January 21, 1999

Victor Borge: As American as a Cheese Danish

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Still Going Like 60 At 90  (7 photos)

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By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

ictor Borge, who learned music at his mother's knee (the family had no piano), wasn't always 90. Often he was younger. He gave his first concert at 8 "or a few minutes after."

	Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
	Victor Borge at his Connecticut home.     Slide Show  (7 photos)

When he was about 12 he saw a Russian pianist in Copenhagen, Denmark, accidentally fall off the piano bench. That was for him, marveled young Victor (which wasn't yet his name). "Such a cheap slapstick thing." He has been doing it himself almost ever since, although his doctors have recently warned him against it. So, he says, "I still don't do it." But of course he does, in every show.

Borge, the long-reigning keyboard comic who lives on a 4.5-acre waterfront estate in Greenwich, Conn., when he is not someplace else, has been making audiences laugh for most of the century, and the fact that he became a nonagenarian on Jan. 3 seems no reason to stop.

As he says in his recent book of the same name: "Smilet er den korteste afstand." In English: "A smile is the shortest distance." Meaning, between people. (This is Borge's third book and the only one that doesn't have hundreds of footnotes.)

Having entertained an estimated 12 million people, and still performing about 60 shows a year, he is planning a Broadway reprise almost 45 years after establishing the Broadway record for a one-man show, 849 performances. The New York Philharmonic and leading orchestras in London, Copenhagen, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and Los Angeles have fallen under his baton.

He now makes $40,000 a night, and his seven videotapes and one semiserious compact disc (half comedy, half recital) are carrying his art to new audiences with sales of more than 3 million so far.

Ten years ago, on Borge's 80th birthday, Wolf Blitzer, the CNN correspondent, said that the Iraqi foreign minister had requested some Borge videotapes "because Saddam is crazy about him." That left Borge uncharacteristically speechless. "I didn't know if I should take it as a compliment," he said.

He grants that George Burns performed older and that Jackie Mason also recently became a solo Broadway phenomenon, but Borge said in an interview at home, "Let's talk about me, do you mind?"

It takes him a little longer now to get to his feet ("My knees," he groaned, "and my nephew"), and his eyes disappear into crinkled crescents over his snowy mustache when he laughs, but there is nothing wrong with his timing, as visitors to his 1909 mansion (redesigned by Edward Durell Stone) run the risk of finding out.

Would his guests like a cup of coffee? "I'm not offering," he said, nattily attired in a blazer with pocket square and a wool tie, "just asking."

When the coffee arrived nonetheless, he steered it away from the piano. "You want to spill it over there?" he suggested.

Of course, there is a piano -- two of them back to back, a Steinway and a Bosendorfer. "When I do four hands, I run around," he said. "Or, with two hands, I play it twice."

How the Piano Acquired Its Keys

The piano has been Borge's chief accomplice since he began performing in Denmark more than 70 years ago, and it remains the focus of his best-known routines. With a handkerchief plucked from his jacket pocket, he mimed one of his stage gags, painstakingly measuring the distance from keyboard to stool, adjusting the seat position, remeasuring, then adjusting again. Then he sat down, pulling the seat closer.

In his living room he threatened to narrate a history of the piano -- "It's quite uninteresting" -- beginning with the invention of one big white key. "People stood and played it forever. It was not until someone invented the cracks -- that changed everything." He recounted the death of Debussy, trailing off with "I don't care -- I have my own problems."

He may be the only musician who ever rhymed Shostakovich with "just a moment." He also once managed to kill an errant fly that was buzzing between his fingers as he played onstage. Backstage, when an admirer asked whether it was hard to get the fly to come in on cue, Borge said: "You have no idea. In rehearsal it was two and a half minutes late."

At Radio City Music Hall in 1983, he accompanied Frank Sinatra singing "Autumn Leaves." Sure enough, leaves started drifting down, coming thicker and faster until Borge rolled his piano out of the way and finally cowered underneath as Sinatra dissolved in laughter.

And who else could stumble into a piano, sound a chord with his backside and then announce, "I play much better by ear, I can assure you."

His co-performers, including a son, Ronald, his stage manager, who is sometimes a straight man, were traditionally kept in the dark about his gags. "If you prepare a lot, it doesn't work," the father said.

Sometimes it still didn't work. The singer Sergio Franchi once grew noticeably impatient with Borge's unscripted clowning, and two other televised segments, written by Mel Brooks, about the 1832 hit parade called "Schlagerparade" and a toreador who fights a piano, fell flat.

Other writers have included Alan Jay Lerner, Henry Morgan and Neil Simon, but Borge said he always preferred to write his own material. What he comes up with, often spontaneously, can really crack him up. Many of his favorite lines began as ad-libs that he then worked into his act. Routinely he assures latecomers "You haven't missed anything" and chides them, "I came from Copenhagen and I got here before you."

Borge, then named Borge Rosenbaum, grew up in a musical family. His father, a violinist, played for 35 years with Denmark's Royal Opera Orchestra, and when he came home, Borge said, "my mother didn't recognize him."

He studied piano with Frederic Lamond, a protege of Franz Liszt, hung around the opera and ballet and joined a variety troupe. With the act bombing, Borge came up with a Mozart parody that was a hit.

Fleeing the Nazis and His Old Name

He was a rising musical-comedy star and film actor when he ran afoul of the Nazis. The confrontation was predictable, he said: "They were Nazis and I was Jewish." He also had trouble keeping his mouth shut. One of his jokes went: "What is the difference between a Nazi and a dog? A Nazi lifts his arm." With the Germans occupying Denmark in 1940, he fled with his wife, Elsie, an American.

Settling in California with a new name that he thought sounded more Danish, he won a regular radio spot on the Kraft Music Hall with Bing Crosby and performed with leading acts like the Paul Whiteman Band.

After the war his career soared with live performances and increasing television appearances. He and his wife divorced -- they had two young children and remained on good terms -- and in 1953 Borge married Sanna Roach, an artists' representative in Chicago who had become his manager. She had a daughter from a previous marriage, and they had two children together.

He was knighted so often in Scandinavia, he said, that "I became practically a weekend." Queen Elizabeth told him, "I grew up on your records." He was honored by Congress and presidents. He has performed with the "Sesame Street" Muppets and conducted (serious) performances of "The Magic Flute" for the Cleveland Opera and the Royal Opera in Copenhagen.

"It takes so long to be 90 years," he said, "but it goes so fast." His tone turned darker when he reflected that with all his honors and accolades, he had never won a theater or television award. But the moment quickly passed as Borge contemplated lunch in a favorite restaurant, the Homestead Inn. It provided a welcome new audience and a chance to polish his repartee.

"Shall I get you a glass of wine?" asked a waiter.

"You can," Borge answered. "But I won't drink it."

He perused the menu (feigning shock that it might be the bill) and summoned the captain. "Do you know any good restaurants?" he asked.

Borge knew what he wanted to order. "Last time I had the half chicken," he said. "Today I'll have the other half."