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.