In the early days of television, all of the great comedy-variety shows I watched had a repertoire of amazing comic actors. The Jackie Gleason Show had Art Carney and Audrey Meadows; Your Show of Shows starred Sid Caesar with Carl Reiner, Imogene Coca, and Howie Morris; Caesar’s Hour included Nanette Fabray; and dear Garry Moore had his own special band of merry players. So it was only natural for me to follow in those sacred footsteps when I set out to create a variety show. I wanted my own TV family and that’s just what I got.
Vicki Lawrence
One mid-January afternoon in 1967, I was not only two weeks overdue with my second child and a mite cranky, but looking and feeling like I had swallowed a watermelon. As I sat going through the mail, I noticed an envelope that had been forwarded from CBS (they had been forwarding fan mail to me since Garry’s show). I sliced it open. A seventeen-year-old high school senior from Inglewood, California, wanted advice on how to get into show business. Everyone told her she reminded them of me, and to prove it she had included a photograph that looked more like me than I had at seventeen.
My jaw dropped. She had also sent an article from her local newspaper that said she was talented, a member of the Young Americans singing group, and a good student.
Coincidentally, ever since CBS had given us the nod, just before New Year’s Day, we had been working on the idea of a recurring sketch with a husband, a wife, and her kid sister. I thought this girl might be right for the kid sister role. The newspaper piece mentioned that she was a contestant for the annual Miss Fireball contest. I checked the date, and the contest was going to be held that very night! It was complete serendipity, but there was something about all of this that seemed somehow fated. Her parents’ names were mentioned, so I picked up the phone and asked the operator for the number of a Howard Lawrence in Inglewood.
A woman answered on the second ring.
“Hello?” A sweet, pleasant voice.
“Hello…is Vicki there?”
“This is her mother. May I ask who’s calling?”
“Hi, this is Carol Burnett. I just received—”
“VICKI!” A shout heard round the world. “VICKI!”
I heard whispering and shuffling and then Vicki came on the line, her voice laced with ennui: “Oh, hi, Marsha.”
Obviously she and Marsha played telephone games.
Once Vicki realized I wasn’t Marsha and she pulled herself together, I asked her if Joe and I could come to the contest that night. I told her we wouldn’t want to disrupt anything, so we would slide in after the lights went down and sit in the back. She gave me the details of where and when and we hung up.
I duckwalked into the kitchen, where Joe was eating lunch, and told him we were going to Inglewood that night.
“We’re what?”
“To catch the Miss Fireball contest at Hollywood Park. There is an auditorium there.”
“Why?” he asked calmly, putting down the rest of his sandwich.
“BECAUSE I’m fourteen months pregnant and I want to see the Miss Fireball contest!” I shrieked.
“Are you nuts?”
I showed him the letter, the newspaper article, and the photograph. We went. Vicki did a comedy routine, accompanied herself on the guitar, and even played the kazoo. She wound up winning. The man who ran the contest had spotted me in the back, and asked me to come up and crown the winner. I waddled up and put the crown on Vicki’s head. The audience gave her thunderous applause. We had pictures taken, congratulated the new Miss Fireball, and went home.
Miss Fireball and a very pregnant me.
My daughter Jody Hamilton, whom I named after my dad, finally arrived on January 18, 1967, weighing eight pounds, eleven ounces. Vicki came to the hospital and brought me flowers—apparently the nurses thought she was my kid sister and ushered her right in. I hugged her, thanked her, and told her I’d stay in touch. I didn’t say anything about the show.
A few months later we were still thinking about the kid sister part. We decided to do a screen test with Vicki and another young actress CBS had recommended. When Perry Lafferty, a CBS executive, saw them both, he was a little worried about Vicki’s lack of experience. He called her “rough.” I said, “So are diamonds, at first.” We hired her.
Vicki developed into a marvelous comedienne over the next eleven seasons, but it didn’t come naturally to her at first. She was eighteen and really, really shy—so shy she often didn’t speak unless spoken to. She played my kid sister in a sketch called “Carol & Sis,” which was a little ho-hum, as it turned out. Beyond this, Vicki wasn’t on the show that much.
This was when my beloved colleague Harvey Korman worked his magic and helped her with everything from character development to accents. You name it. He was a selfless mentor and we started using her a lot more. The more she was on camera, the better and more confident she became.
An interesting aside: in 1973, Vicki had a major hit record with “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” and we presented her with her gold record on our show. We were all very proud of her.
Then along came Mama, but more about that later.
In 1979, the Television Academy interviewed Vicki, and what follows is her own description of our crazy but momentous first meeting and her work with Harvey.
“That night at the contest, I said to the guy that was in charge of the publicity, ‘I’m going to need two seats way in the back for Carol Burnett, and he’s like ‘Yeah, right.’
“And I said ‘No, really, she’s going to come to the contest and she doesn’t want to be seen, so please don’t tell anybody.’ And (again) he was like ‘Yeah, right.’ I remember standing backstage peeking through the curtain, thinking, ‘Well, why on earth would Carol Burnett come to this contest?’ She and her husband sure enough did show up. It was at the racetrack in Hollywood Park, in some big old huge hall, and we girls did two can-can numbers ’cause they had something like an 1890s firehouse theme going, and then there was a little individual talent segment and I remember singing ‘Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey?’ with my guitar and a kazoo strapped around my neck. That was my individual talent and I wound up winning.
“Then that same fellow who had promised to get the seats and not say a word, got up on the stage at the end of the contest and said ‘We have a very special guest in our audience this evening and will she please come up on stage and crown the winner!’ And, I thought, you know, ‘Great, my career is over before it even got started.’ But she did come up on stage and crown me Miss Fireball. And we took pictures. I still have pictures of her; she was very pregnant, in this huge red cape, and she wore this hysterical black turban smooched down over her bangs, and she and her husband took pictures with the mayor and whoever, and it was in the newspaper.
“And after that night I didn’t hear from her. It was like a dream. Later in January, I came home from school and my mom’s got the radio on and they announce that Carol has finally had that baby, thank goodness, and that she’s at St. John’s in Santa Monica. So I’m on my way to a Young Americans rehearsal and recording. We were doing one of those old Firestone Christmas albums. On the way there, I said to the guy that I was sharing the ride with, ‘Let’s stop and get some flowers and run by the hospital and say hi to her.’ And he said, ‘You can’t get in to see Carol Burnett.’ And I said ‘Well, I know her married name now and I think I’m going to try,’ ’cause I had not heard a word from her.
“So yeah, I get my little flowers, I go into St. John’s. Maternity is on the third floor and I go up there, and two nurses are sitting behind the nurse’s station, not doing much of anything, it’s very quiet. I walk up and in my most polite voice say, ‘I’m here to see Mrs. Hamilton.’ And they said ‘Oh my God, you must be her sister Chrissy, wait till you see her, wait till you see the baby.’ And they took me right into her room. And I mean, in hindsight she was very, very sweet, ’cause I mean how incredibly pushy of me to do such a thing, and she said, ‘I haven’t forgotten you. I promise we’re going to call you as soon as I get my stomach back.’
“And it was, oh gosh, several months after that that I heard from her husband, Joe Hamilton, that they were auditioning for someone to play her kid sister on her new variety show that they were putting together and would I care to come down and audition to play her sister!
“An interesting little side note to that story is that Carol, sitting at home, recuperating after having the baby, gets a call from her manager, who was in New York. He was watching The Andy Williams Show that the Young Americans had appeared on, and in the body of our number, I had a little ten-second solo of my own. So he calls her and says, ‘You’re not going to believe this but I have found the kid to play your sister!’ And Carol says ‘Who is it?’ And he says, ‘I don’t know, but she sings with the Young Americans, and she looks just like you.’ And Carol says, ‘I’ve already met her.’ ”
(Recalling her audition for the show.) “The audition was with me and one other girl. She was an actress and I think on a soap opera at the time, and I remember walking into CBS all alone and being taken to my little dressing room. The other girl was there with her agent and her manager and flowers everywhere. At the time it was a very traumatic decision for me. I remember going to the director of the Young Americans, Milton Anderson, and telling him that I was going to drop out of the summer tour because I was going to go do this audition. And he said, ‘You listen to me, young lady, what are the odds that this is going to pan out? If you drop out of the tour, you’re not coming back in the middle. You’re off the summer tour.’ I remember at the time that it was a very, very difficult decision for me to say I’m going to roll the dice, and go do this audition.
“The audition [itself] is a blur. It was a little short scene. I don’t remember the rehearsal. I remember being nervous when we shot it, and I remember thinking the actress is going to be a shoo-in because I’m such a geek.
“Joe Hamilton’s assistant, Charlene, called me, I don’t know, shortly after we’d done the audition, and I remember her on the phone saying, ‘Hi, sweetie, it’s Charlene,’ and her voice sounded like it was going to be bad news. ‘Joe would like to speak to you, sweetie.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, you don’t have to break it to me gently because really, I get it,’ and he came on the phone and said, ‘You know, we’ve looked at your audition.’ And I am like, ‘Just drop the bomb.’ And then he said, ‘We’ve decided that we’re going to give you a shot.’ Now there you have it.
A very “sixties” Vicki and me.
“It was just sort of surreal that this whole thing happened because she was just happening to be putting The Carol Burnett Show together, just happening to be looking for a person to play her kid sister. It was all very surreal.
“But then when I started on her show, I was such a geek. I was pitiful. Harvey used to get mad at me when I would say that, but he took me under his wing and it was either kill me or train me, one of the two; he would say, ‘You forget stage right and stage left and you can’t even find the ladies’ room!’ So he’s the one who took me aside and trained me, ’cause Harvey was nothing if not a team player and probably the best, I would say arguably the best, sketch comedian ever, and how fortunate for me that I feel like I got to go to the Harvard School of Comedy in front of America.
“So, I don’t know. Carol kind of thinks that we were meant to be together, and that one way or the other we would have found each other. I always say she sidetracked me and I was not going into show business. I was going to be a dental hygienist. She thinks it would have happened somehow…it would’ve happened regardless.”
Harvey Korman
Joe and I had been big fans of The Danny Kaye Show and his incredibly talented second banana, Harvey Korman. “Second banana” is a term that has been used in comedy from as far back as I can remember and probably originated in vaudeville. I was never crazy about the term, because the distance between the star and the “second banana” was almost illusory, and frequently he or she walked away with the laugh—if the star would allow that to happen. My view was always to let everyone shine, the way Sid, Jackie, and Garry did. They were never afraid to let someone else score the touchdown. They knew it only made their show better.
We were premiering in the same year that Danny Kaye’s show went off the air, but the lightbulb didn’t light up, the penny didn’t drop, and we just kept thinking, “We need a Harvey Korman!” Finally, we arrived at the brilliant conclusion that we could actually ask the Harvey Korman to come on board.
As I recall we had phoned his agent and were waiting to hear back when I saw Harvey in the CBS parking lot one afternoon at Television City. He didn’t see me, but I shouted, “Harvey!”
He turned vaguely in the direction of the sound and smiled. I waved wildly. We hardly knew each other, but I swear I practically jumped him. I could be misremembering this, but I think I had him pinned against the hood of his car.
“Please, please be on our show! You’re the very best! PLEASE?”
It was unorthodox, but hey, it worked! Harvey recognized me, started laughing, and said yes. I was in heaven! Honestly, I don’t think there is anyone, anywhere who can top what he did—he created hysterically funny characters with different accents and looks—in only four days of rehearsals!
Personally, I’ve always felt that you need to play tennis with a better player, because your game only improves every time. That’s what Harvey did for me as an actor; he made me better. He made all of us better.
Lyle Waggoner
When CBS gave us the green light to do our show, Joe and I got in touch with Carl Reiner, hoping he might become our main producer. He said that he would have loved to be with us, at any other time in his life, but he had just signed to write and direct his first film, Enter Laughing. He said he was thrilled for us, and predicted that our show would be a big success. He then offered a suggestion: hire an announcer who would be more than someone simply saying, “We’ll be right back after this commercial break.”
Carl had seen me in a sketch once, on Garry’s show, where I played a goofy teenager who fawned, fainted, and went ballistic over a handsome matinee idol. He loved that bit so much that he said we should hire a “to-die-for” handsome announcer whom I could interact with. He would be someone I could swoon over, as a running gag, because I was still relying on the kooky, loudmouth, ugly-duckling character I had played on Garry’s show (and, before that, as the man-hungry princess in Once Upon a Mattress).
We took Carl’s suggestion and held auditions in 1967. Dozens of gorgeous men showed up, all looking like Adonis. But when Lyle Waggoner walked in, the contest was over.
He, too, was gorgeous, of course, but there was a lot more to him than that. He was funny. He had a sly, tongue-in-cheek delivery that let you know he wasn’t taking himself or the situation he was in too seriously. He was perfect.
In fact, we came to trust Lyle’s comedic instincts so much we wrote him into more and more sketches as time went on.
He had lots of other talents, too. After we had been on the air for just a few weeks, he was getting piles of fan mail from swooning girls and women all over the country. He got a card table and a chair and set up an “office” in the hallway outside the writers’ room. He would sit there when he had time and answer his mail. One day as I was walking past I saw him open an envelope and add a dollar bill to a growing stack of cash on the card table.
“What’s all this?” I asked.
He produced a copy of How to Audition and Get the Job, a very professional-looking brochure he had written, filled with advice for would-be actors and performers, which he was selling for a dollar a pop!
I read it and it was really well written and, I thought, a pretty good value for a dollar. It also provided me with new insight into Lyle’s impressive entrepreneurial nature!
Another one of his talents: He was a very good carpenter and builder. One week our set designer, Paul Barnes, created a cruise ship for a sketch Tim Conway and I were doing about a nerdy couple who couldn’t quite keep their footing on the high seas. The deck was designed so that it rocked back and forth and Tim and I would slide around, trying to hang on for dear life.
After the taping, Lyle asked Paul what he was planning to do with the huge cruise ship set. Paul told him it would be cut up and burned as rubbish, because it was too big to store. Lyle asked if he could have it. After the show the crew took the set apart and Lyle hauled it home in a big pickup truck. A bunch of us went over to the Waggoners’ for a party some weeks later, and Lyle and his beautiful wife, Sharon, were showing us around, when we walked into a cozy, nicely furnished room.
“Recognize anything?” Lyle asked, grinning. “It’s the cruise ship. I used the wood and built another room!”
In looking back now, I regret the whole “Going Gaga Over Lyle” routine. It worked at first, but after a while it became a tiresome gag. I was a married woman with two children who was forced to act like a lovesick silly teenager whenever Lyle was around. We finally dropped the bit (whew), and Lyle, along with being our announcer, became much more than a foil for me. He became a true rep player.
Today, Lyle has a hugely successful business furnishing movie studios with his Star Waggons (motor homes), which house actors working on films and/or on television shoots. I’ve been in a few of his motor homes, and they’re definitely the best, no question about it. He’s a man of all trades. Smart, funny, and as gorgeous as ever, silver hair and all…(and still someone easy to swoon over).
Tim Conway
Even though it seemed like Tim was a regular performer on our show from the get-go, he was just a guest once or twice a month for the first eight years. He was hysterical—with a comedic mind so brilliant that it was downright scary—and we loved him, but for some dumb reason it took us all those years to wake up and ask him to be on the show with us every single week!
His work with Harvey alone deserves a spot in the comedy hall of fame!
We always taped two shows on Fridays, with two different audiences.
The first one was basically a dress rehearsal and everyone performed everything just as it had been written, “to the ink.” The second show was looser, especially when Conway was involved. He would always check with our director, Dave Powers (Clark Jones was with us for only the first year), to be sure he had gotten every shot in the first pass. Dave had always gotten the shots, which left Tim free to go crazy.
Whatever he had been cooking up all week was about to burst into the scene in the second taping. When this happened, Tim’s ad-libs and improvisations were always funnier than what we’d had before.
Part of what makes Tim so brilliant is his fearlessness. If the audience didn’t get it right away, he would keep upping the ante until they did, and we were caught in the middle. I dare anyone to be on camera and be able to hold it together when Conway gets on a roll. We really tried not to break up, but when we did, it was honest.
The very first time Tim was on our show.
I am frequently asked what Tim is like in “real life.” The answer: he is sweet, kind, considerate, thoughtful—and gloriously nutty!
I’ve told the next story every chance I get since it happened, because it is so typical of Tim’s genius and the way his mind works!
Joe and I went to a party one night in the Valley, at Ernie and Edwina Anderson’s home. Ernie was the top announcer for ABC programming and had worked with Tim when they were both starting out in the business on a local TV show in Cleveland. The whole gang was there: our dancers and writers and Tim and Harvey. When Joe and I got there, Tim was sitting on the couch with his whole head wrapped tightly in toilet paper. He had punched in holes for his eyes and his mouth, but that was it. He was definitely not drunk, but beyond that I don’t know how or why he had decided to become Claude Rains in The Invisible Man.
He never broke character the entire evening, and we didn’t even seem to notice his getup after a while. Our host took a Polaroid of Tim, and his face came out the size of a postage stamp. Tim carefully trimmed it and inserted the Polaroid over his regular driver’s license picture—no lamination in those days, folks!
As Joe and I were leaving, we saw Tim get in his car still looking like the Invisible Man. What happened next is pure Conway. He knew there was one particular street in this San Fernando neighborhood where a cop liked to lie in wait behind some bushes near a four-way stop. Tim intentionally eased on through and saw the red light come to life behind him. He pulled over and rolled down his window. The policeman looked at Tim, still wrapped in toilet paper, and, in a stern voice, asked for his license. Tim handed it right over.
Fortunately, the cop had a sense of humor.
The Television Academy interviewed Tim a while back, and he talked about his childhood, among other things. I think the following is funny and endearing, too, and gives his fans—me included—valuable insight into where he got his cockeyed view of life.
He was asked, “Was there a lot of humor in your house?”
Tim: “Humor that nobody knew about. Yeah, my parents were hysterical, but had no idea that they were. One time my father hooked up a doorbell in our house. He always did his own work and he hooked it up backwards so it rang all the time except when you pressed the doorbell. So we would sit around at night and listen to this (buzzing noise) and I would say to my dad, ‘You know I think that it’s hooked up backwards.’ He would say, ‘Leave it alone.’ And when it would stop he’d go, ‘I’ll get it.’
“A tornado came through town one day, on a Sunday afternoon, about three o’clock in the afternoon. All of a sudden everything went red and this tornado came right up the river we were living close to, and it was a like a bomb went off. It took the roof off the house next door and took a tree out of our yard and just threw it down the street, and wires were crackling and everything. My dad got up, went to the screen door, looked out, and saw this house, no roof, this tree down, the street wires, and everything, and he looked outside and he said, ‘Damn kids.’ So as you can see it was humor that they really didn’t know they had, but I, I truly enjoyed it. I wish I had stories about them beating me and things of that nature, but it never really happened. So it’s unfortunate, but I had a very pleasant childhood.”
Perhaps Tim’s most popular character was the Old Man.
After he graduated from college:
“I volunteered for the army and defended Seattle from ’56 to ’58. As you know they were not attacked in Seattle during that time period!
“I was court-martialed. No sense of humor in the army. I was on guard duty one night and didn’t have my rifle. They’re very touchy about keeping your rifle close to your body in case of an attack and everything, but I was guarding a service club with pool halls and Ping-Pong balls and cards and things, and I didn’t think anybody would be stealing those, it wasn’t even wartime. A lieutenant came around the corner, and you’re supposed to say, ‘Halt! Advance and be recognized,’ with your rifle, and I didn’t have mine ’cause I’d lost it, so I picked one of those large white neon tubes out of the garbage, and I held it on the lieutenant, and I said, ‘Halt! Advance and be recognized,’ and he said (pointing to my ‘weapon’), ‘What is that?’ and I said, ‘It’s a lightbulb and if you come any closer I’ll turn it on!’ You know they just didn’t understand my sense of humor in the army, but that’s their responsibility.”