seal didn't do much--despite its top billing.

It was discouragingly difficult to earn enough money just to eat. Burns often had to pour ketchup into hot water and slurp spoonfuls of this cheap version of tomato soup. It became his lifelong habit to add ketchup to all meals.

Along the way, Burns married a partner from a ballroom dancing act. Hannah Siegel's parents supposedly wouldn't allow their daughter to go on a twenty-six week tour with a single man, and so, Burns claimed, he married her and gave her the stage name of Hermosa (after his favorite cigar). He later implausibly suggested that the marriage lasted only as long as the tour.

His next act was with Billy Lorraine; the two imitated popular singers. Fifteen-year-old Milton Berle was higher on the bill than they were and he thought-correctly-that their act was hopeless. George Burns, already twenty-seven, found himself married to a woman who was no longer his partner in any sense of the word, poor, with few prospects, and a pathetically weak act. He had plenty of drive and ambition, he was happy, but he knew he needed something else.

Burns' life changed at his final booking in Union City, New Jersey during the late autumn of 1923. Rena Arnold, another performer on the bill, had invited her roommates, Mary Kelly and Gracie Allen, backstage. Arnold told Gracie that Burns and Lorraine were splitting up and each was looking for a woman partner. Arnold strongly suggested that Gracie should team up with Billy Lorraine. Gracie went with the intention of meeting him but ended up chatting with Burns. The two met again a few days later at a rehearsal room in a song publisher's office.

There was no romance at first. Burns remained nominally married to Hannah Siegel, and Gracie, just seventeen, was in love with Benny Ryan, a big, handsome Irish song-and-dance man. Ryan was familiar territory. Gracie's father, George Allen, was a big, handsome Irish song-and-dance man, but one who had abandoned his family, pausing, before he left, to teach five-year-old Gracie the steps of an Irish jig. She began her life in entertainment doing the dance at a church social.

Gracie would later become famous for a line about her childhood: "When I was born, I was so surprised I couldn't talk for a year and a half." It was more poignant than audiences realized. At exactly the age of a year and a half, the infant Gracie had grabbed a pot off the stove and spilled boiling liquid on her arm and shoulder scalding herself terribly. The accident left permanent scars. She took to covering up the arm, so that there are no pictures of Gracie Allen with the arm bare.

Gracie entered show business with her sisters in a singing quartet. After the act ended when one sister left, the remaining three joined another act, but it didn't do well. Discouraged, Gracie quit and went to stenography school. But she detested it and longed to return to show business.

She was, therefore, ready when George Burns, then finally able to call himself Nat Birnbaum, came along. They were prepared for their first performance three weeks after they met. Originally, she was billed as "Grace Allen." The nickname would come later when cops, taxi drivers, and newsboys began to call her "Gracie," and the name stuck.

Burns was completely convinced that he should be the comic and Gracie the "talking woman" (the female version of "the straight man"). He wanted to be the one getting the laughs, even if he lifted the material from joke book collections.

The new team started out at a theater in Boonton, New Jersey in late 1922. They were booked for one night and were paid ten dollars. By one account, the manager wanted to know what kind of an act they did. Burns replied, "Dialogue."

"Okay," the manager answered. "But whatever you do, just cut out the talk."

The manager's son standing nearby added, "If there's anything my dad hates, it's talk."

Burns couldn't cut out the talk. He and Gracie were a "patter team," getting laughs just by talking, not by odd make-up or zany slapstick, although he knew that clothes were an important laugh prompt for the audience. Burns wore new clothes, and he wanted them to scream "funny." He therefore shortened his pants and turned up the brim of his hat. The two went out on stage with Burns prepared not only to talk but also to be hilarious doing it.

He talked all right in his rolled-up pants, but he wasn't in the least bit hilarious.

Later in life he savored his retelling of that night's performance, making it and its consequences mythic. The audience, he claimed, laughed at Gracie's straight lines and didn't laugh at his supposedly funny lines. So, he would continue, adding a vaudeville shine to the story, right after the first show he knew he had to change roles. At the very next performance he was the feeder, the straight man, and Gracie was the comedian.

In fact, George Burns was extremely reluctant to give up his role. Burns and Allen were reviewed in Variety twice the next year, in April and June. Both reviewers identified Burns as the wisecracking comic.

During that time Burns and Allen were relegated to a seemingly permanent status as a "disappointment act." Such acts were used when another act cancelled, usually due to illness or drunkenness. New shows opened on Mondays and Thursdays, and George and Gracie would stay in their hotel waiting for a call about a cancellation. The couple would then hop a train to wherever the original act had been scheduled to appear.

Burns only painfully and gradually came to the conclusion that he would have to relinquish his idea of being the comic. Gracie was funny; he was not. Audiences loved her. They loved her voice. They loved the sincerity with which she spoke. They loved her twinkling eyes and porcelain skin, her dainty figure and curly hair.

His decision made, Burns struggled with how to define Gracie's role. Always extremely sensitive to audience reactions, Burns noticed that audiences didn't like it if Gracie was sarcastic. He let the audience guide her character development, but he knew what he wanted to try.

Burns enjoyed what he would eventually call "illogical logic," explanations that made sense, but only on their own terms. Part of this came from his mother. "My mother didn't know she was funny. She once said 'I know I'm going to die…and Uncle Frank is going to come to the funeral…Make sure the coffee is hot…because if the coffee isn't hot…he won't go.'"

Burns thought he and Gracie could do a flirtation act, a man and a woman discussing male-female relationships, in which Gracie could perform that crazy logic. It was an idea that challenged vaudeville tradition because although there were many mixed acts, the woman's role in almost all of them was to be the "Dumb Dora," a dizzy and empty-headed woman.

One typical act, for example, was "Dialogue Between Master of Ceremonies and a Dumb Dora," by a vaudevillian with the improbable name of James Madison. Here's how it began:

Master of Ceremony: If you do well this week, I may hold you over.
Dumb Dora: Hold me over what?
Master of Ceremony: I mean I'll renew your engagement.
Dumb Dora: Has it been broken?
Master of Ceremony: Has what been broken?
Dumb Dora: Our engagement.
Master of Ceremony: We're not engaged. Getting married is foreign to my thoughts.
Dumb Dora: That's all right. I'm a foreigner.
Master of Ceremony: You intrigue me.
Dumb Dora: What's that?
Master of Ceremony: I said, "You intrigue me."
Dumb Dora: Not while all these people are watching.

Essentially the "Dumb Dora" acts consisted of one joke-the woman's misunderstanding replayed in various ways. Burns knew audiences wanted more from Gracie because they cared for her. And so he gave her the mercurial brilliance of his mother's illogical logic. He created a new a new kind of woman partner, a woman who, at least within her own world, was not at all dumb. Burns' conception would give Gracie the punch lines and the profundity, and, in one stroke, turn vaudeville tradition on its head.

He began writing, and then, crucially, hired talented writers, to develop the character that made Gracie famous:

Gracie: All great singers have their trials. Look at Caruso. Thirty years on a desert island with all those cannibals.
George: You've got the wrong man.
Gracie: No. You're the man for me.
George: But they say I'm through as a singer. I'm extinct.
Gracie: You do not!

The act quickly and dramatically succeeded, and the newly divorced Burns declared his love. Stunned, Gracie reacted by insisting that she still loved Benny Ryan. She met Burns' proposals with bouts of laughter or disbelief or downright refusal.

Burns and Allen were in San Francisco, Gracie's hometown, when she got appendicitis. George swore he sent a telegram to Benny Ryan, but Benny never contacted her. She grew angry with him. Still, she would not marry Burns.

At a Christmas party in 1925 she handed Burns a present and wrote a note on it that included the words "with all my love." Burns, dressed improbably for an emotional showdown as Santa Claus, confronted her about it, saying she shouldn't use the words if she didn't mean them. He gave her an ultimatum, to marry him or end the act. Santa then stormed out of the room.

Later that night, Benny Ryan called her for the holiday. Gracie spoke with him and decided on the phone to break up. She immediately called Burns and told him she was ready to get married, which they did on January 7, 1926.

The marriage was the crucial dividing line in their lives between failure and success. Soon after the ceremony, Burns bought a routine and edited it carefully. He knew the Gracie character he wanted to create, and he brilliantly integrated events from their real lives-Gracie's relatives and crowded homes, for example.

Their rise after that was the stuff of dime novels and daydreams: just six weeks after the wedding, they were at the Palace.

Burns and Allen stood in the wings as the stage card changed. Burns reached over and held Gracie's hand as their song, "The Love Nest," started, and the spotlight swung to pick them out in the wing. They smiled and casually walked out on stage.

Gracie pulled to a stop, turned around, and waved. She let go of George's hand and walked back toward the wing, still waving. Then she stopped and beckoned for someone to enter from offstage. A man came out, put his arms around Gracie and kissed her. She kissed him back. They waved to each other, and the man quickly exited. Gracie came back to George in the center of the stage.

Gracie: Who was that?
George: You don't know?
Gracie: No. My mother told me never to talk to strangers.
George: That makes sense.
Gracie: This always happens to me. On my way in, a man stopped me at the stage door and said, "Hiya, cutie, how about a bite tonight after the show?"
George: And you said?
Gracie: I said, "I'll be busy after the show, but I'm not doing anything now," so I bit him.
George: Gracie, let me ask you something. Did the nurse ever happen to drop you on your head when you were a baby?
Gracie: Oh, no, we couldn't afford a nurse. My mother had to do it.
George: You had a smart mother.
Gracie: Smartness runs in my family. When I went to school I was so smart my teacher was in my class for five years.
George: Gracie, what school did you go to?
Gracie: I'm not allowed to tell.
George: Why not?
Gracie: The school pays me $25 a month not to tell.
George: Gracie, this family of yours, do you all live together?
Gracie: Oh, sure. My father, my brother, my uncle, my cousin, and my nephew all sleep in one bed and…
George: In one bed? I'm surprised your grandfather doesn't sleep with them.
Gracie: Oh he did, but he died, so they made him get up.

After the routine, the lights in the house went down, and a spotlight appeared on Gracie. She sang. Just at the end of the song, the music quickened and Gracie broke into her Irish jig.

The lights came up. Burns stood next to her applauding with the audience while Gracie bowed. They did a few more minutes of patter, and, for the final part of the act, they did what no team had done before. They danced together, but George stopped the music four times during the dance, did a few lines, and then resumed dancing. Then they danced off the stage.

Once backstage, Burns and Allen were exuberant. They could still hear the waves of roaring applause. Their friends rushed to greet them. Everyone offered congratulations, including Archie Leach, who would eventually change his name to Cary Grant. It wouldn't be long before the Palace would have them back as headliners.

Burns would never cherish a show business moment as much as this one. It was his first heady realization that after all the longing, all the despair, all the hope, he and Gracie had finally joked their way through the gates of show business heaven.

Gracie was not consumed by show business and never talked about the act offstage, but George lived for the straw hats, musty theaters, and asbestos curtains of vaudeville. Show business was his oxygen. He never lost faith in it, never stopped learning how to navigate its currents, and never surrendered a chance to discuss its future.

Burns and Allen went on to become the greatest comedy act in vaudeville. With considerable justification, Burns always credited Gracie for their success.

Gracie's laugh, her thin, high-pitched voice (which was not at all like her real one), her compact prettiness embodied in her curly black hair and attractive red lips, her sweetness, and her loopy but sincere way of looking at the world endeared her to the audience. She dressed well. She looked like a cute young woman with a child's attractive qualities. She had no aura of a clown as so many other women performers such as Fanny Brice did. She did not make faces. She did not engage in sexually suggestive banter.

Gracie didn't threaten or scare the audience. They didn't want to be like her, but they wanted her to achieve her heart's desires. They also wanted to protect her. Burns had to go out before shows to check air currents in the theater. He didn't want his cigar smoke blowing in Gracie's face. He knew audiences would never forgive him.

Gracie was as big a draw to women in the audience as she was to men. Men liked her because she was pretty and seemed to conform to the stereotypical view then current of women as hopelessly lost in the search for logic in their thought. Women might therefore easily have resented her performances. Instead, though, women admired her. She thought it was because they were not jealous of her, but the attraction lay also in her dignity, in the way that the much-mocked feminine logic actually made sense. Her character could even be understood and appreciated as a sly parody of men's views of women's minds.

Gracie was also a perfect symbol for the real situation of women who were caught between Victorian and modern morality. It was an era of incredible restrictions on women's freedoms. Women were not, for example, allowed to smoke in public. Vaudeville's attractive women performers provided playful alternatives to the rigid gender roles in which women found themselves. Vaudeville was the hallway from Victorian to modern morality. The corseted American moral code was unlaced by vaudeville's brazen performers with their subtle but clear endorsement of a morality that accepted impulsive attraction and championed acting on the impulse. But many women were confused by the changes. They wanted to be respected but were thrilled by the new possibilities. It is no wonder that an attractive, confused character that got respect and proved triumphant would be so interesting to women in the audience.

Gracie had an appealing presence, perfectly defined and rendered character, and good lines, but Burns and Allen also had perfect timing-in two senses of the word. First, their arrival on stage caught the spirit of the age. Somehow Burns, as he listened to audiences, absorbed their deepest needs and desires and knew how to shape his and Gracie's characters to reflect those feelings.

But their timing was not just deft historically; comic timing was a crucial part of their professional craft. In comedy, "timing" refers to a straight man's ability to wait to speak until the laughter has peaked, heads down, and finally stops so that audiences can hear the next line, but not wait for so long after it stops that audiences get confused or bored. The comic's timing refers to the response after the straight man finishes a line. The term "beat" is used to measure the pause between lines, and it and the "pace," or speed of the delivery, had to be perfect.

The comic in the team needed both an appropriate appearance and a funny line. Both the straight man and the comic needed rhythm, a pleasing pattern of the recurring and contrasting elements in their speech. This was especially important for the punchline of the joke after the straight man has set it up.

Burns and Allen were experts at all this. They knew which words to emphasize. They learned to control their voices. The staccato rhythm of their delivery was perfect. Other performers would have spoken too slowly or too fast, or fallen out of the rhythm, which had to be maintained with each line and each silence. They even used pauses well. Gracie would giggle, an infectious sound and a prompt for even further audience laughter. George's repetition of much of the material was also crucial to the pacing, allowing the audience to grasp the premise precisely and be set up by George for the line to follow. It was impossible for Burns to be a comedian in such a structure. Any joke he interjected would break the patented Burns and Allen patter.

Gracie's humor would not have worked had the character not seemed to believe the illogical logic absolutely. The character she created had to take it seriously. Burns the straight man could, on behalf of the audience, show bemusement, but Gracie could not break out of character without ruining the act. It is completely unsurprising that many in the audience confused the real Gracie Allen with her carefully constructed character. They never saw her let the mask slip. The strain of always being "Gracie Allen" gave her devastating migraine headaches and an early and consistent desire to retire from show business.

Despite these tensions, she never faltered. Through the pain, she created one of the most enduring characters in entertainment history, one whose clarity of voice and vision can even come through on the printed page:

Gracie: …I'm a mind-reader…All right, think of something.
George: Well, all right, I'm thinking.
Gracie: Is it green?
George: Is what green?
Gracie: Does it hang from the ceiling and whistle?
George: Does what hang from the ceiling and whistle?
Gracie: Does it run along the floor and sing?
George: Listen…
Gracie: Does it climb up buildings and swim?
George: Just a minute. I thought you said that you could read my mind.
Gracie: Well, George, how can I read your mind if you keep on asking all those silly questions?

Or:

Gracie: George, I've got some wonderful news for you. My brother got married, but it's the carpenter's fault…
George: …What do you mean it was the carpenter's fault?
Gracie: Well, you see, my brother was crazy about a girl who lived on the third floor… George: Yes…
Gracie: But the carpenter made the ladder too short, and he eloped with the girl on the second floor.
George: But what about the girl on the third floor? Bet that made her pretty mad.
Gracie: Oh, well, she didn't seem to mind it. But her husband was so disappointed he could hardly hold the ladder.

George always held the ladder tightly as Gracie scaled up the heights of comedy and eloped with fame.

But, even as that fame grew, neither of them ever forgot that Burns and Allen were a comedy team that came from a great American tradition.

From the book Mixed Nuts by Lawrence J. Epstein. Copyright © 2004.
Reprinted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books
Group. All rights reserved.