Jack Benny and George Burns gave me the wisest, truest advice about show business that I probably ever heard. But it took me seven or eight years to know they were right.
It was sometime in 1952. I’d had two of my first big hits the year before. “Because of You” had reached number one on the pop charts, followed up by a rendition of Hank Williams’s beautiful, bittersweet “Cold, Cold Heart,” which also hit the charts. I was booked into the Paramount Theatre on Broadway, where the shows were sold out.
I saw Jack and George walking down Broadway one afternoon. They were often together in the public mind even then, devoted friends who saw or talked to each other each day, no matter where they were or what they were working on.
Both Jack and George had enjoyed successful radio shows, which they were beginning to bring to television. Their shows were among the first sitcoms. They costarred with their spouses (Mary Livingstone, Jack’s wife, who was born Sadie Marks, and Gracie Allen, who of course was married to George), and the episodes were often set in their television “homes.” So it was easy to confuse the violin-strangling Jack Benny of his show and the cigar-brandishing George Burns of Burns and Allen with the real-life people behind those names. If you saw them on the street, you’d think you were running into old friends.
But they were also the biggest names in broadcasting at that point. I didn’t want to be like just another fan when I saw them walking together, so I looked away. But Jack and George stopped me on the sidewalk and said, “Congratulations, kid, you’re doing pretty well.” I thanked them, of course, and was enormously flattered. But then they looked at me with shrewd eyes and said, “It’ll take you seven or eight years to know what you’re really doing.”
That left me a little puzzled at the time. “Because of You” had sold more than a million copies. I was doing six or seven shows a day, all of them sold out, at one of Broadway’s best houses. Wouldn’t almost anyone kind of have to say that I pretty much already knew what I was doing?
But Jack and George were shrewd in the ways of both show business and life. They had become such well-known characters on radio and TV that millions of Americans felt they were practically members of the family.
Jack was the guy who held his face to exclaim surprise, fretted over pennies, kicked his coughing Maxwell motorcar, and claimed for decades to be just thirty-nine. George smiled slyly, waved his cigar like a wand, and generously teed up punch lines for his wife, Gracie. (And I love what he said about her: “She made me look talented, and I was—talented enough to be married to her for thirty-eight years.”)
But it was easy to forget the hard work it had taken for them to get there. Jack Benny and George Burns were highly disciplined professionals. Each had honed his craft on a thousand different vaudeville and nightclub stages across the country before they ever appeared on radio or television. (Jack, by the way, had to change his name from Benjamin Kubelsky because the great Czech violinist and composer Jan Kubelík didn’t want to be confused with a young American vaudevillian who mostly played his violin for laughs.) They knew how to stride onstage and hold audiences in the palms of their hands. They knew how to get laughs and get off at just the right time, before the laughs could fade. They had learned, over years and years, how to create a personality onstage that sincerely reflected who they were, while also creating larger comic characters. Mostly, they had learned how to stay fresh and worth seeing year after year—after year.
Garden, Buckingham Palace
And they never tired of making each other laugh or showing each other new ways to do it. They went to many Hollywood parties together, and at one, Jack turned to George and said, “This party is a bore. Tell you what: I’m going to go upstairs, take off my pants, and then come downstairs. Let’s see what happens.”
But when Jack whisked upstairs to take off his pants, George told the assembled partygoers what he planned to do. When Jack came downstairs, no one turned a head or batted an eye. And that made Jack break up laughing.
So something like eight years after I’d encountered those two wise men of comedy, Jack Benny and George Burns, on the street, I agreed to appear at a benefit at the Hollywood Bowl. They were on the bill, too, and I saw them sitting backstage, just talking. I had just recorded my albums with Count Basie and was proud of them. But seeing Jack and George there helped me realize how much I had learned in seven or eight years. I had been a young hotshot with a number one record who thought he knew it all. It took falling off the charts, making some mistakes, figuring out what were the best songs and how I could do them better, and learning, through trial and error, how to present a complete show, not just a few good songs, before I could look in the mirror and begin to see a real professional entertainer of the kind that I admired—like Jack Benny and George Burns.
They smiled when I went over to say hello and said, “We remember running into you a while back.” I didn’t remind them that “a while back” had been seven or eight years before. “You gave me some great advice,” I told them, and I think George waved his cigar while one or the other of them said, “Us? Great advice? Impossible.” But isn’t that just what you’d expect Jack Benny and George Burns to say?
The Hills of Florence