‘I’m so glad we had this time together’: Burnett talks playing in a ‘man’s game’
Carol Burnett has been many things in her 60-year career: a best-selling memoirist (“One More Time”), a Broadway playwright (“Hollywood Arms”) and, to generations of movie musical-loving children, the only Miss Hannigan that a little orphan named Annie ever really had to worry about.
But it is as a stellar performer on TV variety shows — first as a regular on “The Garry Moore Show” from 1959 to 1962, then as the host of “The Carol Burnett Show” from 1967 to 1978 — that Burnett, 82, will always best be known. A new 22-disc DVD box set, just released by Time Life, compiles the best episodes from the first five seasons of the Burnett show, none of which have been seen in decades.
Burnett, an Emmy winner as well as the recipient of a special Tony, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a Kennedy Center Honor and the Mark Twain Prize for Humor, will receive the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in January. These are edited excerpts from a conversation in which Burnett, a native Texan, spoke about the genesis of her classic variety show and her lasting influence on TV comedy.
Q: It was unusual for a woman to get her own comedy variety TV show in the 1960s. How did you get yours?
A: I had a 10-year contract with CBS that I signed when I was leaving “The Garry Moore Show.” There was a clause that if within the first five years I wanted to do an hourlong variety show, all I had to do was push the button and CBS would have to put it on.
Q: You waited almost five years to push that button. When you did, how did the network respond?
A: I called New York and got one of the vice presidents of CBS on the phone. He said, “You know, Carol, variety is a man’s game. It’s really not for girls.”
Q: What did he want you to do instead?
A: He said, “We’ve got this great sitcom we’d like to talk to you about called ‘Here’s Agnes.’” Can you imagine? I said no, variety is what I love. I don’t want to be the same character every week. I want to do different characters like I did on Garry’s show, and I want to have guest stars, I want to have music, I want to have dancers, singers, and I want a rep company like Sid Caesar had.
Q: How did you put that rep company together?
A: When we started our show, we all said we need somebody like Harvey Korman, whom we’d seen on Danny Kaye’s show. I just about attacked him in the parking lot at CBS. I practically threw him over the hood of a parked car, and said, “Please, you’ve got to be on our show!”
Q: Were you ever intimidated by a huge guest star?
A: I wasn’t intimidated, but I was in awe. Bing Crosby. Rita Hayworth. Lana Turner. I was raised going to their movies with my grandmother. My girlfriend and I would come home and we’d play act the movies. All of a sudden with the show, I could be Betty Grable with costumes and music and lighting. I’d get to be Joan Crawford.
Q: Were there ever any guests you wanted to have on but couldn’t get?
A: I wanted so badly to have Bette Davis on. And she wanted to do it, but she wanted a lot of money. And the producers said we can’t make that exception, or else everybody else is going to want that amount of money.
Q: One of the best things about your show was that if there was a mistake or an ad-lib during the taping, it stayed in. On one episode in the DVD set, for instance, your wig falls off in a sketch and your guest star Art Carney said, “That’s the first time a woman’s flipped her wig over me!”
A: Today, they would stop tape and put my wig back on! My view was, I wanted to do it like a live show. I wanted the danger there. I wanted the feeling of spontaneity. I wanted it to move really fast. So that’s what wedid—a Broadway musical comedy revue every week. And I didn’t want to have any long stops between sketches. We would be out of there in two hours. In fact, we’d be out in time to take our guest stars to dinner at Chasen’s.
Q: How does it feel to be getting the SAG-AFTRA Award?
A: Wonderful. But I’m a little nervous about it. I’ve watched the show on television before, like when Dick Van Dyke got it, and they panned the audience, and I thought, “Oh my god, there’s Meryl Streep! There’s Brad Pitt!”
Q: I have a feeling they’re going to be just as excited to see you. Fans like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler say you’ve had a major effect on their careers. How does that make you feel?
A: Old! When they say that, I get a little embarrassed, because they would be doing their thing whether or not I’d ever been born. It’s a big compliment, but you have to just thank them and say OK, now you go influence somebody.