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What he neglects to say is that George also made it for Gracie. Born to poor Jewish parents on New York City's Lower East Side, Burns started putting his act together when he was seven in the Peewee Quartet, a group of kids who sang for small change in neighborhood taverns. By the time he was 14 he had found his main prop—a seven-cent Ricoro cigar. "I'd go into one of those places where they would press your suit while you stood in your underwear. I'd put it on hot—I wouldn't bend my knees until it had cooled off—and walk down the street with the Ricoro in my mouth. Nobody ever asked me what I did for a living. They knew it. I was in show business."
He would change names almost as often as his socks. The original Nathan Birnbaum became Harry Pierce, who became Willy Williams, who became Willie Delight. Willie Delight? "Yah," says George. "There was a guy by that name who had 2,000 cards printed up that said, 'Willie Delight, in Vaudeville.' But then he went into some other business, and I bought the cards for a dollar. When they were used up, I changed my name again." He was George Burns when he met and, in 1926, married Gracie Allen, an Irish Catholic comedienne from San Francisco.
Gracie became the screwball and George her straight man. One of their skits went like this. Gracie: "My sister Bessie couldn't come today because her canary is hatching an ostrich egg."
George: "The canary is hatching an ostrich egg?" Gracie: "Yeah, but the canary is too small to cover the egg." George: "So?" Gracie: "My sister Bessie is sitting on the egg and holding the canary in her lap." The laughs would come as if they too had been written in. "Now the audience believed that Gracie believed that story," says Burns. "That was the great thing. Not the joke, but the fact that she could make it believable. It takes a damned good actress to do that." Theirs was a durable formula that lasted through vaudeville, radio and television, ending with Gracie's retirement in 1958. She was only 59 when she died of a heart attack in 1964.
George still lives in the same house in Beverly Hills he and Gracie bought 44 years ago. A Belgian couple looks after it, and when Burns is not working, his day is as well planned as one of his comic routines. He is up at 7:30 a.m. and does 20 minutes of exercises. At 10 he drives to his office in Hollywood and sits down with his four writers to work on new material. By 12:30 he is having lunch at the Hillcrest Country Club where he sits with other show business gentry. Groucho Marx and Al Jolson used to be regulars. Says Burns: "There was a time when not much sturgeon could be brought into California. But Jolson always had some in the kitchen anyway. So when he sat down, I would compliment him on what a great man he was and how the world was waiting for his comeback 'Have a little sturgeon,' he'd say. So I had a little sturgeon. Then Jolson did the sound track for The Jolson Story, and I told him that it was the greatest thing I ever heard in my life. He stopped and said, 'You can buy your own sturgeon now, kid. I'm a hit again.' "