This weekend, as the TV legend and comedy icon celebrates her 80th birthday, let's all look back at the times we had together.
A Legend’s Love Story
In a New Memoir, Carol Burnett Pays
Tribute to a Talented Daughter
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| Carol Burnett and daughter Carrie Hamilton |
The Carol Burnett Show
debuted in 1967, the almost accidental result of a little-noticed clause in
Burnett’s contract for The Garry Moore
Show wherein CBS promised the musical comedy actress her own program. From such inauspicious beginnings, Burnett
and her talented ensemble cast of Harvey Korman, Tim Conway, Vicki Lawrence and
Lyle Waggoner soon became a hit, averaging 30 million viewers per week and
ultimately winning 25 Emmy Awards.
Now, even though The
Carol Burnett Show has been off the air for more than a generation, as
Burnett explains, she still gets mail “from teenagers – even 11-year-olds – who
write me because they’ve seen individual sketches on YouTube. They’re the sweetest letters, saying ‘We
heard about this show from our parents’ or ‘our grandparents. We wish we could have been there at the
beginning.’”
The Best of The Carol Burnett Show
That’s why, adds this recipient of twelve People’s Choice
awards, eight Golden Globes, six Emmys, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and
the Kennedy Center honors, she’s so happy about her latest prize: last fall’s release of a Carol Burnett Show DVD box set, titled “Carol’s Favorites” (16-episode
set $59.95 or 25-episode set $99.95 in stores; 50-episode deluxe edition,
including showcase collector’s box and exclusive memory book $199.95, only at
timelife.com). Now, Burnett explains,
fans old and new can experience the show’s laughs in context, within episodes hand-selected
by the star and presented in their entirety for the first time since their
original broadcast.
Both box sets sport bonus features, such as a reunion
roundtable of the show’s old gang where, Burnett explains, “we all ended up
telling stories that even the others had never heard before.” That’s an achievement, because as the 80-year-old
actress notes, “I have a good memory for the show.” Burnett remembers well the sketches and
musical numbers that had America cracking up at home – and, famously, had some
of the show’s cast members cracking up on screen. And so, picking the episodes for DVD from
among eleven seasons was easy, she adds.
“But I want you to know, I don’t sit around like Norma Desmond.”
Maybe not, but Burnett did famously portray “Nora” Desmond,
a similarly faded and self-obsessed silent-screen star in one of the show’s
popular movie parodies. Then there was
Mrs. Wiggins, the blonde bimbo secretary obliviously chomping her gum. And who could forget Eunice – she’s so
starved for attention, she’d never let you get away with it – in the frequently
recurring series of “Family” sketches that ultimately was spun off into its own
series (although sans Burnett), Mama’s
Family.
But it was in the actress’s spoof of another iconic
big-screen heroine, this time called “Starlet” O’Hara, where The Carol Burnett Show hit its brilliant
peak, and made television history. As Burnett
descended down a grand, Tara-esque staircase, in a gown the show’s costume
designer Bob Mackie deliberately made to look clumsily thrown together from
fringed velvet curtains, complete with curtain rod across the shoulders, “the
audience saw the dress for the first time, and they were screaming,” the
actress remembers. The resulting bout of
laughter, reportedly ten-minutes long, is one of the longest ever recorded on
television, and the dress that incited it resides in the Smithsonian. Even Burnett herself nearly broke down. “To keep from laughing myself, I had to walk
down the stairs while biting the inside of my cheek,” she remembers.
Breaking Up Is Hard
Not To Do
Carol may have kept it together in “Went With the Wind,” but
her entire ensemble was already infamous for not being able to keep a straight
face; in one famous sketch, poor Korman was unable to stop shaking with
laughter as Conway, as a dentist, improv’d a hilarious slapstick routine with a
novocaine needle. “We never did it on
purpose,” Burnett insists about “breaking” on screen. Instead, trained in live television on shows
like Garry Moore and earlier, The Paul Winchell Show, Burnett wanted
to preserve a spontaneous feel. “I
wanted people to see that we’re in the sandbox and we’re having fun. We’re playing,” she explains. “I didn’t want to stop and re-do the scenes,
so I said just let it go. Let the
audience know this is happening, and it’s truthful. And the audience appreciated that.”
In another throwback to her days working with Moore, who
performed a stand-up routine to warm up his own live audience, Burnett also reluctantly
committed to interacting with the crowd – but this time, on camera. “My executive producer, Bob Banner, also
produced Garry’s show. He pointed out,
‘Carol, you’re going to be in funny outfits, with your teeth blacked out, fat
suits, and wigs. I think it’s important
for the audience to get to know you first,’” Burnett remembers. “And after the first two or three shows, the
audience came prepared with some really wonderful questions, so I started to
enjoy it.”
Burnett would ultimately pepper many personal touches into these
interactive “Let’s Bump Up the Lights” segments throughout the eleven
years. She would perform her trademark Tarzan
yell – which she’d developed as a kid, forced to portray Tarzan opposite a
beautiful cousin who insisted on being Jane -- on command. She continued to tug her ear – a on-air
gesture she’d originally used in her Garry
Moore days to signal the OK to her grandmother at home – and close with her
signature song, “I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together,” written by her then-husband,
and the show’s executive producer, Joe Hamilton.
A Mother-Daughter
Love Story
But as Burnett writes in her new book, Carrie and Me: A Mother-Daughter
Love Story, ($24, in stores April 9), even with this outlet for such
personal expression, she decided in 1978 to end her series, in part to spend
more time at home with Hamilton and their three young daughters. The book, Burnett’s third, portrays the actress’
relationship with her eldest, Carrie Hamilton, who in her early teens developed
an addiction to drugs.
Carrie’s illness and setbacks on the road to recovery
preoccupied Burnett during her early post-variety show career, on the sets of
such films as The Four Seasons and
the 1982 big-screen Annie. As Burnett writes, it took a while to accept
a tough lesson about forcing your child to deal with her addiction: “You have to love them enough to let them
hate you.” But by 18, Carrie had successfully
completed rehab, and began a career in which it was clear she had inherited
many of her mother’s talents.
“When she was 25, Carrie made a movie in Japan, Tokyo Pop, that has become a cult
film. She got sensational reviews – but
then she wanted to do other things,” Burnett explains. Eventually moving to Colorado, Carrie pursued
a multi-faceted career as a singer, composer and writer, and began work on a
screenplay called “Sunrise in Memphis,” meant to be the story of a bohemian
girl’s journey to Graceland.
As Burnett chronicles in Carrie
and Me, her daughter took the Graceland trip as research, crossing through
Burnett’s own birthplace of San Antonio, Texas, and digging further back into
the family’s roots in the town of Belleville, Arkansas. But unfortunately, Carrie never got to finish
that screenplay; she was soon diagnosed with cancer, which would ultimately
take her life at just age 38.
The mother and daughter team had first collaborated on the
play Hollywood Arms, based on
Burnett’s book One More Time; the play
ultimately opened in April of 2002, just months after Carrie’s death. Then, during her last days in the hospital, Carrie
asked her mother to fill in the missing middle portion of “Sunrise in Memphis,”
but “not having taken that journey myself, I didn’t know where she wanted the
characters to go. They were hers to
write,” Burnett explains.
But now, with Carrie
and Me, Burnett is fulfilling her promise, finally bringing her daughter’s
screenplay to life by publishing it just as it is. “I felt Carrie on my shoulder the whole time
I was writing the book,” Burnett explains.
“I loved doing it because it brought her back to me.”
“The thing about Carrie was, she never met a stranger,” Burnett explains. “She loved people, and was a great listener. And where I’m a very conservative dresser, she had hair that was never the same color from week to week, and a collection of boas she’d wear. She was quite the character, and I hope readers will get the essence of just what a special person she was.”
