Gracie:; A Love Story

New York, N.Y.: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1988. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 319, [1] pages. Illustrations. Slight DJ wear. Inscribed by the author on the half title page. Inscription reads: To Julia--My Best. George Burns. Also contains a second inscription on the front endpaper from David Fisher, the co-author, which reads Spring 1989 To Phillip and Dorothy, At least this won't sink. I'm very pleased to be your friend, with best wishes David Fisher. Gracie brings to life the charming woman who was smart enough to become the dumbest woman in show business history. Onstage she was lovable, confusing Gracie, who believed horses must be deaf because she saw so few of them at concerts, and who decided to cut her vacuum cleaner cord in half so she could save on electricity. Offstage she was a devoted wife and the loving mother--and throughout her career in vaudeville, radio, television, and the movies, she managed to hide that her left arm had been scarred in a childhood accident and that she suffered from migraine headaches. Offstage, George explains, she was nothing like the dizzy character she played, "except maybe for the time she backed up into a parked car and managed to convince the driver of that car that he'd hit her." "SAY GOODNIGHT, GRACIE..." With those now familiar words, George Burns and Gracie Allen bid farewell to devoted audiences at the end of each of their broadcasts throughout the Golden Age of radio and television. George Burns tells the story of his life with Gracie, the dizzy comedienne whose "illogical logic" charmed America. Burns recalls their first meeting, the tours, days in Hollywood, and their lasting friendship with Jack Benny and others. Here is one of America's most beloved comedians remembering the woman he loved best and the extraordinary life they shared together. Derived from a Kirkus review: Very moving memoir by cigar-puffing nonagenarian George Burns about his late wife, comedienne Gracie Allen, to whom he was married for 40 years and whom he partnered for 34 before her retirement. Burns writes marvelously throughout, without one slip in tone or dumb line, and with verbal cigar puffs to tell us when a joke has landed. He was ten years Gracie's senior and a lame vaudevillian when he met Gracie and asked her to partner him as "George Bums and Gracie Allen." She was to be straight woman and George top banana, but George quickly saw that her straight lines got all the laughs while he raised not a titter. He became straight man, Gracie top banana. George, in fact, said less and less, Grace more and more. Many years later, logging in their eight years of TV shows (298 episodes), poor Gracie would be memorizing 26 pages of dialogue weekly out of each 40-page script, a heavy burden that put her under much tension. Her special humor, as the dumbest woman in the world, demanded absolute adherence to lines as written if her illogical logic was to make sense. Gracie had scarred an arm with scalding water as a youngster and always dressed to the hilt (""like Cary Grant"") with longsleeved gloves to make her logical confusions ever funnier and more "sensible." She was a tine dancer as well and stood up to several intricate sequences with Fred Astaire in the movie Damsel in Distress, by far the best Burns and Allen picture. The memoir is aglow with long sequences featuring Gracie and George and Jack Benny, who has many rousing pages; with the story about Gracie's "missing brother," which was a publicity bombshell that had the whole nation chewing over where her missing brother was; and with George's vast warmth in recalling his long-lost wife, whom he still visits monthly at Forest Lawn Cemetery. Burns' greatest monologue, shimmering with life.