Carol Burnett: Celebrating the TV legend as she turns 90

So, did you ever wonder why Carol Burnett always tugs her ear? It was a way she could say “hi” to her beloved grandmother. The first time she did it was when she made her TV debut at 22 on the Dec. 17, 1955 episode of the popular “The Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney Show.” She played  the girlfriend of the woody dummy. “The first song I sang on TV was ‘Over the Rainbow’ to Jerry Mahoney,” she noted in a 2016 L.A. Times interview with me. “I remember I called my grandmother to tell her I was going to be on television. Nanny said say hello to me. That’s when we came up with pulling my ear.”

Nearly seven decades later, Burnett is still tugging at her ear, singing and making people laugh And on April 26th, which is her 90th birthday, NBC is throwing her a celebration “Carol Burnett: 90  Years of Laughter + Love.” The two-hour taped special features such guests as her BFF Julie Andrews who starred with Burnett on several TV specials most notably the 1962 Emmy winning  “Carol and Julie at Carnegie Hall,”  her “The Carol Burnett Show” co-star Vicki Lawrence, costume designer Bob Mackie, Lily Tomlin, Susan Lucci, Cher, Bill Hader, Amy Poehler, Ellen DeGeneres, Kristen Wiig, Billy Porter and Kristen Chenowerth. Katy Perry sings “I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together,” her signature “The Carol Burnett Show” song that closed each episode, with a weepy-eyed Burnett trilling the final line “Comes the time we have to say so long” with an ear tug.

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Her influence on comedy has been immeasurable. She opened the door for all the funny ladies working today. When she received the SAG Life Achievement Award in 2016, presenters Tina Fey and Amy Poehler told the audience “Carol has been such a huge part of our lives….Carol is better than all of us.”

To put it mildly. She’s received six Emmys and is in contention this year for another nomination for her role on AMC’s “Better Call Saul.” She’s a Tony nominated Broadway veteran (“Once Upon a Mattress,” “Moon Over Buffalo”). She’s earned a Grammy, seven Golden Globes, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, the SAG Life Achievement Award and the first Golden Globes’ Carol Burnett Award for television excellence.

And though she’s best known for the groundbreaking 1967-78 CBS comedy-variety series “The Carol Burnett Show,” she’s also appeared in movies directed by the likes of such legends as Billy Wilder, Martin Ritt, John Huston and Robert Altman. She’s also proven to be an exceptional dramatic actress. She first got to flex her dramatic chops in the powerful 1979 TV movie, “Friendly Fire,” for which she received an Emmy nomination. Burnett’s a best-selling author;  she and her late daughter Carrie Hamilton penned the 2002 Broadway play “Hollywood Arms” based on her memoir “One More Time.”

Burnett had a hardscrabble upbringing.  Both her parents were alcoholics. They moved from San Antonio to Hollywood when her parents divorced. She lived with her beloved grandmother in a one room apartment in a rundown boarding house on Wilcox Avenue in Hollywood. “Every morning, I would walk out of our little building, look up and there would be the Hollywood sign,” she told me in 2007. “That was when you felt that you could touch the sign”

Burnett, who happens to one of the most gracious of stars, never felt unloved. “I knew my grandmother loved me,” adding that her mother was never very nice when she got drunk. Still, she never hit Burnett. “I would kind of disappear into the ether, ignore it or go to a movie,’

Her grandmother saved money every week from her relief check so they could go to double bills at second run theaters on Hollywood Blvd. “It was a quarter for her, and until I was 12, it was 10 cents for me. There would be double features at the Vogue, the Iris and the Hollywood. We would sometimes hit as many as four double bills a week, which means I saw eight movies a week. Then I would come home, and my best girlfriend and I would act out the movies including Betty Grable, Joan Crawford, Tarzan and Jane. The movies were my escape. And then to grow up and having my own show where I would have Betty Grable actually be a guest. Lana Turner, James Stewart….”

Seeing those eight movies a week gave her to the courage to believe there was nothing she couldn’t accomplish. “There was no cynicism in the movies. The bad guys got their dues. So,  when I went to New York I had the Mickey-and-Judy mentality. I will just audition. I’ll get a job. I was so naïve, that it worked.”

“The Carol Burnett Show” was a landmark series when it premiered on CBS in 1967 because she was one of the first women to ever host a comedy-variety series.  During its 11-season run, the series received 70 Emmy nominations winning 25. Burnett, who won her first Emmy as one of the regulars on the 1959-62 CBS “he Garry Moore Show,” wanted to run her series just as Moore had. “The thing about Garry, and this is what I did with my show because I wanted to emulate him, is that we would be sitting around having a table read on a Monday morning for a show on Friday. He might have a punchline, or a joke and he would say ‘Let Carol do this.’ He was just that way, and that is way I wanted my show to be-a true rep company. There were many sketches where I supported. Though I had the title, we were all equal in sketches.”

Burnett surrounded herself with an ensemble of crazies such as Tim Conway, Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence and Lyle Waggoner. Each episode featured Burnett doing a Q&A with the audience; sketches included spoofs of old movies, most notably their insanely hysterical take on “Gone With the Wind” in which Burnett quite literally wearing the curtains, and lavish musical comedy numbers.

Conway actually created the popular characters Mr.Tudball, a businessman  with a bad toupee and an equally bad Romanian accent, and Mrs. Wiggins-his dimwitted secretary. Originally, Wiggins was supposed to be an older woman . “Then I went into Bob Mackie for a fitting. He had this idea about her being a bimbo who the IQ fairy never visited,” Burnett explained in a 2010 interview. “So, he put me in this push-up bra and blouse and blond wig. Then he put on this tight black skirt that had been on the rack and it bagged in the behind. I said ‘I’m flat back here Bob, you are going to have to take this in.’ He said, ‘No, stick your butt out in there.’ Listen, Bob Mackie is responsible for so many laughs and so much of the success of our sketches. He was the one who came up with the ’Gone With the Wind” thing, which is one of the longest laughs ever.

Ironically, CBS didn’t want her to do “The Carol Burnett Show.” They kept pushing her to do a half-hour comedy series. In fact, the network forgot that she had a pay or play contract for a 30 episode one-hour variety show. If they didn’t push the button soon, the contract would be over. “I was as cold as yesterday’s mashed potatoes at that time,” she recalled in 2000. “We called and got the CBS suits on the phone. They didn’t remember the contract. They said, ‘Variety show? Wonderful.  We’ll get back to you.’ It was an ironclad contract. They called back and said, ‘Carol, it would be better if you did a sitcom.’ I said, ‘Variety is all I know and all I want to do, I love the music, the guest stars. This is what I know and what I love.’ So, they had to put it on.”

She recalled that even before the first show taped, her then-husband producer Joe Hamilton flew to New York and went into one of the offices of a CBS V.P. “Behind the desk there was a bulletin board of the fall season and winter season coming up. They had us on at 10 p.m. on Monday nights beginning in September, and then in January the show was there with a question mark. Joe said, ‘I see you have a lot of faith in us.’ But we figured, ‘OK. We’ll get 30 play or pay. At least we can buy the house and take care of the kids.’  We had no idea that it would go the way it did.  We were just happy to be on.”

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