Getting another chance to howl

The lore about Carol Burnett starts, fittingly, in Hollywood. She grew up in an apartment on Wilcox and Yucca with her grandmother, who took her to four double features a week. Afterward, Burnett and her friends would act out all the parts. They’d climb up to the Hollywood sign -- Burnett favored the O’s because they were less rickety than the other letters, as she tells it -- and she would let loose with a Tarzan yell.

That cry ricocheted off more than the hills, eventually landing as a signature moment on one of the most popular, longest-running variety shows on television.

Recognizing that, TV Land is reuniting the cast to present “The Carol Burnett Show” with the Legend Award during its third annual “TV Land Awards: A Celebration of Classic TV” on Wednesday.

It’s a lovely gesture but hardly necessary. Ask anyone of a certain age, and you’ll find that “The Carol Burnett Show,” which ran from 1967 to 1978, became legendary long ago. The program and the cast -- Burnett, Tim Conway, Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence and Lyle Waggoner -- were as much a part of weekly life as Saturday night itself.

Not bad for a Hollywood kid whose grandmother scraped money from the welfare check so they could go to the movies.

Those hours Burnett spent spellbound in darkened theaters would later fuel the show’s parodies of films such as “Mildred Pierce” and “Gone With the Wind.” (The latter inspired one of the great sight gags of all time -- when Scarlett needs a new dress to impress Rhett and uses the curtains, rod and all. Design great Bob Mackie, who worked for the show, came up with the idea.)

Those movie spoofs caught the eye of stars such as Rita Hayworth, who sent a telegram congratulating the cast, and Joan Crawford, who called Burnett and said, “You gave us more production than a ... Warner Bros. movie” -- albeit in slightly saltier language.

In fact, the screen gods and goddesses of the day, those same ones Burnett had watched adoringly with her grandmother, turned out to be admirers, calling to ask if they could come on the program.

Recently, as the cast members looked back on the show’s heyday, they sounded a unanimous note of wonder that their idols were fans.

“Even though I grew up doing Betty Grable and Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth, they were guests on the show. That was something. If my grandmother had been alive, it would have killed her,” Burnett said, laughing, as she sat in her Beverly Hills office. “She would have had a heart attack to see me working with Betty, to see me working with Lana.”

Over the phone from his home in Westlake Village, Waggoner spoke of the day Sammy Davis Jr. stopped him in the hall of CBS, where the show was taped, to thank him for his work. “He’s thanking me?” Waggoner thought.

Conway and Korman, during a joint interview in Westwood, remembered innumerable meetings with famous fans: Gloria Swanson, James Stewart, Gene Kelly, Rosalind Russell and Henry Fonda among them.

Conway recalled trying to talk to Frank Sinatra when Ol’ Blue Eyes approached him. No words came out, just gibberish. Conway insists that even after a number of evenings spent with Sinatra, he was still so awestruck that he couldn’t form a coherent sentence.

Korman remembered Fred Astaire complimenting him on the show, and Korman could only think, “You’re Fred Astaire for heaven’s sake, what are you talking about, why would you even look at me?”

Another big star proved the undoing of a few cast members. Burnett recalled the day Korman came into work with the news that he had been at a party with Cary Grant the previous Saturday night, and Grant had asked the hostess at 10 o’clock where the television was, because he never missed the show. “I said, ‘Oh, my God, Harvey, Cary Grant knows who we are?’ ” Burnett said, her eyes wide.

A few weeks later she was at a party at Peggy Lee’s house when “all of a sudden it got very quiet, and it was as if the Red Sea parted, and in walks Cary Grant.” Burnett immediately ran to get her coat, telling her then-husband (and the show’s producer), Joe Hamilton, that they had to leave before she could meet Grant, because she knew she would make a fool of herself.

While in the coat closet, she felt a tap on her shoulder. “And I turned around, and I’m looking at this gorgeous face, and my heart is beating so loudly that it’s in my ears. And his mouth is moving, and I know he’s got to be saying something charming, but I can’t hear it.

“Then his mouth stopped moving. I realized it was my turn to say something, and I blurted out, ‘Oh, you’re a credit to your profession,’ ” she said with a roll of her eyes. “I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me whole.”

She ran out to the car with Hamilton, who told her she was right: They should have left before she spoke.

Waggoner remembered the party -- Grant tapped his shoulder too. “He said, ‘Excuse me, hello, I’m Cary Grant,’ and I thought, ‘No kidding,’ ” said Waggoner, who was dumbstruck when Grant said he was a fan.

Korman’s moment was at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, waiting impatiently for Conway to show up so they could present an award at a black-tie event, when he got his tap on the shoulder from Grant. “I swear to you, I nearly fainted,” Korman said. “I swooned.”

But Grant was undeterred by all the responses, and the group struck up a friendship. They even used to pal around at the Hollywood Park racetrack. “Grant was a $2 bettor,” Korman confides.

Stars even showed up in the studio audience. One night Korman’s lifelong idol, Laurence Olivier, came to watch a taping. Vicki Lawrence saw how nervous Korman was and tried to reassure him: “What’s the big deal? He’s just a guy, and you’re funny.” To which she said Korman replied, “What do you know, you little putz? You’re too young and stupid to be scared.”

Vicki Lawrence was indeed young, getting the job just out of high school as the result of a fan letter she wrote to Burnett. Over the phone from her Long Beach home, she remembered being onstage doing scenes with movie stars, wondering, “What the hell am I doing here?”

Sometimes the stars may have wondered that themselves. “Usually people who came from the movies or stage were terrified because of the time span we had to work in,” said Mackie, who created about 50 costumes a week for the show. “So it was always an interesting week.”

Lawrence remembered that Hayworth was traumatized because she couldn’t get a dance number right. “She said, ‘I don’t know how you people do this in a week,’ and I’m thinking, ‘My God, Miss Hayworth, you’ve gone up and down a staircase with Fred Astaire, get a grip.’ ”

The cast members are delighted with the TV Land award and that the airing of “The Carol Burnett Show” (8 a.m. Saturdays) has given them a new generation of fans. Most of them are still hard at work, connected in some fashion to the show or one another.

Lawrence often performs on the road with her “two-woman show -- Vicki Lawrence and Mama,” as she calls it, referring to the character she played in “Mama’s Family” that was first seen on “The Carol Burnett Show.” Conway and Korman have been performing on the road together for years. Waggoner runs Star Waggons, which supplies location trailers to the entertainment industry. Mackie recently designed costumes for Burnett in the remake of the musical “Once Upon a Mattress,” due out late in the fall from ABC.

But even after all these years and all those shows, the gang still can’t believe its luck in meeting, and working with, its Tinseltown heroes.

“When we were growing up, these were indeed giants, they were myths, they were larger than life,” Korman said. “Meanwhile it turns around, and they are fans of ours. How gratifying can that be?

“But it brings up another point. Do we have those kinds of people in movies and television today? They’re commodities, you see them on television all the time, in all the magazines. They’re way too available, there’s no magic anymore, no mystery. I miss that.”

*

‘TV Land Awards’

Where: TV Land

When: 9 p.m. Wednesday

Rating: TV-G (suitable for all ages)