In Such Good Company Read online

  ALSO BY CAROL BURNETT

  One More Time

  This Time Together

  Carrie and Me

  Copyright © 2016 by Mabel Cat, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype and colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Burnett, Carol, author.

  Title: In such good company : eleven years of laughter, mayhem, and fun in the sandbox / Carol Burnett.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Crown Archetype, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016008433| ISBN 9781101904657 (hardback) | ISBN 978110190466-4 (e)

  Subjects: LCSH: Carol Burnett Show (Television program : 1967–1978) | BISAC: PERFORMING ARTS / Television / General.

  Classification: LCC PN1992.77.C3255 B87 2016 | DDC 791.45/72—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/​2016008433

  All photos are courtesy of Whacko, Inc., with the following exceptions: this page is courtesy of Vicki Lawrence; this page is courtesy of Bob Mackie; and this page and this page are courtesy of CBS.

  ISBN 9781101904657

  Ebook ISBN 9781101904664

  Cover design by Christopher Brand

  Cover and author photographs: John Nowak

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Carol Burnett

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  IN THE SANDBOX

  A MAN’S GAME

  PLAY!

  VARIETY SHOWS IN THE SEVENTIES

  A TYPICAL WEEK

  LET’S BUMP UP THE LIGHTS!

  SOME OF MY FAVORITE Q&As

  OUR GANG

  Vicki Lawrence

  Harvey Korman

  Lyle Waggoner

  Tim Conway

  THOSE BEHIND THE SCENES FOR THE ENTIRE ELEVEN-YEAR RUN

  Bob Mackie

  Ernie Flatt

  Don Crichton

  Artie Malvin

  Music

  Our Sound Effects

  CBS Censorship

  The Writing Staff

  “LIFE ONCE REMOVED”: A CONVERSATION WITH LARRY GELBART

  EXPLAINING A PUNCH LINE

  OUR RECURRING SKETCHES OVER THE YEARS

  The Charwoman

  “Carol and Sis”

  George and Zelda

  “The Old Folks”

  “As the Stomach Turns”

  Speaking of Martha Raye…

  The Queen

  Stella Toddler

  Mrs. Wiggins and Mr. Tudball

  “Mary Worthless”

  Another One That Bit the Dust

  A Bad Idea for a Number

  Fred and Marge

  “The Family”

  Betty White

  Cary Grant and “The Family”

  Eunice

  THE FAMOUS BLOOPER

  CRACKING UP

  “THE PIGEON LADY” GETS BACK AT TIM

  CHARACTERS AND AURAS

  THE MOVIE PARODIES

  “Mildred Fierce” and “Torchy Song”

  “The African Queen”

  Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé

  “Went With the Wind”

  OUR TRIPS TO ENGLAND, IRELAND, AND ITALY

  “AND THEN SOMEBODY ASKED ME…”

  A MIRACLE MOMENT

  DOWN MEMORY LANE WITH SOME OF OUR GUESTS

  Jim Nabors

  Ken Berry

  Bernadette Peters

  Alan Alda

  Sammy Davis, Jr.

  Roddy McDowall

  Vincent Price

  Donald O’Connor

  Lucille Ball

  “LOVELY STORY,” “THE FUNN FAMILY,” AND OTHER GUESTS

  “Pillow Squawk”

  Rock Hudson

  “Double Calamity”

  “Caged Dames”

  Shirley MacLaine

  “Lovely Story”

  “The Funn Family”

  Mickey Rooney

  Nanette Fabray

  EMBARRASSING MOMENTS

  “ARE THOSE YOUR OWN TEETH?” AND OTHER QUESTIONS I’VE ANSWERED

  THE NIGHT I GOT EVEN

  Ken and Mitzie Welch

  THE MINI-MUSICALS

  AUSTRALIA

  LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION: MORE MOVIE PARODIES I LOVED

  “Sunset Boulevard”

  A Woman’s Picture

  “To Each Her Own Tears”

  Lana Turner

  “High Hat”

  Rita Hayworth

  “The Doily Sisters”

  Betty Grable

  STRESS RELIEF

  THE FLIP SHOWS

  MORE SPECIAL MEMORIES ABOUT SOME OTHER AMAZING GUEST STARS

  The Jackson 5

  Ray Cha

  Carol Channing

  Jerry Lewis

  The Only One, but Who Needs More?

  Sid Caesar

  Carl Reiner

  Bing Crosby

  Jonathan Winters

  Dick Van Dyke

  James Stewart

  THE NIGHT I FIRED HARVEY

  THE EMMYS

  A CONVERSATION WITH DICK CAVETT

  HARVEY LEAVES OUR SHOW

  OUR FINAL SEASON AND THE LAST SHOW

  AFTERWORD

  The Artist Entrance

  Appendix 1: Shows and Guests

  Appendix 2: Writers by Season

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  FOR THE CAST AND CREW OF OUR SHOW, WITH MY EVERLASTING LOVE AND GRATITUDE.

  I recently had the extreme pleasure of receiving the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, and in accepting the honor I talked about how much I loved going to the movies with my grandmother, Nanny, as a kid. My favorites were the comedies and the musicals. I think that’s when I fell in love with the idea of, someday, being a musical comedy performer. Since there wasn’t television “back in the covered wagon days,” when I was growing up, I never imagined that my dream would be realized by having my own weekly musical comedy variety show on the small screen. But that’s exactly what happened.

  I’ve been thinking about that time a lot, and since my memory is pretty good, I decided to put my thoughts down on paper for anybody who might be interested in what we did and how we did it.

  In doing the research for this book, I watched all 276 shows, even though at times I felt like Norma Desmond watching herself on the screen in Sunset Boulevard!

  When I was watching the first few episodes, the first thing I noticed was how I looked. I laughed out loud at my various hairdos, with different shades of red, remembering that I (amateurishly) dyed my hair myself every week using Miss Clairol, because I hated to waste my time sitting in a beauty parlor.

  What really stand out are the changes that evolved. Of course the hairstyles, makeup, and costumes were constantly changing. Remember, this was the late sixties into the seventies…bell-bottoms, miniskirts, etc. The makeup was exaggerated—heavy eyeliner and large Minnie Mouse false eyelashes…upper and lower! Even Bob Mackie, our brilliant costume designer, who surprised us every week with his creations, both beautiful and comedic, would admit that he missed the mark on some occasions. But they were rare.

  One of the things I noticed was how I evolved over those eleven years. I went from the “zany, kooky, man-hungry, big-mouthed goofball,” which was who I had fashioned myself into during my early years, including my time as a regular on the Garry
Moore television show, into a somewhat more “mature kook.”

  I always loved doing the physical comedy—falling down, jumping out of windows, getting pies in the face—however, around thirty-seven, thirty-eight years old, three or four years into the show, I found myself enjoying tackling more sophisticated and complex satires and some of the sketches that had a tinge of pathos. “The Family” scenes with Eunice, Mama, and Ed always touched me deeply, because as crazy as they could get, there was always an element of reality—these were people suffering disappointment and regret, raging against fate, doing the best they could.

  Naturally, there were a lot of sketches and musical numbers I had completely forgotten. Some of them made me laugh, and some, I admit, made me cringe! But overall, I was transported back to the most wonderful and pleasurable phase of my career.

  What follows are many outstanding memories of what occurred during a “regular show week.” I’ll share anecdotes about our cast members, many of our guests, recurring characters, favorite movie parodies, some of the funny and off-the-cuff questions from our audience and my responses—basically how we all played together in the sandbox—hilariously—from 1967 to 1978.

  Some of these stories may be familiar to those of you who know me best, but they needed to be retold in order to give you the whole picture of those eleven wonderful years!

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start over at the very beginning…

  When I was growing up, theater and music were my first loves, so my original show business goals revolved around being in musical comedies on Broadway, like Ethel Merman and Mary Martin. My stage break came in the spring of 1959, when I was cast as Winnifred the Woebegone in the musical comedy Once Upon a Mattress, a takeoff on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea.” It was an Off-Broadway production at the Phoenix Theatre, directed by none other than the iconic George Abbott, “Mr. Broadway” himself!

  The show was originally scheduled for a limited run of six weeks, but it was so popular that it was moved to Broadway and ran for over a year. I got my wish; I was on Broadway! Because no one had expected the production to be so successful, there were numerous booking issues that caused our little show to be bounced from theater to theater—from the Phoenix to the Alvin to the Winter Garden to the Cort and, finally, to the St. James. There were a couple of jokes going around the business about the production during this period. I remember Neil Simon quipped, “It’s the most moving musical on Broadway! If you haven’t seen Once Upon a Mattress yet, don’t worry, it’ll soon be at your neighborhood theater.”

  My second big break came in the fall of 1959 when I was asked to be a regular performer on The Garry Moore Show, a terrifically popular TV comedy-variety series. For almost a year, until the summer of 1960, I doubled up and did both shows. I would perform in Mattress on Tuesdays through Fridays at 8:30 p.m. and then do two shows a day on Saturdays and Sundays.

  I would rehearse for Garry’s show eight to nine hours a day Monday through Friday, and then we would tape his show on Friday, in the early evening, which gave me just enough time to hop the subway and head downtown to arrive at Mattress in time for the 8:30 curtain!

  I had no days off. Hey, I was young, I told myself—but evidently not that young, because one Sunday, during a matinee, I fell asleep…in front of the audience!

  Normally, the scene involved Princess Winnifred trying her best to get a good night’s sleep on top of twenty mattresses, but she couldn’t. The mattresses were highly uncomfortable and lumpy, resulting in a very active pantomime in which I jumped up and down, pounding on the offending lumps, and finally wound up sitting on the edge of the bed wide awake, desperately counting sheep as the scene ended. Not this Sunday. As I lay there on top of twenty mattresses, I simply drifted off to dreamland. Our stage manager, who was in the wings, called, “Carol?” And then louder, “Carol!” I woke up with a start and nearly fell off the very tall bed. The audience howled, but the producers changed the schedule after that and moved the Sunday performance to Monday, so I could have Sundays off.

  By that time The Garry Moore Show had switched to tape, like everyone else, but we still performed in front of a live audience as if it were a live show—no retakes, no stops. We wanted the excitement and spontaneity that went with the feeling of live theater—which was exactly what made the show so good, every Tuesday night on CBS.

  The musical numbers and the writing were certainly worthy of being on the Great White Way; in fact, our junior writer was Neil Simon, whom we called “Doc.” He had worked for Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows. It’s a little-known fact that Neil wrote Come Blow Your Horn, his first play, while he was working for Garry, who was one of his first investors!

  Garry’s show was a great learning experience for me. I remember sitting around the table reading the script the week that the famous vaudeville performer Ed Wynn was the guest. Then in his seventies, he had begun his career in vaudeville in 1903 and had starred in the Ziegfeld Follies beginning in 1914. He told great stories about those days. He got on the subject of “comics vs. comedic actors.”

  Garry asked him what the difference was.

  “Well,” Ed said, “a comic says ‘funny things,’ like Bob Hope, and a comedic actor says things funny, like Jack Benny.”

  That’s what I wanted to be…someone who “says things funny.”

  I left Mattress in June of 1960, while I was still a regular on Garry’s show, but I really never dreamed television was going to be my “thing,” even though I found myself falling in love more and more with the small screen. Garry’s show allowed me to be different characters every week, as opposed to doing one role over and over again in the theater. In essence we mounted a distinct musical comedy revue every week—week in and week out—in front of a live studio audience, just like in summer stock.

  However, I still harbored my dream of starring again on BROADWAY and being the next Ethel Merman.

  CBS asked me to sign a contract with them after I had been on Garry’s show for a few seasons. The deal I was offered was for ten years, from 1962 to 1972, paying me a decent amount to do a one-hour TV special each year, as well as two guest appearances on any of their regular series. However, if I wanted to do an hour-long variety show of my own during the first five years of the contract, they would guarantee me thirty one-hour shows!

  In other words, it would be my option! CBS would have to say yes, whether they wanted to or not!

  They called this “pay or play” because they would have to pay me for thirty shows, even if they didn’t put them on the air. “Just push the button!” was the phrase the programming executives used. This was an unheard-of deal, but I didn’t pay much attention to it, because I had no plans to host my own show—never dreamed I’d ever want to. I was going to focus all of my energy on Broadway.

  By 1966 I had married Joe Hamilton, who had produced Garry’s show, and we had our adorable daughter, Carrie, and another baby on the way. My Broadway career had not panned out, which was why we were in Hollywood to begin with, and I was as in demand as a carton of sour milk. We were sitting on orange crates and packing boxes in the living room of a Beverly Hills home we had somehow managed to scrape together the down payment to buy.

  We had to do something to earn some money. It was the week between Christmas and New Year’s; 1967 was a few days away and our five-year deadline on the pay-or-play clause was about to expire. Joe and I looked at each other, looked around the furniture-less living room, and picked up the phone.

  Mike Dann, one of the top executives at CBS in New York City, took the call and sounded happy to hear from me. He asked about our holidays, and I said they had been lovely but I was calling to “push the button” on the thirty one-hour comedy-variety shows they had promised me in my contract five years ago.

  Mike honestly didn’t remember any of this. He was completely in the dark. Joe took the phone and reminded him in great detail. My guess is that more than a few lawyers were called aw
ay from their holiday parties that night to review my contract.

  When Mike called the next day, he said, “Well, yes, I can see why you called, but I don’t think the hour is the best way to go. Comedy-variety shows are traditionally hosted by men: Gleason, Caesar, Benny, Berle, and now Dean…it’s really not for a gal. Dinah Shore’s show was mostly music.”

  “But comedy-variety is what I do best! It’s what I learned doing Garry’s show—comedy sketches. We can have a rep company like Garry’s, and like Caesar’s Hour. We can have guest stars! Music!”

  “Honey, we’ve got a great half-hour sitcom script that would fit you like a glove. It’s called Here’s Agnes! It’s a sure thing!”

  Here’s Agnes? No thanks…we pushed the button.