George Burns and Gracie Allen — The Private Life of Burns and Allen (1938) 🇺🇸
One of the most amazing success stories in Hollywood is that of George Burns and Gracie Allen. It is also one of the happiest love stories.
George and Gracie have made a fortune and innumerable friends by telling jokes. They form a crack team of highly marketable nonsense, with the sensitive Gracie in the role of a fluttery femme sap, spouting the inanities her shrewd husband and stooge feeds her. Both literally grew up in show business. Recently they were in A Damsel in Distress, pepping up the picture with their individual tomfooleries. Currently they are in College Swing, and are scheduled to make two more pictures for Paramount. Their weekly colloquy is a fount of fun over the NBC airways.
We had practically made a reservation for the psychopathic ward -when we went to interview them. But they turned out to be a thoroughly normal couple. George, we suspect, would not like this. He offered, in fact, to “gag up” the story we had in mind, so that Gracie would be in character in it. But we believe you would prefer to meet them as they really are in private life.
We called on them at their home in Beverly Hills — a lovely colonial mansion. George had just got out of bed (it was 10 a.m.), and came to the library in his pajamas, a funny beret on his head, the inevitable cigar in his mouth. We were enchanted by the gracious interiors of the house. There are, to be sure, some magnificent estates in movieland, but this is about the finest “homey” place we have seen.
“We bought it for the children,” George said, speaking in that husky voice of his. “We always lived in apartments, but when we adopted Sandra and Ronald, we settled down and became substantial citizens of the community.” The private life of George Burns and Gracie Allen revolves around their adopted children.
Presently these two youngsters came in with big, curious eyes, Sandra hugging a doll, Ronald carrying a teddy-bear. Both are fair and rather delicate. The girl is three-and-a-half years old, the boy two-and-a-half.
“I’m trying to give them what I, myself, lacked as a child,” George said with a grim look in his gray eyes. “I really should have been in that show, Dead End. Things were very tough for me when I was a kid. My dad, Lewis Burnbaum, was born in the old country. I don’t know what country it was. I was just a baby when he died. Mother brought us up, five brothers and seven sisters. We had to fight the terrible environment of the lower East Side in New York, where I was born.”
Swathed in an elegant dressing-gown, Gracie entered the library. She is Irish, with dark eyes and almost black hair. Her hands are small and very white. She is quiet, unassuming, and very feminine. She lets George do most of the talking during interviews. His is the dominant personality.
We all went to the breakfast-room, cheery with the bright morning sunlight. Sandra climbed a chair.
“Sit down, don’t stand up like that,” Gracie admonished her. “That’s a good chair.” It was a work of art with its floral designs. Everything in this home is of the finest. “Sit down and you’ll get a nice piece of toast with jam on it.” But Sandra, with the obstinacy of childhood, preferred to stand up on the chair she had climbed. “She is being very naughty, I don’t love her at all this morning,” Gracie told us in that piqued motherly voice. “Daddy doesn’t love her either.” Whereupon the sensitive Sandra burst into tears, and her parents in vain tried to pacify her. The nurse took her away. Ronnie watched the proceedings with astonished looks.
“All my life I wanted to go into show business,” George asserted, after a hearty sip of coffee. “I was the only one in my family who had that desire.”
But Ronald demanded attention. He showed Gracie a tiny finger, which, it seemed, had been hurt. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Gracie said, kissing it. George had to kiss that finger, too. “I didn’t cry!” Ronald declared. “Because you are a big boy,” Gracie assured him. “If you come over here, I’ll give you some jam.” The children had had their breakfast, but jam has drawn youngsters to it since its creation. He stamped around_ the room, whooping his morning war cries. “Are you an Indian?” Gracie demanded. “I’m the big bad wolf,” he answered. “I’m Pop-Eye the Sailor.” Gracie, imitating the voice of that redoubtable mariner, repeated, “I’m Pop-Eye the Sailor.” Then, hugging him, “Oh, you’re so silly!”
George, the paterfamilias, enjoyed these interruptions. “When I was a little fellow I sang with three other boys,” he continued. “We called ourselves the Pee-Wee Quartette. We sang in theatres on amateur nights, and scrambled for the money they threw at us on the stage. We would search each other, and always found a dime in each other’s mouths. My first professional job was a silly sketch in which I was a shoeshine boy. But after working a week, my employer wouldn’t pay me. We used a gun in the act. I made away with it and sold it to a pawnshop for five dollars. I was 11 then.” He puffed at his cigar, remembering.
“When I was about 12 I met a lot of dancers. They used to gather at the Park, to exchange steps, haggle over routines. New steps were worth money. I learned from them how to dance and do a skating act. And one day I teamed up with a fellow called Brown, a professional dancer, and went to Albany with him. My whole family was at the station and gave me a rousing send-off. Brown’s former partner had done the same act in Albany before we got there, and we had to go right back to New York.
“At 14,” George went on, “I opened a dancing-school for two years where I taught foreigners how to dance. Then I went on the road, with a new name and act every week. I did everything — singing, dancing, talking. I was a big bluffer, and if a manager asked me, ‘Can you do this?’ I would say ‘yes,’ no matter what it was. Managers got to know me so well that a few times they wouldn’t even let me get off the train. _ I was doing a singing and dancing act with Billy Lorraine at a theatre in Union Hill, N. J., when I met Gracie. She came back stage with a girl friend of hers, who knew Billy and I were going to split up.
“Gracie had an act that was written especially for her, and we decided to do it together. But it needed some scenery, and I couldn’t dig up $300 to buy it. I had an act of my own. I wrote it, stole it, you know. You take a joke from here, a joke from there, and make up an original act. My act didn’t need any scenery, and we had to do it whether we wanted it or not. As ‘Burns and Allen’ we opened that act at the Hill Street Theatre in Newark, N.J. I didn’t drink, but I took along a bottle of gin to bolster up my spirits, because this act was all talk, and my talking experience was limited to telling a joke now and then. I had never talked for IS minutes straight. We were booked for three days at $5 per day for both of us. It was a terrible theatre and the manager was a hard-boiled man who didn’t seem to like our looks. My bottle of gin came in handy. I poured him a drink, and he moved us from the worst spot on the bill to the best, which for a talking act is next to the last.”
“Did you fall in love with each other at first sight?” we asked.
George: “Gracie was in love with another man, a song-writer.”
Gracie: “I was engaged to marry him.”
George: “I thought of myself as a hell of a gay blade. I used to wear those four-button coats, and always had a cigar stuck in my mouth. Gracie was the first really nice girl I had met, and before long I fell desperately in love with her. I knew she was the one girl in my life, and asked her to marry me. But she wouldn’t. She still preferred the song-writer. Finally, I gave her an ultimatum. It was either me or him.
“Early one morning following a Christmas party, she phoned me she had broken her engagement and we could get married. Our wedding took place in Cleveland, twelve years ago. We had very little money, and didn’t know if the booking-office would accept a new act I had just written. It was quite a gamble. Well, we showed our new act on Monday, and on Tuesday we signed a five-year contract, getting on the Keith circuit at $350 a week. That was a lot of dough for me. On the fifth year, our salary was to go up to $750 a week. Our troubles were over.”
“When did you get on the air?”
“We made our first radio appearance in England, when we went to Europe on a vacation. But the British seemed to like our American humor and we played all through England. Some of our words don’t mean the same thing in England, and we learned to say a 14-stone man instead of a 250-pounder and things like that, but we had no trouble in putting our jokes across. Our radio success came rather suddenly. We were playing at the Palace Theatre in New York when Eddie Cantor invited Gracie to appear on his program for three minutes. She was a hit, even though I do say it myself.
“Then one day a radio executive came backstage at the Palace and asked us if we would go on the Rudy Vallee program. I asked him how much we would get. He said $750. I was amazed. ‘A thousand dollars and not a cent more,’ he said. He thought I was arguing! That was tremendous money for one performance. We grabbed that offer right away. The next week we went on the Guy Lombardo program and stayed with him for two years. That’s when we started Gracie’s mythical missing brother idea. When Guy left the program, we took over the entire show. Now we are the two nuts with the grape-nuts.”
They started in pictures making shorts. “When we first came to the Coast Fred Allen was supposed to make a short for Warners. But he couldn’t make it. One night, at a party, an agent asked us, ‘How would you like to make a short tomorrow morning for Warner Bros.?’ ‘Tomorrow morning! How much money is there in it?’ ‘Fifteen hundred dollars,’ he said. I had never heard of so much money in my life. It was our third year with Keith and we were getting only $500 a week.
“The next morning we went to the studio, and the director of our short turned out to be a fellow whom I knew very well from the East Side. I thought I wouldn’t believe him. ‘Oh, get out!’ I said. To prove that he was the director, he ordered the lights turned on and off, and by golly they were! We made the short, but it was very bad. Our fault. All we could do was to tell jokes. But I liked this movie business. I wrote a short and submitted it to Paramount. They offered me $500. I told them the only way they could buy the script was to buy us, too. They bought us, in spite of our initial failure. We made 14 shorts in two years. But our screen career really began with the first Big Broadcast, with Bing Crosby. It was his first picture, too. And here we are.”
Gracie told her story very briefly. “I was born in San Francisco. My father and three sisters were in show business. I danced and sang a French song when I was three. It went like this.” She sang the song, which ended with the inevitable “Gay Paree.” The telephone rang. It was Mary Livingstone calling. They talked about a party at the Cocoanut Grove, precisely as two women would talk. “Our closest friends,” George explained, “are the Jack Bennys, Eddie Cantors, Al Jolsons and George Jessels.” Competitors all.
“During the summer vacations from school,” Gracie recalled, resuming her story, “I did an act in vaudeville around San Francisco. I also used to sing and dance in church affairs. I went to a convent, and my mother saw to it that I graduated from high-school. I didn’t like to study. I wanted to go on the stage. We formed a vaudeville team, known as the Allen Sisters, and went to New York. After a year my sisters went home to marry, I stayed on in New York. But I didn’t know how to get a job, I knew nothing about booking agents, bookings, etc. Nobody called me. I concluded I wasn’t wanted in show business and took a secretarial course. I hadn’t worked for some time when I met George.”
Here is a truly happy couple. “There is no jealousy between us,” George stated. “We rehearse together and work together in the same shows. Gracie has “a very fine character. There is nothing theatrical about her. When she is off stage, she is off stage. But I’m just the opposite. I live and breathe my jokes. When I write a joke, I try it on the elevator boy, anybody who would listen.”
Gracie: “He is so earnest and serious about his work. If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be working. He is a smart business man and he is the one who keeps pounding out those jokes.”
George: “The secret of our success is that Gracie does all the work on the screen and radio, and I do all the work off the screen and radio. I never stop thinking about the script. I’m always insulting people when I don’t mean it. They say ‘hello,’ and I don’t even look up. I leave home at 10:30 in the morning, and don’t get back until three the next morning. We write all the dialogue in our pictures as well as our radio scripts. I have three writers who have been with me five or six years. One of them is my brother Bill. Night after night we sit up in our office at the Hollywood Plaza Hotel, trying to make a silly woman out of Gracie. When we did that first act together for $5 a day, I was the comedian and Gracie talked straight. But the audience laughed at the wrong places. I immediately rewrote the script and made her the goofy partner. It has been so ever since.”
Clothes, both admitted, is their pet extravagance. They have huge wardrobes. “I use a bar of soap down to the last bubble,” Gracie confessed, “and I hoard my toothpaste until nothing is left in the tube.” Her pet aversion? “I can’t stand bad table manners.”
George: “And the thing she likes best is meat balls.”
Gracie: “I like everything to be served nicely.”
George: “I never thought we would get as far as this. And if today I’m a happy man, it’s because of Gracie and the two children we’ve adopted. She is the best wife and the best mother in the world.”
One must visit them in their home to see the joy they find in Sandra and Ronald. “Ever since we saw the fun Wally Beery was having with his adopted child,” George said, “we wanted to adopt one or two children ourselves.
“Gracie went to the Cradle in Chicago and adopted Sandra when she was five weeks old. Now, a five-week-old baby breathes so lightly you can hardly notice it. They sat up all night, watching her breathe, to make sure she was still living. All of a sudden she sneezed, and they were frightened to death, thinking she had caught a cold. We adopted Ronald at the same place a year later.”
Suddenly he remembered something. “Follow me,” he said. We followed him to a room upstairs, walking like him on tip-toe. Cautiously, he opened the door. Sandra and Ronald were sleeping peacefully. We’ll never forget the expression on his face.
Collection: Motion Picture Magazine, April 1938