Carol

TURNING 90 & STILL YOUNG AT HEART

- LIZ MCNEIL

As a young girl in Depression-era Hollywood, Carol Burnett dreamed of a bigger life. “I used to pretend to be on a radio show,” says the beloved entertainer, who will turn 90 this month. “I’d yell out the window, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have a young girl who is going to sing without any musical accompaniment!’ One time a man next door said, ‘Will you turn that goddamn thing off?’ And I thought, ‘I’m a hit. They think it’s real.’

Burnett’s dreams came true and then some— and her golden gift for comedy led to The Carol Burnett Show, her groundbreaking variety series that featured spoofs, musical numbers, Burnett’s earsplitting Tarzan yell and endless laughs from 1967 to 1978. Offscreen, her life has been marked by moments of serendipity (an anonymous benefactor paid her college tuition her first year) as well as tremendous loss. Her parents died from alcoholism in the 1950s, and she was raised by her grandmother in a one-room apartment. In 2002 the oldest of her three daughters, Carrie Hamilton, who had struggled with drug addiction, died of lung cancer at age 38. And in 2020 she became the temporary guardian of her teenage grandson amid her daughter Erin’s own substance-abuse issues before a permanent guardian was named last year. “Carol transcended a tough childhood by finding the gift of laughter,” says her dear friend Julie Andrews, “and she used that phenomenal gift to save herself and make all of us happier.”