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When the child wonder was about ten, a veteran of kid shows, benefits and early Eastern movies, Mom once broke up a ball game at a Catskill resort just after Milton's playmates had chosen sides. As one of the players recalls it, Mom announced: "Milton has to be the captain, because it's his bat and ball, and besides, he's going to be a big Broadway star some day." By the time he was 15, the lesson was well learned. "Kid," he confided to another trouper, "I'm going to the top in this business. Mama says so." By the time he was 31, Mom had traveled more than 100,000 miles with him around the Big Wheels and in the nightclubs as business manager, cook, claque, straight woman, goad and inspiration.
The New Berle. Through the years, hard-working Comic Berle drove himself so overbearingly to fulfill his destiny that many a bitter show-business colleague came to regard him as a gag-stealing braggart. Now, having conquered at last, Milton seems to be living down his bad reputation. Success agrees with him. Says George Jessel: "He doesn't have to try so hard now, and so he's not so liable to be stepping on other people's toes." Once damned by many who had to work with him on the way up, he now has the respect and good will of most of his show's topflight guest stars, as well as its lesser workers.
Once spanked by a Chicago critic for his "gabby scoopings into the gutter," Berle has been startled, touched and filled with a sense of responsibility to find that he has a sudden popularity among children TViewers. Fellow vaudevillians who once resented him now hail him as a savior of the two-a-day. Once such a professional stray that he has never been acceptable to Broadway's Lambs Club, he will be honored this week by a $50-a-plate testimonial dinner (Thurs. 10:20 p.m. E.D.T., NBCTV) for contributing to interfaith understanding (he has played benefits for all racial and religious groups). Milton, whose interest in the ponies used to keep a bookie stationed in his dressing room, is now plugging hard at being a public-spirited citizen: last month he raised $1,100,000 in pledges for cancer research on a backbreaking 16-hour NBC-TV marathon show.
Larceny & Bold Pace. But some top-bracket comedians, preparing to plunge into TV next fall, are still feeling pain from an old Berle-inflicted wound. Berle ("The Thief of Badgags") has always" been so intoxicated by the sound of audience laughter that he could never resist using likely material—even if someone else had used it first. He is firmly convinced that any gag sounds better leaving his own mouth, and, argues his faithful flock, all jokes are public property any how. An understanding friend explains: "The guy just can't help imitating something that has entertained . . . His heart is in his work. He isn't happy unless he's entertaining people."