A stranger's secret thousand-dollar loan sent Carol Burnett to New York
In 1954 a shipbuilding millionaire watched a UCLA student perform at a party and lent her $1,000 on three conditions: repay it in five years, never name him, and help other young talent if she made it. Burnett repaid him to the day, then became the first woman to host a comedy-variety series.
Carol Creighton Burnett was born in San Antonio, Texas, on April 26, 1933, and named after Carole Lombard. Her parents split in the late 1930s and she ended up with her grandmother in a single room in a poor corner of Hollywood, near her mother. The films her grandmother took her to later fed the sketches of her television show. At nine she taught herself the Tarzan yell, which became a favourite with fans and, she realised later, a fine exercise for vocal volume.
An anonymous envelope with $50 paid her first year at UCLA, where she meant to study journalism, then aimed at playwriting. That track demanded an acting class, and on stage she impulsively stretched her first line into a long, drawn-out vowel. The laugh changed her; she had been a shy, sad girl, and she spent the rest of her career chasing that feeling. Her mother, who wanted her to write instead, once told her she could do that whatever she looked like, a remark Burnett called deeply hurtful in her 1986 memoir.
New York began with hat-checking and a revue staged by aspiring actresses at the Rehearsal Club. A comic nightclub song about her supposed crush on Secretary of State John Foster Dulles reached The Ed Sullivan Show in 1957, and Dulles himself joked about it on Meet the Press. The Broadway musical Once Upon a Mattress in 1959 earned a Tony nomination, and The Garry Moore Show brought her first Emmy in 1962.
From 1967 to 1978 she starred in The Carol Burnett Show on CBS, a vaudeville-flavoured mix of film parodies, characters, song and dance that collected armfuls of Emmys and Golden Globes. Her honours include seven Primetime Emmys, a Grammy for recording her memoir In Such Good Company, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005. In 2019 the Golden Globes created a television career award in her name and gave the first one to her. Even the placement of her Walk of Fame star carries a joke: she asked for it outside the cinema that once fired her as an usherette.
Source: Carol Burnett
