Good Night, George

The last time I saw George Burns, he had just turned 97. I interviewed him in his office in Hollywood, and when it was over and we were saying goodbye, we shook hands and he said:

“Let’s do this every five years.”

Well, we didn’t make it.

But a century isn’t a bad run.

The astonishing thing about Burns, who died Saturday at 100, wasn’t merely his longevity as a performer or even the comedy timing and gifts as straight man to his wife, Gracie Allen, that his peers regarded with awe.

What continued to amaze was his seeming ability to rise to any occasion with the consummate grace and ease that stamped his work--the result of experience gained from every nook and cranny of show business in a career that literally spanned the century.

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Everyone knows how he turned Hollywood’s head with his memorable performance in the 1975 film “The Sunshine Boys.” But just catch a TV rerun of a film he made 38 years before that, the 1937 Gershwin musical “A Damsel in Distress,” and you’ll see George and Gracie team with Fred Astaire in an absolute knockout dance number.

When Burns made that 1937 movie, he was already 41 years old, and the legendary years were only beginning.

At our 97th birthday interview in 1993, Burns wore a flannel shirt, gray slacks and, as usual, was puffing on a cigar in a holder.

Comedians from Sid Caesar to Billy Crystal have noted that Burns used a cigar to virtually orchestrate his act, as if it were a baton or a brilliantly understated prop to punctuate his jokes.

I chatted with Burns about the stogie he was smoking.

“It’s a cheap cigar--three for a dollar,” he said. “A good cigar is well packed, and they keep going out. And when you’re on the stage, if the cigar goes out, the audience goes out too. But this cigar stays lit.”

Years before, as a young reporter, I had interviewed Burns at his home, and, since we both were cigar smokers, the conversation at that time also got around to good puffing.

I asked him what he smoked.

“Anything that fits the holder,” he said. “Never spend more than 20 cents on a cigar.”

I mentioned that a famous comedian spent $1.50 on a cigar, a rather high price at the time.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Burns cracked: “If I spent a $1.50 on a cigar, I’d make love to it first.”

Actually, he didn’t say “make love to.” It was a wee bit racier. But the important lesson for me was the timing and pacing of the crack--quiet, precise and hysterical.

Burns’ ascendancy in the Hollywood performing hierarchy was remarkable because he certainly wasn’t the best singer, dancer, actor or even comedian around. It came down to style and endless perfection of his special skills.

And of course, it came down, for many years, to his partnership with Gracie’s scatterbrain onstage persona on radio and television, as well as in movies. His endless devotion to her, even after her death, was one of Hollywood’s great love stories.

At our 1993 interview, Burns told me: “I must think this at least once or twice a month: What the hell would have happened to me if I hadn’t met Gracie?”

His book “Gracie: A Love Story” begins: “For 40 years my act consisted of one joke. And then she died.”

In October 1994, I received a letter from Charles Michelson, whose company has distributed many famous old radio shows, including “Burns and Allen.”

“Here’s a little incident you might be interested in,” he wrote. “When George was recently checked into Cedars-Sinai hospital, he said he felt like telling Gracie to move over because he was thinking of joining her in bed.

“When management at the hospital heard about this, they offered George a deal to . . . rename the street that crosses George Burns Road at the hospital to be Gracie Allen Drive. George agreed and so everyone is happy once again.”

In his quiet way, Burns represented to his admirers many of the best qualities of American show business--decency, wit, talent and respect for his audience. Shortly before his death, comedian Joan Rivers said of him:

“He’s a gentleman. And he’s comedy when comedy was gentle as compared to all of us.”

Top comedians also observe that Burns was something of a broadcast visionary, helping to pioneer the clever device--later used by Jerry Seinfeld and others--of breaking TV’s so-called fourth wall by moving in and out of a scene to talk to the audience.

The seeds of that TV practice are noted in the book “Say Goodnight, Gracie!,” in which authors Cheryl Blythe and Susan Sackett write in their synopsis of the first episode of the Burns and Allen series in 1950:

“In his opening monologue George explains being a ‘straight man.’ He introduces the cast, explains the show’s format and sings with the Skylarks.”

In his book “Funny People,” Steve Allen saw a rare quality in Burns’ lack of glitz:

“He is like one of those gifted caricaturists who render the essence of a subject with just a few quick Zen-like black lines on white paper.

“About his only concession to entertainment shtick at all is the singing of the obscure songs he recalls from the 1920s or even earlier times, and the odd thing is that they are not funny songs; they are simply obscure. But he makes them seem funny. . . . George is one of the master attention-getters in the history of entertainment.”

He did it by underplaying. If less is more, then George Burns was, in an age of excess, perhaps the ultimate minimalist in show business. He turned terseness into a comedy art form, and it carried over into his dramatic roles as well.

At our 1993 interview, I asked him why he was doing a guest shot on a sitcom.

“They paid me. If I get paid, I do it,” he said.

He told me who attended a birthday party for him. I asked him for more names.

“See, I got a good memory if I get paid,” he said. “If I don’t get paid, I don’t remember a damn thing.”

Exit laughing.