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As the clock nears 8 along the Eastern Seaboard on Tuesday night, a strange new phenomenon takes place in U.S. urban life. Business falls off in many a nightclub, theater-ticket sales are light, neighborhood movie audiences thin. Some late-hour shopkeepers post signs and close up for the night. In Manhattan, diners at Lindy's gulp their after-dinner coffee and call for their checks as they did in the days of the Roosevelt fireside chats. On big-city bar rails along the coast and in the Midwest, there is hardly room for another foot. For the next hour, wherever a signal from an NBC television transmitter can be picked out of the air, a large part of the population has its eyes fixed on a TV screen.
The center of all this to-do is Milton Berle, a jack-of-all-turns vaudeville comic who has gone into television and won a bright new feather for his very old hat. In a space of eight months, Berle's Texaco Star Theater (Tues. 8 p.m. E.D.T., NBCTV) has made him the undisputed No. 1 performer on U.S. TV. His show is a weekly catchall of the things the 40-year-old comic has learned in 35 hard-working years in show business. Berle uses not only his brash, strongbow-shaped mouth to get off his loud, fast, uneven volley of one-line gags; with expert timing and tireless bounce, he also hurls his whole 6 feet and 191 dieted pounds into every act of his show. His motto is still "anything for a laugh"—and practically anything he does gets one.
Berle is not universally admired. His detractors find his brassiness glaring, his lines lackluster and his talent often tasteless. They point out that television is still in its infancy and declare that Berle just happens to be the man who is taking candy from the baby. Nonetheless, the Berle show's New York Hooperating stands at 80—the highest of any regular TV or radio program—and his audience in the 24 cities that see him "live" or on kinescope film two weeks later is reliably estimated at 4,452,000.
Mama Says So. Berle's success on television is a curious byproduct of repeated flops in both radio and movies—a special irony for pushy Milton Berle, who has lived his life to feed what he calls "my great want to conquer." The flops hurt deeply and worried him about his appeal to a mass audience. But they forced him into well-paid jobs in nightclubs, where live audiences kept his talents supple. Meanwhile, more successful comedians were falling into the lazier habit of peering at scripts through spectacles.
"The great want to conquer" began to gnaw Milton Berlinger no more than five years after he was born in 1908 in a Harlem tenement. He was the fourth of five children of the late Moe Berlinger, a quiet, sickly shopkeeper, and his vigorous, iron-willed wife Sarah (now Sandra). The great want sprang first in young Milton's mother, who helped earn the family living as a store detective. One day she borrowed 20¢ carfare to take the five-year-old boy to an amateur contest after he had done an impromptu street imitation of Charlie Chaplin. Milton won the contest, and Mom promptly went to work on his career as if it were a sacred mission. As he grew, his age could be reckoned by his billing: "The Shimmy Kid," "The Child Wonder," "The Wayward Youth."