Thirty years ago today
On Sunday my daughter and I played on the back roof of my place. We used her toy gun to shoot her action figures.
Tuesday, 4 August 2026
Monday, 3 August 2026
Erin Hamilton
On Thursday morning a few more bedbugs had past the two-sided tape that I’d put around my mattress and a few had gotten trapped on it. I think on Friday I’ll try out the new vacuum cleaner in the bedroom.
I started translating “L’enfance de Bonnot” by Boris Vian. I don’t think I’ll upload it to my Christian’s Translations blog but then again I might.
I finished translating “Shylock” by Serge Gainsbourg and out of habit looked for the chords even though I was not surprised that no one had posted them. I worked them out for about half of the intro.
I weighed 90.35 kilos before breakfast.
I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio during song practice for the last of two sessions and it stayed in tune most of the time.
I weighed 92.1 kilos before lunch, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the early afternoon since July 20.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and on the way back stopped at Freshco where I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Canadian cherries are finally in season. I bought five bags of cherries, two pints of blueberries, some bananas, a pack of pork souvlaki, a pack of Full City Dark coffee, and a lint roller.
I weighed 91.55 kilos at 18:25.
I was still several days behind in my journal and worked on getting caught up.
I made a pork roast and had a slice with a potato and gravy while watching the Lifetime Intimate Portrait documentary on Carol Burnett.
From the beginning Carol has brought a rare optimism, compassion and strength of spirit to every performance which not only entertains but inspires.
Carol was named after her mother’s favourite actor Carol Lombard. Her parents realized they weren’t cut out for parenthood and left Carol with her maternal grandmother. Carol became her whole life but she was also a hypochondriac who thought every day that she was about to die. That was scary for Carol when she was under her Nana’s care.
They were very poor but Carol didn’t know it because her whole neighbourhood was poor and many had alcoholic parents. Carol was never hungry and she got to watch eight movies a week.
In third grade Carol loved the Hans Christian Andersen story The Princess and the Pea.
When Carol was 10 her sister Chrissie was born.
At 18 Carol graduated from Hollywood High School. She wanted to go to UCLA and she had the grades but not the $42 a semester tuition and her grandmother couldn’t afford it. One day someone put a letter in their mailbox without mailing it and inside was a $50 bill. To this day she doesn’t know who gave her the money. Nobody she knew had the money to give.
Carol wanted to study Journalism but UCLA had no such course and so her second choice was Theatre Arts.
Chrissie says their mother was rarely functional.
In 1953 Carol spent the summer in San Francisco with the UCLA Players and fell for her fellow actor Don Saroyan. They both dreamed of performing on Broadway.
When the anonymous benefactor gave Carol the $1000 her grandmother was immediately worried about where it came from. She also thought that Carol’s dream of being an actor was a pipe dream.
In 1955 Carol and Don got married.
When she was 23 she was experiencing success but began worrying about her now 12 year old sister back in LA who was getting out of control. Chrissie admits that she had more freedom back then than maybe she should have. She was getting a little wild and growing up too fast. Carol lied to Chrissie that she was just coming to New York for Christmas. After the holidays Chrissie started talking about getting back to school in LA, Carol told her she wasn’t going back and it hit Chrissie hard.
When she met Robert Goulet on The Garry Moore Show she talked about seeing him as a knight in shining armour in Camelot and wished she’d had a can opener.
After Carol auditioned for but didn’t get the part in Babes in Arms she almost immediately was offered a chance to audition for Once Upon a Mattress and she got the part. It was only supposed to run for three weeks off-Broadway but it was a hit and played for two months of sold out shows. It moved from off-Broadway to Broadway. Every day she did the Garry Moore Show and every night she starred in the play. One time after climbing onto the mattresses she actually fell asleep. The stage manager had to yell to wake her up.
One night Julie Andrews came backstage to meet Carol. They went for Chinese food and became lifelong friends. They did several two women shows together.
When Carol won her first Emmy she thanked “The greatest man in the world, Garry Moore”.
In 1963 when The Garry Moore Show ended, Carol was back on Broadway in Fade Out Fade In. At the same time she was in the cast of the TV show The Entertainers which was produced by her second husband Joe Hamilton. One day while rushing to the TV studio her taxi smashed into another car and Carol suffered severe injuries that took three months to recover from. Then she was pregnant and overwhelmed by her workload. She had to quit the play, angering the theatrical community. She didn’t get work on Broadway again for thirty years.
Carol was pregnant with her second daughter Jody when they moved back to LA.
Thirty minutes into the video I have for this documentary the video froze but I still had the audio.
In the summer of 1968 Carol gave birth to her third daughter Erin. Carol and Joe made sure they were home by 19:00 so they could have dinner with their family and tuck their kids in bed.
Carrie used to watch musicals on TV with her mother.
The family played a lot of Scrabble and tons of board games like Password. Carrie says her mother is terrific at Scrabble but she can beat her.
After 11 years CBS wasn’t ready to quit the Carol Burnett Show but Carol was. Tim Conway says Carol and Joe took the cast to dinner one night. Carol announced that she’d done 1300 sketches and didn’t know if she could do any more. She went to the ladies room to cry and Tim said to Joe, “We’ll put her in a mental institution and we’ll go on with the show.”
The National Enquirer posted a story that Carol had been drunk and raucous in a restaurant, forcing strangers to eat her desert, and had a fist fight with Henry Kissinger. Carol sued because her daughters were young and in school and exposed to ridicule because of the rumours. She said she will fight anyone that would dare to try to hurt her kids. In 1981 after four years of struggle Carol won the case and was awarded $1.6 million. She donated it all to various college funds.
For the first time in her life Carol took on a non-comedic role in the made for TV film Friendly Fire and she was nominated for an Emmy.
In 1984 Carol and Joe divorced. Carol didn’t consider their 20 year marriage a failure. They were just different people now.
In 1995 Carol returned to Broadway for the first time in 30 years in Moon Over Buffalo.
Carol played Jamie’s mother on the sitcom Mad About You.
She said she wouldn’t mind getting married again to have someone to travel with. The ideal would be if he lived next door so they each had their own space.
What Carol was happiest about was that her daughters were all close. They called each other and supported each other. Carol can now ask them for advise and get very good advice from all of them.
In January of 1997 Carol became a grandmother with the birth of Erin’s son Zacharie.
Carol’s daughter Erin Hamilton is a dance and electronic music singer. Before that she sang for blues and jazz bands like As Is, and Komba Kalla. Her first solo single was a 1998 cover of Gary Wright’s 1975 hit “Dream Weaver”. Her debut album was One World in 1999. She opened for Bette Midler and Witney Houston. In 2008 her cover of the Cheap Trick hit “The Flame” by Bob Mitchell and Nick Graham reached #1 on the dance charts. She had a second son Dylan but lost custody of him because of her problems with addiction. In 2020 Carol and her third husband Brian Miller gained temporary custody of Erin’s son Dylan when Erin was institutionalized because of suicidal behaviour. Carol tried to take full custody but the court decided on a third party. When Dylan turned 18 there were no longer any restrictions of access to Erin’s son. Even though Erin has been clean and sober for a few years Carol remains estranged from her because she’s had her heart broken by her too many times. Carol has a close relationship with Dylan who is now in college.
Percy Hynes White
On Wednesday morning the two-sided carpet tape that I’d put around the edge of my futon apparently did some good. It caught a few bedbugs but mostly seems to have deterred a lot of them from climbing up to me because I didn’t feel any on me and slept a little better for the first night in a while.
I searched for the next Boris Vian song to learn and found the lyrics for his “L'epoque légendaire” but no audio. It’s from the musical he wrote called La bande à Bonnot for which I could buy the audio but I’m not going to do that. I assume down the road someone who has the audio will upload it. The lyrics are posted online and I’ve got those, so I’ll translate those while I’m waiting for the audio. The next Vian song on my list is “Jules Bonnot c'était pas n'importe qui” (Jules Bonnot Was Not Just Anybody), which is from the same musical and the audio for that is posted online.
I finished memorizing “Shylock” by Serge Gainsbourg. Tomorrow I’ll finish translating it and start working out the chords.
I weighed 89.95 kilos before breakfast.
I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio during song practice for the first of two sessions and it stayed in tune most of the time.
Around midday I went to the Dynacare Labs at Christie and Bloor to get my blood tests done. I’d gotten the requisition from my doctor back in early May but never got around to going until today because I’d been focusing on painting my bathroom. They took two samples of my blood and I barely felt the needle. I also filled a urine sample container and then they surprised me by giving me a heart test. I didn’t even know that was on the requisition. I’d never had a heart test before and had expected to be on a treadmill with electrodes on my chest. I had the electrodes but while lying down. She also put electrodes on my legs and arms.
Note: The above happened on Tuesday and it was today that I went to buy the vacuum cleaner.
I weighed 91.1 kilos at 15:25. I had peanut butter and five-year-old cheddar on saltines with a glass of lemonade.
I took a siesta and got up too late for a bike ride.
I weighed 91.3 kilos at 18:10.
I was still several days behind in my journal and worked on catching up.
I made pizza on a slice of Rudolph’s sandwich bread with rosée tomato sauce, tomato pesto, wedge oven fries, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching the first season finale of Wednesday on Discord with my daughter Astrid.
The story begins with Wednesday inviting Tyler to the woods and confronting him about being the Hyde monster which she found out in a vision when she kissed him. She doesn’t feel in danger being alone in the woods with him because she knows he is attracted to her. But she also didn’t come alone as Bianca and some others step out. Bianca takes control of him with her Siren powers and he wakes up chained to a chair in Xavier’s forest studio. Wednesday has uncovered that Tyler’s mother was a Hyde and that his father the sheriff has been covering it up. Wednesday wants to begin torturing Tyler for information. The others don’t want any part of that and so they leave and report to Principal Weems, who calls the sheriff. The sheriff arrives and arrests Wednesday but for some reason he lets her go. Before she leaves the police station Tyler speaks to her privately and confesses to being the Hyde and liking it. Weems expels Wednesday but she asks to be able to visit Eugene in the hospital before she leaves. They find that Eugene has awakened from his coma and when he describes the figure she saw at the monster’s cave before it attacked him as having red boots. This fits the description of Ms. Thornhill, the only Normy teaching at Nevermore. Wednesday confronts Thornhill and she denies everything until Wednesday calls in Tyler who she says told her everything. Thornhill orders Tyler to kill Wednesday but it’s really Principal Weems shape-shifting. Thornhill admits she is Laurel Gates and that she manipulated Tyler into killing her victims as body parts towards the resurrection of Joseph Crackstone so he can wipe out all the Outcasts. Thornhill grabs a knife and stabs Weems in the jugular, killing her. Wednesday is knocked out with a shovel and she wakes up in chains. Gates uses Wednesday’s blood to resurrect Crackstone in the assembled body parts. She stabs Wednesday before leaving with Crackstone and she is dying. But the ghost of Goody Addams appears and tells her she is going to heal her by passing into her body, then she will never see her again. Learning that Wednesday is in danger, Enid finally transforms into a white werewolf and fights Tyler. She almost loses but eventually wins. With Bianca’s help, Wednesday kills Crackstone. We finally learn what Eugene’s power is as he controls his bees to swarm and defeat Thornhill. Xavier is released from jail and reconciles with Wednesday. Tyler is institutionalized in a high security hospital. Nevermore closes for the rest of the semester and Wednesday finishes her novel and goes home.
Xavier was played by Canadian actor Percy Hynes White, who mad his acting debut at the age of 2 in short films such as Moera: Fact or Fantasy? in his hometown of St. John’s, Newfoundland. He made his feature film debut at the age of 7 in the 2008 Canadian film Down to the Dirt, which was based on his father Joel Thomas Hynes’ first novel. At age 9 he played the lead role in the short film Forty-Five and Five and then in the short films Winners and Little Man. He studied with The Performing Arts Group in St. Johns. He made his television debut in 2013 on The Slattery Street Crockers. His starring performance in Cast No Shadow earned him the Best Actor Award at the 2014 Atlantic Film Festival and the Rising Star Award at the 2014 Edmonton Film Festival. His first Hollywood film appearance was in Night At the Museum: Secret of the Tomb. His performance in I Like Movies in 1922 earned him a Best Supporting Actor award from the Vancouver Film Critics Circle. He co-starred in My Old Ass, Edge of Winter, Our House, Winter Spring Summer or Fall, and Whistle. He co-starred in the X-Men spin-off TV series The Gifted, the Canadian science fiction series Between, the Canadian police series Pretty Hard Cases, and Murdoch Mysteries.
August 3, 1996: The weather was nice so we played outside
On Saturday my daughter began another weekend at my place. The weather was nice and we played outside.
Carrie Hamilton
On Tuesday morning I posted “Bonnot’s Triumphant Tragedy”, my translation of “La complainte de Bonnot” by Boris Vian on my Boris Vian Facebook fan page and on my personal Facebook page.
I worked on memorizing the final verse of “Shylock” by Serge Gainsbourg and should have it in my head on Wednesday.
I weighed 90.2 kilos before breakfast.
I played my Martin during song practice in the last of two sessions and as usual it was always out of tune.
Around midday I took my bike trailer down to Canadian Tire in Uppety Village to shop for a new vacuum cleaner. My old one of many years still sucks but it sucks at sucking. It was hard to make a choice but I finally settled on a Hoover Wind Tunnel because it looked like the kind I’m used to. After tax it cost over $400. I also bought a big roll of two-sided carpet tape. I strapped the box to my trailer and rode home. I put the vacuum together immediately to test it. I think we always expect a vacuum to be more powerful than it is but when I put the hose against my open palm and turned my palm down the hose stayed sucking on my hand. I threw out the old one on the sidewalk outside my place and a few hours later it was gone.
I weighed 90.7 kilos at 15:00.
I took a siesta and woke up too late to take a bike ride.
I weighed 91.05 kilos at 17:35.
I was still several days behind in my journal.
I had a potato with gravy and my last two chicken drumsticks while watching Carol Burnett: A Woman of Character. An American Masters biography of Carol Burnett.
It opens with one of Carol’s audience warmup segments and someone asks Carol what was the most embarrassing question anyone had ever asked her. She said it was if she’d ever had a sex change. Then the next person asks, “Did you?”
John Cryer says Carol was willing to go anywhere in a sketch.
Tracy Ullman says Carol doesn’t imitate people to put them down but to celebrate them.
Carol says when she was a kid she used to cross her eyes and her mother would tell her nothing good will ever come of that.
Tim Conway says Carol could move like a delicate lady but then play against that. It was hysterical that a lady would allow herself to be so comedically abused.
Carol says the first time she was ever asked to do a stunt was on The Garry Moore Show in 1959. It was in a sketch written by Neil Simon called “Playhouse 90 Seconds”. Derward Kirby plays Jack in a hospital bed with life threatening injuries. Carol comes to him in distress over his condition and says he’s got to get better. She asks Jack why he went up the hill. Carol was supposed to jump out the window and was asked if she’d ever taken a fall like that before. She lied that she had. She landed on a mattress and thanked them for providing one proving that she’d never done it before.
Carol loved live theatre because it was instant gratification when you got a laugh. It was also instant depression when you didn’t but you knew where you stood.
After she arrived in New York in August 1954 it started to rain because of Hurricane Carol. Carol loves the rain and good things for some reason happen to her when it rains. Because of the rain she stopped being nervous about being alone in New York.
She moved into a boarding house for women in the entertainment industry called The Rehearsal Club. They were all going to auditions for parts they didn’t get and so Carol decided to organize The Rehearsal Club girls to put on their own show. The hall they rented was packed for two nights in a row and three of the girls ended up with agents.
Ken Welch accompanied Carol on piano for her auditions. He decided to write some comedic material for her to do and one of the first routines he wrote for her was called “The Singers”. She got a lot of publicity for Ken’s song “I Made A Fool of Myself Over John Foster Dulles”.
Bob Mackie says he never saw anyone who could learn a sketch faster than Carol.
Carl Reiner says Carol was extraordinary in that she could get a laugh out of everything she did.
Carol won her first Emmy for The Garry Moore Show. Professionally Carol’s role model was Garry Moore. She could see how he treated everybody and everybody had fun while at the same time getting it done. That’s exactly how she wanted her show to be.
Don Saroyan was Carol’s first boyfriend and they got married in 1955. Carol says he was a good man but turned out not to fit but they parted lovingly.
One time during the audience warmup someone asked how she can find the ladies room. Carol brought her up on stage and directed her backstage to the washroom.
Gary Shandling says it’s a common problem for sketch players to be themselves in front of an audience. But Carol had that ability to be herself.
Dean Fuller, the co-author of Once Upon a Mattress says that if it hadn’t been for Carol Burnett, Once Upon a Mattress would never have happened. Carol says she was terrified on opening night of that play. One of the songs she sings is called “Shy” in which she conveys her shyness in a confident and overbearing manner. It made her an overnight sensation on Broadway. Carol does a comedic ballet of tossing and turning on top of the mattresses. They started the play Off Broadway then moved to Broadway and then to the biggest theatre on Broadway, which was The Winter Garden. Carol has been connected to every production of Once Upon a Mattress.
An audience member asks Carol why she doesn’t sing more ballads. “Your singing is so sad”. Carol was terrified of singing as herself but very comfortable singing as a character. Betty White says that Carol was an actress singer. She would act the lyrics and think the lyrics. You don’t expect to see that with a funny lady because every once in a while she’d let you see through into the poignancy of it.
On her show Carol could play act her favourite films like she did as a kid but now with costumes and an orchestra.
When she wore the window curtain gown with the curtain rod attached in the Went With the Wind sketch she didn’t tell anybody but Harvey beforehand because otherwise he would have had a laughing fit.
Carol says when she and her grandmother went to the movies they would steal the toilet paper.
Harvey Korman says people who become comedians come from pain and conflict. Phyllis Diller says no comic has not come from tragedy (I don’t know if that’s true. Conan O’Brien doesn’t seem to have come from tragedy). It takes an irritation to make a pearl in an oyster.
Carol’s father was an alcoholic but not a mean one. He just got sweeter when he drank.
At UCLA Carol was in a one-act play called Keep Me a Woman Grown. She made the other students laugh and it was the most accepting feeling she’d ever had.
Carol’s anonymous benefactor also leant her boyfriend Don $1000 to go to New York. Carol’s father told her that he wished he’d been able to give her that money.
Even though Carol puts her characters through impossible situations it comes across that she respects and loves them.
“The Stripper” by David Rose became a #1 hit in 1962 and Carol heard a DJ say it was the favourite song of his listeners who were housewives. Carol first created the Charwoman character to show her dancing ironically seductively to that song.
Julie Andrews says Carol is brave in her comedy and in her life.
After becoming a success in New York Carol became worried about her younger sister Chrissie in LA. Nana was getting old and Mama was drinking and Chrissie was starting to get wild with no one to take care of her, so Carol asked them to let her have custody and take her back to New York. Chrissie was just told she was going to spend Christmas with her sister in New York.
Julie Andrews went to see Once Upon a Mattress and they met afterwards to become instant lifelong friends. Betty White says Carol and Julie struck fire together.
In May of 1963 Carol and Joe Hamilton got married. Unlike theatre and movie stars, TV stars have time to spend with their families.
On the first day of rehearsal for The Carol Burnett Show, Carol told the cast that since there was no guarantee the show would last, she wanted everybody to just have fun. It was successful right away. There were a lot of variety shows on at the time but Carol’s show stood out.
Harvey Korman was a special gift for Carol. Vicki says Harvey was a rock but a crazy rock. Harvey would always complain but then he would take the stage and be brilliant. Harvey admits that he was often rude and Carol almost fired him for being rude to one of the guest stars. Carol called him into the dressing room after the show and said, “I hear you’re not happy on this show.” He said, “Sometimes I’m not.” “Well then why don’t you just get off it?” He said he didn’t know. She said, “When you come in on Monday for the reading I want to see a smile on your face.” He says she scared the crap out of him and so when he came in on Monday he acted as happy as he could and on his dressing room door Carol had put a plaque that said “Mr. Happy Go Lucky”.
Joe would deal with all the problems sometimes without telling Carol about them. He protected her.
Peter Bogdonovich says Carol’s show was a combination of vaudeville, burlesque and satire.
Carol says after a few years she stopped letting people make jokes that would be negative towards a woman. She stopped being the kook who would faint in Lyle Waggoner’s arms.
Carol was originally supposed to play Mama but Eunice became dear to her heart because she was like her mother. A woman frustrated with her dreams having not come true.
When she started the movie Pete and Tilly with Walter Mathau she was very stiff because she was intimidated by him. At one point he asked her. “Why do you do all this television crap?” She was no longer intimidated because she felt insulted. Then she realized that he did that on purpose to loosen her up.
Harvey says that Carol is a marvellous actor because people that really do comedy well do tragedy well. Tim says she was excellent in Friendly Fire.
John Cryer was a friend of Carol’s oldest daughter Carrie Hamilton. He says she was a very troubled girl. Carol says Carrie was young when she became a drug addict and still young when she kicked it. Once Carrie had recovered, Carol went on Dinah Shore’s show to talk about it and raise awareness.
Gary Shandling says that when Carol appeared on his Larry Sanders Show they wanted her to say something that she would never say on her own show. She whispers to Larry about a sketch they did in which he was wearing a loincloth. She tells him that he should talk to wardrobe because she saw his balls.
John Cryer says Carol transcended feminism just as Sidney Poitier’s work transcended the Civil Rights movement.
Tim says (jokingly) that since Harvey was a very poor performer he was cracking up all the time. Carol was very difficult to break up and her professionalism was very annoying. Harvey says there’s no other star than Carol that would have given everybody the latitude that she did, especially with Tim who thought it was his show.
Carol worked with Carrie on Fame the TV series on which Carrie played Reggie Higgins in the fifth and sixth seasons. Carol loved working with her and says she was quite a good actor. Julie Andrews says Carrie was a young Carol. John Cryer says Carrie owed much of her comedic sensibility to her mother as much of the United States did. Carrie co-wrote the play Hollywood Arms with her mother. It was Carrie’s idea to turn the first part of Carol’s memoir One More Time about raising her daughter’s and turn it into a play. Carrie developed lung cancer and died at the age of 38 in January of 2002 and so Carol had to finish the play. It premiered in Chicago two months after Carrie’s death.
There’s a clip of Carol singing “I’m Still Here” by Stephen Sondheim from the 1971 musical Follies.
Carl Reiner says Carol’s show lasted 11 years because it was the best. She kept the variety genre alive. Vicki says it was the last of its genre and hung on for dear life because nobody wanted to see it go away. It was nominated for an Emmy every single year it was on.
There’s a clip in which an audience member tells Carol that she played Winnifred in a small production of Once Upon a Mattress. She asks Carol if she would sing part of the song “Shy”. Carol says she will if she comes up to sing it with her.
Harvey says “We were wonderful together”.
Julie Andrews was Carrie’s godmother. Carrie studied music and acting at Pepperdine University. She was a member of the rock band Big Business. She made her TV debut in the movie Love Lives On. She played Maureen Johnson in the first national tour of the musical Rent. She starred in Tokyo Pop. She and Carol appeared on five episodes of Family Feud. She guest starred in The X-Files episode “Monday”. She wrote the short film Lunchtime Thomas, which won the Women in Film Award at the 2001 Latino Film Festival. Carrie and her mother guest starred as a mother and daughter on Touched by an Angel.
August 2, 1996: Brian and I busked on Bloor
Thirty years ago today
On Friday I busked with Brian Haddon on Bloor Street and in the evening we performed on the Spit Fridays open stage in the back room of the Cameron.
Saturday, 1 August 2026
Once Upon a Mattress
On Monday morning I went to bed at 1:45 and slept a little for an hour but then started feeling the bedbugs. I was picking them off me and my bed and crushing them while trying to sleep. I got up at around 3:30 for a search and destroy mission and tried to figure out where they all come from. I have a bedbug proof mattress cover so they can’t be nesting in my bed although I do find them all over it. I’m not sure if the ones that were nesting under the baseboards can get past all the diatomaceous earth I’ve put down. There might be nests in the cracks between some of the floor boards so I might have to get some wood filler. Now that I’ve finished mounting my bathroom mirror I was going to finish cleaning up the splattered paint on the tiles but right now the bedbugs are a priority so I have to focus on the bedroom until they are under control. I need a new more powerful vacuum cleaner so I think I’ll buy one this week.
I searched for images of Boris Vian to post on my Boris Vian Facebook page and found a few.
I memorized the first verse of “Shylock” by Serge Gainsbourg. There’s only be one more verse to nail down.
I weighed 90.7 kilos before breakfast.
I played my Martin during song practice for the first of two sessions and as usual it went out of tune all the time.
I weighed 91.65 kilos before lunch.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back.
I weighed 91 kilos at 18:05.
I was several days behind in my journal and worked on getting caught up.
I had a potato with gravy and two chicken drumsticks while watching the Archive of American Television Biography of Carol Burnett. This is done as an interview by Karen Herman.
Carol was born Carol Creighton Burnett in San Antonio, Texas on April 26, 1933. Creighton was her mother’s maiden name. She says. “I had no nicknames growing up that I could repeat here.” She finished second grade in Texas and then her grandmother took her by train to Hollywood so they could be near Carol’s mother.
She grew up a block north of Hollywood Boulevard but it was really a million kilometers from Hollywood. They were on government assistance but her grandmother managed to save enough so they could see four double features a week. She got in for 11 cents and her grandmother paid 26 cents. They would always go before the peek hours so they got the lower prices. Her favourites were Betty Grable movie musicals. At one time Betty was the biggest movie star in the world and a very popular pin-up girl for soldiers during WWII. After seeing a picture Carol would get together with neighbourhood kids and they would reenact it. Her favourite actor was James Stewart because he reminded her of her dad. Years later she got to know James Stewart and his wife very well.
Carol didn’t think about becoming an entertainer until she went to college. Before that she wanted to write like her mother dreamed of. Her mother wanted to interview movie stars and she did do some freelance work. She interviewed Rita Hayworth and Bob Hope.
Carol was the editor of her junior high school and high school newspapers. When she went to UCLA she majored in Theatre Arts English because then she could take play writing courses. When you major in Theatre Arts, as a freshman you have to take everything. You have to take Scenery, Costume, Lighting, Sound, and Acting. She was scared to death to stand up and perform but when she did a comedy scene and got laughs she felt a wonderful freedom that she had never felt before and she was bitten by the bug.
Carol was a quiet nerd as a child and a good student with good grades.
She would sing as a child with her mother and grandmother in the kitchen while her mother played the ukulele.
In college she was cast as one of the nurses in a production of South Pacific and while singing with the chorus she was louder than the others. Because of that she was asked to sing “Adelaide’s Lament” from Guys and Dolls. Then she realized that she wanted to do musical comedy. She never learned to read music.
Carol’s mother lived across the hall and she had a small TV set. Her mother watched Korla Pandit and The Continental. Pandit was an exotica musician who played the organ and looked and talked sexily to the camera. He claimed to be from India but he was a black man from the southern US.
Carol’s goal was to be on Broadway and she had no dreams of being on television. She was in a musical comedy class at UCLA and the professor had the class be the entertainment at a party in San Diego. Carol did a scene from Annie Get Your Gun. Later she was stealing hors d’oeuvres to take home to her grandmother when someone tapped her on the shoulder. It was a man and his wife who told her they enjoyed her performance. He asked her what she wanted to do with her life. She said she would like to perform musical comedy on stage in New York. he asked, “Why aren’t you there now?” She explained she was only making 75 cents an hour as an usher on weekends and it would take quite a while to save the money. He told her he would give her the money and at first Carol didn’t believe him but his wife confirmed that he was serious. He told her to be in his office a week from Monday morning at 9:00 and he would write her a cheque. A week later he gave her the cheque for $1000 and told her it was a loan. She had to pay him back in five years with no interest if she became successful. He told her that he had to remain anonymous and that she had to promise to help others if she became successful. She’d never seen $1000 in her life. Her grandmother wanted her to spend the money at home to help the family but Carol had made a promise so she kept it.
Carol quit school and headed for New York. She’d never been further east than Texas. She didn’t know enough to be scared in New York so she wasn’t cynical and didn’t put up any barriers. She thinks her positive attitude was nurtured by watching those Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland movies in which life was simple and there was always a happy ending.
She came with the goal of being in a show directed by George Abbott, who was the number one director of musical comedies. A few years later Carol’s first show on Broadway was Once Upon a Mattress and it was directed by George Abbott.
Five years to the day Carol paid her benefactor back. To fulfill his other stipulation, she started Musical Comedy scholarships at UCLA, an Acting scholarship at Emerson College in Boston, a Journalism scholarship at the University of Hawaii, and sometimes she helps people out on an individual basis. She and her husband anonymously sponsored the high school education of a very poor child, paid for him to be sent to a private school and he started getting A grades.
Her first appearance on television was on Omnibus when Leonard Bernstein was the host. She came in and belted out a song then Bernstein hugged her and said, “You’re on next Sunday!” She did a song from DuBarry Was a Lady called “Give em the Ooh La la”.
She was on the Paul Winchell kiddy TV show for a few months starting on December 17, 1955. She called her grandmother to tell her to watch and her grandmother asked her to say hello to her. So that’s how Carol’s ear pulling signal began. Her only job on that show was singing.
She worked on a sitcom starring Buddy Hackett called Stanley and it was the only live sitcom ever to have been done. It was produced by Max Liebman who had done Your Show of Shows. Carol played Buddy’s girlfriend.
Her role as the Princess in Once Upon a Mattress led to her being cast as a second banana on The Garry Moore Show. It was then that she started liking television because she was able to do sketch comedy as opposed to a sitcom where you’re the same character all the time. It was different every week and so she never got bored. Then she realized that what she really wanted to do was musical comedy variety.
Before Garry Moore she appeared on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show and she did a number called “I Made a Fool of Myself Over John Foster Dulles”, which was written by Ken Welch, who along with his wife Mitzi later became Carol’s writers on her show and after. The song was written during the Elvis Presley craze and Ken thought it would be funny to write a song about someone who was just as gaga over the very boring secretary of state as other girls were over Elvis. Carol had sung the song at The Blue Angel nightclub and the audience went nuts so Jack asked her to do it on his show. After that Dulles’s television advisor asked Carol to do it on The Tonight Show again because Dulles had missed it. After that Ed Sullivan booked her to sing it on his show. The next Sunday Dulles was on Meet the Press and at the end he was asked about his relationship with the girl who sings that song about him. He just said he makes it a matter of policy to never discuss matters of the heart on television.
One of the times when Carol appeared on Ed Sullivan, Elvis was on as well. He gave her an autographed picture for her sister Chrissie.
Carol had done The Garry Moore Show as a guest. But one week when Martha Rae was supposed to be on the show she got sick and so Carol was asked to take her place. A week later Carol was invited to be a regular. She says Garry Moore was very underrated as a showman. He was also very generous. If he and the cast were going over a script he might decide to give a line written for him to Carol of somebody else if he thought it was a better fit. Garry said, “My show is a success because I know where the strengths are.” He never raised his voice in anger which inspired everybody else to be nice. It was a happy show and that inspired Carol to do the same thing when she got her own show. She tried to give everyone a chance to shine.
On The Garry Moore Show they tricked Carol on her final appearance. They had done a sketch on found money on another episode. Gerry asked Carol if there’s a sketch she’d like to repeat for her final show and she picked that one. Carol plays a woman who comes home with an airline bag containing $10,000 she found in the back of a taxi. In the middle of the sketch Carol was supposed to make a costume change and she would normally do that in the elevator but it didn’t come. So Carol ran up four floors to her dressing room. Meanwhile Garry is telling the audience that they are tricking her. Carol comes in with the bag and was supposed to open it but they had wired it shut. Several other things went wrong. Derward was pretending to be drunk. Carol really thought everybody had lost their minds. When Carol was starting to be overwhelmed, Garry came out to reveal the trick. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Carol met her second husband Joe Hamilton when he was producing The Garry Moore Show.
Carol left The Garry Moore Show to do more Broadway. She was pregnant and trying to do too much. She was on a show called The Entertainers while at the same time doing a Broadway Show called Fade Out Fade In and she was overwhelmed.
Carol and her husband Joe Hamilton moved out to LA and didn’t do much for a while. She did a couple of guest appearances on The Lucy Show. Lucy told Carol she was lucky she had Joe because he could be the heavy and Carol could relax and be Carol. Lucy had that when she was with Desi but after she divorced Desi she had to get tougher and they started calling her Lucille Balls. Men in show business who take charge are normal but when a woman does it she’s a bitch. Carol says she was always afraid to speak up on her show. She would just say she didn’t feel she fit in with the way a sketch was going. Now she realizes that “No” can be a complete sentence but she tries to be nice about it.
Carol says she learned from Lucy that comedy, no matter how silly has to be truthful and serious. She was meticulous and so her show was a well-oiled machine that could be taped in an hour. Carol thinks it’s ridiculous that some sitcoms take 24 hours to shoot.
Carol was on The Twilight Zone in 1962. Rod Serling had been a guest on The Garry Moore Show and they did a takeoff on The Twilight Zone that was written by Niel Simon who was a junior writer for Garry’s show. That week Rod told Carol that he had a pilot he wrote for comedian Jesse White in which he’d play an angel and he asked Carol to be in it. She played an usher and she did a routine similar to when she was an usher in college. The theatre where she’d worked had a crazy manager who refused to talk or be talked to and just used a series of signals. Carol was the spot girl because she was the tallest and had the loudest voice. He had hand signals to refer to “spot”, a hand as a pointed gun to mean “shoot” and then signals for aisle 1, 2, and 3 and another meaning “balcony”. Carol would stand in the middle of the lobby on an amber spot and shout “Aisle 2 straight ahead and the stairway to your right!” One time Carol got in trouble when she told him with words that he was wanted on the phone. He barked at her and told her from now on to use the “phone” signal with the thumb and pinky extended and the middle fingers folded in. She was fired one night when Strangers On a Train was playing. In those days people would just come in in the middle of a movie, watch it to the end and then sit until the next showing so they could see the beginning and then leave when they got to the point where they came in. A couple came in during the last five minutes and wanted to be seated. Carol suggested they go get some popcorn and wait to see it from the beginning so they wouldn’t spoil it for themselves. The ushers were all female and they wore fezzes and jackets with epaulets. When the manager saw Carol wasn’t letting them sit down he tore off her epaulettes and drummed her out of the usher corps. She says she must have told that story to Rod Serling because he wrote the usher character into the pilot. Years later when Carol got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame she arranged for them to put it directly in front of the theatre where she was fired.
Carol had signed a contract with CBS for ten years when she left The Garry Moore Show that required her to do two guest appearances and a special every year. She had the very rare option in the contract that within the first five years she could push the button and they had to put her on the air for thirty weeks in a one-hour variety show. At the time she and Joe were not doing well. They had a family coming and they were trying to buy a house. They had one week left before pushing the button would no longer be an option. She called up the head of CBS and told him she wanted to push the button to get a variety show and there was silence on the other end. He said, “Let me get back to you” and Carol knew he didn’t know what she was talking about. She says he must have went to the lawyers and found out about the option. He called her the next day and offered her a sitcom called “Here’s Agnes”. She told him she wanted to do a musical comedy variety show. No woman had ever had a comedy variety show. Dinah Shore had a musical variety show. Since Carol wouldn’t accept the sitcom they were legally bound to give her the variety show.
She got Monday nights opposite I Spy and Big Valley. She never dreamed she’d be on for more than 30 weeks.
When Carol got the show she wanted to have what Garry’d had, which was a true repertory company. She’d seen Harvey Korman as Danny Kaye’s second banana and she told Joe they needed somebody like Harvey because Harvey was like Carl Reiner was for Sid Caesar. Danny’s show was going off the air just as hers was coming on and she ran into Harvey in the CBS parking lot. She grabbed him and pushed him against a car, saying, “You’ve gotta be on our show!” He couldn’t say no.
Vicki Lawrence had written to Carol asking for advice. She was in a singing group called The Young Americans. She wrote that she was vying for the title of Miss Fireball of Inglewood but the letter reached Carol on the day of the contest. She looked at Vicki’s picture and had a feeling. Carol was pregnant and could go into labour at any time but she told Joe they were going to the Miss Fireball contest that night. She got Vicki’s father’s number from the operator and called. Vicki’s mother answered and when she heard that Carol Burnett wanted to talk to Vicki she started screaming for her. Vicki answered the phone saying, “Hi Marsha!” because she thought it was her friend’s crank call. Vicki was hired for the show but for the first four years she just did the Carol and Sis sketch and a few musical numbers. But she was a sponge and absorbed everything that Harvey and Carol were doing. In the third or fourth year she started developing her own characters.
Tim Conway had been a guest on The Garry Moore Show and he’d been on McHale’s Navy. Carol says there is nobody funnier in the world. He became a regular guest on Carol’s show. They didn’t sign him as a regular until season 9 even though everybody thought he’d been with her all the time.
Carol says Conway’s goal in life was to destroy Harvey. It started when they did a sketch in which Tim was a new dentist and Harvey was his first patient. Tim started going off script and shooting himself accidentally with novocaine so parts of his body were incapacitated while he was working on Harvey and it caused Harvey to lose control and crack up. He was laughing so hard that he was in tears. Once Tim got on a roll he would always go off script. He would do everything perfectly in the dress rehearsal but when he deviated it was always gold. Harvey and Tim love each other and now even go out on the road to do an act.
When Carol wasn’t sure of a character she was doing, Bob Mackie would solidify it with a costume or a wig. That would inspire Carol to develop a walk or talk for the character. For instance Mrs. Wiggins’s walk came about because the skirt was so tight that if Carol were to stand up straight the skirt would bunch up. Bob told her to stick her behind out. With Eunice it was different because she understood the character from the script. But Bob made the Went With the Wind sketch with the gown he made for Carol out of the curtains that utilized the curtain rod as well. Carol thought it was the most brilliant sight gag of all time.
Carol developed her Tarzan yell when she was still a child. She used to see the Tarzan movies with her cousin and then they’d act them out. Her cousin would play Jane and Carol would play Tarzan. After seeing a Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald movie Carol would play Nelson.
Carol hopes variety shows will come back but she thinks networks are scared of them. She thinks they’re scared of music. Carol says audiences love sketches and they love to see famous people thrown into sketches that put them in a different light. If she had her show today she’d have Megan Mullally and Julia Louis Dreyfuss on and have them sing. Carol admits that there could never be a show exactly like hers because of the cost. She had a twenty piece orchestra and the costumes today would be too expensive to make. She thinks Bette Midler could have had a great variety show because she’s variety performer. She suggests that Martin Short could also helm a variety show.
Carol says fame has never been important to her. She would have been happy just making a decent living. She doesn’t get stopped on the street in LA but she does in New York where a cab driver might shout, “Hey Carol!” She says little girls know her from the role she played in the film adaptation of Annie.
Carol’s advice to those starting out is to get an education because the more you know the more material you have command over and the funnier you can be.
The final question for all interviewees of this series is “How would you like to be remembered?” Carol says, “She made me laugh.”
Once Upon a Mattress was Carol Burnett’s first Broadway show and the fulfillment of a dream. It was a musical comedy with music by Mary Rodgers and lyrics by Marshall Barer. It was based on the Hans Christian Andersen story The Princess and the Pea. In this version Queen Aggravain has forbidden anyone in her kingdom from getting married until Prince Dauntless does. But any potential bride for Dauntless must be so sensitive that she can detect a pea under several mattresses. There are several other tests leading up to this one and all of the other princesses fail until Princess Winnifred from the Swamps arrives, played by Carol in the original production. Of course Winnifred wins. The first television adaptation was done in 1964 and featured the original Broadway cast including Carol. It also featured Elliot Gould in his first ever screen appearance. In 1972 another TV adaptation was done, this time in colour and also starring Carol. In 2005 another TV adaptation was produced by Disney with Tracy Ullman in Carol’s original role and Carol playing Queen Aggravain.
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