ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 10, 1996 TAG: 9603110104
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
George Burns, the cigar-puffing comedian who was the best comic ``straight man'' of his time in a partnership with his wife, the masterfully scatterbrained Gracie Allen, and who then began a brilliant new solo career in show business when he was nearly 80, died Saturday.
He was 100, and his career in show business lasted 93 years.
Burns died at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif., said his manager, Irving Fein.
When he was well into his 90s, Burns announced with his customary brio that he had arranged to celebrate his 100th birthday, on Jan. 20, 1996, with an engagement at the London Palladium. That being the case, he noted, he could not possibly die - ``I'm booked,'' he explained.
The diminutive, gravel-voiced Burns, delivering doses of his dry humor and occasionally breaking into a fragment of some long-forgotten vaudeville ditty, all the while savoring a huge cigar, was a beloved figure to several generations of Americans.
He not only survived but triumphed in vaudeville, radio, television, nightclubs, records, books and movies. Even as he aged, he seemed ageless.
In July 1994, however, Burns fell in a bathtub in his home and was hospitalized. Two months later, he was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for surgery to drain fluid from the surface of his brain.
He never recovered fully, and became increasingly frail. He was forced to cancel his Palladium appearance and a sold-out engagement scheduled for last year at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.
Burns already had his opening line ready: ``It's nice to be here. When you're 100 years old, it's nice to be anywhere.''
Then a bout of flu kept him from attending a party in his honor Jan. 16 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. The birthday party was also timed to coincide with an announcement of Burns' donation to Cedars-Sinai for the George Burns and Gracie Allen Research Institute. There already is a George Burns Medical Education Center in Israel.
The Burns and Allen team rose to the heights of the entertainment world in the 1920s and remained there, whether in vaudeville, movies, radio or television, until Allen's retirement in 1959.
After her death in 1964 at the age of 58, Burns continued to perform on television in concerts and nightclubs with such performers as Carol Channing, Ann-Margret and Dorothy Provine.
In 1975, when he was 79 and after undergoing major heart surgery, Burns made a triumphant movie comeback in Neil Simon's ``Sunshine Boys,'' in the role of a retired vaudeville performer, and began his remarkable second career.
He had been absent from the screen in a leading role for 35 years, but he won an Academy Award as best supporting actor, a coup that led to new film roles. He also appeared in annual television specials and was a guest on many programs.
Burns, whose original name was Nathan Birnbaum, was born Jan. 20, 1896, on Pitt Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the ninth of 12 children.
As a child, he and a pal would pick up bits of coal from the streets to take home. And friends, on seeing the boys' knickers bulging with coal, would call out, ``Here come the Burns Brothers,'' a reference to the name of a coal company that served the neighborhood. The nickname stuck, and the comedian took Burns as his stage name.
At age 7, he joined with a 6-year-old basso and two other boys to form the Pee-Wee Quartet, which performed in saloons and on the Staten Island ferry, where, he said, the only way for people to avoid them was to jump overboard. At 13, he and a friend opened B-B's College of Dancing.
Following the vogue of the times, Burns appeared in vaudeville as a trick rollerskater and a member of Latin and ballroom dance teams. ``I even did an act with a seal,'' he once recalled. ``It was small-time vaudeville, playing bad theaters and thinking you were good if you played a theater worse than you were.''
Burns' acts were invariably so awful, he said, that no booker would hire him, so he would constantly be forced to invent new stage names, among them Willy Delight, Captain Betts and Buddy Links. He was part of a song-and-dance act at a theater in Newark, N.J., when he was introduced to Allen in 1922.
Although she was only 16, Allen had four years of vaudeville experience, playing Irish colleens. Burns persuaded her to join him with Allen playing his straight ``man.'' But it soon became apparent that Allen was a natural comedienne, and Burns rewrote their material to give his new partner most of the laughs.
By 1926, when they were married, Burns and Allen had become stellar attractions in vaudeville. Their act, called ``Lamb Chops,'' written chiefly by Burns, became so popular that the Keith theater circuit signed them to a six-year contract.
Their radio debut came in 1929, when they were appearing at the Palladium in London. On their show, which began on NBC in 1932 and lasted until 1950, Burns cultivated Allen's characterization of the addlepated nitwit. He gave her lines, for instance, in which she explained she trimmed the hedge with an electric razor, or put straw in the water in which she boiled eggs ``so they'll feel at home.''
``The character was simply the dizziest dame in the world, but what made her different from all the other dumb Doras was that Gracie played her as if she were totally sane, as if her answers actually made sense,'' Burns once explained. ``We called it illogic-logic.''
Their patented humor carried over into movies. They played themselves in more than a score of films, which included ``The Big Broadcast'' series of 1932, 1936 and 1937, ``International House'' (1933, with W.C. Fields), ``Many Happy Returns'' (1934), ``A Damsel in Distress'' (1937, with Fred Astaire) and ``College Swing'' (1938).
``The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show'' made the transition from radio to television, on CBS, in 1950, and it traveled well. The theme song, ``Love Nest,'' was the same and
the program always ended with Burns' rasping, ``Say good night, Gracie.'' To which Allen obligingly replied, ``Good night, Gracie.''
After Allen's retirement in 1958, Burns continued the television show for a season, working with their son, Ronald. His son, of Los Angeles, and his daughter, Sandra Luckman of San Diego, survive him, as do seven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
Burns never remarried after Allen's death in 1964, but he made a habit of squiring women many years his junior. Bill Cosby, the comedian, ran into Burns, a beautiful woman on each arm, at a book signing and asked why he always had two women with him. ``They're hipper than canes,'' he replied. And he once said, ``I'd go out with women my age, but there aren't any women my age.''
After ``The Sunshine Boys'' won him an Oscar, he appeared in pictures including ``Oh, God!,'' a 1977 film in which he played God, ``Just You and Me, Kid'' (1979) and ``Going in Style'' (1979).
There was a sequel, ``Oh, God! Book II,'' in 1980 and, in 1984, another sequel, ``Oh God! You Devil,'' in which the comedian played both God and the Devil. ``Why shouldn't I play God?'' he said when he was 93. ``Anything I do at my age is a miracle.''
LENGTH: Long : 130 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. File/1994 Burns prepares for his 98th birthdayby CNBcelebration at Caesar's Palace. color
2. File/1950 Burns and Gracie Allen, his "nitwit" comedy partner for
35 years, share a laugh at a Beverly Hills party in 1950.