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.