Radio and television mirror (July-Dec 1951)

EVERYBODY'S UNCLE MILTIE (Continued from page 39) exhausting. Read a Cancer horoscope and you have the analysis of your Uncle Miltie." Milton made himself an uncle. He says, "It just happens." Strangers are forever cosying up to Milton on the street, asking questions, bestowing confidences, behaving quite as if they and he were lifelong friends, which they feel (Add reason why Milton is king) that they are. One day in the thick of Times Square traffic a woman stepped up to Milton, asked him would he please, at the end of his TV show on Tuesday nights, tell the children in his audience that the fun was over and now they must go to sleep? "So one Tuesday night, a few weeks later, we ran under time," said Milton, "that is, we had three minutes left to go on the show with nothing to go on with. Remembering this woman and her request that I ask the kids to go to sleep immediately after my show, I ad libbed, 'Look, kiddies, there isn't any TV after 9 o'clock so your uncle Miltie wants you to go right to sleep.' The next day, on the street, it was, 'Hulloa, Uncle Miltie! Hiya, Uncle Miltie!' — and I'm an uncle!" He has written one hundred and twentyfive songs — among them, "I'm So Happy I Could Cry." "L'il Abner," "You Took Me Out of This World," "I'd Give a Million," "Save Me A Dream," "Give Her my Love," "Lucky Me." When you ask Miltie "What is your favorite song?" he japes, "Mine, all mine — any song I write!" There's a joke on the tip of his tongue, a crack (usually at his own expense) every time he opens his mouth. Of his schooldays, at P.S. 20 and P.S. 184 in Harlem, New York he'll reminisce, "I was the teacher's pet— she couldn't afford a dog." Of his early days in vaudeville, "I once did a two hour act. One hour to see it and one hour to regret it." At the antic ad lib Milton is past, present and — we dare say, future past master. His book, Out of My Trunk, written during World War II, is the hilarious story of Miltie's encounter with a talking elephant, "a former Mastadon of Ceremonies." The book is dedicated "To my Mother, Who Never Started the Applause — She Just Kept It From Dying Down." But now Milton has written another book. No, not a funny. A novel. A dramatic novel. It is titled Sit Still, My Soul. The dedication reads, "For my Mother, Who Knows How Much A Clown Can Weep." His songs, most of them, are nostalgic and when asked "What is the most important thing in life to you," he said "My child. Especially my child to me." To which he added, quoting, " 'If the day is done, and the child smiles . . .' " Milton's leisure time is spent with his Vicki, aged six. He says "I take my baby riding in the car. We go through Central Park, visit the Zoo. Or I sit there on a bench while she plays. Feeling like Bernard Baruch." For weeks after Vicki made her first appearance on any stage on her Daddy's Texaco Show, Daddy's first question to one and all, pal or passerby was "See Vicki on the show with me?" Then, without waiting for an answer, he'd say pridefully, "No rehearsal, mind you. I just taught her a few lines and she went on, cold. While she was on I was so nervous, I must admit, that I just stood there praying 'Oh, God, don't let her forget her lines.' She didn't forget them, not one. After it was over I told her, 'You're a regular Berle — hamming it up.' " There is some ham in him, Miltie admits. "There has to be some ham in me or the enthusiasm wouldn't be there. But there was said to be ham in the late great John Barrymore which means that ham is not the word for it, but confidence," said Miltie (coining a new definition for old) "confidence in yourself." With what is left of Milton's leisure time (you could put it on the head of a pin) he goes to the fights. Plays billiards. "I don't play cards. I don't drink, never did. Don't like the taste of it. Occasionally I go to the races. Love sports. Play golf. Some tennis. My one big extravagance is my cigars — which cost me about eighty cents apiece — I like to give them away." Miltie's "pet hate" is "lit cigarettes. People not putting out their cigarettes right." He's "queer for chocolate." Put a ten-tier chocolate pastry in front of Uncle Miltie and he doesn't need to be the magician he is (uh-huh, that, too) to make it "Now you see it, now you don't." Milton still lives in the ten-room terrace apartment in mid-Manhattan which was his home before he and his wife, Joyce Matthews were divorced. Of Joyce, Milton said only, "Contrary to reports in the columns, 80 HAVE YOU SEEN the fugitive criminal described on the "True Detective Mysteries" radio program Sunday afternoon? si 000 REWARD is offered for information leading to his arrest. For complete details, and for an exciting halfhour of action and suspense, tune in jfcc* 1^ "TRUE DETECTIVE MYSTERIES" Every Sunday afternoon on 502 Mutual radio stations Joyce and I are not getting married again. I am not getting married again, period." Now, a cook, housekeeper, maid and chauffeur-valet "do" for Miltie. He likes, so he says, to eat at home. "I eat alone a lot." He also eats out a lot. He goes to bed very late. "I don't want to go to bed and I don't want to get up." He mourns that he can't have a peaceful breakfast "due to the telephones always ringing." His housekeeper could take the calls for him. But doesn't. Uncle Miltie says "No." There is nothing more protective between Miltie and his public than a piece of tissue paper. There is none of the "Oh, if only I had my life to live over again," lament in Milton. But he does say of himself "I am not, temperamentally, happy and gay. I think the sweat and tears through which I have passed have made me not as happy as I appear to be, theatrically." For Milton Berle, born Milton Berlinger, who made his bow to the public when he was so high and has been taking the bows (and the inevitable bruises) ever since, there has been on the long climb up the sweat and the tears. "I was only five," he reminisced, "when. in a neighborhood movie theater I did an imitation of Charlie Chaplin, so you can imagine," he made a clown's face, "how I looked with a mustache ! " Even as Milton tells you about the long climb up he dilutes the "sweat and tears" with the gags and the laughs. Noblesse oblige, perhaps, as befits a king? "I was born in a Harlem tenement, one of five children — four boys of which I am the youngest and then, the baby of the family, my sister Rosalind who now, by the way, designs the costumes for my show. My father, not a well man, was unable to work steadily and as there had to be some means of revenue my mother, a store detective at, as I recall it, Gimbel's, Wanamakers, Saks, worked all the time. Between living in a tenement house in Harlem with five kids to care for and holding down a job that was nervy as well as tough, she should have died of it. She didn't. Not my mother. "Some forget, when, they grow up, what their mothers did for them and were to them. I don't forget. I remember pretty good when she was crying and not crying, all the sacrifices she made for me, all the things she went without so that / wouldn't. I don't think there is ever enough you can do for your mother. Ever." In show business Milton Berle's devotion to his mother is as well known as, say. Whistler's Portrait of His Mother is known in the art world. And as respected. Both are, it may be said, Works of Heart. Milton was still knee high when it became obvious that there had to be more revenue coming into the Berlinger till than the then two-dollars-a-day salary of a store detective provided. From the time he could babble Milton's precocious sense of humor could make the sourest puss break up, laughing. His imitations, even as a moppet, were inimitable. The imitation he did of Chaplin, which was in an amateur contest for the best imitation of the No. 1 clown, won first prize. This demonstration of what Miltie could do. given a stage to do it on, led him to the old Vitagraph Studios, where he played the brat in comedies with Flora Finch. By this time it became apparent to his mother that there was gold in that thar