Gag Machine

The No. 1 jokesmith of his day is a six-foot gag-&-stunt machine named Milton Berle (rhymes with churl). His 38-year-old brain is a tight-packed file of some 50,000 jokes and japes. With never-miss efficiency, Berle can dip into these mental files, yank out just the gag he wants when he wants it. The "Thief of Badgags" (as spiteful rivals call him), who has probably lured more people into nightclubs than any performer alive, is now making his sixth attempt in 18 years to lure listeners to their radios with a Berle show.

Last week, the new Berle show, despite a choice time spot (Tues. 8 p.m., NBC) and a whopping publicity buildup by Philip Morris, got a not-so-hot Hooperating of 11.1. The reason was as plain as the remodeled nose on Milt's face: he has to be seen. His gags need his visible leers and risible nudges to get across.

New Man. For the new show, Milt claims that he has become a new man. "It's a different me," he muses, puffing a halo of cigar smoke. "I'm not the manufactured Broadway comedian any more. I'm going back, back to my real talent. I began as a dramatic actor, you know. . . . On this new show, people will get to know the real Milton Berle. The Milton at home."

If the new character failed to come across on the air, it might have been partly because Milton is almost never at home. When he is, home is a $4,000-a-year duplex in Manhattan's fashionable East 80s, bric-a-brackish with so much glass in tables and on walls that Milt meets himself every time he turns around.

Milt got his start just a few blocks north--in Harlem. His mother, Mrs. Sandra Berlinger, a Wanamaker and Gimbels store detective, began peddling him around New York's old Biograph movie studios when he was only five. At 16, she shoved him into his first solo comedy act, planted herself in the audience and started every big laugh with a stentorian "yak" that soon became famed throughout show business. At 21, Milt was a smash hit at the Palace, rolled on to successes on Broadway. But most of all, he wowed them in nightclubs. (His latest run: 46 weeks at Manhattan's Carnival Club, at $11,000 a week.) Now, Milt says, he is "through with the saloons." "For the first 26 weeks of the radio show," he explains, licking up a fresh eight-inch cigar, "I canceled out everything. The Philip Morris people been great, GREAT! They're gonna stick with me until the show builds. This time I gotta make it. I'm sincere about this. Why, I turned down $25,000 a week at the Roxy to work on the show, and it's only paying me a measly three, four thousand."

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