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Milton Berle (b. Milton Berlinger, ( July 12 , 1908 , New York City ; d. March 27 , 2002 , Los Angeles , California ) was an American Comedian and---after a career spanning Vaudeville , film, and Radio ---became Television 's first true superstar. As the manic host of the legendary '' Texaco Star Theater '' ( NBC , 1948 to June 14 , 1955 he became known as '''Uncle Miltie''' to millions. He was given this monicker in Boston . The show was also known as the Buick-Berle Show when Buick became its sponsor in 1953 and '' The Milton Berle Show '' in its final season). Berle's freewheeling, wildly antic style ensured his legend would outlive the show (which once owned America's home audience on Tuesday nights) and, some feel, his talent. THE SHOW BUSINESS KID Born in a five-story walkup at 68 West 118th Street in New York, Berle had the entertainment itch in early childhood, beginning his long career in 1913 by winning a contest with an impersonation of silent comic genius Charlie Chaplin . Despite his many genuine achievements, Berle in his later years seems to have padded his résumé by claiming to have worked as a child actor in Silent Films , including '' The Perils Of Pauline '' and with Chaplin in '' Tillie's Punctured Romance ''. It has been brought into question whether Berle was even on the West Coast as a child. But he did pay his dues in film, stage, and radio work, building a following, and in the fall of 1948 Berle finally caught his biggest break, when NBC —reviving its radio vehicle ''Texaco Star Theater'' yet again (it was, formerly, the vehicle through which Ed Wynn and, especially, Fred Allen refined and advanced the styles that made them radio legends), with Berle as its host—decided to bring it to television in the fall of 1948 , after Berle had spent the summer as one of the tryout show's rotating hosts. MR. TELEVISION "I'd rather be a has-been than a might-have-been, by far; for a might have-been has never been, but a has was once an are," Milton Berle was once quoted as saying. It turned out that he got his wish—perhaps a little sooner that he might have wished to get it. NBC took the chance and named Berle the permanent host of ''Texaco Star Theater''—and launched an American icon. The show and its host owned Tuesday nights for the next several years, hitting the number one slot in the Nielsen ratings and keeping it with as much as an 80 percent share of the recorded viewing audience. Berle individually and the show itself each won Emmy Awards after the first season. Theaters, restaurants, and other businesses either closed completely or simply shut down for the hour so their customers wouldn't miss Berle's antics. He was credited with a huge spike in television set sales (many believe Berle helped sell more television sets in the U.S. than anyone else in the medium's early years), and between that and his stature as the medium's first superstar Berle earned the nickname "Mr. Television." He earned his slightly more familiar nickname after ending a 1949 broadcast with a brief remark to children watching the show: "Listen to your Uncle Miltie and go to bed." And he was so popular, at the height of the show's success, that NBC signed him to an exclusive, thirty-year contract in 1951. SHOOTING STAR The only problem with that deal was that NBC (and practically everyone else) couldn't know just how short would be the average lifespan of any comedian on television, compared to radio comics whose careers went on for two decades and often longer. In part, this was due to the more ephemeral nature of visual comedy: they who don't adapt faster don't survive longer. And, indeed, Berle ended up wearing out his welcome almost as rapidly as he had built it up in the first place. Texaco pulled out of sponsorship of the show in 1953; Buick picked it up, prompting the renaming to ''The Buick-Berle Show'', but Berle's ratings continued to fall and Buick pulled out after one season. By the time the again-renamed ''Milton Berle Show'' finished its one full season under that name, Berle already seemed like ancient history—though this final season did provide some of the earliest television appearances by a young Rock And Roll singing star named Elvis Presley . NBC had no choice but to cancel the original Berle show at last. He later appeared in the Kraft Music Hall series, but NBC was finding increasingly fewer roles for its one-time superstar. By 1960 , he was reduced to hosting a game show, '' Jackpot Bowling '', delivering his quips in-between the on-screen efforts of bowling contestants. TRYING TO LIVE UP TO HIS LEGEND Unable to find or accept other television work, Berle played Las Vegas , where he played to packed showrooms at Caesar's Palace, the Sands, the Desert Inn and other casino hotels at the end of the "glory days" of "old Vegas". Berle had appeared at the El Rancho, one of the first Vegas hotels, in the late 1940's. Berle also made thousands of nightclub appearances, appeared on Broadway in Herb Gardner 's '' The Goodbye People '' in 1968 , and appeared in many films (mostly as himself). These included '' Always Leave Them Laughing '' ( 1949 ) with Virginia Mayo and Bert Lahr , '' Let's Make Love ,'' with Marilyn Monroe and Yves Montand ( 1960 ); '' It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World '' ( 1963 ); '' The Loved One '' (1965); '' The Oscar '' ( 1966 ); '' Lepke '' ( 1975 ); Woody Allen 's '' Broadway Danny Rose '' ( 1984 ); and '' Driving Me Crazy '' ( 1991 ). He also had guest roles on Television series such as '' The Jack Benny Show '', '' Make Room For Daddy '', '' The Lucy Show '', '' Batman '', '' The Big Valley '', '' Get Smart '', '' The Mod Squad '', '' Ironside '', '' Mannix '', '' McCloud '', '' The Love Boat '', '' CHiPs '', '' Fame '', '' Fantasy Island '', '' Gimme A Break '', '' Diff'rent Strokes '', '' Matlock '', '' Murder, She Wrote '', '' Beverly Hills 90210 '', '' The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air '', '' The Nanny '', '' Roseanne '', '' Sister, Sister '', and many others. In 1966 , freed in part from the obligations of his NBC contract, Berle was signed to a new weekly variety series on ABC . The show failed to capture the large audience Berle commanded in the 1950s , and was cancelled after one season. He later appeared as guest villain Louie the Lilac on the short-lived (but wildly popular) ''Batman'' series, also on ABC. Like Jackie Gleason , his contemporary (who managed to avoid Berle's pitfalls in making his own comedy-variety show last over twice as long), Berle proved a solid dramatic actor and was acclaimed for several such performances, most notably his lead role in "Doyle Against The House" on '' The Dick Powell Show '' in 1961—he received an Emmy nomination. He also played the part of a blind survivor of an airplane crash in '' Seven In Darkness '', the first in ABC's popular '' Movie Of The Week '' series, and was often seen on the '' Hollywood Palace '' variety show on ABC. During this period of his life, Milton Berle was rightfully (although with less fanfare than might have been appropriate) placed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having performed the greatest number of charity performances of any show business performer. Unlike the high profile, carefully orchestrated shows done by peer Bob Hope to entertain the troops, Berle went completely out of character and did more shows, over a period of 50 years, on a lower profile basis. Berle received an award for entertaining at stateside military bases in World War 1 as a child performer, in addition to traveling to foreign bases in World War 2 and Vietnam. Berle was nearly a permanent fixture at virtually any charity benefit in the Los Angeles / Hollywood area, and was instrumental in raising hundreds of millions of dollars for charitable causes. The first televised charity telethon was hosted by Berle. SATURDAY NIGHT DOOMED By 1970 , however, Berle was appearing primarily as a nod to his past, an increasingly nostalgic figure as well as a reference in pop culture history. And sometimes this led to disaster as often as devotion. On April 24th, 1979 Berle guest-hosted Saturday Night Live . This should have been a natural union, considering how much the show—in all its "contempt not for the medium but for the bad habits it had developed over the years," as chronicler Tom Shales phrased it—owed to the absolute best of the early, anything-goes ethos of Berle's ''Texaco Star Theater''. As Berle had invented television in some ways, ''Saturday Night Live'' was trying (and at its best succeeding) in re-inventing the medium. The bad news was that Mr. Television's appearance proved anything but transcendent. Uncle Miltie seemed to spend as much time trying to upstage the show's youthful cast as he did trying to work with or augment them. Berle's long and storied reputation for taking control of an entire television production whether invited to do so or not was another cause of stress on the set. Berle had more or less designed and built the studio that SNL used thirty years previously, and was not ready to accept that he didn't know how to do everyone's job (from the stage hands to the lighting crew) better than they did. In Shales and James Andrew Miller's ''Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live'', one of the show's writers, Rosie Shuster, described the rehearsals and the telecast itself as "sort of like watching a comedy train accident in slow motion on a loop." Upstaging, camera mugging, inserting old comedy bits that he may or may not have "stolen" from others, and a maudlin performance of "September Song" complete with pre-arranged standing ovation (something creator Lorne Michaels and company had never sanctioned), and Berle ended up banned from a show that owed him a certain artistic debt in the first place. Berle's household in Beverly Hills received several rambling, stoned phone calls from John Belushi for weeks after the Saturday Night Live show, with Belushi loudly proclaiming that Berle was the greatest comedian in history. The Milton Berle episode of SNL has reportedly been banished to the vaults, never to see the light of day again, on the direct orders of Michaels. Another well know incident of upstaging occurred during the 1982 Emmy Award s, when Berle and Martha Raye were the presenters of the Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a variety or music program. Berle was reluctant to give up the microphone to the award's reciepients, from Second City Television . After interrupting actor Joe Flaherty 's acceptance speech several times, the SCTV actors and writers left the stage looking very upset. The Canadian comedy troupe later created a parody sketch of the incident, in which Flaherty's character actually beats up a Berle look-alike, shouting "you'll never ruin another acceptance speech, Uncle Milty!" BETTER TIMES He fared better, however, in 1985 , when he appeared on NBC's '' Amazing Stories '', created by Steven Spielberg , in an episode called "Fine Tuning", where friendly aliens from space, having received TV signals from the Earth of the 1950s , travel to Hollywood in search of their idols, Lucille Ball , Jackie Gleason , Burns And Allen —and Uncle Miltie. Berle, speaking gibberish, is the only person able to communicate directly with the aliens. It was one of the finest performances in Berle's later life. He presided as the master of ceremonies for countless . A small portion of this interview can be seen in the 2005 PBS' special The Pioneers Of Primetime . One of his most popular performances in his later years is guest starring in The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air , as the womanizing, joke-making patient who leads Will to thought he died because the patient slept right away. Most of his dialogue is improvised and shocked the audience in one blooper that he screamed out the four-letter word by mistake. Berle had one of the greatest joke collections in the world, with about 6.5 million jokes on computer. The books ''Milton Berle's Private Joke File'' and ''The Rest of the Best of Milton Berle's Private Joke File'' each had 10,000 of these jokes. Being Jewish, {Link without Title} one of his best remembered jokes was, "Any time a person goes into a delicatessen and orders a pastrami on white bread, somewhere a Jew dies." This joke would not have been funny if he were not Jewish. GOODBYE, UNCLE MILTIE With the nickname of "Mr. Television," Berle was one of the first seven people to be inducted into the Television Academy Hall Of Fame in 1984 . He died of colon cancer on March 27 , 2002 , at the age of 93. Despite having previously made detailed arrangements himself to be buried with his third wife Ruth at Mount Sinai Memorial Park in Burbank, Berle's fourth wife Lorna Adams (who was reported in the tabloids as out partying in a tight leather skirt at age 65 while Berle lay dying at home) made different arrangements and Berle was interred in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California . He was survived by two adopted children, daughter Victoria born in 1945 and son William born in 1961. In more than one way, Berle was television's first shooting star as well as its first bona-fide superstar. He burned out on television almost as quickly as he exploded into a national obsession, and never really found his way back to stardom in that medium. The downside is that Berle's manic style may now seem dated, perhaps by definition television styles are doomed to a short life, and Berle's career was the first Guinea Pig to have proven that televisions nature is more fickle than any other medium. But, however dated even his best work now seems, Milton Berle gave a new medium a shape that continues to be a reference point for both the best ''and'' the least of what that medium has since had to offer. Milton Berle's legacy on television also includes the fact that he risked his newfound TV stardom at its zenith, to go nose to nose with Texaco Oil when the sponsor tried to keep black performers off television. Berle threatened to quit and leave Texaco and television without their star unless a black vaudeville dance act was allowed to appear as scheduled. Berle lived personally and professionally by the oldest Vaudeville stage performer's code of ethics: If you had talent, you were welcome on stage, black, white, green, gay,or anything else. "The Four Step Brothers" went on and Texaco backed down... and Berle was never forgiven by certain factions within Texaco. WORK ON BROADWAY
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