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Milton and Mom, who were accompanied on their tours for years by his younger sister, Rosalind, made it a point to be the first arrivals at rehearsals to get priority on the songs Milton wanted to sing. Early in the game, Mom began to serve as an audience "plant." In line of duty, she has cut loose with her piercing, roof-shaking laugh in every major theater in the U.S. Only a frankly hostile audience could resist Mom's lead. Milton's stage response to her laughter has become standard: "Thank you, mother," and that is usually good for a laugh, too. Today, a vigorous woman of 71, Mom Berle took a bow on last week's TV show and did one of her specialties—a brief straight bit for her son.
After Kennedy& Berle broke up, Milton had some trouble catching on as a single. His brashness, coming from a gawky kid with loving-cup ears, struck most people as intolerable. But Milton and Mom persevered. When he was 21, illness made a vacancy at the New York Palace, vaudeville's top spot, where he had played with Elizabeth several times. An agent booked Milton at $750 a week and discreetly vanished on a cruise. But Milton "fractured 'em," ran for seven weeks and won a firm hold as a headliner.
The Whole Gamut. Always reaching for more laughs, Berle has even tried stooping for them. At Chicago's Palace in 1933, he broke records for five weeks but he outraged the late Chicago Daily News Critic Lloyd Lewis, who found him a "blab-mouthed, satyr-eyed kid" who "toys with physiology, pathology and pruriency, tossing them about with all the freedom of a delinquent boy." On television, acutely conscious of his juvenile following and of the strait-laced National Broadcasting Co., Berle keeps it clean.
Ever looking upward, Milton tried the legitimate stage. In the 1932 Vanities, the Times's Brooks Atkinson calmly noted in Berle "a certain derivative exuberance." In 1934's Saluta, Atkinson found him running "the whole gamut from vulgarity to grossness" with "immense enthusiasm and no discrimination at all." Since then, Berle's theatrical record consists of two moderate successes (See My Lawyer and the Ziegfeld Follies of 1943) and, most recently, an immoderate flop (Spring in Brazil). He has also flopped several times as a producer and backer. As a producer, he did so much tampering with one show that, an observer recalls, "When it opened out of town, everybody on the stage looked and talked like Berle."
Like lyric writing (for some 50 unsung songs), radio (where, after five failures, his current show—Wed. 9 p.m. E.D.T., ABC—is fattening on his TV glory), and movies (for which a plastic surgeon bobbed his nose in 1939), the theater is one of Milton's gnawing frustrations. This season, while already riding high in TV, he tried unsuccessfully to get a supporting role in South Pacific. But producers are now wooing him instead.