Carol Burnett Plays On

Jody turned up occasionally to take Burnett for a soda, but he failed to stay sober. Louise had an affair with a married man, resulting in the birth of Burnett’s half sister, Antonia Christine, and afterward fell into a deep depression and began drinking heavily, too. Burnett remembers volcanic fights between Mae and Louise, who would accuse Mae of trying to turn Burnett against her. Burnett learned how to disassociate, pretending at bath time to be a mermaid or drawing comics about a fictional happy family. During her teen-age years, Mae and Louise would refer to this behavior as “Carol putting her shade down.”

Burnett inherited her mother’s fascination with the movies. The Hollywood sign was visible from the roof of their building, and Burnett liked to climb up there and gaze at it. She and Mae would see second-run features at local theatres almost daily, and at night they would “hit the boulevard” to scope out the premières taking place at the grand film houses. Burnett’s favorite stories were always “the happy ones,” in which lovers found each other in the end, justice was served, and everyone tap-danced off into the sunset. (“The movies then, they just weren’t cynical,” Burnett said.) She and other local kids would act out scenes from films. A cousin would play Jane; Burnett, as Tarzan, perfected her yodel. She developed a pretend radio show, which she’d perform out the window, and a recurring bit in which she’d play her own twin. Still, she rarely thought about becoming a professional performer. Her mother was a vain woman, styling her hair painstakingly each day to cover a birthmark on her temple, and she was tough on Burnett about her appearance. By the time she reached middle school, Burnett was five feet seven, with a weak chin that made her feel like a “gopher girl.” Louise advised Burnett to pursue a career as a reporter, telling her, “You can always write, no matter what you look like.”

In Burnett’s telling, her path to show business involved a series of miraculous breaks, beginning at the end of high school, when she was admitted to U.C.L.A. but couldn’t afford a forty-three-dollar administrative fee. One afternoon, she checked the mailbox and found an envelope addressed to her, with no return address, containing a single fifty-dollar bill. “To this day, I have no idea where it came from,” she said. “But it paid for college.” At U.C.L.A., she discovered that there was no undergraduate journalism major, so she enrolled instead in the theatre-arts program, planning to study playwriting. But in a mandatory acting class she discovered a knack for comedy. She played a country bumpkin in a one-act play, delivering her straightforward opening line—“I’m back!”—in a Texarkana drawl inspired by one of her great-grandmothers. It brought down the house. She soon started doing college musicals, where she learned that she could belt. “I tried out for the chorus of ‘South Pacific,’ and the director told me I was too loud and couldn’t blend,” she said. She did get the part of Nathan Detroit’s fiancée, Adelaide, in “Guys and Dolls,” and found a more fitting register in a number that the character sings with a honking cold.

“Once they find out you can talk, they never stop asking you questions.”

Cartoon by Robert Leighton

Louise came to see her in a college production and Burnett fondly recalls her saying, “You were the best one.” But neither of Burnett’s parents would survive to see her career success. Her father died in 1954, at the age of forty-seven, owing to complications from alcoholism; her mother died a few years later, at forty-six, of the same cause, leaving Burnett as the guardian of her teen-age half sister. (Mae lived until 1967, just before “The Carol Burnet Show” débuted.) Still, Burnett told me, of her childhood, “I always knew I was loved.” Her autobiographical stage play, “Hollywood Arms,” features a scene in which she’s let down by a drunken Jody, then serenaded by her mother and grandmother with a Doris Day ode to positivity: “Live, love, laugh and be happy.”

Like Barbra Streisand, who had a natural talent for singing and claims to feel almost bored by her instrument, Burnett doesn’t like to analyze where her artistry comes from. In a 1972 Esquire interview, the writer Harold Brodkey pressed her to examine her comedic sources. Had she read Freud? “It’s just comedy,” she replied. “There’s no medicine box—no, there’s no soapbox to my humor.” Still, you don’t need to be trained in psychoanalysis to recognize that some of Burnett’s most iconic comedy routines double as portraits of the malcontented women who raised her, among them her role in “The Family,” a series of sketches from “The Carol Burnett Show” about a riotously dysfunctional working-class clan. The writers behind the sketches assumed that Burnett would play the part of Mama, the mean-hearted matriarch; instead, Burnett chose to be Mama’s daughter Eunice, a whiner in a dead-end marriage who believes that she is destined for Hollywood stardom. Burnett gave the character a Texas twang, as a reference to her own thwarted mother. The sketches ran long, often up to twenty minutes, forcing viewers to endure the family acrimony past the point of comfort. Burnett likes to recount how the cast rehearsed one “Family” sketch without accents or costumes, as an experiment. The effect was very different. “It was devastating,” she said.

This past year, the comedic writer and actor Cole Escola delivered a distinctly Burnettian performance as Mary Todd Lincoln in the hit Broadway farce “Oh, Mary!” Escola told me, “What Carol did is so important to me, because it really feels like watching someone open a childhood wound, but knowing how to do it for laughs.” Like Burnett, Escola comes from a family marked by poverty and alcoholism, and Escola said, of Burnett’s comedy of repressed or delusional women, “I don’t see it as apolitical at all.” “Oh, Mary!” tells the story of Lincoln’s assassination in an ahistorical spew of dirty jokes and cabaret numbers. The play, which Escola wrote, isn’t explicitly drawn from their personal history, but they described it as “more autobiographical than any memoir I could write,” adding, “I get the same feeling watching Carol perform the broadest, dumbest things, or these kitchen-sink melodramas that are actually surprisingly telling and deep. And, if they don’t hit people, then the next joke is never too far away.”

Burnett’s singular vice is real estate. “I used to love to move,” she told me, adding that this might be because she’d spent so much of her youth stuck in one tiny room. Throughout the years, she has lived in some combination of a Beverly Hills mansion, a sprawling manor in Honolulu, a compound in Santa Fe, an apartment in Trump Tower, and a condo in the Wilshire, a tony building in L.A. Around 2000, as a sentimental gesture, she rented Room 102, the apartment she’d grown up in, and used it briefly as a writing studio.

Today, Burnett has whittled her real-estate portfolio down to one property, a relatively modest Mediterranean-style house in a gated golf-course community in the Santa Barbara area. When I first visited her there, in the fall of 2024, she steered me into the main hallway. It was lined, like the walls of a midtown-Manhattan deli, with hundreds of photographs of Burnett with other famous people, including almost every American President since Eisenhower. There were framed notes from Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart. A telegram from Rita Hayworth, sent after Burnett did a sketch parody of Hayworth’s role in the noir film “Gilda,” read, “I loved it. You should have done the original.” One photograph, of Burnett and Dolly Parton standing back to back, was angled slightly, to suggest that it was being weighed down by Parton’s breasts. “Isn’t that great?” Burnett said.