Abe Burrows

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Abe Burrows (b. Abram Solman Borowitz, December 18, 1910, New York City; d. May 17, 1985, New York) was a noted American humourist, author, and director for radio and the stage, particularly Broadway.

He began his radio career as a protege of Ed Gardner, the writer and star of radio legend Duffy's Tavern, with whom he co-created the show after Gardner's character, Archie, premiered on the earlier radio show This Is New York. Burrows was made the show's head writer, and he credited the experience with investing the Runyonesque street characters he fashioned for Guys and Dolls. "The people on that show," Burrows once said about Duffy's Tavern, "were New York mugs, nice mugs, sweet mugs, and like (Damon) Runyon's mugs they all talked like ladies and gentlemen. That's how we treated the characters in Guys and Dolls."

Burrows also wrote for Danny Kaye's short-lived mid-1940s radio comedy show, helping head writer Goodman Ace fashion material for Kaye and co-stars Eve Arden and Lionel Stander, before hosting his own radio program, The Abe Burrows Show (CBS) in 1948, a fifteen-minute weekly comedy Burrows wrote and directed as well. As he himself recalled many years later, this show came about while he was writing a radio show for comedienne Joan Davis, when George Jessel asked him, "When the hell are you gonna become a professional?" Burrows continued as Davis's head writer while doing his own show.

Mixing comic patter ("I guess I could tell you exactly what I look like, but I think that's a lousy thing to say about a guy") with his clever comic songs, The Abe Burrows Show was popular with listeners and critics but not with its sponsor, Lambert Pharmaceutical, then the makers of Listerine mouthwash but promoting a Listerine toothpaste on the show. Lambert, according to Burrows, complained that the show wasn't selling much of the toothpaste. "It seems that my fans were being naughty," he wrote. "While they were laughing at my jokes, they were sneering at my toothpaste."

Both shows originated from CBS's Los Angeles affiliate, KNX, whose program director Ernie Martin encouraged Burrows---who had done some film work---to think about writing plays. "I told him I felt my funny stuff was okay for radio, but I didn't think people would pay theater prices to hear it," Burrows recalled. Eventually, however, Burrows wrote, doctored, or directed such shows as Make a Wish, Two on the Aisle, Say, Darling, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Cactus Flower, Can-Can, Silk Stockings, Breakfast At Tiffany's and many others. With his collaborator Frank Loesser, Burrows even won a Pulitzer Prize for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

Burrows also became a famous script doctor, enough so that the desperate call of a producer, "Get me Abe Burrows!", remained Broadway shorthand for a script that needs repair for many years. Yet Burrows himself downplayed that role in his memoir, while discussing his fixing of Make a Wish:

I have . . . performed surgery on a few shows, but not as many as I'm given credit for. I've been involved in nineteen theatrical productions, plus their road company offshoots. Only a few of these have been surgical patients. And I don't usually talk about them. I feel that a fellow who doctors a show should have the same ethical approcah that a plastic surgeon has. It wouldn't be very nice if a plastic surgeon were walking down the street with you, and a beautiful girl approached. And you say, "What a beautiful girl." And the plastic surgeon says, "She was a patient of mine. You should have seen her before I fixed her nose." Doctoring seldom cures a show. The sickness usually starts at the moment the author puts the first sheet of paper in his typewriter. All the redirecting and recasting can never help much if the basic story is wrong.

Burrows also wrote the screenplay for the 1956 film, The Solid Gold Cadillac, as well as producing a pair of television series, Abe Burrows' Almanac (1950) and The Big Party (1959).

Twice married and the father of two sons and a daughter, Burrows's elder son, James Burrows, became an influential television director whose credits have included The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Cheers---the latter a show the younger Burrows helped create as well, a show whose setting of a neighbourhood bar populated with quirky locals was a direct descendant of the radio show that helped launch his father's distinguished career.

In 1980, Burrows published his memoir, Honest, Abe: Is There Really No Business Like Show Business?, in which he recalled the meat of his career, including his mentoring of several comedy writers including future M*A*S*H writer Larry Gelbart (who was once a Duffy's Tavern writer), Nat Hiken, Dick Martin, and Woody Allen, the latter a distant cousin of Burrows's. He died after a battle against what came to be known as Alzheimer's disease in 1985.

[edit] References

Abe Burrows, Honest Abe: Is There Really No Business Like Show Business? (Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown).
Sies, Luther F. Encyclopedia of American radio 1920-1960. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000. ISBN 0-7864-0452-3