The cliché of the sad clown who laughs on the outside while crying on the
inside holds more than a little truth when it comes to multi-talented actor
and comedian Carol Burnett. For more insight, keep watching for a look inside Burnett's sad life.
Carol Burnett was born in 1933 in San Antonio, Texas, during the Great Depression.
A few years after Burnett's birth, her parents, Joseph and Ina Louise Burnett,
headed west to Los Angeles in search of a better life. She recounted in an interview with NPR:
"My parents came to Hollywood from Texas, and left me there with my grandmother.
They were hoping that they were going to strike it big out here in Hollywood.
And then they divorced. And so my grandmother and I followed my mother out to Hollywood in 1940."
As Burnett recalled in her 2011 autobiography This Time Together: Laughter and Reflection,
her parents were big drinkers and low earners. Writing about her father, she said:
"He had a drinking problem, but he was a good-natured drunk."
However, being hooked on the drink kept Joseph out of steady work, and the family was forced
to rely on government assistance to get by. Burnett told UPI in 1986, simply,:
"It was not a pleasant childhood."
However, she admitted that some others had it worse:
"There are some that were happier and some that have been really miserable.
Mine was not miserable."
Even as a young child, Carol Burnett could see that her parents' drinking was problematic.
As she told People in 2018, she blamed herself and
felt it was her responsibility to try to get them to stop boozing, saying:
"I thought they could [quit] if they wanted to. You can't fix it."
This knowledge was something she would come to share with others who experienced similar
upbringings. In a video interview with actor/activist Marlo Thomas,
Burnett was asked for her advice to children who, like her, have alcoholic parents. She explained:
"First of all, it's not your fault. You think, what am I doing that causes all of this.
And second of all, and I wish it had been in existence when I was growing up,
go to Alateen, which is an offshoot of Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon."
She said of the organization geared toward teenagers that:
"[...] what you learn to do, God willing, is to detach, with love. But they help you
realize that you're not, that you can't cure them, and you didn't cause it.”
“So you have to look out for yourself."
When Carol Burnett, her younger half-sister Chrissie,
and their grandmother (whom she called “Nanny”), Mabel White, relocated to L.A.,
they all lived together in a tiny studio apartment in a building called the Hollywood Arms.
As Burnett told UPI, their dire circumstances didn't seem all that different from those of
everyone else she knew. She explained:
"Then, all my friends had something like my life. [...] Most everybody
in that neighborhood was on relief. It was the Depression."
She recalled thinking that society was divided into:
"two kinds of people — us and the people in the movies. I didn't know anybody in between."
Going to the movies, she revealed in an interview with Maclean's,
was Nanny's one indulgence, and one that gave the youngster a sense of purpose
and happiness. In addition to fostering Burnett's love of film, Nanny inspired a famous Burnett-ism:
The ear-tug move was the TV star's way of saying hello to her grandmother on the program.
Carol Burnett's success didn't come without a whole lot of good fortune.
As People reported, Burnett was thrilled when she was accepted to UCLA
after graduating from high school, but crushed when she had no way to raise the $50
tuition. And then, an envelope showed up in her mailbox, containing that exact amount.
Burnett told the publication, quote, "I still don't know who it was."
While attending UCLA, she gravitated toward theater, and eventually began dreaming of
Broadway. Yet money still remained a problem. Everything changed when,
after a performance with her fellow students, she was approached by a husband and wife
who had just watched her perform. When she told them she hoped to go to New York City,
he offered both Burnett and her boyfriend $1,000 interest-free loans to fund their move.
There were conditions attached: they must pay him back within five years; if they became
successful they would promise to similarly help out other struggling young performers;
and, most importantly, they must never reveal his identity. As Burnett put it to People:
"Somebody had helped him get his start in this country. So he was paying it forward."
Carol Burnett lost both her parents when she was still a young woman,
she told UPI, when they were both only 46.
In her autobiography, Burnett wrote of visiting her father to say goodbye
before she left for New York City to pursue her showbiz dreams. She wrote:
"He was in a cot in a charity hospital suffering from tuberculosis
aggravated by years of drinking."
Before she left, he asked her to save him a ticket for her first Broadway show; sadly, he didn't
live long enough to see his daughter's success, dying not long after her arrival to the city.
Once she arrived in the Big Apple, success came quickly. According to
People, it wasn't long before the plucky performer landed an attention-getting role
on TV's The Garry Moore Show and then the lead role in Broadway hit Once Upon a Mattress, with
CBS eventually signing her to an unprecedented deal that resulted in The Carol Burnett Show.
Carol Burnett's mother, Ina, had been an aspiring writer who never found the success
she believed she deserved. As Burnett revealed in an interview with UPI, elements of her mother
wound up in Eunice, one of the more enduring characters she created for The Carol Burnett Show.
Noting that her mother neither resembled nor sounded like the character,
Burnett noted that Eunice and her mother did share:
"this philosophy of 'if only...' and 'I could have...' and 'I should have...'.
It was always, 'If this hadn't happened...' or, to Nanny,
'If you hadn't rained on my dreams...'. There was a lot of Mama that I put into Eunice."
The Eunice sketches, she told NPR, were equal parts tragedy and comedy:
"Eunice always had these dreams... that she was gonna be somebody."
“You just give me back all of my lines, and you keep this
scene-stealing hog outta my line of fire!”
She cited a sketch in which Eunice makes it
onto the stage of wacky 1970s TV talent competition The Gong Show
and considered it the first stop on her train to Hollywood stardom. Of course, Burnett said:
"They gonged her before she got three notes out."
The sketch, she admitted, quote, "was a heavy piece."
While Carol Burnett was pushing her career to become one of TV's biggest stars,
all was not rosy on the home front. As she recalled for ABC News,
behind the scenes she was coping with a failing marriage and the realization that her daughter,
Carrie Hamilton, had developed a serious addiction to drugs and alcohol by age 13.
Burnett shouldered the blame for her daughter's drug abuse, saying:
"I thought... was there something I should have seen, something I should have known,
something I would have spotted? You know, what did I miss? Was I not strong enough?"
Burnett wrote about her daughter's struggles in a book, Carrie and Me: A Mother-Daughter Love Story.
In an excerpt, she described checking Carrie into more than one treatment facility. She wrote:
"Finally we got tough and sent her to rehab."
In a later People interview, she filled in more details:
"She got sober when she was 17. I put her in a third rehab place, and oh my God,
she hated me. I came to the conclusion that I had to love her enough to let her hate me."
After her daughter got sober, Burnett told People:
"We started bonding. We wound up working together,
writing a play together. We worked together in three shows."
Meanwhile, Hamilton pursued her own career as an actor and writer, amassing screen credits
including such TV series as Fame and Beverly Hills, 90210, and a starring role in the
feature film Tokyo Pop. Eventually, Burnett and her daughter teamed up to write a play:
an adaptation of Burnett's memoir One More Time, Hollywood Arms,
which is based on her upbringing in her grandmother's studio apartment.
Before the play premiered at Goodman Theater in Chicago in spring 2002,
tragedy struck when Hamilton was diagnosed with lung cancer. She died in January 2002 at age 38.
As Burnett explained in an interview with Fox News,
she learned a valuable lesson about life by watching her daughter in her final days. She said:
"When she was in the hospital the last time one of the nurses came up to me in the hall and said,
'Carrie just cheers us up when we go in the room.' And I asked Carrie, 'How can you be up and
so cheerful?' and Carrie said, 'Every day I wake up and decide today I'm going to love my life.'"
Marriage has not always been easy for Carol Burnett. She was still in her 20s when she
wed college sweetheart Don Saroyan who, like her, was an aspiring actor.
According to a review of the biography Laughing Till It Hurts
in the Chicago Tribune, the marriage ended simply because she became:
"so obsessed with her burgeoning career that she soon [had] little time for anything else."
Burnett's second husband, Joe Hamilton, was also the executive producer on The Carol Burnett Show.
While the two worked successfully together on her hit TV series, the experience had clearly taken
its toll when, in 1982, they announced their separation. Burnett and Hamilton were married
for 19 years, and shared three children. They divorced in 1982; he died in 1991.
Burnett wed one more time, in 2001, marrying drummer Brian Miller. Despite their age difference
— he is 26 years younger — the match proved to be a solid one. Burnett explained to People in 2010:
"As we get older, the gap between our ages narrows. If you were 40 and
married a 20-year-old, I don't think you could communicate like [we do]."
In April 2020, Carol Burnett celebrated her 87th birthday. Living to such a ripe old age has meant
saying goodbye to many friends, including several beloved co-stars from The Carol Burnett Show.
The first Carol Burnett Show cast member to pass away was Harvey Korman,
who died in 2008 at 81. In a statement provided to CBS News,
Burnett shared that she was "devastated" by Korman's death. More than a decade later, Burnett
said her final goodbye to Tim Conway, legendary for his ability to crack up the rest of the cast.
After Conway's passing in 2019 at age 85, Burnett issued a statement obtained by Deadline:
"I'm heartbroken. He was one in a million, not only as a brilliant comedian but as a loving human
being. I cherish the times we had together both on the screen and off. He'll be in my heart forever."
The following year, Lyle Waggoner — who spent seven years on The Carol Burnett
Show — died at the age of 84. Burnett told People:
"He was funny, kind and multi-talented. But even more than that, a loving friend. I will miss him."
Of Carol Burnett's three children, her late daughter Carrie Hamilton wasn't the
only one to experience problems with substance abuse. As The Blast reported in August 2020,
Burnett filed legal documents to have her and husband Brian Miller appointed as
temporary legal guardians of her grandson, Dylan, then 13. According to The Blast,
Burnett claimed that her daughter, singer Erin Hamilton, threatened suicide, and her
family contacted the LAPD to perform a wellness check. Burnett said in a statement to People:
"Due to addiction issues and other circumstances that my daughter, Erin, has been struggling with
impacting her immediate family dynamic, my husband and I have petitioned the court to be appointed
legal guardian of my 14-year-old grandson. We look forward to recovery being the next stepping
stone towards normalization and ask for privacy at this time to allow that process to occur."
On September 1, a judge granted Burnett's request. While Burnett offered no comment,
Entertainment Weekly reported that the court found, quote,
"sufficient evidence... to grant the matter." The order was valid until January 2021.
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts,
please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline​ at​ 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.