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.