This Time Together Read online

  A lovely lady appeared: beautiful pale hair in a bun, slim black dress, pearl earrings, pearl necklace.

  “May I help you?”

  “Thank you. I’d like to buy these stockings.”

  Smiling, she looked at me and said, “Aren’t you Carol Burnett?” I nodded, and she introduced herself: “I’m Miss Melton, and I’m a huge fan.”

  I thanked her and signed autographs for each of her five grandchildren.

  When it came time to pay for the stockings, I realized I had left my credit card in the hotel. But I HAD MY CHECKBOOK! I could write a check!

  She said, “I’m sorry, but I’ll need some identification.”

  “But I just signed FIVE autographs! You know who I am.”

  She understood, but she had her rules.

  I was at a total loss and running out of time. “Can’t you do something?”

  “I’ll have to ask Miss Darnell. She is the head of this department.”

  She smiled and pointed to a lovely woman way, waaay across the floor, sitting at a beautiful antique desk. I couldn’t help but notice that the two women could’ve been clones: hair, pearls, dress, the whole nine yards.

  Miss Melton approached the antique desk to speak to her supervisor. After a moment, Miss Darnell looked up, smiled, and waved. I smiled and waved back. Are they gonna give me my panty hose or not?

  Miss Melton came back and said, “Miss Darnell says that she will okay your check if you’ll do the Tarzan yell.”

  Excuse me? The Tarzan yell? In Bergdorf Goodman? I thought about the panty hose and the people waiting for me at rehearsal. All-righty … I let go with one of the best (and loudest) Tarzan yells that I have ever done, almost as good as the one that persuaded the Manhattan mugger on my street to give up his life of crime. It was a doozy of a yell.

  At that point, a Bergdorf security guard burst through a door, and Miss Melton, Miss Darnell, and I found ourselves staring straight into the business end of a very large gun.

  So Brandon dear, forgive me, but now at least you’ll understand.

  John Steinbeck and the Twenty-fourth Floor

  In 1964, my husband, Joe Hamilton, and I, along with our baby, Carrie, and my sister, Chris, had moved to a high-rise on Lexington and Seventy-second Street in New York. Our apartment was on the twenty-second floor. We had heard that the brilliant writer John Steinbeck also lived in the building, but after being there for more than a year we’d never even caught a glimpse of him. Both Joe and I were huge fans of his, having devoured just about everything the Nobel Prize–winning novelist had ever written.

  One night we were coming home from having dinner out, and as we entered the lobby we could see that a very large man was holding the elevator door open for us. We thanked him as we got in. In a deep voice he asked, “What floor?” I looked up at him, and both Joe and I said at the same time, “Twenty-two.” He pressed the button for our floor and then hit the one for the twenty-fourth floor. The elevator doors closed and we were on our way.

  Then it dawned on me: I’m standing next to John Steinbeck!

  Elevator etiquette has always seemed weird to me. Nobody speaks or looks at anyone else in an elevator. People go up and down cooped up together in a box and do nothing but stare at the floor numbers overhead. That night it looked like the three of us would be doing just that when—at about the fourteenth floor—this tall gentleman looked at me and said, “Excuse me … Miss Burnett?”

  I was floored. “Yes?”

  He offered me his hand—his large hand. “I’m John Steinbeck.”

  “Oh, I know. I know! What a pleasure to meet you!” We shook hands.

  He said, “My wife and I have always admired your work. We watched you all the time on The Garry Moore Show. Very funny. Very funny.”

  “Thank you SO much! Ohhh, and I love everything you’ve ever written!”

  He smiled at me. “Well, thank YOU so much.” I also thought he was awfully handsome.

  I looked at the numbers and realized we had just about reached our floor. As the door opened and we stepped out onto our floor, I also realized I had neglected to introduce him to Joe, who was, by this time, looking a bit ticked off.

  As the door was closing to go up to twenty-four, Joe nudged me in the ribs, and I blurted out as the elevator door was about to close: “Oh, and this is my husband, George Hamilton.” Where that came from and why, I’ll never know. Joe looked at me like I was nuts, and by the time I screamed, “NOOO! NOOO! Not George! I mean Joe … JOE Hamilton!” the ship had sailed, and Mr. Steinbeck was gone.

  Joe defrosted enough to speak to me sometime late the next day.

  CBS vs. My Variety Show

  So there we were, airing on Tuesday nights for CBS. Even though The Garry Moore Show had switched to tape like everyone else, we performed in front of an audience as if it were a live show—no stops and no retakes. We barreled ahead like we were doing a Broadway revue, which was exactly the point. We wanted the spontaneity and excitement that go with the feeling of live theater.

  The writing and the musical numbers we performed every single week were certainly worthy of being on the Great White Way. In fact, our junior writer was Neil Simon, whom we called “Doc.” He wrote his first play, Come Blow Your Horn, while he was working on Garry’s show, typing away after hours. Garry was one of his first investors.

  After I’d been on Garry’s show for a few seasons, CBS asked me to sign a contract with them. Mike Dann and Oscar Katz were the key programming executives in on the negotiations. The deal they offered was for ten years (1962–72), paying me a decent sum to do a one-hour TV special each year, along with two guest appearances on any of their regular series. However, if during the first five years of the contract I wanted to do an hour variety show of my own, they would guarantee me 30 one-hour shows. This was called “pay or play,” which meant that they’d have to pay us for thirty shows even if they didn’t put them on the air. “Just push the button!” was the phrase they used. It was a great feature of the deal, but I really didn’t pay much attention to it because I never dreamed I could, or would even want to, host my own show.

  I was much more interested in Broadway.

  Fast-forward to 1966. Joe and I were enjoying our first beautiful daughter, Carrie, and we had another baby on the way. My Broadway career hadn’t panned out, so we had left New York and were sitting on orange crates and packing boxes in the living room of a Beverly Hills home on which we had scraped together the down payment. In big demand just four years earlier, now I was as cold as yesterday’s mashed potatoes.

  While we weren’t in the poorhouse, it was obvious we had to do something. It was the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Nineteen sixty-seven was a few days away, which meant that nearly five years had flown by since we’d made the contract with CBS. Time was running out on our pay-or-play clause. Joe and I looked around the living room, looked at each other, and decided to make the call.

  In New York, Mike Dann picked up the phone.

  “Hey, Carol! How are you guys? Have a good Christmas?”

  “Yes, thanks, Mike. Hey, I’m calling about pushing that button.”

  Friendly but obviously in the dark, he said, “Huh?”

  “The button, Mike, you know … where I get to do thirty one-hour comedy-variety shows? In the first five years of my contract? Remember that part of our deal?”

  Mike wasn’t being coy. He honestly didn’t remember that clause. I handed the phone to Joe, who explained it in great detail. Mike said he’d get right back to us. I’m guessing that more than a few lawyers were called away from holiday parties that night.

  The next morning Mike called back and said, “Well, yes, I can see why you called. But really, I don’t think the hour thing 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’s show was mostly music.”

  I responded, “But comedy-variety is what I do best! It’s wh
at 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!”

  Mike had other ideas. “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!”

  I handed the phone to Joe.

  CBS scheduled the premiere of our show for Monday, September 11, 1967, opposite I Spy and The Big Valley, both of which had ratings in the top ten. Well, at least we’d have our thirty weeks until we had to find something else to do. In the meantime we could get rid of some orange crates and open up the packing boxes.

  Joe flew to New York for a meeting with Mike. It was all very friendly, although Mike was clearly worried. There was a bulletin board mounted on the wall behind his desk, featuring the days of the week and the prime-time TV hours, with four-by-six-inch cards tacked on it, one for each CBS show in the fall lineup. He had neglected to close the folding doors that would conceal the cards, so Joe saw our show on a card that read: “Sept.–Feb.: Burnett show.” After February, the only thing in the slot was: “?” Obviously CBS thought we wouldn’t last the whole season.

  Actually, we didn’t expect to last much longer, either.

  Happily, though, we fooled both ourselves and CBS. We were to run for eleven wonderful seasons.

  Our Rep Players

  All the great comedy-variety shows that I watched in the early days of television had a repertoire of amazing comedians. Your Show of Shows starred Sid Caesar with Carl Reiner, Imogene Coca, and Howie Morris; The Jackie Gleason Show featured Art Carney and Audrey Meadows; Caesar’s Hour included Nanette Fabray; and Garry Moore had his band of merry players. So when I set out to create my own variety show, it was only natural to try to follow in all those hallowed footsteps and put together a TV family of my own. And that’s exactly what I did.

  CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Tim, Vicki, Harvey, and me.

  COURTESY OF CAROL BURNETT

  Vicki Lawrence

  Our second baby was due in December 1966, and our show was scheduled to premiere in September 1967. One January afternoon I was tending to the mail at our desk. I looked and felt like I had swallowed a basketball. I was way overdue and a mite cranky, to say the least. I noticed an envelope that had been forwarded to me from CBS. It was about two or three weeks old. The letter was from a seventeen-year-old high school senior, asking for advice on how to get into show business. She said everyone told her she reminded them of me. She enclosed an article written about her from her local Inglewood, California, newspaper.

  The accompanying photograph amazed me. This girl looked more like me at age seventeen than I did! Coincidentally, we had been toying with an idea of a recurring sketch in our show featuring a wife, a husband, and her kid sister. I couldn’t help thinking that because of the resemblance this girl could be a likely candidate for the kid sister role. The interview in the paper went on about how talented she was, that she was a good student, and that she was a member of the Young Americans singing group. It also said that she was going to be a contestant in the annual Miss Fireball contest in Inglewood. I reread her letter. There was something about it that grabbed my attention—and gave me that funny feeling.

  When I looked at the article again, I noticed that the date of the Miss Fireball event was that night. The article gave her parents’ names. I picked up the telephone.

  “Operator, do you have a listing for a Howard Lawrence in Inglewood?”

  I dialed the number, and a woman answered.

  “Hello?” Nice dulcet voice.

  “Hello … is Vicki there?”

  “This is her mother. May I say who’s calling?” she asked softly.

  “Hi, this is Carol Burnett. I just received—”

  “VICKI!” A shout heard round the world. “VICKI!”

  I heard whispering, a little shuffling, and then Vicki came on the line, her voice laced with ennui: “Oh, hi, Marsha.”

  I guess she and Marsha played telephone games.

  After I finally convinced Vicki that I wasn’t Marsha and she pulled herself together, I asked her if it would be okay if Joe and I came to the contest that night.

  “We’ll stand in the back after the lights go down. Are you happy with what you’re performing?”

  She was fine with all of it. I got the details of where and when, and hung up saying, “We’ll see you tonight!”

  I waddled into the kitchen, where Joe was eating a sandwich.

  I said, “Don’t get too comfortable. We’re going to Inglewood tonight.”

  “We’re what?”

  “To catch the Miss Fireball contest at Hollywood Park. There’s an auditorium there.”

  Calmly, he put down his sandwich. “Why?”

  “I’m fourteen months pregnant, and I want to see the Miss Fireball contest.”

  “Are you nuts?”

  I explained the whole thing to him, doing a show-and-tell with the letter and the article.

  We went. Vicki did a comedy routine, accompanied herself on the guitar, and even played the kazoo. She also won the contest.

  We congratulated her and went home.

  My adorable basketball finally arrived January 18, 1967. Jody Hamilton, eight pounds, eleven ounces. I named her after Daddy.

  Vicki paid us a visit in the hospital, bringing flowers. I thanked her and also told her we’d keep in touch, not saying anything about our show at that time.

  A few months later, in the middle of casting our rep players, we were still up in the air about the “kid sister.” We got in touch with Vicki and another young actress recommended by CBS, and decided to do a screen test. We wrote a sketch and taped it twice, once with Vicki and once with the other actress.

  Perry Lafferty, a CBS executive, was a little worried about Vicki’s being so wet behind the ears: “She’s rough.”

  Our reply was, “So are diamonds, at first.” She was hired.

  Over the next eleven seasons, Vicki developed into an extraordinary comedienne, but at first it wasn’t easy. She was only eighteen and unbelievably shy—so shy that she hardly ever spoke up in rehearsals unless someone spoke to her first. For the first couple of years she played my kid sister in an ongoing sketch called “Carol & Sis.” I never really cared for this particular sketch (I thought it was bland), and beyond this Vicki wasn’t being used much. Today, a network would tell us to let her go. CBS’s Perry Lafferty trusted us, so she stayed.

  Bless Harvey Korman. My beloved colleague took Vicki under his wing and helped her with character study, accents, voices—you name it. We started giving her more to do, and the more she did the better and more confident she became. (In the meantime “Carol & Sis” bit the dust, thank heavens.) Vicki was becoming a very good character actress with terrific comedy chops, so we gave her lots more to do.

  Then along came Mama.

  It was our seventh season and two of our best writers, Dick Clair and Jenna McMahon, came up with a sketch about a totally poor, ignorant, and dysfunctional family, consisting of Eunice (the wife), Ed (the husband), and Mama, Eunice’s cranky mother. I loved it because it was all about character and situation, without any written jokes. In fact, if we had played it straight, there wouldn’t have been many laughs; the sketch was more like a one-act play.

  At first we thought I’d play Mama, but I leaned more toward Eunice (she reminded me of my own mother, who never saw her dreams realized). Harvey, of course, would be the hapless Ed. We thought of hiring an older actress to come in and play Mama, but Bob Mackie, our costumer, suggested Vicki. Why not give it a whirl? We sat down to read the script and I tore into Eunice with a kind of south Texas accent. I just saw these three people coming from that part of the country. It felt right. Harvey and Vicki followed suit with the accent, and the family was born.

  Bob dressed Eunice in a godawful flowered print dress, white patent leather shoes, and a sad-looking dark brown wig that looked like it had been fried to death. Ed wore an ol
d shirt and baggy mismatched pants with suspenders. Bob put Vicki in a padded dress, a gray wig, and spectacles. She wore no lipstick or eye makeup. She narrowed her eyes and jutted out her chin and laced into her character with a vengeance. She was hysterical. All our characters were way over the top, and the audience screamed with laughter.

  Eunice and Mama going at it on The Carol Burnett Show.

  COPYRIGHT © CBS PHOTO ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

  “The Family” became a running feature of our show, airing once every month or so; we wound up doing about thirty-five sketches before we went off the air. With each one Vicki got better and better. Here she had started out playing my kid sister and wound up brilliantly acting the part of Mama. I was incredibly proud when Vicki was awarded an Emmy in 1976. After our show she later starred in her own successful sitcom, Mama’s Family.

  Harvey Korman

  By the time spring 1967 came around, Joe, as our producer (along with Bob Banner, executive producer), was busy putting together our writing and production staff, many of whom came out of Garry’s show and were willing to take a chance on Hollywood. At the same time we were on the lookout for our very own gang of comedians who would play and have fun with us every week, the way we did on Garry’s show.

  Joe and I had been huge fans of The Danny Kaye Show, and particularly of his incredibly talented second banana, Harvey Korman. Harvey was to Danny what Carl Reiner was to Sid Caesar and Art Carney was to Jackie Gleason. “Second banana” is a term that has been used in comedy as far back as I can remember. It probably dates back to vaudeville. I never took to it much, though, because the good ones never fit into that “second” slot as far as I was concerned. In fact, lots of times they were the ones who walked away with the laughs … if the star would allow it. Those stars I’ve mentioned weren’t afraid to let their teammates score a touchdown. They knew it only made the show better overall.