STILL SMOKIN’ : He’s Older Than the Model T, but George Burns Shows No Real Signs of Slowing Down

Think of the automobile for a moment, of how pervasive it is: how our work, play and even romances are intrinsically linked to the internal combustion engine; how lines of cars now stretch around the world in a Mobius ribbon, from motionless freeways to jungle mud roads; how the modern world we know begins with the car--everything before it was muskets, oxen and gaslight.

Then think of George Burns, who has been around as long as the automobile, and perhaps smokes even more. The world’s oldest working comedian was born in 1896, about the time when horseless carriages were first beginning to appear on America’s roads. By the time Henry Ford put the automotive age into high gear with the Model T in 1908, Burns had already been performing for five years. And while the world may be running low on fossil fuels, Burns is still going strong.

He’s recently cut down from 20 cigars a day to a reasonable 10 or 15, with his martini consumption similarly dropping to three or four a day. Instead of standing for the full hour when he performs now, he’s seated some of the time. That’s when he’s not dancing.

In addition to steadily appearing in films (he recently turned down another “Oh God” script because he didn’t like it), on TV and in commercials, and issuing best-selling books, Burns still makes between 25 and 30 live appearances a year, including his scheduled performance for Children’s Hospital of Orange County at the Performing Arts Center on Tuesday. He recently signed a five-year contract to continue appearances at the Las Vegas Riviera and has long had the London Palladium booked for five nights in 1996, for shows to celebrate his 100th birthday. His only concern, he’s often said, is that the Palladium might not be there that long.

His advice for living such a long and active life?

“If you smoke cigars, use a holder.”

Burns chatted recently in his Hollywood offices, located on the same lot where he’s conducted business since the Burns and Gracie Allen TV show began filming there in the ‘50s. Except for the numerous framed photos highlighting Burns’ career, the office is thoroughly nondescript and time-worn, with inexpensive wood veneer paneling and lived-in office furniture, suggesting it belongs to a tired insurance salesman rather than a one-man entertainment industry.

It is here that Burns meets daily with his longtime friend and co-writer Hal Goldman. They trade jokes, come up with new material for his act, and write books such as the just-issued “Wisdom of the 90s” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons. $12.95).

The humor concocted here, Burns says, “is all material that fits my age. I don’t say anything that’s younger than I am. It doesn’t have to change much. My material at 94 was just as old as it is at 95.”

Seated in a director’s chair bearing his name, Burns smoked one of his ever-present El Productos--”If I paid $6 for a cigar,” he has quipped, “I’d expect to sleep with it.” Except for his sporting leisure wear instead of a tux, he was every bit what you’d expect George Burns to be.

“I think I’m the same on the stage as I am off,” he said, and he thinks that accounts for a large part of his success. “I like people and people like me. Everybody knows me, I’ve been around for such a long time.

“The only thing that’s really different when I’m on stage is the love that comes over the footlights gives you this vitality. If you asked me to get up and do my act here, I couldn’t do it, but in front of an audience I can.”

However much the world may change, Burns says his world stays largely the same. Along with the familiar office, he’s lived in the same house for 55 years and has belonged to the Hillcrest Country Club for 57 years, definitely getting the most out of his $100,000 lifetime membership fee.

When Burns isn’t doing a show, his day follows a set routine:

“My average day is I always come to the office at 10. Hal is here and there’s always something to do. Then I leave at 12, go to the club, have a little lunch, play bridge for two hours, go home, take a nap, get up at 5:30, have a double martini and either go out, which I do a couple of times a week, or stay home. If I go out, I have a little more to drink. If I stay home, that’s it. And I smoke all day.

“I exercise every day, and do a little walking. But I don’t care whether you exercise or walk, you get older every day. But I still work. I don’t believe in retiring. I don’t think anybody should retire. You don’t do anything when you retire. You don’t enjoy anything when you retire. I love show business. And what do you do when you retire, play with your cuticles? You ever play with your cuticles? It’s not exciting.”

After 88 years, show business holds few surprises for Burns, and interviews certainly aren’t one of them. He has stock answers ready for most questions, funny ones, rendered with the same flawless, low-keyed timing and delivery that has endeared him to generations.

Once, lunch and bridge at the Hillcrest meant sharing a table with the likes of Jack Benny, the Marx Brothers, the Ritz Brothers, Danny Kaye, Georgie Jessell, Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle and Danny Thomas, all trying to top each other’s humor.

All but Berle have passed on now, and the mood at the club has changed.

“Sometimes if the situation comes up and can get a laugh, I go for it,” Burns said, “But I get my laughs mostly in the theater now.”

Has it been a strain being expected to be the quip-ready George Burns all the time?

“No, because I wasn’t always George Burns. I had all kinds of names. I was Brown of Brown and Williams, then I was Williams of Williams and Brown, I was Davis of Davis and Harris, and Dunlap of Dunlap and Newman. In fact, I had to change my name every week. I couldn’t get a job with the same name twice. Then when I met Gracie, I stuck to George Burns.”

Indeed, before meeting up with Gracie Allen while in his 20s, Nathan Birnbaum (as Burns was born in New York City on Jan. 20) was far from a show biz success. He did dance acts, singing acts, comedy duos, seal acts, none of which clicked.

Then he met and married Allen, and his dry, cigar-slow calm amid the storm of her dizzy incomprehension was a comedic pairing that audiences found irresistible for 38 years, once they hit on it.

“It was really the audience that found Gracie’s character,” Burns said. “When I worked with Gracie, I was the comedian and I wrote the act. Well, I was the comedian for the first show, that’s all. From then on Gracie became it.

“You see, Gracie was a dramatic Irish actress, and the audience fell in love with her. And if Gracie said something sarcastic the audience wouldn’t accept it, but if she said something off-center, they loved it. So they found Gracie’s character, and I found my character by saying to Gracie, ‘How’s your brother?’ That’s what I did and Gracie talked for 40 years.”

Though a success on the stage, in films and in nearly two decades on radio, the duo’s humor found its ideal niche in 1952 with TV’s “The Burns and Allen Show.” With its inspired, absurd (and never cruel) humor and Burn’s reality-bending practice of stepping out of the action to talk to the audience (something he says he picked up from Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”), the show was a runaway hit, halted only by Allen’s retirement due to cancer in 1958. It still is in popular syndication.

In his books Burns has wonderfully chronicled his love for Allen and their career together (specifically in “Gracie, A Love Story,” though she figures in all his books) and anecdotes on his show biz cohorts (best collected in “All My Best Friends”).

With “Wisdom of the 90s” being his ninth book, one might think Burns would be running out of anecdotes, but he’s not worried: “Well, if this book sells, I’ll make up some more memories.”

“I don’t write a book,” he explained, “I talk a book. Hal and I sit and talk and my secretary takes it down. If it’s funny, we put it in the book. If it isn’t funny, we say my secretary wrote it.”

He does have a remarkable recollection of his vaudeville days and other distant events.

“My memory is good if it happened 50 years ago, but I’m not interested in what I did yesterday. I’m only interested in what I’m doing today and what I’m going to do tomorrow.”

According to Goldman, who has been with Burns for 12 years, “To the younger comics, show business isn’t everything. For some, it seems only to be a means to an end, but to George it’s his whole life.”

Asked for the best wisdom in “Wisdom of the 90s,” Burns said, “The most important idea is to fall in love with what you do for a living. That’s terribly important. Here I am 95 years old, and I got up this morning with something to do that I love.

“If you love what you do for a living, it works. A lot of people work and hate what they do, but I love it. Even when I was a failure in show business, from age 7 to 24, I didn’t think I was a failure. I loved what I was doing. I thought the audience was a flop, not me.”

And now?

“Now they love me. I’ve been around for 1,000 years, so I walk out on the stage and everybody stands up, saying, ‘How do you like that--he walks!’ ”

Who: George Burns in a benefit performance for the Children’s Hospital of Orange County.

When: Tuesday, Nov. 19, at 8 p.m. With singer Julie Budd.

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.

Whereabouts: San Diego (405) Freeway to Bristol Street exit. North to Town Center Drive. (Center is one block east of South Coast Plaza.)

Wherewithal: $50 to $500.

Where to call: (714) 532-8690.