The Child Wonder

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As the clock nears 8 along the Eastern Seaboard on Tuesday night, a strange new phenomenon takes place in U.S. urban life. Business falls off in many a nightclub, theater-ticket sales are light, neighborhood movie audiences thin. Some late-hour shopkeepers post signs and close up for the night. In Manhattan, diners at Lindy's gulp their after-dinner coffee and call for their checks as they did in the days of the Roosevelt fireside chats. On big-city bar rails along the coast and in the Midwest, there is hardly room for another foot. For the next hour, wherever a signal from an NBC television transmitter can be picked out of the air, a large part of the population has its eyes fixed on a TV screen.

The center of all this to-do is Milton Berle, a jack-of-all-turns vaudeville comic who has gone into television and won a bright new feather for his very old hat. In a space of eight months, Berle's Texaco Star Theater (Tues. 8 p.m. E.D.T., NBCTV) has made him the undisputed No. 1 performer on U.S. TV. His show is a weekly catchall of the things the 40-year-old comic has learned in 35 hard-working years in show business. Berle uses not only his brash, strongbow-shaped mouth to get off his loud, fast, uneven volley of one-line gags; with expert timing and tireless bounce, he also hurls his whole 6 feet and 191 dieted pounds into every act of his show. His motto is still "anything for a laugh"--and practically anything he does gets one.

Berle is not universally admired. His detractors find his brassiness glaring, his lines lackluster and his talent often tasteless. They point out that television is still in its infancy and declare that Berle just happens to be the man who is taking candy from the baby. Nonetheless, the Berle show's New York Hooperating stands at 80--the highest of any regular TV or radio program--and his audience in the 24 cities that see him "live" or on kinescope film two weeks later is reliably estimated at 4,452,000.

Mama Says So. Berle's success on television is a curious byproduct of repeated flops in both radio and movies--a special irony for pushy Milton Berle, who has lived his life to feed what he calls "my great want to conquer." The flops hurt deeply and worried him about his appeal to a mass audience. But they forced him into well-paid jobs in nightclubs, where live audiences kept his talents supple. Meanwhile, more successful comedians were falling into the lazier habit of peering at scripts through spectacles.

"The great want to conquer" began to gnaw Milton Berlinger no more than five years after he was born in 1908 in a Harlem tenement. He was the fourth of five children of the late Moe Berlinger, a quiet, sickly shopkeeper, and his vigorous, iron-willed wife Sarah (now Sandra). The great want sprang first in young Milton's mother, who helped earn the family living as a store detective. One day she borrowed 20-c- carfare to take the five-year-old boy to an amateur contest after he had done an impromptu street imitation of Charlie Chaplin. Milton won the contest, and Mom promptly went to work on his career as if it were a sacred mission. As he grew, his age could be reckoned by his billing: "The Shimmy Kid," "The Child Wonder," "The Wayward Youth."

When the child wonder was about ten, a veteran of kid shows, benefits and early Eastern movies, Mom once broke up a ball game at a Catskill resort just after Milton's playmates had chosen sides. As one of the players recalls it, Mom announced: "Milton has to be the captain, because it's his bat and ball, and besides, he's going to be a big Broadway star some day." By the time he was 15, the lesson was well learned. "Kid," he confided to another trouper, "I'm going to the top in this business. Mama says so." By the time he was 31, Mom had traveled more than 100,000 miles with him around the Big Wheels and in the nightclubs as business manager, cook, claque, straight woman, goad and inspiration.

The New Berle. Through the years, hard-working Comic Berle drove himself so overbearingly to fulfill his destiny that many a bitter show-business colleague came to regard him as a gag-stealing braggart. Now, having conquered at last, Milton seems to be living down his bad reputation. Success agrees with him. Says George Jessel: "He doesn't have to try so hard now, and so he's not so liable to be stepping on other people's toes." Once damned by many who had to work with him on the way up, he now has the respect and good will of most of his show's topflight guest stars, as well as its lesser workers.

Once spanked by a Chicago critic for his "gabby scoopings into the gutter," Berle has been startled, touched and filled with a sense of responsibility to find that he has a sudden popularity among children TViewers. Fellow vaudevillians who once resented him now hail him as a savior of the two-a-day. Once such a professional stray that he has never been acceptable to Broadway's Lambs Club, he will be honored this week by a $50-a-plate testimonial dinner (Thurs. 10:20 p.m. E.D.T., NBCTV) for contributing to interfaith understanding (he has played benefits for all racial and religious groups). Milton, whose interest in the ponies used to keep a bookie stationed in his dressing room, is now plugging hard at being a public-spirited citizen: last month he raised $1,100,000 in pledges for cancer research on a backbreaking 16-hour NBC-TV marathon show.

Larceny & Bold Pace. But some top-bracket comedians, preparing to plunge into TV next fall, are still feeling pain from an old Berle-inflicted wound. Berle ("The Thief of Badgags") has always" been so intoxicated by the sound of audience laughter that he could never resist using likely material--even if someone else had used it first. He is firmly convinced that any gag sounds better leaving his own mouth, and, argues his faithful flock, all jokes are public property any how. An understanding friend explains: "The guy just can't help imitating something that has entertained . . . His heart is in his work. He isn't happy unless he's entertaining people."

Yet virtually every major comedian feels robbed. Says Bob Hope: "When you see Berle, you're seeing the best things of anybody who has ever been on Broadway ... I want to get into television before he uses up all my material." Jack Benny is smarting over what he considers the theft of a hillbilly sketch, which Milton claims to have used first. Says Fred Allen: "He's done everybody's act. He's a parrot with skin on." Eddie Cantor is rankled because, he says, Milton recently used a sketch written for Cantor in 1920.

With probably the biggest beef of all, Ed Wynn ("The Perfect Fool") argues that in 1913 he originated Milton's whole format of introducing all the acts and playing a buffoon in each of them. While displaying an old scrapbook of his jokes, Milton was recently asked to explain a page headed: "Ed Wynn Jokes." Said he: "Those are some jokes Ed Wynn once gave me." Says Wynn in Hollywood: "I never gave him any jokes, nor did I give him permission to steal my life's work."

Superman & Rosie O'Grady. Berle's own gifts for TV should be plain even to his most diehard detractors. His early start as an entertainer has given him a unique combination of talents: he has an old trouper's know-how and a newcomer's vigor. To a grueling weekly job, he brings a boundless appetite for work and dazzling stores of energy. Cracks Bob Hope: "I think he ought to be investigated by the Atomic Energy Commission . . . Unfortunately, he's got talent, too." Besides being an excellent master of ceremonies, a facial contortionist and a helter-skelter clown, Berle can sing, dance, juggle act, do card tricks, imitations and acrobatics, ride a unicycle and mug under water.

He offers all the visual razzle-dazzle a TV screen can hold. With at least five costume changes in each show, he has bounced on as Superman, Li'l Abner, Santa Claus, an Easter bunny, Father Time and Rosie O'Grady. He has made entrances by dog sled, donkey, horse chariot, kiddie car and parachute. He often coaxes the unexpected out of his guest stars: Gracie Fields sang for him in a bathing suit, and the Metropolitan's Tenor Lauritz Melchior in blackface.

Beyond his showman's skills, Milton gets into all the offstage acts too. Though his contract gives him the right to assist in putting the show on, he runs the whole business. He has a master grasp of the TV medium still rare among lesser practitioners who are hamstrung by radio techniques. He calls the show's camera shots, directs the acts, plans the continuity, bosses the booking, writing, lighting and costumes, dictates the musical arrangements (and frequently hands them out to the musicians), approves the scenery (and sometimes helps shift it) and, in rehearsal, often leads the band over the head of its conductor.

The Retort Mechanical. Perfectionist Berle works at his supporting company so long and hard that in recent weeks there has been no time for a dress rehearsal; before the studio audience enters there is not always a chance for NBC janitors to sweep up a litter of sandwich wrappers, crushed coffee cartons and remnants of some of the 15 to 20 eight-inch cigars that Berle mangles daily. At the last minute, the impresario gets around to learning his own lines. But memorizing is his neatest trick, and it lies at the heart of his talent.

Although the Berle office holds a file of 850,000 indexed gags (with duplicates on microfilm in a bank vault), he carries his own file in his head. His mind works like an I.B.M. machine: a situation arises, something clicks and the right gag, insult or retort flips from Berle's mouth on cue, with reinforcements right behind it. This hair-trigger efficiency has made him the nightclubs' deadliest squelcher of hecklers and a dangerous foe in a battle of wits.

It has also given him an undeserved reputation for clever ad-libbing. Comic Berle, who went through the eighth grade of Manhattan's Professional Children's School mostly by correspondence, is not an original wit, nor is he in a class with such impromptu quipsters as Fred Allen or Groucho Marx. He rarely invents his repartee; he selects it quickly and efficiently out of stock. But its flow is so fast, aggressive and well-timed, and it is driven with such mugging verve, that it can stun most opponents into silence.

As a kid in vaudeville, young Milton developed his memory hand in hand with his considerable talent for mimicry. He would stand in the wings, soaking up lines and gestures; after watching a performance a few times he could give a letter-perfect recital of a role, complete with gestures, inflections and pauses. Once, in Atlantic City, teen-aged Milton startled Ethel Barrymore, then making two-a-day appearances on the same bill, by doing her whole act for her.

Thank You, Mother. When Milton was between twelve and 16, he teamed in a big-time act with Elizabeth Kennedy, now 41. With adolescence, he began to sprout like a weed, fought a squeaky voice and grew round-shouldered trying to carry conviction as a boy in blue knee pants. He would get to the theater early to join the tumblers in practice and learned flips, handstands and comic bouncing on a tram-polin. Fascinated by magicians, he almost ruined a disappearing woman act by getting into the trap door to see how it was done.

He would complain when the stage manager waved him off after only five bows; backstage noises while he was on would send him off railing like a prima donna at old, established stars. Sometimes he threw a tantrum at stagehands for no reason, but usually ended with a gag that left them laughing. Years later, at a nightclub, he broke into tears after a drummer mistimed a cue in his act. He had the man fired, later rehired him and now carries his own drummer--the same man--with whom he conducts a running feud.

Milton and Mom, who were accompanied on their tours for years by his younger sister, Rosalind, made it a point to be the first arrivals at rehearsals to get priority on the songs Milton wanted to sing. Early in the game, Mom began to serve as an audience "plant." In line of duty, she has cut loose with her piercing, roof-shaking laugh in every major theater in the U.S. Only a frankly hostile audience could resist Mom's lead. Milton's stage response to her laughter has become standard: "Thank you, mother," and that is usually good for a laugh, too. Today, a vigorous woman of 71, Mom Berle took a bow on last week's TV show and did one of her specialties--a brief straight bit for her son.

After Kennedy& Berle broke up, Milton had some trouble catching on as a single. His brashness, coming from a gawky kid with loving-cup ears, struck most people as intolerable. But Milton and Mom persevered. When he was 21, illness made a vacancy at the New York Palace, vaudeville's top spot, where he had played with Elizabeth several times. An agent booked Milton at $750 a week and discreetly vanished on a cruise. But Milton "fractured 'em," ran for seven weeks and won a firm hold as a headliner.

The Whole Gamut. Always reaching for more laughs, Berle has even tried stooping for them. At Chicago's Palace in 1933, he broke records for five weeks but he outraged the late Chicago Daily News Critic Lloyd Lewis, who found him a "blab-mouthed, satyr-eyed kid" who "toys with physiology, pathology and pruriency, tossing them about with all the freedom of a delinquent boy." On television, acutely conscious of his juvenile following and of the strait-laced National Broadcasting Co., Berle keeps it clean.

Ever looking upward, Milton tried the legitimate stage. In the 1932 Vanities, the Times's Brooks Atkinson calmly noted in Berle "a certain derivative exuberance." In 1934's Saluta, Atkinson found him running "the whole gamut from vulgarity to grossness" with "immense enthusiasm and no discrimination at all." Since then, Berle's theatrical record consists of two moderate successes (See My Lawyer and the Ziegfeld Follies of 1943) and, most recently, an immoderate flop (Spring in Brazil). He has also flopped several times as a producer and backer. As a producer, he did so much tampering with one show that, an observer recalls, "When it opened out of town, everybody on the stage looked and talked like Berle."

Like lyric writing (for some 50 unsung songs), radio (where, after five failures, his current show--Wed. 9 p.m. E.D.T., ABC--is fattening on his TV glory), and movies (for which a plastic surgeon bobbed his nose in 1939), the theater is one of Milton's gnawing frustrations. This season, while already riding high in TV, he tried unsuccessfully to get a supporting role in South Pacific. But producers are now wooing him instead.

Although he has rung up record salaries in nightclubs ($460,000 for 46 weeks at Manhattan's Carnival) and vaudeville ($23,000 a week at Broadway's Roxy), Berle will work for nothing rather than go without an audience. He has entertained in hotel lobbies, restaurants, railroad stations, buses and cabs. (To a convulsed cab driver on whom he worked during a recent ride, Milton cracked: "You think this is funny? You should've caught me last Tuesday in a cab on 57th Street!")

Good Samaritan. Some of his best performances in nightclubs, which the new, more refined Berle professes to find too "smoky and noisy" for his taste, have been put on free, while Milton was a customer. Visiting a Philadelphia spot during the war after a hard day's work, he went on the floor at 3:30 a.m. and played until 6 to two customers, a janitor and some sleepy waiters. Recently, when Gypsy Rose Lee walked out on a club date at the last minute, Berle stepped in and put on a two-hour show. Last year, when a mishap forced Kay Thompson out of her act at Le Directoire, a frantic owner was assured: "Don't worry. Berle's in the house." Milton put on the show.

Much of Berle's free entertaining has been in good causes. He has probably played more benefits than any other performer--as many as seven in one night. In 1946, he set up the Milton Berle Foundation for Crippled Children. He has done marathon radio shows (from 12-24 hours) in New York, Chicago, Baltimore and Pittsburgh to raise funds for heart associations. Last year he spent four hours clowning with each of 75 patients in a Chicago hospital for children with rheumatic fever. Said a witness: "He has a way with kids, a way of being a kid himself."

He has played the good Samaritan in show business too. When an unemployed actor with a chance to get a vaudeville job ran into him on Broadway and asked for material, he stayed up all night in a hotel room, pouring gags into the man. He also helped salvage an actress from alcoholism, wrote an act for her, paid for its musical arrangements, made the bookings and appeared with her on the early engagements. He is easily approachable to down-&-outers, and generous with gifts. Among his unusual presents: plastic-nose operations just like his own for his secretary and the head of his fan club.

Dollars & Dolors. Berle's earning capacity is high enough to let him hit $1,000,000 a year if taxes made the effort worth while. For the last ten years he has earned more than $250,000 a year; in 1946 he piled up $750,000. His current TV and radio shows pay him an estimated $6,500 a week, and next fall he is slated for a raise.

Once inclined to go overboard on horse bets, he tries to hew to a pocket-money allowance of $125 doled out weekly by a Wall Street law firm, which receives his income, pays his bills, nourishes his annuities and tends to the dozen companies lumped under the name Milton Berle Enterprises, Inc. Among his interests: a machine tool company, a furniture factory, real estate, music publishing, a toy business, a producing company.

His personal life is not nearly so rich. Sensitive despite his brashness, he has been left deeply insecure and distrustful by his career as a child in a rough-&-tumble struggle. "The great want to conquer" has left him neither time nor depth for other interests, except the spectator sports and an occasional game of billiards. He goes almost everywhere with a bolstering entourage of yesmen, who run his errands and remind him at frequent intervals that he is terrific. In 1941 he married Showgirl Joyce Mathews, a striking blonde who got a Reno divorce six years later. Still friendly, they share custody of an adopted daughter, 3 1/2year-old Victoria, on whom he lavishes deep affection.

Conquests to Come. Three months ago, convoyed by a housekeeper, valet and chauffeur, Berle moved into a sumptuous nine-room bachelor apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side. There he keeps in touch with Broadway and Hollywood through two phones in each of four rooms. Aside from mellowing him, success has awakened some tony tastes that amuse old acquaintances. He has recently taken to Homburgs, dark, dignified suits, fancier restaurants, and an occasional pose of world-weariness.

Success has also aroused a desire for "more time for Berle." One friend is skeptical of this reach for leisure: "What Milton would really like would be to have his TV and radio shows, do a midnight turn at a nightclub, have a disc jockey show from noon to 2, spend some time during the week with Dick Rodgers batting out a few tunes. Sandwiched in between, he'd direct and produce a play, stage some revue sketches, be a TV network consultant, be called to Hollywood to star in, co-produce, co-direct, co-write and edit a movie. In spare moments, at all state, national and international functions, he'd like to be toastmaster. He'd like to be abbot of the Friars [which he is], shepherd of the Lambs and president of the Players. And in the sunset of his life, if show business ever has a czar like Happy Chandler, three guesses on Milton's choice for the job."

Milton's own plans are a little more modest. Anxious for a new crack at an old failure, he will probably make a movie this summer if he can get a deal that will give him some control over the picture. He has thought about starring in a show next fall on Broadway, where he has $30,000 in a forthcoming revue. Next month he will start a daily 400-word syndicated column in more than 50 newspapers. He is getting ready to parlay his television winnings into a TV producing company, a TV school and, for tours of U.S. theaters, Milton Berle Television Units. In the long haul, he wants to produce and direct. Well fed at last, the great want still hungers for new conquests.

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