Gumption (25 page)

CAROL BURNETT

T
he thing about Carol Burnett is . . . she’s kind of a goddess. There will be some of you younger types who may not be as familiar with her variety program,
The Carol Burnett Show
, which ran for only
eleven years
, from the late sixties into the late seventies, so I would suggest you treat yourself to some of those on the YouTube. Once you have committed to your viewing, however, do be prepared to cut yourself off cold turkey, as the typing in of that show’s particular moniker produces a staggering 166,000 results, many of them full episodes, of which they made some 278-odd. Mind this rabbit hole of raillery; it is rather bottomless, and your sides may actually split should you fail to heed my counsel. Rib-tickling to the point of bruises is guaranteed.

I arrived at her lovely home near Santa Barbara, California, to pick her up for lunch. I had met her twice before, once when she was a guest on my wife’s talk show, and once when we sat together at a Broadway play, and she had already set me at ease by treating me like
family from the get-go. She has the generous ability to make everyone she meets feel like they’re the apple of her eye. Regardless, I was nervous to spend time with her on my lonesome, because I can be clumsy.

She let me in the front door (French oak with copper details) and bid me wait while she fetched her purse. I looked to my right and noticed the door to the powder room upon which was the sort of sign plaque that would normally read R
ESTROOM
or L
AVATORY
. Carol’s read: E
UPHEMISM
. My tension left me immediately.

She has won accolades for decades, or “decaccolades,” if you insist, and much has been (justly) made of her ridiculous comedy chops. She has been as good at winning laughter and awards as my beloved Chicago Cubs have been at not winning pennants, a tall tally of praise, indeed. (Next year, you son of a bitch.) So many laurels have been wreathed about her comedy offerings, I fear that another most significant virtue has been sorely overshadowed: Carol Burnett is
foxy.

Sure, she makes me laugh. I am a human mammal, which is the only requisite to finding her hilarious to the point of leaving couch puddles. But her face and body language also contain such a surplus of heart and earnest; her smile, such a proliferation of beauty; and her fulsome songbird’s voice (when not mangled for a laugh), such a bewitching lilt that I must confess I have been in love with her for forty-some years.

There have been other great beauties in my life, sure, and funny ladies? Shucks, I’ve been lucky enough to befoul quality programs
lousy
with them. Nonetheless, Carol somehow combines her self-deprecating charm with a natural charisma that makes her the queen of the bunch. (Lest I be suspected of infidelity, I should reveal that my
wife, Megan, feels much the same as I; in point of fact, Carol has politely but firmly declined our seventeen entreaties—as of this writing—to join us in a three-way.) Not to mention, she got there decades before the funny ladies to whom I now bow, establishing herself as an intrepid pioneer in a field where few ladies had been allowed to do more than possess bosoms. Gilda Radner, Catherine O’Hara, Molly Shannon, Lisa Kudrow, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Melissa McCarthy, Rachel Dratch, Kristen Wiig, and now Jenny Slate and Ellie Kemper are all luminaries who have followed in Carol’s footsteps from the world of sketch comedy to the top of show biz mountain (to paraphrase Ms. Poehler).

On top of her legendary comedy program and her extensive work in film and on Broadway, not to mention a veritable Thanksgiving feast–level grocery list of awards—Golden Globes, Emmys, People’s Choice Awards, and many others (a menu long enough that you had best fix yourself a sandwich if you want to settle in for a scroll down her IMDb page)—Carol Burnett has also published three bestselling books. So pervasively is her mojo workin’ that not only did she receive the 2013 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003, but she was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005.

When I look back at the aplomb with which she delivered all her delicious performances, the decorum with which she comports herself when not onstage, and all the gales of laughter with which she and her partners in comedy caused our house to be filled, I am inclined to imagine Ms. Burnett as one of those lifelong champion types; the kind of person who wins the preschool lemonade
fund-raiser; who earns every scouting badge until they make her up a new badge simply for “badge earning”; and who mercilessly dominates the seventh-grade spelling bee. (In Minooka, she was called Tracy LaLonde.) It’s easy, then, to imagine my surprise when I learned that, on the contrary, she had a pretty traumatic childhood, raised primarily by her mother’s mother, on relief in a low-rent Hollywood apartment. That fact makes all the more impressive the demeanor of elegance and class she has effortlessly maintained throughout her career, even while falling down a set of stairs.

Her folks were both plagued by alcoholism, starting with her dad when she was just a wee girl in San Antonio. Her mom and dad had aspirations of “making it” in Hollywood, so they moved to Los Angeles, where they ended their marriage in divorce and unloaded young Carol on her grandmother, although her mother still lived down the hall from them. Burnett said that her mother would get mean under the influence of drink, so young Carol took to hiding herself behind a screen and drawing while her mother and grandmother had it out. For a time, she thought she might even pursue a career in drawing, perhaps aspiring to one day illustrate fairy-tale books. Comedy is often the best therapy, however, and so it’s no surprise that Carol’s famous Eunice character bore some strikingly similar elements to her mother during these fits of rancor. At Hollywood High School, Burnett did perform in some school dramatics, but nothing caught fire, and so she found herself drawn more to her job editing the Hollywood High newspaper.

Finally, at UCLA, majoring in theater and English (because they had no journalism program), she found herself thrust reluctantly
onstage in a required freshman acting class. Cast as a hillbilly, she reached into her (heretofore untested) bag of tricks and let rip with a lengthily drawled, “I’m bayaaack.” The audience, as hers tend to do, erupted in laughter, and just like that, everything changed. According to Carol, “All of a sudden, after so much coldness and emptiness in my life, I knew the sensation of all that warmth wrapping around me. I had always been a quiet, shy, sad sort of girl, and then everything changed for me. You spend the rest of your life hoping you’ll hear a laugh that great again.”

She became obsessed with performing and writing for the theater. Her newfound acumen onstage made her popular on campus, an entirely new sensation in her life. Teenage singing sessions, harmonizing with her grandmother and mother (who would also play the ukulele), had revealed to her that she had a strong, leading voice. After a few years at UCLA, armed with this arsenal of talents and a satchel full of gumption, she lit out east for the territory of Broadway, figuring onstage would be where her best shot at success resided. This plan did not align with that of Carol’s mother: “She wanted me to be a writer. She said, ‘You can always write, no matter what you look like.’ When I was growing up she told me ‘to be a little lady,’ and a couple of times I got a whack for crossing my eyes or making funny faces.”

In this one formative anecdote, strongly smacking of Eleanor Roosevelt, Carol was told that she “didn’t have the looks” to succeed as a beauty, even as she was stockpiling the clown’s ammunition she would eventually come to brandish in her lifelong campaign to make us smile.

She made it to New York, took a room in a boardinghouse for
aspiring actresses, and got a menial job as a hatcheck girl. After a slow first year, she began scoring appearances on a couple of different children’s and variety television shows. Burnett even did a season on Buddy Hackett’s short-lived sitcom,
Stanley
, playing his girlfriend, but when the show got canned, it was back to the hustle for her. She spent a couple of summers working the Adirondacks vacation circuit, which turned out to be a great boon, as she and her community of talented cutups were able to hone their skills and workshop their sketch ideas before presenting them in the big city.

It’s worth noting that throughout her twenties, despite her enormous talent, Carol Burnett really had to bust her hump. I am always hugely inspired (and personally relieved) to learn of the hard work that was required of any of my heroes before they could arrive at the level of mastery for which they ultimately garnered renown, not to mention the redoubled sweat it cost them to
maintain
said level. I copped this axiom from Tom Waits’s toothsome cut “Little Man,” but apparently the Roman philosopher Seneca was first credited with “Luck is when opportunity meets with preparation,” and Carol was loading her plate with a healthy serving of just that: preparation.

The opportunity part came into play, with resultant luck in tow, when she scored the lead in the Broadway musical
Once Upon a Mattress
in 1959 (a show that had been workshopped in the Adirondacks). Since when it rains, it pours, she was then simultaneously hired to work as a regular on
The Garry Moore Show
, a live television variety program that she would shoot live on Fridays before hustling over to her eight
P.M.
performance of
Mattress.
She was nominated for a Tony for the Broadway musical and two years later won an Emmy for the TV
show! Not a bad stretch for a young charwoman yet to see her thirtieth birthday.

Sitting at lunch with Carol Burnett on a beautiful Southern California afternoon, my head was swimming a bit with a heavy dose of how-the-hell-did-I-get-here. Hearing her first-person account of hijinks from the set of her show, and imagining her and Tim Conway and Harvey Korman and the rest trying to get through some of those live sketches with a straight face was the most delicious part of the meal. As we ventured into her earlier history, Carol unfolded a couple of anecdotes that I can’t help but pass along:

1.
While working on
The Garry Moore Show
, a junior writer she called Doc Simon (Neil Simon) wrote a sketch called “Playhouse 90 Seconds”—a send-up of the popular
Playhouse 90
dramatic television series. As she describes it: “Durward Kirby was in a hospital bed with his head bandaged, I’m his wife or whatever, and he’s a doctor. I say, ‘How are you, darling?’ ‘Oh, Jill, I don’t feel too well.’ And I say, ‘Oh, Jack, why’d you have to go up the hill?’ And he said, ‘Well, I just felt I should fetch a pail of water. Look what happens.’ And then Garry [Moore] comes in and says, ‘It’s not good. What are you gonna do, Jill?’ I say, ‘Well, I’ll just go tumbling after.’ And then I dived out of a window. So the producer said, ‘Do you know how to dive out of a window, Carol?’ I said, ‘Oh, sure! No problem.’ . . . We’re getting on the set during blocking, and so I didn’t know what I was gonna do. I just knew I was gonna sail out of that window. I said, ‘Well, I’ll just go tumbling after,’ went out, and I landed on a mattress,
and I sat up and said, ‘Oh gosh, guys, thanks for the mattress!’ I guess I thought I was just gonna go splat! I didn’t even think to check.”

2.
Carol’s double schedule in
Once Upon a Mattress
and then rehearsing and performing on
Garry Moore
left her with only Monday nights off. The musical, based upon the Hans Christian Andersen story
The Princess and the Pea
, requires the princess (Carol) to try and go to sleep upon a pile of mattresses. Even though she had the bloom of youth on her side, the heavy workload still caught up with her during one Sunday matinee, and she was out like a light. She thinks she must have been asleep for only twenty or thirty seconds before the stage manager was able to awaken her with panicked whispers. The moral of the story is either “Too much gumption can land you in trouble with Actors’ Equity” or “The employment of gumption requires adequate rest, at the risk of great peril to the gumptionator.”

“It never occurred to me to be cynical. . . . I didn’t know that I couldn’t do certain things, so I did them.” Carol Burnett said that of the pluck it must have taken to pull off this seemingly impossible schedule. Ignorance can indeed lead to bliss. I said that.

She struck up a lifelong friendship with Julie Andrews (another fervid boyhood crush of mine), when Andrews guested on
Garry Moore.
In 1962 the pair of luminous ladies appeared in a television special together,
Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall
. The two had such a magical appeal together, like perhaps a young Aubrey Plaza and Amy Adams, if you combined them with Bambi.

Nonetheless, the (typical) CBS executives were initially reluctant to green-light the idea, as they believed Andrews was not sufficiently famous, and what with Burnett’s weekly presence on Moore’s show, the public would not be excited enough to tune in. Until one night after a CBS promotional event, when Burnett was unable to hail a taxi. The executives in question offered to wait until she was safely away, but Burnett told them not to bother, because a truck driver would appear shortly to pick her up. Almost at once, a trucker screeched up and did just as she’d predicted. Burnett received a telephone call from CBS immediately upon arriving home. Paying homage to her clear display of bewitchery, they approved the special, which went on to win an Emmy for both the show and Carol herself. The secret!