The World’s Youngest 92-Year-Old Man

Once a month George Burns goes out to Forest Lawn in Glendale to visit Gracie’s grave. He and Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen had met and become a vaudeville team in 1923. They were married in 1926 and had been together for 41 years when she died in 1964.

“I talk to her,” Burns said over lunch at Hillside Country Club a few days ago. “I tell her what I’ve been up to, which of our pals I’ve run into. I’ll tell her I had lunch with you.” Ed Bradley and a crew from “60 Minutes” went out with him last time and Burns said, “I told her, ‘Gracie, you’re now on 60 Minutes.’ ”

It’s a cheerful rather than a melancholy visitation. “Look,” Burns says, “I don’t know if she hears me or not. But it makes me feel better.”

He has a lot to tell her. His latest film, “18 Again,” in which he trades bodies with his collegian grandson (Charlie Schlatter) is just opening. He recently concluded his semi- annual, sold-out, six-night stand at Caesars Palace. He did a major one-night appearance in Atlanta and received an honorary degree from the U. of Hartford.

He has been collaborating with author David Fisher on a biography of Gracie, to be called “Gracie,” and he has some rather philosophical story ideas for another sequel in the “Oh God!” series, in which he would like to have sport with an atheist and with some of the wilder promoters of religion.

“The atheist would say, ‘You don’t exist. I studied that in college and I know .’ And God would say, ‘Well, you may be right, of course. I never went to college.’ ”

Beyond his specific doings, Burns, who turned 92 in January, has become an important symbol of the possibilities of an active life far beyond the allotted three score and 10. Burns, sharp of tongue, keen of wit, his memory not just good but remarkable, is living proof that life begins at twice 40.

As part of his stage routine he says that people ask him what his doctor thinks about his daily martinis, his dozen cigars, his dates with young women. “I don’t know,” Burns says he tells his questioners; “my doctor’s dead.” It gets a very big laugh every time. Burns also draws a big round of applause when he says, “You can’t help growing older, but you don’t have to grow old .”

In “18 Again,” as Burns notes with some satisfaction, he is playing a man who is only 81.

His naturalness on stage (and everywhere else) is finally a display of those long years of experience. “The secret of being a performer is honesty,” Burns says, “and if you can fake that you’ve got it made.”

There is a good deal of truth in the joke. “I try to act as if I’m not getting paid,” Burns says. “As if I was just doing it for fun.” His act runs as if on rails, but each night he seems to be making it up as he goes along.

When, as does occasionally happen, he blows a lyric to one of the patter songs, he makes the recovery part of the act, almost as if he’d done it on purpose. “And I don’t do anything that would be wrong for my age,” Burns says. He has calculated it all with a shrewd showman’s expertise. In vaudeville days, as Burns as remarked, he went on stage before the performance in each new theater, puffing a cigar to see which way the house drafts blew.

“If my smoke went in Gracie’s face the audience hated me and it ruined the act.”

“60 Minutes” wanted to take Burns back to his birthplace on Pitt Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, but the neighborhood is now solidly Latino and scarcely any trace of its turn-of-the-century Jewish past can be found.

Born Nathan Birnbaum, Burns was one of 12 children and had six brothers and five sisters. “My father wasn’t a sex symbol. It was just that there wasn’t any heat in the house. We were very poor. My father was an inspector who went around checking that food was made in a kosher way. You don’t do it to get rich--he got paid in chopped liver. He died very young, only 47.”

When he was eight, Burns and three other boys worked for a druggist, mixing and bottling fountain syrups in the basement of the pharmacy. “A guy named Lou Folly used to come around. He thought the whole world should sing harmony and he taught us.

“We sang while we worked and people would come down the basement stairs and throw pennies to us. We figured there was money to be made. We’d sing in saloons and they’d throw us in the street. We’d sing in the street and people would throw us back in the saloon. We’d pass the hat and sometimes people would give us pennies and sometimes they’d take the hat. We kept running out of hats.

“We sang on streetcars. It cost a five center to ride the Staten Island ferry. We’d get on and ride back and forth. Couples liked to go up on the top deck and make love. We’d go up and serenade them. The guy would pay us to go away. We made more money not singing than singing.”

Burns paused in his recitation. “I can’t tell if these stories are true or not true any more. I’ve done a little embellishing on them over the years. What the heck, they’re better that way.” As John Ford said, print the legend.

Burns has famously talked about all the different names he used in his early years in vaudeville, taking a new identity before the bad word of mouth attaching to the previous act caught up with him.

It seems reasonably true, or at least reasonable, that Burns really did know another vaudevillian named Willie Delight who had 1,000 business cards printed, used up 180 of them and then quit the business. Burns says he bought the other 820 cards and changed his name again, to Willie Delight.

He and an early partner called themselves Brown and Williams and had a roller-skating act. The secret, Burns said, was that the rear wheels didn’t turn. “That was your control. I’d do a dance to ‘Chicken Reel’ and then I’d sing a ballad--I was a soprano in those days--while my partner skated around.”

Vaudeville acts used to sit, bags packed, in the waiting room of an agent named Farley Marcus, ready for any last-minute, one- night bookings. One morning Burns heard Marcus’ end of a phone conversation with a theater man who needed a dog act.

Burns: “I told the secretary, run in and tell Marcus that Brown and Williams and their dogs are sitting in his office at this very minute. The date was for Lake Ronkonkoma in the Catskills. We got the booking and went out and rented two dogs and did our act with the dogs under our arms and made $10. That was big money. There was a restaurant where you could get a 7-course meal for 35 cents. Five cents a course. Not bad.”

Burns was variously a comic, a straight man, a singer (a boy soprano for years), a dancer, a skater, whatever he could get paid for doing.

“From age 8 to age 27 I was a failure and I didn’t even know it, I was having so much fun,” Burns says. At 27 he met Gracie. She was a dramatic actress, doing Irish sketches with a male partner, rooming with two other Catholic girls and intending to marry Benny Ryan, a songwriter whose compositions included “Mississippi”and “Why Frances Dances With Me.”

(“I’m the only Jew in my family,” Burns says. “Because of Gracie, the two children were raised as Catholics and I’ve got seven Catholic grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. I used to eat fish every Friday, but always with my hat on.”) One week, now doing business as Block and Davis, Burns was playing Union City, N.J., but the team was about to break up. Rena Arnold, one of Gracie’s roommates, suggested that Gracie look George over as a possible partner.

“Two weeks later we opened as a team. I was the comedian for one show. Then the audience found Gracie’s character. The audience tells you what they want. You have to be smart enough to listen. My talent was off the stage. I could think of things for her to say. I wrote 80 or 85% of our material. Things turned around completely. We were able to buy a couple of hats.”

Despite Gracie’s marriage plans, her other roommate, Mary Kelly, liked George better and played Cupid, Burns remembers. “She said, ‘I’ve just met the man Gracie should marry.” George was so in love he wrote a song for Gracie, which he can still do in his patter-song style and which consists largely of “I love you” repeated endlessly.

“Gracie said, ‘If you write another song for me that bad, I’ll marry Benny Ryan after all.”

Burns and Allen were a vaudeville success and they had some luck. They did their first radio shows for the BBC while they were appearing in England: 5-minute spots repeated several times for the various regions of the country.

In the early days of sound movies, they were dining with Jack Benny and Mary Livingston at the home of Benny’s agent in New York, Arthur Lyons. George and Gracie were then commanding $350 a week as a team, Benny was making $600. Lyons asked Benny if he wanted to make $1,800 for nine minutes’ work. Fred Allen had been scheduled to film a comedy short for Paramount out at Astoria, Long Island, but had had to cancel. Benny couldn’t do the short either so Burns volunteered.

“In vaudeville we did what was called a flirtation act, but it was for out of doors. The set at Astoria was a living room. It wouldn’t work for our act.” Improvising, they began with Gracie looking under the sofa pillows and cushions.

George: “What are you looking for?”

Gracie: “The audience.”

George (pointing at the camera lens): “There’s the audience.”

Burns asked if she could talk for nine minutes. Gracie said, “Ask me how my brother is.” He did and Grace was off. After nine minutes George checked his watch, stopped her in mid-sentence and said, “Gracie, we’ve just earned $1,800.” Paramount, delighted, signed them to do four more at $3,500 each. The shorts led to their work in features, which began with ‘The Big Broadcast” in 1932.

“I had the easiest job of any straight man in history,” Burns once said. “I only had to know two lines: ‘How’s your brother?’ and ‘Your brother did what ?’ ”

Eddie Cantor hired Gracie, alone, for a 4-minute spot on his radio show. Rudy Vallee hired them both for his radio show the following week and so began their 19-year run on network radio and television.

(Burns, having a bowl of chicken soup for lunch, interrupts the memories to say, “I like food you don’t have to cut with a knife. You order a steak, you’ve got to cut it up, got to chew it; you should be paid for eating it. If I don’t like the food, I send for ketchup. If I don’t like the girl I send for ketchup. I send for ketchup no matter what.”)

Burns has admired many comedians but thinks that another George, Jessel, was one of the quickest wits he ever knew. “One morning at nine o’clock I saw Jessel at the bar drinking three brandies, one after the other. I said, ‘George, what’s wrong.’ Jessel said, ‘Norma Talmadge left me.’ I said, ‘But that was 35 years ago.’ He said, ‘I know, but I still miss her.’

“Talmadge took off to Florida with another guy and George followed them with a gun. He aimed at the guy but missed and hit a gardener who was kneeling in a flower bed two blocks away. The judge said, ‘Mr. Jessel, how could you aim at a man close to you and hit somebody two blocks away?’ Jessel said, ‘I’m not Buffalo Bill, I’m an actor.”’

Burns grins mischievously. “It must be hard to ask questions,” he says. ‘I couldn’t do it. But I love to answer questions because I’ve always lied so well.”

More seriously, Burns says, “I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t met Gracie. I’d still be in show business, I think, but who knows?” Gracie retired in 1958 and George did little until he was cast in “The Sunshine Boys” in 1975, in a role his old friend Jack Benny had been going to play. Benny died in 1974. The film won Burns an Academy Award and led him into his triumphant second career.

“You see, it’s all luck,” George Burns says. “If I hadn’t been making chocolate syrup in the basement, I wouldn’t be in show business.”