Word: miltons
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...Berle. Through the years, hard-working Comic Berle drove himself so overbearingly to fulfill his destiny that many a bitter show-business colleague came to regard him as a gag-stealing braggart. Now, having conquered at last, Milton seems to be living down his bad reputation. Success agrees with him. Says George Jessel: "He doesn't have to try so hard now, and so he's not so liable to be stepping on other people's toes." Once damned by many who had to work with him on the way up, he now has the respect...
...professional stray that he has never been acceptable to Broadway's Lambs Club, he will be honored this week by a $50-a-plate testimonial dinner (Thurs. 10:20 p.m. E.D.T., NBCTV) for contributing to interfaith understanding (he has played benefits for all racial and religious groups). Milton, whose interest in the ponies used to keep a bookie stationed in his dressing room, is now plugging hard at being a public-spirited citizen: last month he raised $1,100,000 in pledges for cancer research on a backbreaking 16-hour NBC-TV marathon show...
...Hope: "When you see Berle, you're seeing the best things of anybody who has ever been on Broadway ... I want to get into television before he uses up all my material." Jack Benny is smarting over what he considers the theft of a hillbilly sketch, which Milton claims to have used first. Says Fred Allen: "He's done everybody's act. He's a parrot with skin on." Eddie Cantor is rankled because, he says, Milton recently used a sketch written for Cantor...
With probably the biggest beef of all, Ed Wynn ("The Perfect Fool") argues that in 1913 he originated Milton's whole format of introducing all the acts and playing a buffoon in each of them. While displaying an old scrapbook of his jokes, Milton was recently asked to explain a page headed: "Ed Wynn Jokes." Said he: "Those are some jokes Ed Wynn once gave me." Says Wynn in Hollywood: "I never gave him any jokes, nor did I give him permission to steal my life's work...
Beyond his showman's skills, Milton gets into all the offstage acts too. Though his contract gives him the right to assist in putting the show on, he runs the whole business. He has a master grasp of the TV medium still rare among lesser practitioners who are hamstrung by radio techniques. He calls the show's camera shots, directs the acts, plans the continuity, bosses the booking, writing, lighting and costumes, dictates the musical arrangements (and frequently hands them out to the musicians), approves the scenery (and sometimes helps shift it) and, in rehearsal, often leads...