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Showing posts with label Burns and Allen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Burns and Allen. Show all posts
Happy Birthday, Dear Gracie. Share your favorite Gracie moments here. Share and wish her a Happy 118th Birthday - but of course Gracie would say she was only 107.
Being a web log for the observations of actor, author, cartoonist, comedian, critic, director, humorist, journalist, master of ceremonies, performance artist, playwright, producer, publicist, public speaker, songwriter, and variety booker Trav S.D.
For Women’s History Month, Travelanche is hosting several posts by several guest bloggers about various female vaudevillians and other performing artists. This is the second in our series, by guest bloggerLauren Milberger.
They say the great ones never truly know how great they are -that the great ones do it without effort, without the knowledge of doing it any other way – doing what comes naturally. Gracie Allen was that kind of woman, that kind of comedian. But of course she wasn’t as black and white as the medium in which she played. Gracie Allen never gave the same performance twice; she had no conception of it. If she had to eat on camera she ate on camera; if she had to darn a sock she’d darn a sock. Being truthful in her work was a given to Gracie long before the phrase “Method Acting” became part of our lexicon. She unknowingly went against convention in her Vaudeville days, wearing whatever she liked on stage (always a nice dress) at a time when performers wore the same outfit each night – costume was as much a part of the act as the lines or moves themselves. When asked by her husband and comedy partner, George Burns, one night why she brought her purse on stage when the previous night she had not, she replied simply, “A lady always carries a purse.” When asked by a director of a Burns & Allen feature film if she could “cheat” towards the camera while eating, she answered, “But this is how I eat breakfast.” Everything Gracie Allen the character said on stage, Gracie Allen the woman believed, and so in turn did the audience.
Gracie Allen’s onstage persona was that of a scatterbrained woman with her own sense of logic – her mind was an open book. In real life, Gracie Allen almost never gave an interview as herself; to find an interview, usually very early in her career, where she speaks as herself, is rare. Gracie Allen was a very private and humble woman. She believed her own personality was not at all interesting and that the public cared only for her on stage persona, so why do interviews as herself. This kept Gracie Allen’s real life shrouded in mystery and -whether she knew it or not – gave her a final vestige of privacy.
And who would have blamed Gracie’s audience for being fooled into thinking she was her fictional persona? After all , Gracie Allen, wife of George Burns, mother and Vaudeville/Radio/TV/movie star, was playing a woman named Gracie Allen, wife of George Burns, mother and Vaudeville/Radio/TV/movie star; even in almost all of Gracie’s movies her character had the first name Gracie and/or last name Allen. Not to mention Burns and Allen used many of the real-life names of Gracie’s family members in the Burns and Allen comedy act. Even her real age is a mystery, as she never revealed it even to her husband and family. It was only after the 1900 census as well as her high school yearbook were discovered that her true age came to light. What is mostly known about Gracie, beyond her ditzy character, is from second hand sources, such as George Burns himself as well as her friends and family. Therefore, reconstructing the real Gracie Allen is more complicated than her character’s sense of logic.
She was kind, giving, fiercely loyal and fought for what she felt was fair and just in the world. Her motto was simply, “To be professional; on time and don’t push me around because I’m small.”(Burns 1988) The 5’1″ slip of a woman had that Irish passion and never let anyone forget it. Once in a Vaudeville act, after George refused to take a joke out of the act she didn’t think was funny, Gracie refused to answer George’s straight line – each and every time until George took the joke out of the act. Another time, in New Orleans, a local dry cleaner ruined an expensive dress of Gracie’s and refused to reimburse her for the damage; Gracie stepped out of the act in different intervals each night in the middle of a joke, to let the audience know of her dissatisfaction, until the dry cleaner paid her back. Once, outside the Brown Derby, Gracie literally kicked George in the ass for not opening a door for her. She helped her friends (and enemies) out with money when Vaudeville died, adopted two children including a son whom most would have considered sickly at the time, and made sure her sisters had everything they needed when they both were lost in a sea of dementia (Something she feared would happen to herself) She did all this while remaining, as Gracie would refer to herself, “a lady.” She was embarrassed by the large burn scars on her left arm from a childhood accident (She always wore long sleeves because of it), and the fact that she had two differently-colored eyes, but according to George she never complained about either flaw. In fact, if she did complain about something one knew it was a big deal – she was a Vaudeville trooper on-and off-stage. This made her appearance very important to her; something she was proud of. George remarked she never left the house with a hair out of place or her make-up less than perfect. Gracie had unresolved issues with her father, also a Vaudeville hoofer, who had abandoned her family when Gracie was a child – so much so that when Gracie’s father came backstage to see his now-famous daughter, Gracie’s only comment on the matter was: he had nothing to say to her when she was growing up and therefore she had nothing to say to him now. She was however very close to the rest of her family, her mother and sisters, and she loved her children fiercely. She didn’t think she was funny, even though American considered her its comedy sweetheart, stating that she knew funny, but wasn’t funny. When asked to say something funny her response was, “Charlie Chaplin.” George Burns says the only real joke he ever heard Gracie tell, after being egged on by friends was, “An Irishman walked out of a bar.” She hated her feet, loved gossip and her only wish was be able to wear a strapless, sleeveless, evening gown – the one thing her money and fame could not provide her. In August 1932 The World Telegraph interviewed George and Gracie in their NY hotel room; it’s one of the rare interviews where Gracie speaks as herself. She remarks, in the interview, how she is not looking to play Shakespeare and someday hopes to have enough money to retire and never work again. The reporter even mentions how during the interview Miss Allen kept staring out the window, waiting for her daughter and nanny to come back from a stroll in the park. This would be in direct parallel to her husband George Burns, who felt performing was his life and performed well into his 90’s – one might say that after Gracie’s passing, show business was what gave him the reason to live so long. It is a lovely interview and a rare glimpse into Gracie’s personality and her dynamic with George. Her excitement about their travels around Europe lifts off the page with the same enthusiasm George had talking about show-business. At one point, George, ever the raconteur, exuberantly tells the interviewer that he can’t sit still when he talks: “I have to walk around and act out everything,” to which Gracie mutters, “But perhaps you noticed that,” looking on him lovingly before sharing an admiring smile (The New York World Telegraph 1932).
The love between George and Gracie is well-documented; he adored her and lauded her as the genesis of all his success, which was half-true. They were both responsible for each other’s successes and they each referred to the other as the talented one. The difference was George lived longer to tell the tale. But after all, being the literal brains behind their act as the writer, storytelling was George’s talent. Their love story sounds like something out of a storybook. He loved her, and pursued her, in Vaudeville while Gracie claimed she loved another. And like a great act one finish, after giving Gracie an ultimatum to marry him and drop her fiancé, or break up the act, Gracie called him early Christmas morning and agreed to marry him.
Together his sense of humor and her rare talent for the stage brought them great success as a team in real life as well as show business. And although their Dumb Dora act – the girl/boy double act with a nitwit woman and smart straight man – wasn’t anything new for the time, Burns and Allen brought their originality – themselves -to their work, making it something new and innovative. But that wasn’t how it started. When Gracie first met George he was doing an act that was just imitations of other, more established Big Time acts. But his act was breaking up and George needed a new partner. Enter Gracie Allen, stage right, an out-of-work hoofer whose short respite from show business in stenography classes was a bust. They both needed new partners and George’s act was cheaper so they agreed to do his “new” act. Only just like George’s old act his “new” act was neither new nor innovative. The act consisted of jokes straight out of joke books – safe material – material that was sure to keep the fearful Burns employed, as new untested material was far too risky. George would later admit he had spent so much time in Small Time Vaudeville he was fearful of being more; he was happy coasting–he just couldn’t admit it. But the more George and Gracie worked together the more confidence he seemed to get and the more new material he wrote – until it was the whole act. George went from a twenty-eight-year-old playing it safe to a confident star that played The Big Time, The Palace. They were each other’s loves and muses – each encouraging the other.
And although Gracie Allen spoke of retirement as early as 1932, and not too long after she had the money to do so, Gracie didn’t retire until her heart become too weak to continue in 1958. Gracie Allen’s heart perhaps had loved too much to go on. She loved her husband George so much that she stayed in show business longer than she would have wanted to for his sake. She knew that show business was the breath of life to her husband – “He needs it for his metabolism,” She told Carol Channing on teaching Carol her old Burns and Allen act, when Carol appeared with George in Gracie’s place. (Burns 1988) And once George ventured out on his own she reminded him of the lessons she had taught him when they first met- truthfulness. If he didn’t believe what he was saying, how could the audience? “All you need in acting is honesty, and if you can fake that you’ve got it made, “George would always joke later in his life. But George believed as early as the 1940’s that, according to his biography on Gracie, “a joke just isn’t funny unless it has some truth in it;” he just needed to learn how to incorporated that into his deliver. (Burns 1988) George said he learned a lot from Gracie, but the most important was, “She taught me that you’ve got to make it sound like you’ve never said it before …A lot of Gracie rubbed off on me.” (People October 31, 1988 Vol. 30 No. 18)
*George Burns won the academy award for Best Supporting Actor in 1976.
Lauren Milberger is an actor/writer who resides in NYC. Her essay “George Burns and Gracie Allen: Double Act” is a part of the essay book “Playbills to Photoplays: Stage Performers Who Pioneered Talkies” and her play The Onion: First Dates was produced, co-starring herself, at The Warehouse Theatre in SC, as part of the Southern Slam Festival. She is currently working on her play The Raconteurs: The Story of Burns and Allen. Information and workshop enquires can be made to www.laurenmilberger.com. For updates and news please like Burnsallenproject on Facebook – follow @BurnsAllenplay on Twitter.
I love Gracie Allen. It’s strikes me every episode of Burns and Allen how much of a genius she is. When someone can make something seem so effortless and natural, you know they’re in total control. She’s my heroine.
Laughing forever...Burns and Allen and Cozi TV, ME TV and Antenna TV...... There is nothing on television in the night......I've discovered cozi tv. It's impossible to turn off, it's so interesting...seeing all of those old shows...I barely remember watching Burns and Allen in real time...I do remember it was funny, though, and now I can't stop laughing out loud. copied from Vanity Fair.....March 2011
Once Upon a Time in Beverly Hills
When Freddie de Cordova, Johnny Carson’s longtime producer, died in 2001, his wife knew her big-caviar days were over. Their mansion would have to go. Then Janet de Cordova did something that shocked le tout Beverly Hills.
STYLISH TO THE END Janet in Mexico in 2009, the year she died, in the home of Gracie Covarrubias, her faithful housekeeper. Portrait by Jonathan Becker.
On March 20, 1990, in the middle of the night, paramedics were called to the de Cordova home at 1875 Carla Ridge Road, in the Trousdale section of Beverly Hills. Freddie de Cordova, the executive producer of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, and his wife, Janet, a leading local socialite sometimes referred to as the Duchess of Trousdale, were asleep in their separate bedrooms. The problem was downstairs, in the servants’ quarters, where Gracie Covarrubias, the longtime housekeeper, was trying to revive her husband, Javier, who was dying of a heart attack. When the paramedics arrived, they muted their sirens. Javier was removed on a gurney and driven to Cedars-Sinai hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Early in the morning, Gracie Covarrubias returned to the house, and at eight o’clock Freddie de Cordova appeared at the breakfast table. He began to go through a pile of newspapers and the Hollywood trades, in preparation for his ritual midmorning phone call with Carson, in which they discussed the headlines that might make fodder for Carson’s monologue that night. Gracie fixed de Cordova’s breakfast, then, according to a close friend of the de Cordovas’, “waited until after he ate to approach him, saying, ‘Mr. De, I have something to tell you.’ Freddie asked, ‘What’s that, Gracie?’ She said, ‘Javier is dead.’ Freddie was stunned. He said, ‘Why didn’t you call us?’ Gracie said, ‘I didn’t want to wake you up. I called the police, and I told them not to use their sirens.’ She added, ‘I didn’t want them to wake up my lady.’” Janet de Cordova, a late riser and a heavy user of sleeping pills, was still in bed. Gracie, as usual, took her her breakfast tray at precisely nine o’clock.
“Of course, Janet was very disturbed when she heard Javier had died,” the late Dominick Dunne, a friend of Janet’s, told me. “It got to the point where Gracie, after all those years working for Janet, was very well known to the Beverly Hills set. This is one of those stories where the servants become more than just the help.”
Michelle Phillips, the former Mamas & the Papas singer, who was a protégée of Janet’s, recalls, “Janet kind of freaked out. She kept screaming, ‘Where is he?’ But that was Gracie. She always kept the messy things away from Janet. She wanted everything to be like a flowery sweet bouquet for her. She took on the problems herself and kept Janet’s world running smoothly.”
According to Dunne, “In Trousdale, there is a kind of urban legend. If you say ‘Javier is dead,’ it’s like a code for a certain generation. They know exactly whom you are quoting, what you mean. It’s like something out of Trollope or Edith Wharton—a lady and her maid. Janet could be a very demanding and difficult lady, but there was something special about her bond with Gracie.”
“Attached at the hip” is how Nancy Reagan, another of Janet’s friends, characterizes it.
When Johnny Carson retired from The Tonight Show, on May 22, 1992, an era also ended for the de Cordovas. Freddie had produced the show for almost 25 years. Although he stayed on for a brief period as a consultant to Jay Leno, Carson’s successor, his importance in the Hollywood hierarchy—chief gatekeeper to the most revered man in the entertainment industry and executive producer of NBC’s most profitable late-night hour—was over. It was a tremendous blow to his ego. “Leno paid Freddie a pittance, maybe $500 a week,” Janet told me in 2009, shortly before her death, with bitterness in her voice. (An informed source says the network paid him more than three times that amount.) “Freddie started to dress in the worst way,” she continued, “ordering clothes from these horrible catalogues, wearing white shoes and black socks, even though he had closets full of Carroll & Co. suits. He was worrying about me—letting me spend on my clothes, and he would dress cheaply. It was getting pathetic.”
Carla Ridge, as they called their pavilion-like modern house, had been a glittering hub of L.A.’s social scene, and the thought of giving all that up was hard to take. “We were living high off the hog,” said Janet, whose spending was legendary.
“Everything with Janet had to be big and the best,” says her friend Betsy Bloomingdale. “If it was caviar, it had to be big caviar. She always had wonderful things—Lalique, Baccarat—anddid wonderful things, always with Gracie behind the scenes, making sure it was the way Janet wanted it.”
“Janet was an absolute perfectionist,” says Joanna Carson, the third wife (1972–83) of Johnny Carson. “Everything in its place. If an ice bucket on the bar was one centimeter out of place, she would veer over, pass by, touch it back into place, and say something to Gracie or one of the other girls who worked there—I think there were always three girls, Gracie and two under her.” Anne Douglas, the wife of Kirk Douglas, recalls, “The dinners at that house were things of beauty. Janet did not slave in the kitchen, but she made sure everything was either brought in from Chasen’s or was the caviar pasta from Le Dome—her favorite because it had lots of vodka and lots of caviar.” Producer and director George Schlatter (The Dinah Shore Chevy Show, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In) tells me, “I think she single-handedly introduced Château d’Yquem to this town.”
For years, whenever Carson threatened to quit, Janet would make a play behind the scenes. “Every time,” Joanna Carson recalls. “If Johnny’s contract was coming up, which was every two years, he would say, ‘I’ll give up this show.’ He didn’t want any more money; he just wanted more time off. Then the phone would ring. Janet: ‘Jo-aann-ah! What are we going to do?’ I knew it wasn’t going to happen—Johnny loved that show too much—but she always went behind Fred’s back to me to try to make sure it wasn’t going to end when it didn’t need to.”
“The de Cordovas’ raison d’être,” said Dominick Dunne, “was to live an A-list life. The A-crowd in Los Angeles was a mix of Hollywood and society, with the Reagans very much at the center of things.” The de Cordovas were among the very few TV couples allowed into that rarefied group. “They were untouchables,” in the words of George Schlatter, “in a group of all above-the-title people—the Gary Coopers, the Jack Bennys, the Frank Sinatras, the Billy Wilders, the Dean Martins, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Armand Deutsches, the Lew Wassermans, the Ray Starks, the Earle Jorgensens, the Gregory Pecks, the Jules Steins.”
Freddie’s Demise
What Janet did not know as the curtain finally rang down on Freddie’s career was that her husband had, in effect, already confronted the end of the road with Carson. According to several friends of Janet’s, Freddie was too ashamed to tell her that he and Carson had had a very ugly break at the studio a year previously. Author Bill Zehme, who is at work on a book titled Carson the Magnificent, says, “It was when Johnny returned to the air after his son Ricky died. I’ve studied that tape like the Zapruder film, where Carson did this tribute at the end of the show, talking about his son, a nature photographer, who had died when he was shooting on a mountain and his car rolled over him and took him down the mountain. So Carson goes through a normal show with no mention until the very end. He’s clearly going a little bit long with the tribute, but there are all these majestic nature shots, and Carson is talking about his son—heart-wrenching. Carson was never so naked on the air. And then his eyes start darting over to where Freddie is, and you can see a little register of annoyance. I learned later that Fred was over there actually giving him the ‘Wrap it up’ sign [to indicate that the show was running over]. That was July 1991, so what happened next was Johnny exploded in the after-show meeting in his office. He took Freddie off the floor, and he was never allowed back on. That was the deathblow.”
.......about 5 more pages in VF.....................
here is a link to this very interesting information about old Hollywood from Vanity Fair. You will notice Freddie deCordova in the credits of Burns and Allen but, of course I know him best from Johnny Carson and the Tonight Show.
Really, Johnny was amazing...when I was a kid I felt like I knew him, as if he was my friend. I'm still in shock from the American Experience Show on PBS about Johnny Carson, after seeing it three times, and some of the info I already knew, I was speechless. Just wondering what othew people thought about that show, too.
For Women’s History Month, Travelanche is hosting several posts by several guest bloggers about various female vaudevillians and other performing artists. This is the second in our series, by guest bloggerLauren Milberger.
She didn’t think she was funny, even though American considered her its comedy sweetheart, stating that she knew funny, but wasn’t funny. When asked to say something funny her response was, “Charlie Chaplin.” George Burns says the only real joke he ever heard Gracie tell, after being egged on by friends was, “An Irishman walked out of a bar.” She hated her feet, loved gossip and her only wish was be able to wear a strapless, sleeveless, evening gown – the one thing her money and fame could not provide her.
Together his sense of humor and her rare talent for the stage brought them great success as a team in real life as well as show business. And although their Dumb Dora act – the girl/boy double act with a nitwit woman and smart straight man – wasn’t anything new for the time, Burns and Allen brought their originality – themselves -to their work, making it something new and innovative. But that wasn’t how it started. When Gracie first met George he was doing an act that was just imitations of other, more established Big Time acts. But his act was breaking up and George needed a new partner. Enter Gracie Allen, stage right, an out-of-work hoofer whose short respite from show business in stenography classes was a bust. They both needed new partners and George’s act was cheaper so they agreed to do his “new” act. Only just like George’s old act his “new” act was neither new nor innovative. The act consisted of jokes straight out of joke books – safe material – material that was sure to keep the fearful Burns employed, as new untested material was far too risky. George would later admit he had spent so much time in Small Time Vaudeville he was fearful of being more; he was happy coasting–he just couldn’t admit it. But the more George and Gracie worked together the more confidence he seemed to get and the more new material he wrote – until it was the whole act. George went from a twenty-eight-year-old playing it safe to a confident star that played The Big Time, The Palace. They were each other’s loves and muses – each encouraging the other.
August 26, 2012 at 2:17 pm