Burns Without Allen

The longest-running team in show business began applying the brakes last week in Hollywood. After 36 years as the better half of Burns and Allen, pretty, professionally giddy Gracie, still slim and girlish at 53, announced that she will retire in May. "I'm going to sleep for six months," she said. "I'm going to invite people in to dinner, and visit my grandchildren. And I'm going to clean out the bureau drawers."

Over the years, Mrs. George Burns has accumulated an overflow of nostalgia--good times, well-used gags and trademarked nitwitticisms that made her vaudeville's, radio's and TV's longest-suffered, best-loved wife. Her Irish father, a song-and-dance man from San Francisco, named her Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalia Allen, and at three, Gracie joined his act in top hat and red whiskers. In 1922, after hunger had urged her into secretarial school, she caught the down-at-heel act of George Burns (real name: Nathan Birn-baum). George promised to feed her, even became her foil when Gracie got all the laughs. They were married in 1926. Six years later they landed a CBS contract and have been on the air ever since.

Gracie has ingratiated herself with millions of Americans in such mad trifles as her One Finger Piano Concerto, her plugs for Sponsor Carnation Milk ("I don't see how they get milk from carnations"), her weakness for clipping her boxwood hedge with George's electric razor. In the '30 she popped up all over the dial looking for her supposedly lost brother, a long-running gag that drove her real, unlost brother, a San Francisco accountant, into hiding. In desperation, he wired Gracie: "Can't you make a living any other way?"

As petite, auburn-haired Gracie bowed out of one of television's most successful comedy shows, George Burns, now 62, insisted that he would go on without her. He will also continue as head of TV's moneymaking McCadden Productions (Bob Cummings Show, The People's Choice). Of Grade's retirement, he said: "No one so richly deserves it. Her kind of work takes a lot out of you. Like I ask Gracie how her brother is and she talks for four minutes without stopping. That's very hard work."

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