Carol Burnett — Her Life In Front of and Behind the Camera Revealed (Exclusive)

Discovering the Actress Within

Details Wesley, “She did an acting piece at UCLA and got the acting bug. There was a benefactor there who saw her doing her work and thought she had some material and some potential, so he put up some money for her to go to New York. He said to her, ‘I think you’re going to be a success. Repay this money to me in five years. I trust you on doing that.’ And, in fact, she did become a success. She went to New York, had to struggle some like any unknown actress, but she was very strong in auditioning.”

In 1955 she found herself cast in a small role on the kid’s show The Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney Show, which led to her starring in the TV sitcom Stanley, with Buddy Hackett, from 1956-57. She had a regular gig on the game show Pantomime Quiz in 1957, followed two years later with a stint on Broadway in the musical Once Upon a Mattress.

 “At that time,” Wesley explains, “she became a part of Gary Moore’s daytime show, where she became a favorite. She’d do a lot of comic numbers there and went over great. She also appeared on Jack Parr’s The Tonight Show and The Ed Sullivan Show. But the thing that really sealed the deal for her was when The Gary Moore Show moved to nighttime. Martha Raye got sick one time and just could not do the show, so they brought in Carol under CBS’ protests. They wanted to air a repeat, but Gary Moore said, ‘You’re either doing the show with Carol or we’re not going to do it at all.’ She did it last minute and was superb. She had a lot to learn and a lot to do, but she got the audience on her side and soon they made her a regular, which led to her successful career.”

It’s All in the Fine Print

Three seasons in, Carol decided to leave The Gary Moore Show to do other things, but CBS was under pressure due to the fact that Moore was a Top 10 show, and a lot of people attributed its success to her, so the network put her under contract. Unbeknownst to them, however, Carol’s lawyers had been very clever in their work on said contract.

Wesley explains, “There was a provision in there that said within a five-year period, if she wanted to, at any time she could get a guaranteed season’s worth of shows from CBS, including a variety show. But what happened during the ensuing years from the signing of that contract is that Carol had some professional challenges and setbacks. She did a show called Fade Out, Fade In on Broadway where there were a lot of problems with the show that ended up giving her kind of a bad reputation. She went with her husband [Joe Hamilton] to Hollywood in 1965, but they only got a couple of supporting roles. Then it hit them around Christmas time in 1966 that they could activate that clause in her contract.  CBS’ attitude was that they didn’t have to put her on at nighttime; they could have put her on Saturday morning if they wanted to. But they were wise enough not to do it.”

Birth of ‘The Carol Burnett Show’

CBS did try to get her to take a sitcom — Here’s Agnes — but she and husband Joe refused, so a variety show it was. “They didn’t do Carol any favors initially,” says Wesley of the network, “when she was placed on Monday nights from 10-11, where CBS had a lot of problems. Throughout the entire 1960s they had a lot of shows that failed there, like East Side/West Side with George C. Scott. They had The Jean Arthur Show that bombed there for a while. It was airing opposite I Spy on NBC and The Big Valley on ABC. And CBS was preparing for The Carol Burnett Show to fail; they were even lining up shows that could potentially replace it.

“Part of the problem,” he continues, “was that the belief was that Carol’s star had dimmed since she’d been on The Gary Moore Show and she’d not had as much success on Broadway. She was still a name, but she was not considered a top name. But what happened was that during the first couple of shows she was able to have some big names as guest stars. She started with Jim Nabors, who was very popular at the time — Gomer Pyle was a big Top 10 hit and people wanted to see him. She also had Lucille Ball on one of the first episodes, so she had some good ones to kick things off and that helped the show to stabilize pretty quickly. By the end of the season, and to everyone’s surprise, her show had finished in the Top 30 and had knocked I Spy off the air. The Big Valley lasted only one more year against it as well. So that was something. I mean, it really did catch everyone by surprise, but the industry loved it. The Carol Burnett Show is one of the few shows that was nominated for best in its genre every single year.”

Which had a lot to do with the people that Carol decided to share the stage with.

Harvey Korman

“Harvey Korman was the go-to utility supporting player for the series,” Wesley points out, “able to sing, dance, do comedy and even solid drama. He studied every script intently and found ways to create characters with quirks both in their vocal and physical deliveries that often generated unexpected laughs from audiences. Carol and her producer husband, Joe Hamilton, wanted Carl Reiner for the position at first, but he was too busy. Harvey was next on their list thanks in part to his great work for four years as a regular on The Danny Kaye Show. In fact, Carol and Joe pleaded with Harvey at the CBS Television City lot to join them while he was doing comic staging for The Steve Allen Comedy Hour, a 1967 summer series. His rapport and chemistry with Carol on screen was instant and led him to win multiple Emmys and Golden Globes. Harvey could do almost any dialect effortlessly.”

Lyle Waggoner

He adds, “Carl Reiner did help Carol and Joe by recommending that they add a handsome man in the Rock Hudson mold to serve as her announcer and comic foil, since Carol was known to play love-starved women on The Garry Moore Show. An open casting call occurred, and Lyle Waggoner won the role for two reasons: He attracted the most attention from the women working at CBS Television City during his audition, and he showed he had a natural humorous flair with Carol. Lyle turned out to be a decent dancer and singer as well. He did everything fine that he was given, and though the show didn’t replace him when he left after seven years, he was a welcome guest on several reunion specials in later years.”

Vicki Lawrence

“Vicki Lawrence,” Wesley observes, “had both luck and intelligence to get onto the series. She had contacted Carol earlier when she was a high school student and noted how everyone in her class thought she looked like Carol. To Vicki’s astonishment, Carol visited her in person and struck up a friendship. Still, when the series decided it would have a regular segment with an actress playing Carol’s younger sister, Vicki had to audition for the part. She wisely dyed her mousy brown hair to be more red like Carol’s, and that helped her win the part. Knowing that she was very inexperienced professionally, she served as a student with Harvey as her comedy mentor, and she developed a winning comic timing and delivery all by herself. She was a trained singer who had a surprise number one hit in 1973 with ‘The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,’ but comedy proved to be her bigger field for success, particularly in 1974 when she started playing Mama in “The Family” sketches on the series. As Carol noted, Vicki started the series as her sister and ended it playing her mother. Vicki brought a lot of energy to everything she did on the series and was a beloved member throughout. In fact, the regular with the least experience wound up doing the most number of Carol Burnett Show episodes besides Carol herself!”

Tim Conway

“Finally,” he notes, “Tim Conway was someone Carol knew from guest starring on The Garry Moore Show, and he clicked with her audiences immediately as an often befuddled buffoon as one of her first guests. Audience reaction was always strong for Tim, and a year after Lyle had left, Carol and Joe talked Tim into becoming a regular. Tim became famous (or was it infamous?) for cracking up Harvey with ad-libs in the second tapings of the show, and everyone agrees Harvey never knew what Tm would throw at him. The differences in their height (Harvey was 6-foot-4, Tim was nearly a foot shorter) often added to the comedy, too. Tim himself also helped with writing more than the other on-air regulars, and his creation of Mr. Tudball was a great addition to the series in its last years. It gave him a chance to be the aggressor as well as the aggrieved in skits, and really showed his range well. Simply put, Tim was one of a kind, and he helped make a great show even greater.”

Changing Forms of Comedy

In researching his book, Wesley explains that early on there were different kinds of comedy styles being tried, while at the same time certain things from that first season remained throughout. “In that first year,” he says, “they started ‘As the Stomach Turns,’ which was a soap opera parody that was originally supposed to be a one-shot type deal, but it morphed and kept going. And that became their longest-running sketch. Also during the first season they had a spoof of old time movies that got a lot of good attention and press, which led to them doing more spoofs of old movies, which became a regular thing on the show. There was also one sketch where Carol was bedeviled by all these characters from commercials, which became a running thing as well. So you can see the genesis of some things going on during the first season that lasted for years. At the same time, it was still finding itself. I noticed when they had the Smothers Brothers on, that the show suddenly felt more like an episode of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. So it took a little bit of time to define its identity.”

Classic Saturday Night Line Up

And once the show did, it soared, eventually taking on the tail-end position of what become an incredible night of Classic TV on Saturdays: 8:00, All in the Family; 8:30, MASH; 9:00, The Mary Tyler Moore Show; 9:30, The Bob Newhart Show; and 10:00, The Carol Burnett Show.

“I talked to Fred Silverman about that,” Wesley details regarding the head of programming for the network at that time. “The show was very established on Monday nights on CBS for its first four seasons, and then Fred Silverman took over and the network underwent its ‘rural purge,’ where they were getting rid of old shows like Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies that went for a predominantly older audience. Rural, so not as attractive to advertisers. Well, Carol’s show was one of the exceptions to the rule, but at the same time Fred Silverman wanted to make a big splash. He also knew that Adam-12 was kicking off the night on Wednesdays for NBC and he wanted a strong show there, so he moved Carol to Wednesdays. Carol was not thrilled, because she felt the earlier time slot would be harmful to the show’s sophisticated comedy, and she didn’t want to have to book rock acts. That’s not something she did over the first four years; the only people who had a hit on the charts when they appeared on the show was Dionne Warwick, the Carpenters and the Jackson Five. But she went along with the decision to move the show to Wednesday.

“They didn’t do too hot, but they held up fairly well,” he explains. “They came in second place to Adam-2 and to the mystery movie, which included Columbo at the time, but, again, it was still a very strong second. The following year, 1972-73, they moved it again, because Fred was trying to save the Sonny & Cher comedy hour, thinking it would be the one that could knock out Sanford and Son on Friday nights. Well, he was wrong and the ratings went down. So to save it, he was looking at other options, but there weren’t too many, because CBS was doing so well at the time. But one thing he thought of was that he could put them in Carol’s time slot and move Carol to Saturday nights from 10 to 11, where Mission: Impossible was doing OK, but not as strong as the rest of Saturday night’s shows were. So he moved it there, and that’s where the show became an anchor and probably best known, and where it stayed for most of the rest of its five years.”

Flash Forward to Season 11

By season 11, it was clear that The Carol Burnett Show was starting to lose steam, not helped by outside circumstances. “In the last season,” Wesley points out, “Fred Silverman had moved over to ABC and he debuted The Love Boat on Saturday nights and it killed them, along with the fact that Harvey Korman had left in the last season in part because Fred Silverman had offered him his own show on ABC. With that, the show really took a beating on Saturday nights. But CBS thought it still had potential, so they moved it to Sunday nights and the ratings did go up, but it was still not a blockbuster. So when Carol did announce that she was ending the show herself, she made a point to say that CBS was intending on renewing it for a 12^th season.

“But as many people told me privately, a renewal did not mean that CBS would necessarily keep the show for the whole season; they could have canceled mid-season without any big fanfare, like NBC had done with Bonanza and Ironside. Carol knew she wanted a big closing show and she got that. And I think it was a smart way to do it, because, to be honest, the last season there was not very much there. It was not as good as preceding seasons were. Dick Van Dyke had joined the show that season and the writers tried writing for him as they would for Harvey Korman, and Dick didn’t like that. He left after 12 episodes and then they had Ken Berry and Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, but it just didn’t have the same magical chemistry as the show before hand. And the writers were repeating themselves. After 300 episodes, it became a constant struggle to come up with new and original comedy.”

The Final Episode

Details Wesley, “CBS gave her a two-hour finale where she was able to play some classic bits that she had not shown before. She was also able to do wrap-ups of storylines with characters like Mrs. Wiggins and Mr. Tudball, where they had flashbacks of how he hired her. They had another one with Mama and Eunice going into therapy and trying to get things resolved, and not really doing so. There were some nice surprises, as well. Joe Hamilton got Jimmy Stewart to surprise Carol onstage and tell her how much he loved her. She idolized Jimmy Stewart and just broke down in tears after that.

“As everyone knows,” he elaborates, “at the end of every season Carol would dress up in her charwoman character and say that the season’s over, would go through the bare studios at CBS Television in Studio City and survey everything. Well, this time she came out as the charwoman to applause and a standing ovation from the studio audience. She sat on the pail and just spoke extemporaneously about what the show means and what people meant to her. It was just so heartfelt and well done. And by the time she was singing ‘I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together,’ she was doing it through tears. It was just beautifully done and it was something most long-running variety shows never had the chance to do. It really put a button on everything.”

A Private Life in Turmoil

As has been well-documented, in her personal life Carol and Joe were dealing with the addiction of their daughter, Carrie. Born on December 5, 1963, she became a cigarette smoker in her early teens, and then spent three years battling heavy drug and alcohol addiction which, with the exception of a brief relapse at 17, she had beaten by the time she was 15. Sadly, the years of struggle took a toll on the marriage between Carol and Joe, which ended in divorce. Even more tragically, after Carrie had turned her life around both personally and professionally, on January 20, 2002, at the age of 38, she died of pneumonia as a complication of lung cancer that had spread to her brain. Needless to say, the effect was devastating to Carol, who eventually wrote a book about their relationship and will be serving as executive producer of a movie version.

“The situation with the drugs happened during the last season of The Carol Burnett Show, and I asked several people if they knew about it and whether or not that was a factor that entered the work,” Wesley offers. “They say it didn’t happen; that the show wasn’t impacted, so I did not include that in the book. I got from four or five different people that Carol was there, focused on the work. That was just her situation with Carrie when she went home. But I have my own feeling about it. I think that situation with Carrie kind of threw she and Joe Hamilton off the ball somewhat in the last season. I think they weren’t as focused on the show as they needed to be. But that’s all speculation on my part.”

Life After ‘Carol’ for Carol

There was a four-week summer revival of the show on ABC that was expected to become an annual happening, but it never did. Carol appeared in films like The Four Seasons and Annie, and tackled more serious fare like the TV movie Friendly Fire and the feature Life of the Party: The Story of Beatrice, which focused on a woman battling alcoholism. She also made appearances on the spin-off from The Carol Burnett Show, Mama’s Family, and the sitcom Mad About You (winning an Emmy Award in the process). Acting roles have continued since then, and most recently she’s been starring in a one-woman show.

“In that show,” says Wesley, “she’s taking questions from the audience, just like she did on her TV show more than 50 years ago. And people love it. I think she enjoys it as well, connecting with people and seeing their reactions. She gets all sorts of questions and handles them well. I know there are a lot of stars whose worst nightmare would be to stand up in front of an audience and have them ask questions, but this is something they used to do on The Gary Moore Show when it would go to the videotape and they were having some problems setting things up. So they talked to the audience. When Carol got her show going, they were looking for the right opening. Joe Hamilton and his executive producer were telling her, ‘We think if you’d do the question and answer thing like you did on Gary Moore, it would start the show more distinctively and let people relate to you more, because that will be the only time they see you not in character and just being yourself.’ She wasn’t thrilled, but said she would give it a shot.

“So it was the third show where she started that and she was nervous, because it seemed a little quiet. Then someone volunteered, ‘Who’s your guest star?’ ‘Oh, Jim Nabors.’ Then she told them Harvey Korman was there, and they liked that because they knew him from The Danny Kaye Show for years. And it broke the idea and became the staple of the show. And for her style of working with the audience as well.”

The Legacy of a Piece of Classic TV

As Wesley discusses, there was a period of time where — like most actors who have had as big a show as Carol Burnett was — she attempted to put some distance between herself and it, resulting in some of those previously mentioned film and TV projects. But something started to change within her when she saw the endurability of the show, and how people were enjoying reruns of it in the ‘80s, episodes released on VHS and DVD, and Mama’s Family.

“By the 1990s, I think Carol realized, ‘Look, people love my show. I’m proud of my show. Let’s at least acknowledge it and start giving it its due.’ And you can make a great case that it was the best comedy-variety show ever. It was very consistent in what it set out to do. It was aimed for middle class audiences, giving them a good time without feeling like you were being insulted intellectually or morally. I don’t think there was an effort to make audiences feel uncomfortable, as there is with some comedy nowadays. And there was a lot of love there: Carol’s love for her audience and guest stars and everyone on the crew, and they loved her back. What comes through more than anything is that there’s a show that loved people and that people loved.”