Stanley Burns

A young Stanley Burns, early in his career, with a genie-turbaned figure, in a promotional photo he autographed for a friend. Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog

Picture a kid in Manhattan who cannot get a sentence out. Elocution lessons do not help. Then he wanders into the Harlem Dime Museum, and one of the working ventriloquists there hands him a dummy to try for a minute. Young Stanley starts talking through it, and the stutter is just gone.^[1] That kid grew up to run two careers at once for sixty years. He worked New York's nightclub and vaudeville circuit as one of the trade's most inventive ventriloquists, and at the same time he collected every scrap of paper, every photograph, and every story this art ever produced, so that somebody, someday, could sit down and write its history properly. He ended up being that somebody himself. Pull up a chair.

A stutter, a borrowed dummy, and the Harlem Dime Museum

Stanley Burns was born in New York City in 1919.^[2] As a boy he developed a severe stutter, bad enough that he was sent for elocution lessons. Nothing worked. Then he found his way to the Harlem Dime Museum in Manhattan, where the working ventriloquists performed, and one of them let him borrow a figure for a few minutes. The moment young Stanley started speaking through it, the stutter disappeared completely.^[1] That is the entire launch of a sixty-year career. Some men find their calling in a classroom. Stanley found his in a museum full of talking dolls, curing a speech problem by pretending to be somebody else for a minute.

By 1936 or 1937, still a teenager, he was studying distant voice with the Great Lester himself.^[3] Twenty years later, weeks before his own death, Lester wrote about the kid he had trained: he is "now busy doing vent and collecting big money, and has the best act of all vents." Lester called him "the most advanced Ventriloquist with the most modern delivery, ideas, and inventive novelties in his presentation," noted that he refused to imitate or steal another vent's material, and said Burns never had to look for work because "they are all after him."^[3] That is about as strong an endorsement as one working ventriloquist can hand another.

The lineage did not stop with Burns. Years later, Shari Lewis called him "Uncle Stan" and credited him as one of her own ventriloquism teachers when she was a little girl.^[4] Follow that thread and you get a named, dated chain running straight through American entertainment: the Great Lester taught Stanley Burns distant voice around 1936, and Stanley Burns helped teach it to the girl who grew up to put Lamb Chop on network television. That is not a small thing to have your fingerprints on.

The invention nobody could explain

Burns's signature bit was a wizened little Chinese-character figure he called Dr. Lichi, named after the nut. Frank Marshall carved him in the late 1950s, and carved him more than once over the years, the way any working ventriloquist wears out a hard-used figure.^[5][6] What made Dr. Lichi famous was not the carving. It was what he did on stage. Burns was, by the best evidence this archive holds, the first ventriloquist to rig a figure with radio-controlled remote operation. While he supplied the voice live, Dr. Lichi moved his own mouth and turned his own head in full view of the crowd, with no visible assistant and no visible wiring, and audiences simply could not work out how.^[1]

Cy Leonard caught the act in Toronto and marveled that this was still the era of vacuum tubes, not transistors, and yet none of what had to be fairly bulky equipment was ever visible. Burns kept both hands plainly in sight the whole time. Johnny Main admitted flat out: "he always kept us all guessing as to how he manipulated his remote control figure. I still don't know how he did it." Jimmy Nelson said the same.^[1] The surviving figure, now in Dan Willinger's Frank Marshall collection, shows part of the answer: one control hidden under the silk cap, and a second worked by a bulb and a long tube, which let Burns stand about six feet from the figure and still control the mouth.^[7] Even knowing the mechanics, it is easy to see why nobody in the room could follow it live.

Sixty years of work, here and abroad

The stage work never stopped. The Oracle's pages catch him working New York City in 1953, "hitting the ball high, wide and handsome."^[9] The next year he was at the Elmwood, a supper-night club across the border in Windsor, Canada, where a visiting brother ventriloquist reported he "as usual did a superb presentation in vent."^[10] That same year he filmed Vent Haven itself in color, and in 1957 he air-mailed his own titled print of the film all the way to Houston so a jam session there could screen it.^[10][11] In January 1955 he turned up as a guest on Edgar Bergen's CBS radio show.^[12] By 1956 he was a named client of Frank Marshall's shop, and that same year, in one of the odder footnotes in this whole archive, somebody's blue suitcase containing "a ventriloquial doll and puppet" went missing near 58th Street and Sixth and Seventh Avenues in New York, with a no-questions-asked reward posted in the Times. Jerry Layne, writing the next month, wondered out loud whether it was Burns's own figures inside that suitcase. Whether he ever got them back was never recorded.^[13][14]

In 1957 he played the Palace Theatre in New York City alongside Jay Marshall.^[11] He told people for the rest of his life that he had been the last ventriloquist ever to work that stage. That is his own claim, passed down through a friend, and it was never independently checked. I will let it stand as his.^[1] A year after that he skipped the Buffalo convention entirely, because word had reached him that Bill Dodson was close to finishing some new piece of vent apparatus, and Burns wanted to see it firsthand. The invention was not ready by the time the doors opened, so the trip from New York got called off.^[15] That is a man who would rather miss a party than miss the next new idea.

His characters carried him across every kind of room there was: Bruce, the redhead Frank Marshall built him; Cecil, his small sidekick; Dr. Lichi; Lulu, his saucy number for grown-up crowds; Uncle Sam, carved for him by George Larsen; and Susie, a sweet little girl figure who helped him work magic tricks.^[16][2] He performed a command show for the Roosevelts at the summer White House, on a bill with Zero Mostel, and kept working trade shows, industrial shows, and television variety for decades after that.^[1] Later still came film work: Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan and Woody Allen's Radio Days, plus a recurring ventriloquist dummy choir bit on Conan O'Brien's show.^[1][4]

Dr. Lichi

The remote-control figure that made Burns's name. One control ran under the silk cap. A second, worked by a bulb and a long tube, let him stand six feet off and still move the mouth.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central, Dan Willinger's Frank Marshall Collection

Dr. Lichi, off the body

The 1953 figure, dated inside the head, sold as Lot 36 for $1,450 when the Willinger collection went to auction in 2015.

Photo via WorthPoint

Other Voices

Thirty years of research, a 380-page hardcover with a 24-page color section, and a print run of just 1,500 copies that was never reprinted.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog

Florida, March 1993

Burns, five years from the end, with Harold Greenbaum, Walter Walters Jr., and Jerry Layne. One friend on the scene called him "another great character, full of stories."

Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog

The collector and the book that took thirty years

Somewhere in all that touring, Burns started keeping things. Rare photographs, memorabilia, and theatrical posters of the art's biggest names filled his apartment, tucked between Eighth Avenue and 23rd Street.^[2] He befriended Edgar Bergen, the Great Lester, Señor Wences, and W.S. Berger, the founder of Vent Haven, and stayed close with Shari Lewis into her own television years.^[2] Around 1970 he started turning all of it into a proper history of the art: thirty years of research, with his wife Sylvia typing his notes into a computer while Stanley chased down every lead that had anything to do with ventriloquism.^[17][2]

His friend Bob Ladd wanted to publish it for years and kept getting the same answer: "wait until I get the book out."^[2] Stanley got to see the finished result, transposed to CD-ROM by Dan Ritchard, just days before he died.^[1][2] The printed edition followed after his death, arranged by Sylvia: a 380-page hardcover, a 24-page color section, titled Other Voices: Ventriloquism from B.C. to T.V. Only 1,500 copies were ever made, and it was never reprinted.^[18][19] Cybervent, the trade's own web outlet, names it as one of just two standard histories of the art, right alongside Valentine Vox's I Can See Your Lips Moving.^[20] I own a copy myself. Every page of it is the work of a man who spent his whole life collecting the receipts for an art nobody else was writing down.^[6]

The last months

About a month before he died, the Masons of New York honored Burns for decades of charity work, performing at holiday shows for children who otherwise would not have had a show at all. He wore his Distinguished Service Award proudly that night.^[2] Johnny Main remembered him there too: a week short of his 79th birthday, leaning on a cane, and still working in a little of his expert distant voice technique with a twinkle in his eye. "He was a master," Main wrote.^[2] Main also remembered the day Burns brought Bruce in for repairs and insisted on driving a nail between the figure's eyes to hold a pair of glasses on, over Main's own objections. Al Semok later told him Burns's figures were in the shop for work all the time. That is exactly the kind of relationship a performer has with the thing he depends on every night, hard use and all.^[2]

A 2003 profile in the New York Times, "Puppet in Lap, and Audience in His Palm" by Dan Barry, is on record too, proof of how far his story traveled even after he was gone. This archive has not gotten hold of a copy to quote from directly.^[21] After he died, Sylvia hired Bob Olson to liquidate the paper side of the collection, the photographs and posters and programs Stanley had spent a lifetime gathering.^[22]

Stanley Burns died in New York on August 1, 1998, a week after his 79th birthday. His wife Sylvia survived him.^[1] Nearly two decades later, when Cybervent put together its own short list of legends for a set of collectors' cards in 2016, his name made the cut.^[23] He earned it twice over: once on stage, fooling rooms full of people with a wired-up wooden head, and once at a desk, making sure the rest of us would have somewhere to read about how he did it.

A stutter cured in one minute at the Harlem Dime Museum, and sixty years later he's the one writing the history books. Meanwhile I'm still stuck in a trunk between shows, taking notes on nothing.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy