MY FIRST ADOPTEE: RONNIE BURNS

Ronnie Burns was the adopted son of George Burns and Gracie Allen. There had never been any secret about his adoption. He came from The Cradle. Gracie said they chose him because he was the most sickly baby there and needed the most care. Ronnie was always referred to by the press as "the adopted son of." He was just one of many of those "adopted son/daughter ofs" in the First Golden Age of Hollywood Adoption, but he was the only one, as far as I knew, who was on TV. He was the first visible adopted person I ever "knew."

See, back then, even during that Golden Age, where it seemed half of Hollywood was adopting, adoption in the real world wasn't discussed in public. I'm not sure that was a bad idea . If the Internet had been around then, and my parents adoptaobsessed like adopters are today, I'd have been mortified. It was bad enough being adopted without having your business spread all over front street.

I don't remember feeling any externalized identification with Ronnie as an adoptee; he just was. I was 9 or 10 years old when he joined the cast of the Burns & Allen Show playing himself, so I wasn't intellectualizing things. But I do remember a fascination with him, and a disturbing feeling that as an adoptee he wasn't "real." ...he was a sort of an out-of-body experience...which of course, begs the question, was I?

I was so a slow learner, that it wasn't until I saw the Proud and Profane on the late night movie when I was 14, that it occurred to me that my parents might not have been married when I was born. Back then, those things were never discussed in polite company. A year after that, at a school dance, I was talking to a wallflower-in-arms, when she casually mentioned her parents had gotten married a year after she was born. I felt confused and faint. I ruminated over that confession for the longest time. How did one live with the fact that your parents weren't married? Even if they were later? It did not make me feel better about being adopted.

After Burns & Allen went off the air, Ronnie continued working in Hollywood as an actor and behind the scenes. He took the money he made there, and went into real estate investment. In his later years he raised Arabian horses on a ranch in Santa Ynez. He was married to the same woman for 30 years (another earlier marriage), had 3 sons, and 6 grandchildren. I think he had a good life.

I can't find any clips of him on Burns & Allen or any of his film work outside of the draggy JD film Anatomy of a Psycho (1961). No, he's not the psycho--but he's in love with the psycho's sister.

Exception: "Wallace" on The Honeymooners. This is Ronnie's finest performance.





I'm not even sure why I'm writing this today, except for some reason Ronnie Burns popped into my head last night. I Googled him and learned that he died of cancer at the age of 72 in 2007. I felt bad. Like I'd lost something.

Times were protective then. I never knowingly "knew" another adoptee or bastard until my first job out of college when I worked with a man who'd been adopted during the Great Depression. After that, I never knowingly knew another adopted person (though I knew a couple kept bastards and certainly people who created bastards!) until I was in my thirties. Even as times changed, adoption was not something one talked about with any security.

By today's confessional standards, it must be difficult to understand that for me, reared in deep silence, the mere existence of Ronnie Burns was important--a gift--even if I couldn't articulate that importance until much later. Like now. For many years Ronnie was my only link to adopteehood. A sort of looking glass that validated me. There were at least two of us out there, even though intellectually I knew there were millions. He was on the TV screen and he was real. He was not playing an adoptee. He was one.

When Ronnie died, his AP obit read in part: Born in Evanston, Ill., he was adopted when he was 3 months old. He is still referred to usually as "adopted son of."

I have no idea how Ronnie felt about being adopted or if he chose to investigate his roots. I'm betting, though, he didn't like being reminded--and the world reminded with him--that he was "the adopted son of..."

When I see Ronnie or anyone else described as "the adopted son/daughter of" on some level I cringe. But on another level, I want this. The descriptor is part of our identity. I will always be grateful for Ronnie's visibility and the lifeline he threw out to me so many years ago, by his mere visibility, even if that visibility was front streetscaped- and surely an albatross. In a world where adoptees were freakizied internally, his presence tempered my freakishness and help me psychically survive to sort things out later.

Am I making any sense?