Vivian Vance

            On Friday after midnight I went over my bed several times with a lint roller until no baby bedbugs got picked up. I went to bed again with no two sided carpet tape around the futon to trap bedbugs before they could get to me because I wanted to wait until I steam the bed later today. After yoga I found several on the floor and wall at the head of my bed and a nest in a groove in the plaster. All that’s going to be blasted with steam later today. 

            I memorized the fourth verse of “Jules Bonnot c'était pas n'importe qui” (Jules Bonnot Was Not Just Anybody) by Boris Vian and almost nailed down the fifth and final verse. 

            I finished translating “Docteur Faust” by Serge Gainsbourg and started looking for the chords. No one has posted them so tomorrow I’ll start working them out. I think this song will be fairly easy. 

            I weighed 91.1 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Kramer during song practice and it stayed in tune most of the time. 

            Around midday I steamed my mattress then moved it into the living room and steamed the west side of my bedroom where the bed sits. I steamed the baseboards, the floor, parts of the walls, as well as the back of the stand beside my bed. 

            I weighed 92.9 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 92.25 kilos at 18:05. 

            I was still two days behind in my journal and worked on catching up. 

            I made a new batch of gravy from chicken drippings and had some with a potato and a chicken leg while watching an interview with Lucille Ball and another with Lyle Waggoner on Carol Burnett.

            Lucy says Carol is one of the greatest gals she’s ever met. She first went to see Carol when she starred in Once Upon a Mattress because she was interested in making her part of one of her company’s shows. But someone else had already gotten her for their show so she just became friends with Carol. She showed herself to be a true comedian on her second performance and that’s unusual. She had it, which is honesty, delivery, energy, timing, and vulnerability. Lucy loves how she gets so deep into a character. Vulnerability is very necessary for a comedian. Carol sometimes breaks Lucy up when they work together and Lucy has to be careful because she doesn’t approve of that. She’s funny because she believes in her characters. The same thing used to happen with Vivian Vance. There isn’t anything Carol can’t do well. 

            Lyle says Carol’s show was very relaxed and a lot of fun. He didn’t mind the live audience. Carol was not intimidating but just one of the players. She’ll go down as one of the top comedic actors of all time. He hasn’t seen anyone that can hold a candle to her.

            Steve Lawrence was a good kisser. 

            Tim Conway came up with ingenious ideas and he was very athletic, as was Carol. 

            Lyle had great admiration for Harvey Korman because he could do characters like no one else. He co-starred on The Danny Kaye Show but Lyle thinks he was better than Kaye. 

            When Lyle co-starred on Wonder Woman they gave him a very nice trailer. He asked where they got it and he was told that they rented it from a private owner in the Valley. So Lyle bought a motor home and they rented it from him for the three years he was on Wonder Woman. He found out that there was no one stop shopping place for motor homes and they often had to rent them from four different places. So Lyle started buying up coaches until he had a little fleet. In 1988 he started building trailers and now he has two manufacturing plants building trailers as fast as they can. He’s thought there would be a saturation point but it never came and so now his company Star Wagons has 800 trailers scattered all over the country and they’re going to send some to Vancouver. Lyle retired five years ago and his two sons run the company. The trailers all have built in generators, satellite systems, and make-up areas. He’s always been an entrepreneur and even when he was acting he considered it a business with himself as the product. 

            When Lyle was interviewed for the part of the announcer on Carol’s show he thought it would be funny to pretend to stutter. They looked at him in silence and thanked him for coming. He thought he blew it. But the next day they asked him to come and meet Carol. When Carol first saw him she pretended to faint. Lyle ran over to help her up. After some light conversation they thanked him again and he left. The next day he was told he had the job. 

            They allowed them to tweak the scripts a bit to surprise of throw the other actor off. They called them savors. (A savor is actually a pause after a line to build tension or to let a mood hover for the audience). 

            Everybody copied her show as the template for variety shows. 

            Lyle did several guest appearances on The Sonny and Cher Show. He says Cher was one of the friendliest people at CBS. 

            Even after The Carol Burnett Show had only been on a few weeks people were recognizing Lyle all across the country. 

            Lucy mentioned that Carol reminded her of her comedy partner Vivian Vance. Vivian Vance first acted professionally at The Little Theatre in Albuquerque, New Mexico and made enough to go to New York so she could study with Eva La Gallienne. The Little Theatre later was renamed The Vivian Vance Playhouse. After some struggle she finally got work performing in Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Music in the Air. The show lasted for two years. She next understudied Ethel Merman in the original production of Anything Goes. Her first starring role was in Hooray For What. She made her silent film debut in 1925 in The Patent Leather Pug. She made her sound film debut in Take a Chance in 1933. Her most successful stage role was in Let’s Face It in 1941. She co-starred in The Secret Fury, The Blue Veil, and The Great Race. Desi Arnaz saw her in Voice of the Turtle and decided she would be perfect for the part of Ethel Mertz on I Love Lucy (His first choice was apparently Bea Benadaret). She won an Emmy in 1953 for playing Ethel (It was the first Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in the history of the awards). She was offered an Ethel and Fred spin-off but turned it down. After Lucy and Desi divorced, Desi would sometimes visit Lucy on the set of The Lucy Show and they would act like they were still married. In the late 60s she and her husband moved to New Mexico where they owned and operated a travel agency. For three years in the 1970s she played Maxine in Maxwell House commercials. She was the godmother of John Sebastian.