At 79, after nearly 75 years in show business, Milton Berle still gets
”the flop sweats” when he performs. It`s the kind of sweat that drenches his shirt and soaks through to his jacket, that makes his makeup run down his cheeks and leaves his skin clammy. It comes from fear.
Fear of dying ”the death of a dog.” He`s standing in front of an audience, dropping his pants, walking on the sides of his feet, catching a pie with his face, working his butt off-anything for a laugh-while the audience sits like a lump.
Fear of losing his slippery hold in show business, of having to go back to the crummy clubs and the five-shows-a-day grind houses, of having to make another comeback.
Fear.
He hasn`t lost it even though he`s been working since he was 5, supporting his family since he was 10. When you`ve been a has-been at 16, it doesn`t matter if you`re playing to thousands at the Palace or to a hundred at the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago.
Today it`s a hundred at the Museum. They`re the old Berle fans, the ones who remember him in ”Sun Valley Serenade,” who sat through all his shows at the Chez Paree and bring old TV Guide`s for him to sign, including one from 1953 that trumpets his comeback. (”Yeah,” says Berle when he sees it, ”that was my eighth.”)
Milton Berle is in town to hype his new book, ”B.S. I Love You”
(McGraw-Hill, $17.95), about his 60 years as a member of the Friar`s Club. As part of the promotion, he`s appearing at the museum. They`ll show a short tape of his TV highlights; he`ll speak, then autograph books. They`ve been running his old shows all afternoon.
– ”Texaco Star Theatre,” 1951: After the opening number (”Oh, we`re the men of Texaco/We work from Maine to Mexico/There`s nothing like this Texaco of ours!) Berle comes out in an enormous wedding gown, lipstick up to his nose, and introduces ”a great young comedian: Danny Thomas.”
– ”Kraft Music Hall,” 1959: ”Did you ever see my wife in a pair of slacks? She looks like she`s smuggling Vic Tanney out of the country. Laugh it up folks, these are the jokes.” Ed Herlihy makes Velveeta, tuna, and noodle casserole.
– ”The Milton Berle Show,” 1966: ”You`re my kind of audience . . . trapped.” Jayne Mansfield and Martha Raye are guests. Martha Raye says, ”Take away her blond hair, beautiful face and gorgeous figure and what have you got? . . . Me!” They sing ”I Enjoy Being a Girl.”
And now they`re showing the tape of Berle highlights. Berle trading one- liners with Elvis Presley, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Peter Lorre, Carl Sandburg. Berle yelling ”Make-up!” and getting slapped in the face with a huge powder puff. Berle with his hair greased down and his teeth blacked out. Berle mouthing ”I love you” to the camera. Berle vamping as Carmen Miranda and Cleopatra. ”I swear I`ll kiwl you a milwyun times!” Berle dancing in long underwear. Doing his own stunts. Breaking up at his own jokes. The TV audiences-the women in hats and gloves, the men in suits-eat it up. The applause is led by Berle`s mother. She laughs first and loudest. ”Don`t laugh lady. You may have children of your own someday.”
Berle stands quietly in the back of the dark auditorium watching the tape with the audience. He`s puffing on a big cigar, another one is stuck in the pocket of his sports jacket. His hair is white and wispy. He`s trimmer than in his TV days. The bunny teeth are still there. He`s wearing heavy pancake makeup. He`s not laughing. He`s not even smiling. He`s shaking his head in disgust. He doesn`t like the sound system.
”It`s terrible,” he says to the publicist. ”I can`t hear anything. Tell them to turn up the treble, the treble.”
He`s about to go on. ”Introduce me as either Uncle Miltie or Mr. Television.”
” . . . and now Mr. Television . . . Milton Berle.”
Berle strides out as though this was still 1949 and he still owned Tuesday nights. A photographer fumbles with her camera as she focuses on him. He pauses. ”Lady, my suit will be out of style by the time you take it.” He looks at a woman in the audience. ”I remember you from 20 years ago. I never forget a dress.” He fluffs his hair as the laughter dies down. ”I was just on a Polish cruise, seven days, three nights.” He winks. ”I was walking down Wells Street and I heard a couple of guys speaking Iranian. I said, `Boys, you`re in America now. Speak Spanish.` ” He burps. ”I got so much gas I`m being followed by Arabs.” He plays with his cigar. ”Henny Youngman used to say, `Take my wife.` Little did he know, everyone did.” He burps again. ”Damned tuna fish. I think they finally took Charlie.” He loosens his tie. ”My book, `B.S. I Love You,` is in it`s 14th printing. The first 13 were blurred.” He shrugs. Old joke. He knows it. ”I`d like to introduce someone who`s more than a friend to me. He`s a total stranger.” He looks at his watch. ”I gotta be going, I`ve got to be on the set in June. They told me to do five minutes. Berle do five minutes? I bow for 20!”
An hour has gone by. He was scheduled to speak for 30 minutes.
”To say it was a pleasure (pause) would be lying. . . .”
He comes off the stage drenched.
The flop sweats.
Milton Berle is trying to pull a George Burns, make a comeback at 80. Until recently, he made the papers only when he spoke at someone`s funeral. But it`s going to be difficult. ”Burns is a sweet-looking old guy. Everyone loves him,” says Irving Fein, the agent who masterminded Burns` comeback and who gave Berle the idea for this book. ”Berle is more of a tough old guy. Once in a while I get him a job. He`s doing a lot better lately. He hasn`t worked Vegas in the last few years, but he still works Atlantic City.”
Berle`s publicist, Glenn Schwartz, says he needs a project that will appeal to a younger generation.
Besides the book, Berle has two TV shows in the can. One is a nostalgic comedy, ”Side by Side,” co-starring Sid Caesar and Danny Thomas that will air on CBS this spring. The other is a syndicated special, ”Milton Berle: the Second Time Around,” made of excerpts from the old shows. He`s hoping it will lead to a series. ”I think people will be thrilled with it,” says Berle.
”They`ve never seen anything like it, wall-to-wall comedy, no lulls, bang, bang, bang. Then they`ll be able to separate the men from the boys when it comes to performers.” He`s scheduled for the covers of People and Spy magazines.
But don`t tell him he`s trying to make a comeback. To hear him tell it, he never left. Over lunch at Eli`s, he bristles at the suggestion that he`d like to have the kind of career Burns has.
”What do you mean, would I like to have his kind of career? I have that kind of career. I play Atlantic City twice a year. Twice a year I`m at Tahoe. That`s a funny question, would I like to have his kind of career. I mean, he`s had TV specials, I`ve had a lot of them. I make guest appearances. I`ve got enough to do.”
He`s had plenty to do today: six interviews from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., with one short nap break. He hung around after the interviews were over, telling one more show biz story, reminiscing about the old days when he held the record at the Chicago Theatre until Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis played there in 1951, always doing a little more shtick. Before his WBBM-TV interview, he told Linda MacLennan not to worry: ”I`ve done this before.”
After his interview with Norman Mark was over, he stayed on the WMAQ-TV news set, kibbitzing with weatherman John Coleman, betting Warner Saunders that the Bears would get blitzed. Live televison, he loves it.
And he thinks it`s expected of him. ”I know my image, the wise guy, the fast talker, always putting people down.”
Between interviews, he entertained his little entourage-a couple of old friends, a publicist, an aide, a reporter-with more show business stories. About the time Harry Blackstone Sr. was doing his disappearing act and reappeared in the middle of Helen Hay`s show in the theater across the street. About why Spencer Tracy always entered a scene looking down: He didn`t want to miss his mark. About the greatest line he ever heard: Berle, and his wife Ruth, and George Burns were having dinner. Burns, who was no angel when he was married, was saying he had just been to the cemetery to visit Gracie.
”I tell her everything,” said Burns.
”Now,” said Ruth.
–
Nineteen forty-nine was a very good year for Milton Berle. He was 41 years old and on the cover of Time and Newsweek. Not bad for the former Milton Berlinger, son of Moe and Sadie (she became Sandra Berle when he became Milton Berle), a one-time resident of various New York tenements, the brassy, pushy comedian (one reviewer said he ran ”the whole gamut from vulgarity to grossness”), the Thief of Bad Gags (Fred Allen called him ”a parrot with skin on”). After big successes in vaudeville and night clubs, but repeated flops on radio, on Broadway and in Hollywood, he was on the top.
Newsweek called him TV`s ”first and biggest star.” Time called him ”a strange new phenomenon.” On Tuesday nights, when the Texaco Star Theatre was on, theaters, restaurants and movies were empty. Businesses closed early. The rush for the check at the Pump Room was comprable to what happened before Roosevelt`s fireside chats. Water levels dropped between 9:00 and 9:05 p.m. as the country flushed together. The show was red hot.
And Berle was the show. He called the camera shots, directed the acts, wrote the material, arranged the music, oversaw the lighting, costumes, and scenery, and gave himself the best laughs. He was as high as high gets. He got mail addressed to Uncle Miltie, U.S.A. NBC signed him to a lifetime contract. He was making millions.
But he wasn`t happy. He`s never been happy or at peace. ”I guess I always was one of those people who can stand anything but happiness,” he wrote in his 1974 autobiography, ”Milton Berle” (he wanted to call it ”Love Me, Love Me, Love Me . . . ” but the publisher objected). He was old at 10. Tired at 24. He gambled away fortunes. He never felt loved. He surrounded himself with ”hangers-on, freeloaders and stray broads.” He needed to work three and four jobs at a time because he hated to go home. He once took over the stage at 3 a.m. after the other performers had finished and played until 6 a.m. to a couple of customers, a few sleepy waiters, and the janitor. His ego was enormous and he ”pushed and shoved and bullied” everyone around him. His greatest successes caused his severest depressions. When he played the Palace to rave reviews in 1932 it scared him to death.
”At least when you`re climbing up, you know what you`re gouging and kicking and punching for. But suddenly you`re there and it`s more frightening than anything you knew before. . . . You find yourself working twice as hard, fighting twice as hard-and just to stay in the same place,” he wrote.
He had no childhood. Today he says that`s his one regret: ”I never got to do what the other boys did, play basketball, swim, that stuff.” Instead he was playing cheap clubs in two-bit towns, sharing a bed with his mother and sister in fleabag hotels. Breakfast was an orange split three ways, half a hard-boiled egg, and hot water and evaporated milk heated over a hot plate.
”You want to know what a Jew`s doing eating corned beef on white bread with mayonnaise. You go spend your childhood moving across the country eating in diners and hash houses and railroad lunch counters and dumps you can`t even imagine, and you`ll find out.” The anger and hostility bubbles through. ”You don`t take on grown-up responsibilities without paying a price for it.”
What kept him going through all those years?
”The need to get laughs and take bows and my mother.”
You can`t write about Milton Berle without writing about his mother. A reporter once wrote that she made Mrs. Portnoy look like ”your favorite aunt” and ”crippled him from birth.” She pushed him, manipulated him, controlled him with equal doses of love and guilt. She was allergic to cucumbers; he still doesn`t eat them. She had a fear of drafts; he won`t open a window. She wouldn`t drink ice water, he won`t touch it. When she spoke, it was always ”our career.” When he got a got a woman pregnant she told him to marry her: ”Later we can divorce that tramp.”
She guided his career from the day he won a talent contest when he was five through silent films to TV. She was the one who told him to start off on his left foot when he was in the chorus line of ”Florodora” on Broadway. He got the laugh. The producer noticed him.
For years she got him women. She used to pick a seat in the audience next to a pretty girl several years older than he and then bring her backstage and leave them alone for a few hours. If Berle tried to see the girl more than two or three times, she would say the girl was ”too old” and ”a tramp.” When he grew up, she horned in on his dates. He`d be ready to go out, and she`d suddenly appear, dressed to the teeth, saying ”Where are we going tonight?” She ruined his relationships, broke up his two marriages to show girl Joyce Mathews. He was her ticket to the good times, and she didn`t want to give him up.
Ask him about it today and the subject still is tender. ”Look,” he says, ”It was a love-hate story, a silver cord story. It was always Milton and his mother, his mother and Milton. No woman was good enough for me, only her, okay? If I took someone out more than three times, my mother would find a way to break it up. I couldn`t do nothing. I loved my mother. I was on a tight rope.”
Berle turns to his imaginary mother on his left. ”She didn`t mean it, Momma.” He turns to his imaginary date on his right. ”She didn`t mean it, Shirley.”
”I had to go back and forth, back and forth. My mother wouldn`t let go. It didn`t matter who the other woman was. She wanted me to herself. She didn`t want to share Milton with anyone. She wanted me to be single forever. She didn`t care how many girls I knocked up, as long as I never married, okay?”
Sandra Berle met her match when Berle started dating Ruth Cosgrove, a publicist and a former WAC (Women`s Army Corps). Mrs. Berle had read about the affair in gossip columns and said she wanted to meet Ruth. The three of them went to the El Morocco night club.
”She was bedecked, my mother-sable, all her jewelry, blue-white hair, a pedicure every day. I gave it all to her because she never had it. I want you to picture this. I said, `This is the young lady you`ve been reading about.`
The first question my mother had the chutzpah to ask her: `How old are you?`
Ruth said, `30.` My mother said, `You`ll never see 30 again.` Ruth said, `Can I call you Sandra?` She said, `Of course.` Ruth said, `Listen, Sandra. If you want to play games, if you want to tell jokes, throw one-liners and ask insulting questions, I can play, too.` She was the first woman who ever stood up to my mother. And when my mother heard that, she backed off. Ruth was very smart.”
Today Berle spends most afternoons at the Friar`s Club, lunching with old friends, the ones who still are around. Maybe he`ll stop in at his office. A good project would interest him. He`s angry that when people think about him, they say, ”We`ll call on Milton. I wonder what he`ll say? Do you think he can do five minutes?” He has his health, wealth, an incredible memory. (He`s great with dates, but he forgets that he wrote about his affair with Marilyn Monroe in his autobiography. ”How do you know about me and Marilyn?” he asks a reporter. ”I never said a word about her.”) His marriage has lasted for 34 years. He keeps in touch with his two children. He keeps track of his illegitimate son.
All in all, he seems to be one lucky guy. He denies it.
”Lucky?” He turns to the publicist and his aide. ”Johnny, Tony, she says `You`ve been a lucky guy` to me. Lucky? Just the opposite. I`m not lucky. I worked hard for everything. It was pure sweat and very hard work. All the times I died the death of a dog in a night club, that`s not very lucky. You only know about my successes, you don`t know about the flops, the flop sweats I went through. But I wouldn`t change it.”
Berle puffs on his cigar, looking for a way to end the interview.
”Here, I`ll give you something that might be a good button for your whole column. You write, `So I finally said to Milton or Mr. Berle, or Uncle Miltie, ”When are you going to retire?” ` and Milton quipped, `To what?` ” It is a good button, a good line. Only George Burns said it first.
