Milton Berle dies

Posted 8:01PM on Wednesday 27th March 2002 ( 23 years ago )

LOS ANGELES - Milton Berle, the acerbic, cigar-smoking vaudevillian who eagerly embraced a new medium and became ``Mr. Television'' in the dawn of the video age, died Wednesday, a spokesman said. He was 93. Berle died at 2:45 p.m. at his home after a lengthy illness, publicist Warren Cowan said. Berle's wife, Lorna, and several family members were at his side. Berle had been under hospice care for the past few weeks. He had been diagnosed with colon cancer last year. ``He was responsible for the television set in your home today,'' Cowan said. ``He put television on the map.'' ``Uncle Miltie'' was the king of Tuesday nights, and store owners put up signs: ``Closed tonight to watch Milton Berle.'' The program's popularity spurred sales of television sets and helped make the new technology a medium for the masses. At 8 p.m., four Texaco service attendants sang the ``Texaco Star Theater'' theme, and then came Berle, dressed for laughs: a caveman introduced as ``the man with jokes from the Stone Age''; a man in a barrel ``who had just paid his taxes.'' If the audience thought he looked funny in a dress, Berle was happy to oblige. Skits in drag became a trademark. He was called the ``Thief of Bad Gags'' and joked about stealing quips - ``I laughed so hard I nearly dropped my pencil,'' he said of a rival comedian. He stopped at nothing for a laugh. ``Good evening, ladies and germs,'' Berle would say to his audience. ``I mean ladies and gentlemen. I call you ladies and gentlemen, but you know what you really are.'' He admitted his humor wasn't gentle: ``I guess you'd call my style flippancy, aggressiveness ... a put-downer.'' In his debut season in 1948, Berle's show was watched on four out of every five sets in the nation, and he was the new medium's highest-paid funny man. But the magic faded later in the '50s, and in recent years, Berle and his outsize cigars played fairs, night clubs, college campuses and the private Friars clubs in Beverly Hills and New York. In 1983, he was among the first seven inductees into the TV Hall of Fame of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Born Mendel Berlinger in New York's Harlem on July 12, 1908, Berle remembered his mother bouncing him on her knee and telling him, ``Make me laugh.'' His mother, Sandra, was a thwarted entertainer; his father Moses, Berle recalled, was a ``charming, rather helpless man who suffered from rheumatism and could never keep a job. ... He always dreamed of the big chance around the corner, but it never came.'' Berle's first chance came at age 5, when he won a vaudeville contest by imitating Charlie Chaplin. Soon he was doing child leads in films with Mary Pickford and Mabel Normand, and was the kid rescued from the railroad tracks in the nick of time in the Pearl White movies. He appeared with Chaplin and Marie Dressler in the movie, ``Tillie's Punctured Romance,'' and with Miss Pickford in ``Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.'' His Broadway debut came in 1920 in ``The Floradora Girl.'' He attended New York's Professional Children's School, and as a teen-ager toured the vaudeville circuit as a stand-up comic, taking his jokes from College Humor and Captain Billy's Whiz Bang. ``I studied stars like Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, Lou Holtz and others,'' Berle said in a 1984 interview. ``I have eight or 10 press books of bad notices from those years, but it was a good education in learning what not to do.'' In 1936 Berle was a headliner with the Ziegfeld Follies. He played a long run with Earl Carroll's Vanities and began bringing his brand of humor to radio with guest spots on humor shows. He also appeared in several minor film comedies, such as ``New Faces of 1937'' and ``Always Leave Them Laughing'' (based on his autobiography). But he never really made it on the big screen. Then came 1948 and the advent of television. Berle was signed as host of the first show of a variety series - the ``Texaco Star Theater.'' He was supposed to alternate with several other hosts, including Henny Youngman and Morey Amsterdam, but Berle drew so much fan mail that NBC soon gave him the spot permanently. Berle's hour-long ``Texaco Star Theater'' began June 8, 1948, and was renamed ``The Milton Berle Show'' before it ended in June 1956. He won an Emmy for the program, which was truly his own.

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