Who is the Rake: George Burns
His life spanned 100 years and 49 days, and by the time he died he’d conquered every branch of entertainment, from vaudeville to stand-up. The cigar-chomping George Burns did it all — and no one did it like him.
Centenarians are, by their enduring nature, old troupers. Think of Kirk Douglas, cutting his 100-candle cake amid the luxe confines of the Beverly Hills Hotel, or Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, at a Guildhall lunch in her 100th-birthday honour, snatching back a glass of wine mistakenly purloined by the Archbishop of Canterbury with a tart admonition of, “That’s mine!” Or even of this magazine, as determinedly dapper and fleet of (well-shod) foot as it was 99 issues ago. But perhaps the most venerable of showbiz super-troupers was the American comedian George Burns.
Well into his nineties he announced with his customary brio that he’d booked the London Palladium for a 100th-birthday gig on January 20, 1996. His reasoning : “I can’t possibly die before then. I’m booked.” In the event, he had to cancel after “having a fall”, a dread eventuality that shadows all centenarians, thus robbing the London audience of a chance to hear what by then had become Burns’ signature line: “It’s nice to be here. When you get to my age, it’s nice to be anywhere.”
In truth, Burns was everywhere that entertainment pitched its tent over the course of the 20th century, moving through vaudeville, radio, television, stand-up, records, books, movies, and finally national institution status, this particular institution being diminutive and raspy of voice, chomping on an ever-present cigar, clad in trademark tux or turtleneck and chunky-framed architect- style glasses, and sporting granite-hewn features — Mount Rushmore by way of the Borscht Belt — that remained resolutely nonplussed whether he was recounting his feuding with Groucho Marx, his serenading of Jackie Kennedy at the White House (“I sang La Vie en Rose — she told me she’d been speaking French all her life, but after hearing me, realised she’d been doing it all wrong”), or raiding his arsenal of senior wisecracks: “When I was a boy, the Dead Sea was only sick.”
Actually, when Burns was a boy — or, more specifically, when he started performing, as a seven-year-old, in 1903 — Teddy Roosevelt had just become president, and the first transatlantic radio broadcast had just been delivered. Not that Burns had time to notice: after the death of his father, a Polish émigré and part- time cantor, he had to hardscrabble on the Lower East Side to help support a family of 10, picking up pieces of coal from the street with a pal to take home (the neighbourhood cry as they returned with bulging knickers, “Here come the Burns Brothers”, after a coal merchant that served the area, furnished the young Nathan Birnbaum with his eventual stage name), and forming a pre-teen singing troupe called the Peewee Quartet that gatecrashed local saloons and regaled commuters on the Staten Island ferry.
At 14 he found his trademark prop — a nickel cigar called a Hermosa Jones (later, he’d switch to El Productos; in an interview with Cigar Aficionado, he reckoned to have smoked more than 300,000 over the course of his life). “I’d go into one of those places where they would press your suit while you stood in your underwear,” he recalled. “I’d put it on hot — I wouldn’t bend my knees until it had cooled off — and walk down the street with the Hermosa Jones in my mouth. Nobody ever asked me what I did for a living. They knew it. I was in showbusiness.”
He had to hardscrabble in New York to help support a family of 10, picking up pieces of coal from the street.
