George Burns--Still a Wonder After 8 Decades

The world has long since been oversubscribed with nominations for the Eighth Wonder thereof. Maybe George Burns should be titled the Ninth Wonder of the World, a handle nicely appropriate to a man who--at age 92--is not only still entertaining but is knocking ‘em sideways.

On Monday night he finished his semiannual six-night appearance at Caesars Palace. He packed the 1,300-seat Circus Maximus showroom for the one performance he gave each evening.

Natty in a tuxedo with an impudent red handkerchief in the breast pocket, Burns enters, puffing a newly lit cigar, to a standing ovation. Something over 50 minutes later, he exits to two standing ovations (one, and then an encore, and then a second ovation). Happens every night.

He perches against a stool part of the time, but it seems less a concession to age than to the traditions of the Las Vegas stage. He punctuates his patter songs with bursts of soft-shoe shuffling, just enough to remind you that life begins at 90 as well as 40 and that Burns was performing professionally before the current President of the United States was born.

By now many of the lines are familiar. “I’m glad to be here,” Burns announces; “I’m glad to be anywhere .” The songs are wonderfully corny (“She looked like Helen Brown”).

The enchantment of the evening is the display of charm and guile honed by eight decades in front of audiences, from the small and hostile to the large and adoring.

His recollections of the days in vaudeville are central to his appeal. He creates nostalgia for a kind of entertainment that almost no one in the showroom is old enough to have experienced in the flesh. Even the days when Ed Sullivan used to resurrect Smith and Dale and some of the other classic vaudeville acts on his Sunday-night television show are older than the memory of many in the audience.

But here is Burns, remembering as if they were yesterday the times when, to hear him tell it, he had to change his name and his act every week to keep ahead of the bad word of mouth. Those were the days, he says, when he was once booked at $15 a night but after the first evening got $25 a night for not performing.

By now, you have the feeling that fact and myth are blended in Burns’ routine as inseparably as the ingredients in a marble cake, but it is, of course, no matter. The leavening of truth is all it takes and the hard lessons from those apprentice days show in every nicely timed flick of the cigar ash.

“I’ve written six books,” Burns says (flick). “Not bad for a guy who’d only read two.” (Flick, flick.)

There is at that a subtler but potent appeal in Burns’ presence and in the strongest of the material he has chosen. One of his best and most popular songs is “I’d Like to Do It Again,” done in his intimate sung-spoken recitatif style. It is a celebration of life in the form of a wish for more, and for the wisdom to savor it next time in an even more profound and leisurely way.

His encore number is “I Wish I Was 18 Again,” a hit single from a country-Western album that he did as part of the extraordinary new career that began when he was 78. It echoes the same theme in a more up-tempo idiom. “I’m three quarters home from the start to the end and I wish I was 18 again,” Burns sings.

The effect on the listener is to become aware not only of Burns’ remarkable and lively age but of the listener’s own, and to feel at that moment a freshened gratitude for life. Whatever seems distressing about the listener’s life, if only the infidelities of the dice and the treasons of the roulette wheel, is somehow reevaluated in the different, longer perspective Burns provides.

The song provided the title for Burns’ newest film, “18 Again!” a light and pleasant comedy opening later this month and sneak-previewed over the weekend here.

Burns is engagingly supported by his longtime accompanist, Morty Jacobs, who preserves the order of march and gives the songs the right tinkling and insouciant flourishes. Susan Anton was Burns’ enthusiastic opening act.

The London Palladium has an agreement for Burns to play two weeks there in 1996, when he will be 100. He intends to fulfill the contract.