Ray Richmond: Carol Burnett remains a national treasure we must savor while we can

While I was growing up back in the days when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, there wasn’t a ton of debate over who the funniest women in show business were. It was Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett, usually (but not always) in that order. Lucy was the First Lady of Television, and Carol was the dame who seemingly could do anything on a stage. She could sing, she could dance, she could tell jokes, she could wear crazy outfits with uncommon flair. It didn’t even matter if she sang or danced well, because performing something poorly would simply make her the butt of the joke – and no one could do that better than her.

I attended Hollywood High School and was always proud that it was also Burnett’s alma mater. She took out a full-page ad annually in the yearbook congratulating that year’s senior class. It was the classy thing to do, coming from a woman who has long been the very definition of grace, humility and integrity. Good luck finding someone who will say a bad word about Carol Creighton Burnett. There is simply no chance. From the time she grew up poor in a Hollywood apartment – raised by a grandmother because her alcoholic parents were ill-equipped for the job – she has been destined for greatness. No one deserves the long run Burnett has had more than she does.

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Lucy has been gone now for 34 years, but Burnett just ticks on and on. She’s continued to work and remain part of the comedy equation going back to the late 1950s, since she starred in “Once Upon a Mattress” off-Broadway, then on to TV’s “The Garry Moore Show” in the early 1960s, then performing alongside her lifelong chum Julie Andrews in an iconic 1962 TV special, then of course came her own legendary comedy-variety hour “The Carol Burnett Show” on CBS for 11 seasons from 1967-78, then playing Miss Hannigan in “Annie” in 1982 on the big screen – and on and on it went.

Along the way, there have been 24 Emmy nominations and six wins, not to mention a Presidential Medal of Freedom, a Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. And even at 90 years old (turned on April 26), Burnett is still more than in the game; she’s still making magic. She’s eligible for a drama supporting actress nom for her work on “Better Call Saul,” and as executive producer of the April 26 NBC special, “Carol Burnett: 90 Years of Laughter + Love,” a glorious two-hour special (currently streaming on Peacock) featuring performances and appearances by everyone from Bernadette Peters, Vicki Lawrence and Steve Carell to Amy Poehler, Cher, Bob Mackie, Oprah Winfrey and dozens more. You get the impression from watching it that the producers didn’t have a lot of trouble lining up participants.

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What’s perhaps more remarkable than even her sheer longevity is that Burnett remains razor sharp. This was more than clear during her panel appearance for a “90 Years of Love + Laughter” at the NBCU FYC House panel last Friday at The Aster on Vine Street in Hollywood, mere blocks from where she lived with her grandma and attended high school. Interviewed by “Access Hollywood’s” Kit Hoover, Burnett was in top form, regaling an audience of a few hundred attendees with quips and stories. A question to Carol about what she most remembered about the first installment of her “Carol Burnett Show” inspired a remarkable story about her CBS contract that forced the network’s hand to “push the button” on her show.

“I had a very unusual contract,” she began, “and a really good agent. It ran for 10 years and called for me to do a special a year and two guest shots annually on sitcoms or whatever. But then it (stipulated) that within the first five years, if I wanted to do an hourlong comedy-variety show, all I had to do was push the button and they’d have to put it on for 30 shows whether they wanted to or not, Well, they thought I wouldn’t want to do it. So, it got to be the end of the fifth year, and my husband and I had just moved to California from New York and put a down payment on a house. We thought maybe we ought to push that button. At least we’d get 30 shows.

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“I picked up the phone. This is between Christmas and New Year’s. We only had that one week now, otherwise we’d (be out of luck). I got (vice president of programming) Mike Dann on the phone. I said to him, ‘I want to push that button.’ He was like, ‘What?’ Finally he said, ‘I’ll call you back tomorrow.’ I’m sure he got a lot of lawyers on the phone that night. He called me the next day and said, ‘Well you know Carol, comedy-variety is a man’s game. It’s not for you gals. It’s Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason, Dean Martin. We’ve got this great sitcom we’d love you to do called ‘Here’s Agnes.’ I said, ‘No. I want what Garry Moore had. I want what Sid Caesar had. I want music, I want sketches. I want guest stars.’ And they had to give it to me.”

It’s a good thing they did.

Burnett also spun a yarn about how she had shot the film “Annie” and, after filming was complete, she’d had cosmetic surgery done to give her more of a chin. Well wouldn’t you know, she wound up getting called back in to reshoot a scene in which her character Miss Hannigan has to enter and exit a closet to retrieve a necklace. She told the director John Huston that she was worried about her chin looking different exiting the closet from the time she entered it. His advice: “Look determined.” This was the same John Huston who, when Burnett asked for advice about playing her character, said, “Just cavort, dear.”

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“‘OK,’ Burnett recalled telling him, ‘I’ll cavort.’ So, I cavorted.”

It wasn’t just Burnett’s recall that was so impressive on Friday night. It was also her energy and the gusto and timing with which she delivered her material. The audience was eating it up, and why not? It ain’t every day you get to hang with a legend.

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