The F-word is very important to Carol Burnett.
That is, at 91 years old, with 25 Emmy nominations, two Peabodys and a Presidential Medal of Freedom, she’s only looking for one thing when it comes to work: fun.
“It’s my F-word. If it looks like it’s going to be fun, I want to do it,” she says.
Burnett has spent more than seven decades making people laugh. One of the best physical comedians of all time, she did it again as Norma Dellacorte in Apple TV+’s 2024 comedy “Palm Royale,” about a social climber (Kristen Wiig) desperate for her aunt-by-marriage’s inheritance. Burnett plays the conniving aunt.
In the first three episodes, Burnett didn’t even have lines, since her character was in a coma. However, being immobile couldn’t hold her back from stealing every scene.
It seems nothing could. In 1958, she landed her first gig, as a supporting comedian, on “The Garry Moore Show.” Ultimately, she appeared on 133 episodes. After that, she scored a 10-year contract with CBS, which offered her an hourlong variety show for 30 episodes.
“I called CBS, and they kind of pooh-poohed it,” she says. “They said, ‘Well, comedy variety is a man’s game.’” Instead, the network pitched her a sitcom called “Here’s Agnes.”
“Palm Royale” creator Abe Sylvia liked this story so much that he wrote it into the twist at the end of the first season: Burnett is actually Agnes, Norma’s roommate, who may or may not have killed Norma. (The name “Norma” is also a nod to Burnett’s cat, spotted on her laptop screen in the hotel room where she’s spending the day. Beside the computer sit scripts from Season 2.)
In the fifth year of her contract, Burnett pushed back at CBS and soon started her own variety show. “The Carol Burnett Show” aired for 11 seasons, from 1967 to 1978; it featured, at various points, Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence, Lyle Waggoner, Tim Conway and Dick Van Dyke. The show earned 25 Emmys.
In those 11 years, Burnett was given only one censorship note from the network. In one sketch, she played a member of a nudist community; when asked how they dance, she answered, “Very carefully.” CBS said she couldn’t say that, so she changed it: “When they said, ‘How do you dance?’ I said, ‘Cheek-to-cheek.’”
It’s been more than half a century since Burnett began in the business. Not only has the industry changed, but so has being famous. Now there aren’t many topics that are off-limits; celebrities commonly share their opinions about everything from equal pay to who they’re voting for in the upcoming presidential election. The former, Burnett has something to say about; the latter, not so much.
“I stay out of it,” she says of politics. Burnett has never publicly endorsed a candidate. “It sounds corny, but I want people to be happy again, to love and be joyful, and that’s what I’m seeing as a possibility.”
Politics comes up again when asked what she’s afraid of. First, her answer is snakes. Then she expands: “The world. How is it going to turn out? I’m scared with what’s going on in the world now. That scares me the most. Yet now, I do have hope.”
“Hope and joy” could be Burnett’s middle name: No matter the question or topic, she has a smile on her face. It remains even as she discusses the many ways the world has changed — or, in the case of equal pay, hasn’t. But she hopes women will keep pushing for it.
“I went to a lot of meetings [about equal pay], and at one point, I was calling fellow celebrities. I won’t say who, but I got this one man, a very big star, rattling on about it. He said, ‘I don’t want to do that, because that means all the women are going to be smoking cigars,’” she says, looking puzzled. “‘OK? They could smoke cigars now! We’re not stopping them, if they want to light up.’ Is that the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard? What about equal pay for equal work?”
While Burnett has always had confidence when asking for what she wants, she also has an interesting perspective when it comes to handling rejection. Early on, she lost a role she was auditioning for in New York against one other young woman.
“What kept me from being disappointed or dejected was a wonderful thought: It wasn’t my turn; it was her turn,” she says. “That saved me from being sad.”
The confidence that her turn would come grew as she surrounded herself with women in the same boat as she was. In the early 1950s, she was paying $18 a week to live at the Rehearsal Club in New York, which housed women pursuing a career in show business. Now, she’s developing a comedy-drama for Apple TV+ about it.
She lights up as she reflects on her time at the club, telling one story that will be featured in the show: She and four other women chipped in $5 to buy an audition dress from Bloomingdale’s that they all shared.
Another story from that time: Every meeting the young women went to, an agent would say, “Let me know when you’re in something.” But they couldn’t land a role without an agent. “So I called a meeting. There were 25 girls, and I said, ‘Let’s put on a show.’ We wrote it, and everybody wanted to do their own thing,” she remembers. Some sang soprano; some did dance routines. Once “the ladies who lunch in New York,” who sponsored the club, saw the first act, they paid $200 for the women to rent the Carl Fischer Concert Hall for two nights.
“We sent penny postcards to every agent, director and writer in town saying, ‘You’re always saying, “Let us know when you’re in something.” We’re in something. This postcard is your ticket. Please come.’ And we put on a show,” she say
Burnett famously grew up with her grandmother in a small apartment in the heart of Hollywood, where she fell in love with movies. “When my grandmother and I would go, I always loved Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. They would always be putting on a show — they would put it on in the barn, and then it would wind up going to Broadway! That’s where I got the idea.”
The idea worked. Three women landed agents; one was Burnett.
Burnett is currently co-writing and producing two other series she’s not ready to talk about. “I don’t want to jinx it,” she says. But she does mention a show that will drop in December on TCM: While classic films like “Mildred Pierce,” “Gone With the Wind,” “The Heiress” and “Born to Be Bad” air, Burnett will dissect them in a discussion with Dave Carter.
But “Palm Royale” will likely be her last on-camera job, marking her retirement from acting. “Probably,” she says before quickly correcting herself with “Unless there’s a cameo or something fun!”
One person she’d never turn down is Vince Gilligan. Burnett played a guest role in the final season of “Better Call Saul,” and her “feel-good” show is “Breaking Bad.” So if Gilligan asked her to appear on his upcoming Rhea Seehorn series, “I’d be there in a shot,” Burnett says.
She felt that way about “Palm Royale” too. When Sylvia told Burnett that the series starred Wiig, Allison Janney, Laura Dern and Ricky Martin, she didn’t need to read a script to say yes. “Just to be able to get in the sandbox and play with those people, it would be a joy,” she says.
It’s no surprise that those who were able to work alongside Burnett felt like the lucky ones. “Fingers, toes, eyes, legs, roads, bridges,” Sylvia says of casting the comedy legend, “everything that I could physically cross was crossed. Carol is so deft, so instinctual and so completely in control of her one-of-a-kind, once-in-a-generation instrument.”
Burnett announced her arrival on the set of “Palm Royale” with “a gentle ‘Yoo-hoo,’” he says, and her presence encouraged everyone to do their best. “She is one of the most gifted people we will ever have the good fortune of working with, as well as being a total ray of sunshine.”
If “Palm Royale” does turn out to be Burnett’s final role, it’ll be her decision — much like it was during “The Carol Burnett Show.”
“I called it quits,” she says, “because I thought we had done just about everything we could do, and we had started to repeat ourselves in sketches. I said, ‘I want to leave before the network starts flicking the lights on and off and saying, ‘Goodbye. Don’t do this anymore.’ I wanted to say goodbye.”
Tiana DeNicola contributed to this story
Burnett has been a supporter of the Hereditary Disease Foundation since its inception in 1968. She knew the founder, Dr. Milton Wexler, whose wife, Leonore, had Huntington’s disease, and whose two daughters, Alice and Nancy, had a 50% chance of inheriting it. The hope was that Wexler would find a cure.
Nancy became a doctor, and in 1979 formed a team of other doctors to study the disease. They headed to an island in Venezuela after learning that half the population had Huntington’s.
“For years, they were doing tests. Miraculously, they found the gene that causes it,” Burnett says. While there’s not yet a cure, finding the gene is one step closer to doing so.
“It was her tireless work. Now also in finding that gene, it opens the door to find a cure for ALS, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s,” she says. “Once they found the gene, it meant that anybody who could get it could choose to take the test to find out if they’re going to get it or not. What kind of a choice would you make? Would you want to know? Would you not want to know?”
It’s a question Burnett has no idea how she’d answer. But she finds it extremely important that people are aware of the possibilities, so that they can seek treatment early.
Makeup: Marja Webster; Hair: Sachi Worrall
From Variety US