George Burns

Actor

• Born: January 20, 1896
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: March 9, 1996
• Place of death: Beverly Hills, California

Entertainer, actor, and writer

Burns had a remarkable show-business career that spanned ninety-four years. It began when he was eight and sang with a children’s quartet, and he made guest appearances until shortly before his death at one hundred. He distinguished himself in vaudeville, radio, early television, and films.

Area of achievement: Entertainment

Early Life

George Burns was born in 1896 in New York City to Orthodox Jews Louis Philip and Dora Bluth Birnbaum, the third of their twelve children and the first child born after they immigrated from Eastern Europe. The family lived in a one-room tenement apartment until they could afford a three-room cold-water flat. Burns’s father worked in a kosher butcher shop, and he sang as a cantor at the synagogue.

The show-business bug bit Burns at age eight, when he began singing in a quartet. The boys called it the Pee Wee Quartet, and they sang for pennies. As Burns got older, he had “small-time” gigs, meaning a few minutes on the bill, after the jugglers or animal acts, and before the main or “big-time” acts. Big-timers were on stage fourteen minutes or more. Burns became a vaudeville song-and-dance man, and he frequently changed partners, once working with a trained seal. It was an exciting time. He got enough bookings to support himself, and he met future stars: Jack Benny, Milton Berle, the Marx Brothers, George Jessel, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, and Bob Hope. Burns knew them all, and they became his lifelong friends.

There were women performers, too. They included Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker, and an Irish Catholic girl named Gracie Allen, who sang with her sisters before becoming Burns’s partner in the early 1920’s. They began honing the material that would eventually bring them fame and fortune in a new medium, radio, that was just beginning to appear on the scene. Burns had only a fourth-grade education, but he wrote all their comic material.

Allen became his life partner. They married in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1926, despite religious differences. Benny served as best man. The couple adopted two children, daughter Sandra in 1934 and son Ronald in 1935. The adoptions were finalized through a Catholic adoption agency, with the condition that the children be raised in that faith. Burns, though not observant in adulthood, never renounced his Judaism. When asked why he never legally changed his name to George Burns, he replied that he was born Jewish and would die Jewish.

Life’s Work

The original Burns and Allen routine was what vaudeville called a Dumb Dora act. However, they refined the concept until it sparkled. While the Gracie character acted befuddled, she was in her convoluted way brilliant, and their routines were never mean-spirited. Burns easily made the switch from vaudeville to radio, and the show he wrote was always in the top ten. The couple started out on the Guy Lombardo show, offering comic relief between the musical numbers. Soon they had their own show. Eventually Burns hired a team of writers that included his brother Willie, but Burns remained the genius behind their success.

When television burst on the scene, he again made the leap and again enjoyed phenomenal success. The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show was one of the first situation comedies and was a hit for eight years. They had been doing films as well, dating back to the vaudeville days, when some of the theaters interspersed motion-picture footage with the live acts. The film work was an extension of the radio and television shows.

The show ended in 1958. Burns began the signature sign-off: “Say good night, Gracie.” “Good night, Gracie,” she replied for the last time. She developed a heart condition and the work was becoming increasingly difficult. She retired, and she died of a massive heart attack in 1964 at the age of sixty-nine. Burns never remarried. He is said to have broken down in tears twice in his adult life: when his wife of thirty-eight years died and, years later, when he tried to give the eulogy at Benny’s funeral.

Burns tried doing other television work, but he realized it was Gracie who made their acts work. He had reinvented himself several times before they teamed up, and he had to do it again. Toward that end, he made a number of films, including a series of three that were commercial hits, Oh, God! (1977), Oh, God! Book II (1980), and Oh, God! You Devil (1984). He did Just You and Me, Kid (1979) with Brooke Shields. These works introduced him to new audiences that were too young to remember Burns and Allen.

His biggest opportunity came when Benny asked that Burns be the one to replace him in the film The Sunshine Boys (1975), in which he was to star with Walter Matthau. Benny’s health had declined, and he wanted Burns to take over the role. Burns received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his work in The Sunshine Boys, about two aging vaudeville performers. He was eighty years old. One way he worked through his grief when Allen died was to write about her and their life together. Thus came Gracie: A Love Story, in 1989. He wrote ten books in all, and each is a delight, filled with stories of the old days and told by a consummate storyteller and someone who clearly loved the life he had lived and the people who had shared it. Burns began to slow down as he approached his hundredth birthday, and he died on March 9, 1996, of cardiac arrest.

Significance

“Legendary” is the right word to describe Burns. Few people have had the good fortune to do what they love, become wealthy doing it, and do it for ninety-four years. Burns worked in, and succeeded at, every area of show business. Some performers never worked again when vaudeville disappeared. Others could not make the leap from radio to television. He kept going, learning and adapting as he went along, always ready for the next challenge. Every time, he made it look easy.

When he lost the woman to whom he had been married for thirty-eight years and with whom he worked almost that long, he became an Academy Award-winning film star. He outlived most of his friends, but he never wallowed in self-pity. Retirement was not in his vocabulary. It was not until he was nearing one hundred that he talked about dying and being with his beloved Gracie again.

Bibliography

Burns, George. Gracie: A Love Story. New York: Penguin, 1989. Burns’s memoir of his professional partnership and his marriage to Allen, whose hilarious twisted logic was the basis for their act, beginning with vaudeville and enduring through radio, television, and film. They had one of the great show-business love stories.

Burns, George, with David Fisher. All My Best Friends. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1989. Fascinating anecdotes of Burns’s friendships with some of the best-loved entertainers of the twentieth century, including Benny, Cantor, Jessel, Groucho Marx, Hope, Brice, and Jolson, to name a few.

Fagen, Herb. George Burns: In His Own Words. New York: Avalon, 1996. An intimate look at the life and career of one of America’s most enduring entertainers.

Gottfried, Martin. George Burns and the Hundred-Year Dash. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. A detailed biography covering Burns’s childhood, family, his marriage to Allen, and the legendary career that spanned decades.

Jenkins, Henry. What Made Pistachio Nuts? New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Despite the humorous title, this is a serious examination of the early days of comedy as it evolved from its vaudeville beginnings to other media as they became available.

Reinehr, Robert C. The A to Z of Old Radio. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2010. In-depth study of the golden age of radio, and all those, including Burns, who made it great.