December 1, 8, 15 and 29 at 8pm
Carol Burnett seems busier than ever at the age of 91. She recently earned her 25th Emmy nomination for her supporting role in the Apple TV+ comedy “Palm Royale” playing a wealthy woman. She also won her seventh honor last year as executive producer of the outstanding variety special (pre-recorded) “Carol Burnett: 90 Years of Laughter + Love.” Adding to her busy career, the funniest of funny ladies is spending Sunday nights this December (except the 22nd) on TCM. The living legend, who starred in the beloved Emmy Award-winning CBS variety series “The Carol Burnett Show,” will introduce some of her favorite films with TCM host Dave Karger along with the uproarious parodies of the movies that featured on episodes of her series. These lampoons were lavish with whip-smart dialogue, Bob Mackie’s clever costumes and Burnett and company’s hilarious performances.
The series kicks off December 1 with the 1939 Civil War epic Gone with the Wind starring Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Leslie Howard, Olivia de Havilland and Hattie McDaniel. It won eight Oscars including Best Picture and a historical win for McDaniel for Best Supporting Actress. The blockbuster inspired “The Carol Burnett Show’s” funniest spoof “Went with the Wind,” which aired November 13, 1976. Burnett plays Starlett O’Hara and Harvey Korman is Captain Ratt Butler.
One of the most famous sequences in Gone with the Wind is when penniless Scarlett makes a dress out of the green velvet curtains hanging at her home, the Tara Plantation, which she wears to convince Rhett to give her money. It was Mackie who came up with the idea that Burnett shouldn’t just wear the curtains in her spoof, but also wear the large, cumbersome curtain rod. “That gown is gorgeous,” Ratt tells Miss Starlett. “Thank you,” she says, “I saw it in the window, and I just couldn’t resist.” The sight of Burnett descending the stairs was named the second funniest TV moment of all time by “TV Guide” in 1999. The dress was donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 2009.
What made the show’s parodies so special was Burnett’s passion for these motion pictures. She grew up in Hollywood in a one-bedroom apartment she shared with her grandmother on Wilcox Avenue. She told me in a 2007 “L.A. Times” interview, “Every morning, I would walk out of our little building, look up and there would be the Hollywood sign. That was when you could feel that you could touch the sign!”
Burnett, who wrote the 2002 semi-autobiographical Broadway play “Hollywood Arms” with her late daughter Carrie Hamilton, said her grandmother would save money every week so they could go to double bills in second-run theaters. “It was a quarter for her, and until I was 12, it was 10 cents for me. There would be double features at the Vogue, the Iris and the Hollywood. We would sometimes hit as many as four double bills a week, which means I saw eight movies a week. Then I would come home, and my best girlfriend and I would act out the movies, doing Betty Grable, Joan Crawford, Tarzan and Jane. The movies were my escape. And then to grow up and have my own show where I could have Betty Grable be a guest, Lana Turner, James Stewart – the people I grew up idolizing.”
Her passion, though, led to her losing her job as an usherette at the old Warner Brothers theater on Hollywood Boulevard in 1951. “It was 65 cents an hour,” Burnett recalled. “We had to wear a harem-pants outfit, these little funny jackets with fake gold braid epaulets and a fez hat. The manager was certifiable. He would line all of us girls across the lobby and proceeded to give us signals as to where to report.”
Burnett was often the spot girl. “I stood in the middle of the lobby in the amber spotlight to direct customers as they would come in.” She lost her job when she tried to talk a couple out of entering the theater during the last few minutes of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951). They were not happy with her suggestion and loudly complained. So much so, the manager, she recalled, “ripped off an epaulet. I was drummed out of the corps in front of Aisle 2.” Still, Burnett added, “When we would see those eight movies a week, that gave me the courage to think there was nothing I couldn’t accomplish. There was no cynicism in the movies. The bad guys got their just dues. So, when I went to New York, I had the Mickey-and-Judy mentality – ‘I will just audition…I’ll get a job.’ I was so naïve that it worked.”
She became an overnight sensation with the 1957 novelty song “I Made a Fool of Myself Over John Foster Dulles” at the famed night club The Blue Angel in New York, which led to invitations to perform the tune on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Jack Paar Show” in the same week. Two years later, she joined the cast of the popular CBS comedy-variety series “The Garry Moore Show.” She earned a Tony nomination in 1960 for her first Broadway show, the musical-comedy “Once Upon a Mattress,” and starred in such movies as Pete ‘n’ Tillie (1972), Robert Altman’s A Wedding (1978), The Four Seasons (1981) and Annie (1982). Throughout her career she has guest starred on countless television series including “Glee” and “Better Call Saul,” and she won two of her seven Emmy awards (including a 1987 Lifetime Achievement Award in Comedy) for her appearances on the series “Mad About You.”
Burnett’s love for movies expands beyond the most commonly known pictures. On December 8, she talks with Karger about Born to Be Bad (1950) and Torch Song (1953). Directed by Nicholas Ray, Born to Be Bad stars Joan Fontaine as a conniving femme fatale who marries a woman’s fiancée while keeping time with her boyfriend. Burnett has a field day in the sketch “Raised to be Rotten” from the Dec. 15, 1973 episode. Torch Song resembles a parody. The romantic melodrama finds Crawford playing a Broadway diva musical-comedy star (Crawford appears in brown face in one number) who falls in love with her blind pianist (Michael Wilding). Crawford is one of Burnett’s favorite actresses and she channels the Oscar-winner in the satire “Torchy Song,” which premiered Jan. 22, 1977.
Olivia de Havilland won her second Oscar for her indelible performance in William Wyler’s The Heiress (1949), which kicks off the December 15 evening with Karger. De Havilland plays as a spinster under the thumb of her tyrannical father (Ralph Richardson) until she falls in love with a handsome fortune hunter (Montgomery Clift). It’s hard to believe anyone could make a parody out of such a serious, stately film, but Burnett and company did just that in “The Lady Heir,” which aired March 15, 1975. Burnett is the plain Jane who is so meek and nervous, she does needlepoint while hiding in the piano. Harvey Korman plays her father and frequent guest star Roddy McDowall is the manipulative young man. Also airing is A Stolen Life (1946), a glossy Warner Bros.’ melodrama that finds Bette Davis playing twin sisters who both love the same man (Glenn Ford). In “A Swiped Life,” which aired on Jan. 24, 1976, Burnett plays the shy sister and her wild, extroverted twin who loves a handsome young lighthouse keeper (Korman).
Burnett concludes her visit on December 29 with two of the pre-eminent film noirs of the 1940s: Mildred Pierce (1945)and Billy Wilder’s first masterpiece Double Indemnity (1944). Mildred Pierce, directed by Michael Curtiz, stars Crawford in her Oscar-winning role as an overly devoted mother who starts a successful restaurant so she can spoil her vicious teenage daughter Veda (Ann Blyth). Burnett sports the thickest of eyebrows and the biggest shoulder pads as “Mildred Fierce,” which aired Nov. 20, 1976. Actress, singer and “The Carol Burnett Show” regular Vicki Lawrence is equally on point as Vida, Mildred’s “apple of my eye, the light of my life, the salt in my stew, the cream in my coffee, my reason for living.” Korman captures Zachary Scott’s oily seducer Monte Beragon as Monte Slick: “Why don’t you come to my beach house, and I’ll show you the ocean.” Mildred: “I’ve seen the ocean chum.” Monte: “Not my hunk of it. Don’t fight your impulses.”
Burnett and guest Steve Lawrence take on the Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray roles as the murderous lovers in “Double Calamity,” which aired Nov. 3, 1973. The sketch makes a lot of fun of Burnett’s chunky, clunky ankle bracelet as well as a shoot-out that goes on at length.
Burnett received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on May 21, 1975, on the sidewalk right in front of the theater where she had been fired 24 years before. Burnett pointed out that by the time she got her star, the theater had been closed “forever.” When she and her husband created a small media room in their house, “We got a hold of the powers that be, and they gave me the door to Aisle 2 that I was fired in front of. They also gave me those little, tiny exit signs that are above the door. I just have this feeling about Hollywood Boulevard – it’s mine. It’s mine.”
