Continued from page 1

Milton Berle

Thursday March 28, 2002 01:00 PM EST

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"Milton Berle proved to the networks that you could do a new show every week with the same cast," fellow broadcasting legend Sid Caesar told CNN. "Milton Berle is going to be sorely missed. He was Mr. Television, and also a friend."

Outlandish costumes, including women's clothes and giant Eskimo furs, lines such as "Good evening, ladies and germs" and "I swear, I'll kill you a million times" (the latter with Berle's own strange inflection) and his ever-present cigars became some of his trademarks.

"Milton Berle had a great influence on most of the comedians today, including me," former Tonight Show host Johnny Carson told the AP.

Berle began his professional career at the age of 5. Born July 12, 1908, to Sadie Berlinger, a department store security detective, and her husband, Moe, a sometimes house painter with, his family said, more dreams than follow-through, Milton grew up in New York. When the bill collectors closed in, Berle became the breadwinner for his parents and his three older brothers and younger sister. "It wasn't until I was fairly grown up," Berle later wrote, "that I learned that moving could be done in the daytime."

Dragged around to casting calls by his pushy stage mother, Berle's first job was as a walk-on in silent pictures. He appeared in such films as 1914's The Perils of Pauline and 1920's The Mark of Zorro (with Douglas Fairbanks). At age 10 he became part of a children's vaudeville act, in which he imitated Eddie Cantor. In 1920, The Times reported, he and another youngster, Elizabeth Kennedy, formed their own vaudeville act, and Berle changed his name. The following year the act was playing in the Palace Theater on Broadway. It wasn't long before he began working on a solo act, which he debuted in 1924, when he was 16.

Brash, confident and pushy even by vaudeville standards, Berle earned a reputation early in his career as an outrageous joke-stealer, prompting Bob Hope to say, in later years, "Of course, I love Milton . . . I love to sit home and watch him on TV and see how my jokes are doing."

Berle went on to use the accusations as a gag in and of itself. "God, I wish I'd said that, and don't worry, I will," he would joke, The New York Times reported. And, "I laughed so hard I nearly dropped my pencil and paper."