The Burns and Allen Radio Programs | Part Two

Background

George Burns and Gracie Allen's three seasons over CBS for General Cigar began a Burns & Allen franchise over Radio, in Film and on Television spanning twenty-six years. Burns & Allen's Radio programs spanned eighteen of those years:

• 1932 The Robert Burns Panatela Program
• 1933 The White Owl Program
• 1934 The Adventures of Gracie
• 1935 Cambell's Tomato Juice Presents Burns and Allen
• 1936 Campbell's Soups Presents Burns and Allen
• 1937 George Burns and Gracie Allen [for Grape Nuts]
• 1938 Chesterfield Time with George Burns and Gracie Allen
• 1940 The Hinds Honey and Almond Cream Program
• 1940 The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show [for Hormel]
• 1941 Well I Swan [for Swan Soap Flakes and Detergent]
• 1945 Maxwell House Coffee Time
• 1949 The Amm-i-dent Show

Needless to say, as George Burns and Gracie Allen's fame and popularity continued to rise there were no end of sponsors willing to promote their goods with Burns & Allen as their headliners.

The Campbell Soup Company doubles down on early Radio

From the very inception of locally and regionally broad-cast Radio The Campbell Soup Company was among the more prominent early sponsors of local, regional and eventually nationally broadcast Radio. Campbell Soup promoted its--then--twenty-one lines of concentrated soup as well as its Tomato Juice.

• 1931 The Campbell Orchestra
• 1932 Lanny Ross
• 1934 Hollywood Hotel
• 1937 Komedy Kingdom
• 1935 The Campbell Tomato Juice Program
• 1936 Campbell's Soup Presents George Burns and Gracie Allen
• 1938 Edwin Hill and the News
• 1938 Amos 'n' Andy
• 1938 Campbell's Playhouse
• 1939 Helen Hayes Theatre
• 1939 Brenda Curtis (Serial)
• 1939-1958 Edward R. Murrow and the News
• 1940 Fletcher Wiley and the News
• 1940 Charlie and Jessie
• 1941 The Man I Married
• 1941 The Arkansas Traveler
• 1944 Grand Hotel
• 1946 The Jack Carson Show
• 1946 Hildegarde
• 1946 Meet Corliss Archer
• 1947 Double or Nothing
• 1951 Club Fifteen
• 1954 Grand Central Station
• 1956 Aunt Jenny's Real Life Stories (Serial)

George Burns and Gracie Allen expand their CBS franchise

One of the more unlikely duos to achieve Entertainment World super-stardom, Jewish-born Nat Birnbaum [Stage name George Burns] and Irish Catholic-born Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen grew up worlds apart in myriad ways. Nat from New York and Grace from San Francisco found each other in New Jersey, Birnbaum performing a vaudeville act with then partner Lorraine. Grace reportedly approached Birnbaum after his 'Burns & Lorraine' act about working in vaudeville and 'George Burns' offered her a suggestion that she work with him. That was 1922. The act became a couple, and the couple married shortly after meeting. Continuing to slug it out in vaudeville for another five years, Burns & Allen soon caught the attention of the Film Industry and its search for comedy teams for its growing production of 'talkies' of the era. Burns & Allen were featured in several Vitaphone Shorts of the era, eventually leading them into featured guest appearances over network Radio. As the guest appearances grew more frequent, Burns & Allen's novel 'dumb Dora' act acquired exponentially more fans.

Here's an example of just one of hundreds of articles of the era, making observations on Gracie Allen's genius, this one from the November 17th 1935 edition of the Oakland Tribune:

Real Money For Just Acting Dumb

     IT IS axiomatic of show business that it is as futile to separate any of the reigning teams of stage, screen or radio as to enjoy ham and eggs without one of the component parts.
     Like most of the bits of wisdom that flutter down the ages and find their way into the adage text books, it isn't worth the paper it is written on.  For every Kolb and Dill who can't maintain their pace as individuals there are dozens of Lowes and McLaglens who do all right when parted.
     There are a good many persons in this world who consider an eggless breakfast the nadir of matutinal meals, but who wouldn't give you a dime a dozen for ham, fried, broiled, boiled or baked.  Many a doughnut addict can't abide the aroma of coffee and shuns it as he would the works of the devil.
     All of which is prelude to the iconoclastic statement that an interview with Burns and Allen, from which George Burns is absent, may be as rare as a day in June, but it is nonetheless a pleasant enterprise, for Gracie Allen isn't nearly as dumb as she lets on to be.
     Most interviewers find the pair as a team in interviews, however, and also find Burns doing most of the talking. That is all part of the game to delude the public into the belief that Miss Allen, off stage, is the same merry zany that she is when faced with an audience, a microphone or a camera.
     This interview, as a matter of fact, was due to be a Burns and Allen gabfest, but Burns got his dates mixed and was off in a downtown hideaway sweating over his next radio program and Miss Allen was at home playing housewife and mother.
     "Let me telephone George," she began in her customary flutter after the introductions.  "It'll only take him a few minutes to get here and he knows all the answers."
     "No, indeed," demurred the suave Teet Carle, cicerone on this expedition from Paramount, at a signal from your correspondent.  "We'll just rest here a bit and catch George later at his leisure."
     And Miss Allen, with definite misgivings, had to let it go that way.  She would much rather play dumb, but if there is no evading an issue, she meets it with resignation.  After all, as thickwitted as she seems to be, it was her, not Burns, who catapulted the team into international prominence.
     BURNS had gone on the stage when he was 12 as the oldest of four juvenile singers who called themselves the Peewee quartet.  By the time he met Gracie Allen he had had so many partners that fellow vaudevillians used to greet him with: "Who you with this week, George?"
     Even when the Burns and Allen team was launched it was George, not Gracie, who had the top line.  The audience promptly changed that when they laughed more at Gracie's questions than at George's answers.  In more or less self-defense he switched positions.  A good many years of minor success followed, success in vaudeville both here and abroad, but nothing of the sort that came out of a chance invitation to Gracie—not George, mind you—to play a bit in one of Eddie Cantor's programs on the air.  She did so well that she and George were signed for another network program.
     Yet despite all this, Gracie Allen will answer you that it is Burns who is the brains of the team, who does all the work, who thinks up all the jokes, who makes all of the business contacts.  As a matter of fact he is and does, but the genius that is added to the programs and pictures is the genius of a young woman who discovered a type that American comedy had overlooked.
     She is the personification of the sweet young thing who asks the stupid questions at the baseball games, who titters at the wrong time at serious dramas, who greets friends across the auditorium  ecstatically at swanky operas, who walks in front of automobiles against signals and miraculously escapes, who trumps all of her partners aces and still wins the bridge prize.
     THE virtue of Gracie Allen's impersonation is that she is a perfectly normal-looking person, dark, vivacious, pretty, smartly dressed and intelligent.
     "George is very careful writing the programs to keep me on the thin line between absolute idiocy and common sense," she was saying.  "It's a difficult job, and he gets far too little credit for it.  People are forever complimenting me on bright sallies or devastating remarks.  They feel they are impromptu even when they see me reading a script in the studio.
     "To tell the truth, I rarely know what the program is to be about before we start rehearsal.  I don't want to.  It's George's business.  I come with a clear mind—a varant mind, if you will, and often my natural errors in reading tricky speeches make the situations even funnier than if the answers were pat.
     "As soon as a broadcast is finished I go home or out with friends, as the case may be, and George shuts himself up in his office and maps out the general theme for next week's work.  It's all fresh in his mind then, he has had a chance to test out audience reaction on certain ideas, and he stays on the job until early morning.
     "I don't know how he stands the grind.  Of course he buys jokes and comedy situations—everybody does—but that's only the beginning.  They must be worked into the script and they must be arranged to fit the characters."
     "YOU had it a lot easier in vaudeville, even it you didn't make so much money."
     "I suspect it seemed that way from out front," Miss Allen smiled; "but we were unconsciously preparing ourselves for the demands of radio long before we ever dreamed of going on the air.  Nearly every performance we gave—and sometimes we did four and five a day—contained new bits of business.  We were constantly adding and dropping material.
     "If other vaudeville folks had followed our system, there would be vaudeville today.  It died of dry rot.  No one ever wanted to change an act or get a new one.
     "If we got a good big laugh in an act and decided it was getting stale, we'd pull it out and risk another, maybe getting smaller returns.  Then we'd go to work on the old one.  George would rearrange it, dress it up to fit a new situation, change it around a little, and presently we'd have it in the routine again, bigger and better than ever.
     "He found that people laugh more at jokes with which they are somewhat familiar than brand-new gags.
     "We had an experience in London that is more or less typical.  Two of the biggest laughs in our routine in America came out of gags dealing with the word 'hug' and the term 'Post Office.'  We were flabbergasted when the English public found them riotously unfunny.  You know how it is when you're waiting for a big laugh and nothing comes.  It's ghastly.
     "The audiences were kind and polite, but they wouldn't laugh.  Then one evening a little English pantomime artist came up to the dressing room in a friendly spirit and gave us a tip.  "Try cuddle instead of hug," he suggested, and change Post Office to Postman's Knock.  They don't know what you mean."
     "That bit of advice saved the day.  From that time on we had no difficulty keeping our English cousins amused, and we have a standing offer to do a week in London whenever we get a chance to go over."
     "And how about pictures, what of them?"
     "Oh, I like the work," said Miss Allen, smiling diplomatically at Paramount's representative, "and I like the money, naturally."
     Gracie Allen is a San Francisco product, daughter of an old song-and-dance man.  She made her first public appearance as an infant dancer at three and a half at entertainments.  By the time she was 13 she was filling in the vacation months as a vaudeville dancer.  She did a tour with her three older sisters, and when Charlie Reilly left the Columbia here and took out a vaudeville unit, the Allen Sisters went with him.
     "It was an Irish sketch, you may recall," she said, "and in time I inherited a speaking part as one of the colleens. My sisters left the show one by one and returned home to teach dancing.  I stayed with it.  I didn't want to become a dancing teacher.  In fact, once when things got tough in vaudeville, I decided to become a stenographer and went to a secretarial school to study."
     She was laboring over her pothooks when a friend induced her to go over to Union Hill in New Jersey to give her moral support in a vaudeville tryout.  Back stage she met a brash young man who was doing a song-and-dance act with Billy Lorraine.  His name was George Burns, and before long Lorraine was looking for another partner and the secretarial school had lost a student.
     "The funny part of our start was that I'd been with the Reilly troupe so long I adopted a brogue that was almost natural."  Gracie giggled.  "For a long time the Burns and Allen gags were delivered with a touch of the- Ould Sod. Finally it slipped away from me.  Married? Oh, no, we were business partners for four years before we were married.
     "We both had obligations, but when RKO signed us on a six-year contract our future was more or less assured, so we took the fatal plunge!"

And from the May 22nd 1936 edition of the Oakland Tribune:

Burns and Allen were one of three popular husband and wife comedy teams of the era, along with Fred Allen and Portland Hoffa and Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone. The following article from the January 19th 1936 edition of the Oakland Tribune compared and contrasted the three wildly popular comedy couples:

From the October 18th 1936 edition of the Oakland Tribune: 

"There is one thing worse than being alone--that is being alone with Gracie Allen", wails her husband George Burns.  But perhaps that statement should not be taken too literally, for they are happily married and have two children.

 "And so it goes!  Day after day and headache after headache!", asserts Gracie's husband as he writhes in anguish.  "If all the aspirin tablets I've taken were laid end to end, I'd still have to take them -- and I'd still have a headache".

Series Derivatives:

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