Vicki Lawrence
Vicki Lawrence jokes that she has grown into the character of “Mama,” the character she made famous on “The Carol Burnett Show,” as if it were a pair of hand-me-down blue jeans.
“I’m older than I ever thought Mama was,” Lawrence says. “I was 24 when I started playing her. People would ask, ‘Well, how old do you think she is?’ And I’d say, ‘I don’t know. Mid-to-late 60s maybe.’
“Now, I’m older than that.”
Lawrence today is 72 and is still portraying Mama some 48 years later. She was in town recently to perform her critically acclaimed two-woman show, “Vicki Lawrence and Mama,” at Arlington Music Hall.
For the younger generation, “Mama” was the sharp-tongued matriarch of a Southern family who doesn’t suffer fools well, even when they’re blood, in the famed skits on Burnett’s show. The sketches were written by Dick Clair and Jenna McMahon. The skits evolved into a spin-off, “Mama’s Family,” which originally ran on NBC before being canceled after one season. In 1986, almost two years after, “Mama’s Family” returned in first-run syndication, lasting four more seasons.
Lawrence, an Emmy Award winner for her work on “The Carol Burnett Show,” is convinced that her story of Hollywood fame would never happen today. Hers started with a fan letter she wrote as a senior in high school to Burnett. Lawrence was an admitted serial fan letter writer.
“I had crushes on every guy that you could think of that was on TV back in the day,” she says. “I had all their autographed pictures on my walls. Everyone from Fabian and Bobby Rydell to Johnny Crawford from the ‘Rifleman’ and ‘The Donna Reed Show.’ It was ridiculous.”
Friends at her Morningside High School in Inglewood, California, said she looked like Burnett, as did a newspaper reporter writing an advance of the Miss Fireball competition, which was looking for a young girl to represent the Inglewood Fire Department.
“My mother was like, ‘OK, it’s time to write this fan letter,” Lawrence says. “So, it was really my mother.”
The letter managed to land on Burnett’s desk at the CBS studios. Burnett’s cousin, whom Burnett called “Cuz,” worked as her secretary at the time.
“Cuz went into her office and said, ‘I have a fan letter here that you really should read.’”
Burnett was at that very moment putting together a new show, “The Carol Burnett Show.” As part of that, Burnett and the writers were thinking of doing a sketch of her raising her sister in New York when she was first married.
“So, they were looking for a kid sister,” Lawrence says. “She said, ‘I’m going to call her.’ She looked up my dad’s name in the phone book and made arrangements to see this [Miss Fireball] to see this contest. Nothing like this would ever happen now.”
Lawrence was 18 years old, a freshman at UCLA, and a then part-timer on “The Carol Burnett Show.”
The first part of her two-woman show is autobiographical, telling audiences the story of how it all happened.
Lawrence relayed how Burnett would tell the story about “the suits” coming downstairs and saying, “'Don’t you think we need to get a cute little actress because Vicki is kind of rough.’ And Carol said, ‘I said to them, she is a diamond in the rough, and we are keeping her.’
“Nowadays, if you think about it, I would be voted off by the judges. And if not the judges, America would vote me off the next week.”
Serendipitous is a word she uses often. It’s all a story of chance and good fortune.
“I’ve found that the further away you get from the golden age of television almost how magical those stories become. Even ‘Mama' was serendipitous. It was an accident.”
Today, Lawrence is also an advocate for those, like herself, who suffer from a rare condition called chronic spontaneous urticaria — a “mouthful,” she likes to say. Urticaria is the medical term for hives. CSU is a condition that causes chronic hives. There is no rhyme or reason why it happens. And there is no cure.
Lawrence does her work through csuandyou.com.
How was the character of “Mama” developed: "The original sketch was written by two writers on Carol’s show. They came from dysfunctional upbringings and wrote this beautiful homage to their crazy families. They wrote Mama for Carol. When she read the sketch, she said she wanted to play Eunice, which was very upsetting to the writers. She went to Bob Mackie and said, 'Don’t you think we could make Vicki Mama?' And he said, ‘Oh, yeah, for sure.’ By then, I had played many old ladies on the show. It was just another old lady.
“Then when she decided she wanted to do it Southern, they [the writers] lost it. They said, ‘You have ruined it. You’ll offend half the country.’ They were wrong. Everybody loved it. They couldn’t write those sketches fast enough. It took them at least three weeks to churn one of those out.”
School and the show. How much time did the show demand? “The deal [with the show] was you can go to college as long as you can be at the studio by 10 o’clock. I had no college life. I was off campus before anybody was awake. I took everything you could take at 7:30 – 8 in the morning.
“In the beginning, all I did was that Carol and Sis sketch. We only did them for a few years. I didn’t have a lot to do in the beginning. I would have three or four lines in these sketches. They always had me hanging the coats in the closet. Always. That was something for me to do. I’d be standing up at the closet, looking at Harvey and Carol down in front of me acting, and look at that audience behind them. I literally had to snap myself out of it and say, ‘Pay attention! You have a line coming up. What are you doing?’ It was surreal … the whole thing was surreal.”
That troupe, with Harvey Korman and Tim Conway, was simply a collection of geniuses. “It was like going to the Harvard School of Comedy in front of America, you know? And Harvey was the one who taught me, I would say, most of what I know about comedy. Carol had a show to run. She was very, very busy. He said, ‘Forget stage left, stage right, you can’t even find the toilet.’ He just set about to make me a comedian. He took me under his wing and worked on dialects with me, and props. I remember him saying to me very early on, ‘Make your props your friends.’
“To this day, my props are always my friend because I associate them when I’m learning lines, what you’re doing and where you are with the lines. I have a hard time memorizing a script. I need it up on its feet, and find out where everything goes. And then it’s easy for me to learn my lines.”
And … oh, I’m sorry, go ahead. “Funny story. In the 1990s I worked on 'Hannah Montana' with Miley Cyrus, who was very young and very new, but the producer said, 'She’s really a sponge … she’s really smart, really good. We’re trying to get good actors in her to work with her. So, if you have anything to teach her, please, teach her.’ So, the very first scene we had was in the kitchen. We had to get stuff in and out of the cupboards and get stuff together on the countertop, and she was kind of fighting with the props. And I said, ‘Miley, make the props your friends,’ and we talked about it and how Harvey had taught me that. By the end of rehearsal, we had choreographed this lovely little kitchen scene.
“Fast forward about four years later, and I’m on one of the very last episodes of 'Hannah Montana.' [Grandmother] and Miley are all dressed up, and we’re going to a fancy tearoom. We enter the scene and sit down, and I put my purse on the table and realize like two lines into the scene that that purse is going to be in every shot, and it’s not going to be good. I stop and say, ‘Hold on, hold on. This purse is going to be a problem.’ I said, ‘Miley, where did you put your purse?’ She said, ‘I hung it on the back of my chair, Vicki. Make your props your friends!’" [laughing]
What were your thoughts about young Miley Cyrus? “She was adorable. She was smart as a whip. She ran that place … pretty much. She is a smart girl. When it ended, everybody was calling me asking, ‘What is going to happen to Miley?’ She went on a little wild streak. ‘Is she going to be OK?’ I said, ‘You know what, she’s smarter than hell. She knows she doesn’t want to be a Disney star forever, and she is breaking that mold … throwing it against the wall. She’s so damn talented. I’m not a bit worried about Miley coming out the other side.’”
You’re doing Mama almost 50 years after she came to life. Might you pull a Betty White and be doing Mama at almost 100 years old? “Oh, my, God. Wouldn’t we all love to be Betty White? I used to say when I was young, 'I hope to grow up to be Betty White.' Now, I’m like, ‘Who the hell can keep up with Betty White?’ Doesn’t she want to take a vacation?
“She was on ‘Mama’s Family’ for the first season we were on NBC. She guest starred a lot, and Rue McClanahan was my co-star. We sat for a year and half before we were put in first-run syndication. It was during that year and a half that those girls did a pilot called the ‘Golden Girls,’ and I remember Betty coming to me and my husband and said, ‘You guys, I think this is the one.’ Boy, was she right. I lost both those girls to the ‘Golden Girls’ in that year and half.”
