Ccmdidette

One Presidential pretender out to out-stump Tom Dewey and all the rest is the Surprise Party's nominee--Gracie Allen, witling half of the radio & cinema team of Burns & Allen. Unannounced to audiences, last week Gracie sashayed into a half-dozen other people's radio programs to air her politicocomic aims.

>Ken Murray (Texaco) asked what party she was affiliated with. "Same old party," replied Gracie, "George Burns." Murray tried to be more explicit. Politicians always pick a political party, he said, and then get affiliated. "Well," said Gracie, "I may take a drink now and then, but I never get affiliated."

>Fibber McGee (Johnson's Wax) told Gracie he has heard whispers about Dewey, Hull, Taft and Garner all heading for the White House. Were they just rumors? Said Gracie: "They are not.

I'll be running for the White House, and I'm not going to take in any roomers." This sort of prattle all over the networks, on programs ranging from Jack Benny's Jell-O half-hour to Dr. I.Q.

(Mars, Inc.--candy), and even in Washington (whither Gracie flew from Hollywood to attend the Women's National Press Club dinner and announce her convention: in Omaha, May 15-18), was a new twist to an old Gracie Allen stunt.

In 1933 Gracie raised Cain on the air, popping up on countless programs in search of her supposedly missing brother. The search went on for months, got to be a coast-to-coast gag. It also boosted Burns & Allen's radio popularity tremendously.

The Surprise Party's platform is redwood trimmed with "nutty" pine; its emblem is a kangaroo for Leap Year (see cut). She has a song which goes: Vote for Gracie To "win the Presidential racie. . . . Vote for Gracie, Keep voting all day long.

For routine questions, she read answers from cards. Samples:

Q. "What do you think of the Neutrality Bill?"

A. "If we owe it, let's pay it."

Q. "What do you think of the national debt?"

A. "We ought to be proud of it--it's the biggest in the world."

Q. "What do you think of the Dies Committee?"

A. "We've got to keep it going. Who'd color the Easter eggs?"

For her Omaha convention, which coincides neatly with the Union Pacific's Golden Spike celebration, Gracie will travel over the U. P. lines in W. Averell Harriman's private car, will have a torchlight parade of 25,000 whiskerinos.

Meanwhile she intends to continue barging in on other radio programs, plans to campaign right up to election. In campaigning she plans to kiss baby girls only, and to wait until the boy babies grow up.

Gracie Allen's dippiness is a stage prop that accounts for most of Burns & Allen's reported $9,000-a-week radio salary. Off-mike, she is not always so dippy. As a guest on Information Please last summer, she stacked up favorably with the most select experts. On one Screen Guild show she played opposite James Cagney in a serious Irish playlet and did it well. One year U.S.C. psychology students, professing to find considerable sense behind Gracie's nonsense, voted her Hollywood's most intelligent actress.

Gracie is Irish (full name: Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalia Allen), 35, petite, blue-eyed, auburnhaired, and San Francisco-born. Her father was a song-&-dance man.

Gracie joined the act, in top hat and red sluggers (whiskers), at three and a half. She got some convent schooling, but at 13 or thereabouts joined three older sisters in vaudeville as hoofer and singer.

In 1922 she teamed with George Burns (Nathan Birnbaum, Manhattan East Sider who had been doing variety turns since he was 12) and her career of professional daffiness began. She and Burns were married in 1926. In 1931 a guest turn on Eddie Cantor's program paid off in a radio contract, and Burns & Allen have been on the air and in the movies regularly since.

Most of the year they live in a twelve-room Beverly Hills house, with two adopted children. On the side Gracie paints her own brand of surrealism (Keg-Lined Can Sinking a Couple of Hard Putts in No-Trump), in 1938 had an exhibition in Manhattan to help out the China Aid Council. Her lost-brother stunt in 1933 proved an almighty headache for her real, unlost brother George, a San Francisco accountant. After all the ribbing he could stand, he wired Gracie: "Can't you make a living any other way?"; then really disappeared till the gag blew over.

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