Burns & Allen

Burns and Allen were an American comedy duo consisting of George Burns and his wife Gracie Allen. They worked together as a successful comedy team that entertained vaudeville, film, radio, and television audiences for over forty years. The duo met in 1922 and married in 1926. Burns played the straight man and Allen played a silly, addle-headed woman whose convoluted logic Burns was often ill-equipped to challenge. The duo starred in a number of films, including Lambchops (1929), The Big Broadcast (1932) its two sequels (1935 and 1936), and A Damsel in Distress (1937). Their 30-minute radio show debuted in September 1934 as The Adventures of Gracie, whose title changed to The Burns and Allen Show in 1936; the series ran, moving back and forth between NBC and CBS, until May 1950. After their radio show's cancellation, Burns and Allen reemerged on television with a popular sitcom, which ran from 1950 to 1958. Burns and Allen's radio show was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1994. Their TV series received a total of 11 Primetime Emmy Award nominations, and its episode "Columbia Pictures Doing Burns and Allen Story" was ranked No. 56 on TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time in 1997. They were inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1988. Burns and Allen met in 1922 and first performed together at the Hill Street Theatre in Newark, New Jersey and continued in small-town vaudeville theaters. They married in Cleveland on January 7, 1926 and moved up a notch when they signed with the Keith-Albee-Orpheum circuit in 1927. Burns wrote most of the material and played the straight man. Allen played a silly, addle-headed woman, a role often attributed to the Dumb Dora stereotype common in early 20th-century vaudeville comedy. The team had played the opposite roles until they noticed that the audience was laughing at Allen's straight lines, so they made the change. In later years, each attributed their own success to the other. The Burns and Allen team was not an overnight sensation. Burns said, "We were a good man-and-woman act, but we were not headliners or stars or featured attractions. We were on the bill with them. There would be a star or two stars and a featured attraction, and then we would come—fourth billing in an eight-act show." Their career changed direction when they appeared in their first film. In the early days of talking pictures, the studios eagerly hired actors who knew how to deliver dialogue or songs. The most prolific of these studios was Warner Bros., whose Vitaphone Varieties shorts captured vaudeville headliners of the 1920s on film. Burns and Allen, who had earned a reputation as a reliable "disappointment act" (one that could substitute for another performer on a moment's notice), were last-minute replacements for Fred Allen in Lambchops (1929), in which they performed their patter-and-song routine. Paramount Pictures used its East Coast studio to film New York-based stage and vaudeville stars. Eddie Cantor, Fred Allen, Ethel Merman and Smith and Dale were among the top acts seen in Paramount shorts. Burns and Allen joined the Paramount roster in 1930 and appeared in a string of one-reel comedies through 1933, usually written by Burns and featuring future Hollywood character actors such as Barton MacLane and Chester Clute. In 1932, Paramount produced an all-star musical comedy, The Big Broadcast, featuring the nation's hottest radio personalities, including Burns and Allen. Their favorably received performance was followed by guest appearances in Paramount features through 1937. Most of these used the Big Broadcast formula of an all-star comedy cast. In 1935 they also starred in a pair of low-budget features, Here Comes Cookie and Love in Bloom. At RKO, Fred Astaire succeeded in his efforts to make a musical feature without Ginger Rogers, and the studio borrowed Burns and Allen from Paramount for the 1937 film A Damsel in Distress. Their names appeared with Astaire's before the title. Under contract to RKO, the young Joan Fontaine was assigned as Astaire's romantic interest, but when she proved to be an inadequate dance partner, Astaire performed most of his dancing with Burns and Allen. The trio's comic dance in the film's funhouse sequence earned an Academy Award for choreographer Hermes Pan. Burns suggested a dance number that employed whiskbrooms as props, used in vaudeville by a duo called Evans and Evans. He bought the idea and auditioned the routine for Astaire, with Allen and the surviving member of the Evans and Evans team. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cast Burns and Allen in its Eleanor Powell musical Honolulu (1939). This was their last film as a team; Allen appeared in two subsequent films on her own, but Burns and Allen did not return to the cameras until their television series in 1950. When Burns was 79, he had a sudden career revival as an amiable, beloved and unusually active comedic elder statesman in the 1975 film The Sunshine Boys, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. In 1977, his starring role in Oh, God!, along with the former film, permanently secured his career resurgence. At the age of 80, Burns was the oldest Oscar winner in the history of the Academy Awards, a record that would remain until Jessica Tandy won an Oscar for Driving Miss Daisy in 1989. Burns, who became a centenarian in 1996, continued to work until just weeks before his death of cardiac arrest on March 19, 1996, at his home in Beverly Hills. In 1929, Burns and Allen made their debut radio performance broadcast in London on the BBC. In the United States, they failed at a 1930 NBC audition. After a solo appearance by Allen on Eddie Cantor's radio show, they were heard together on Rudy Vallée's The Fleischmann's Yeast Hour and on February 15, 1932, they became regulars on The Guy Lombardo Show on CBS. When Lombardo switched to NBC, Burns and Allen took his CBS spot with The Adventures of Gracie, beginning on September 19, 1934. Along the way, the duo launched a running gag that made them radio stars: the fictitious hunt for Allen's lost brother, which began on January 4, 1933 and eventually became a cross-network phenomenon. Allen also appeared on other shows (especially those produced by the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, which produced the Burns and Allen series) looking for her brother. Bad publicity after a bid by NBC to squelch the stunt—and an accidental mention by Rudy Vallée on his Fleischmann's Hour—helped it continue. Allen's real brother, a shy accountant living in San Francisco, went into hiding until the gag ran its course. Burns and Allen followed this with another running gag in which Allen launched a comedic and fictitious run for the presidency. During the election year of 1940, she represented the fictitious Surprise Party and advocated nonsense as part of her platform. Allen actually received write-in votes on election day. The title of their top-rated show changed to The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show on September 26, 1936. In 1941, they moved from comedy patter into a successful sitcom format, continuing with shows on NBC and CBS until May 17, 1950. As in the early days of radio, the sponsor's name became the show title, such as Maxwell House Coffee Time (1945–49). The show featured several radio regulars, including Toby Reed, Gale Gordon, Bea Benaderet, Mel Blanc, Allen's real-life friend Mary "Bubbles" Kelly, Ray Noble, singers Jimmy Cash and Tony Martin and actor/writer/director Elliott Lewis. The Sportsmen Quartet (appearing as the Swantet during the years when the show was sponsored by Swan soap) supplied songs and occasionally backed Cash. Meredith Willson, Artie Shaw and announcers Bill Goodwin and Harry Von Zell were often involved in the scripts, usually as additional comic foils for Burns and Allen. For a long time, Burns and Allen continued their flirtation act with Burns as Allen's most persistent suitor. Their real-life marriage was not written into the show