Happy Birthday Carol Burnett

 from GK's The Writer's Almanac today:

It’s the birthday of American comedienne Carol Burnett, born in San Antonio, Texas (1933), whose long-running television show, The Carol Burnett Show (1967–1978), introduced audiences to such characters as “Chiquita,” a parody of Spanish singer Charo, the pneumatic, dimwitted secretary Mrs. Wiggins, and “The Charwoman,” a beleaguered cleaning woman with a penchant for breaking into song. The Carol Burnett Show was so popular that Hollywood stars lined up to appear; the show boasted luminaries like Lana Turner, Betty Grable, and Gloria Swanson.

Her parents were performers, but also alcoholics, so Burnett’s childhood was rough. When her parents moved to Hollywood, Burnett’s mother installed her in a one-room apartment with her grandmother, Mabel, who raised Burnett from then on, while her mother lived down the hall, drank, and tried to make it in show business. Mabel wore long johns with a drop-seat, was a notorious hypochondriac and took Burnett to the movies all the time, sometimes twice a day. Back then, movies were always double features, and only cost 11 cents for Burnett and a quarter for her grandmother, so they ended up seeing four movies a day several times a week.

Burnett thought she might be a playwright so she enrolled at UCLA, where students in the playwriting program were required to take an acting class. Burnett’s life changed. She had a small role in a production and decided to make the most of it, drawing out her single line to try and get a reaction from the audience. She says:

“They laughed and it felt great. All of a sudden, after so much coldness and emptiness in my life, I knew the sensation of all that warmth wrapping around me. I had always been a quiet, shy, sad sort of girl and then everything changed for me. You spend the rest of your life hoping you’ll hear a laugh that great again.”

After a class performance at a party in Hollywood, Burnett was stuffing cookies in her purse when a man approached her and asked if she wanted to be an actress. When she said yes, he offered her a thousand dollars to go to New York City if she promised to pay it back in a year and then do something nice for someone else if she got famous. Burnett was skeptical, but the man’s wife said he was sincere, and the next day he drew up a contract, and off Burnett went.

She got her first big break in television, acting in a sitcom with Buddy Hackett and on The Garry Moore Show (1959), but it was her appearance as Princess Winnifred in Once Upon a Mattress — the 1959 Broadway musical adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea” — that really got her noticed.

Burnett wrote about her childhood in the memoir One More Time (1986). Explaining her determination to succeed as an actress, she said, “There is something about being poor and having alcoholic parents that either poisons you or toughens you for life. I realized it was either sink or swim — get out, or be pulled down.”

At the end of every episode of The Carol Burnett Show Burnett would tug on her left ear. That was a special sign to her grandmother Mabel that she loved her.

In 2005, she was recognized as “one of America’s most cherished entertainers” and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom “for enhancing the lives of millions of Americans and for her extraordinary contributions to American entertainment” by President George W. Bush.