Carol the Clown

The biggest yuk to hit television since Sid Caesar's salad wilted is a Goofy-Cousin-Clara sort of a girl with a grin full of teeth, a manner both tentative and brash, and a talent that comes bubbling up every time she opens her big mouth, shakes a leg, or crosses an eye. Carol Burnett, 29, who last week shared the podium with Julie Andrews in a TV special called Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall, has a warmth that neither coaxial cable nor gloom of darkened living room can dim. She is even funny away from the camera, despite her demurrer: "I'm never on when I'm off."

The Dulles Girl. Carol has been a regular on The Garry Moore Show for the past three years, a fact that has made

Tuesday nights more than ordinarily bearable in the Wasteland. Last week's special was Burnett at her manic best. Instead of ending up as a homemade foil for the urbane Andrews charms, she came near to clomping away with the whole show.

As an exhausted member of the "Nausiev Dancers," she fairly hoofed her dirndl off in a parody on visiting Russian dance companies set to a Volga-rized score from Annie Get Your Gun. Even in a too-predictable "cavalcade of U.S. musical comedy" medley with Julie Andrews--a Merman-Martin act, complete with audience applause to greet every familiar tune--Carol's mugging saved the cliches from being too cloying. While Julie sang dramatically: "You've been in love, or so you said, you should know better . . .", Carol, suddenly smitten with guilt, put bent fingers in mouth and averted her head in a hilarious oh-God-you're-so-right gesture.

Burnett blends pure waffles-and-syrup Americana with a tomboyish hoydenism and emerges as the girl next door, only vastly more amusing. In 1952, she was industriously studying journalism at U.C.L.A. ("I wanted to be Brenda Starr") when, as part of a course in playwriting, she was required to take part in a college show. She went on, got a houseful of laughs, then and there decided to switch her major. Says Carol: "It's kind of like dope. You get hooked."

She headed for Manhattan, where her first role was as a hatcheck girl at a sort of "Dolly Dainty restaurant near Rockefeller Center." Two years of jobs at we-stage-our-own-original-revues-every-week-type summer resorts, minor TV work, and a burgeoning acquaintance with the city's unemployment compensation officials, brought her a booking at Manhattan's Blue Angel, a smoky launching pad for talent that holds a star-making record no other nightclub can equal. Says Carol: "I wanted to open with something different from the usual 'Hello, Everybody' kind of song--something that would cut through the smoke and the conversation and catch 'em by the ears." So she came out singing I Made a Fool of Myself Over John Foster Dulles.

Becoming known as "the girl who sings the song about John Foster Dulles," Carol landed the lead role in Once Upon a Mattress. The show and Carol (as Winifred, the Pea Princess) were hits. In the middle of Mattress' long run, Carol was signed on as a regular with The Garry Moore Show. It meant rehearsing the television show during the day every day, doing the Broadway show every night plus matinees on Wednesday and Saturday. Carol, who is normally a slim 121 Ibs. (5 ft. 7 in.), dwindled to 106, recalls: "I looked like John Carradine in drag." Curlers & Pratfalls. Married to a college friend, Don Saroyan ("Any kin? Maybe--I suppose all Armenians are re lated somehow"), she and her husband were separated 2 years ago, plan a divorce this summer. Carol was surprised when gossip columnists paired her off with Dick (Dr. Kildare) Chamberlain, whom she barely knows. ("When I met him I had my hair in curlers and looked like I was trying to tune in Mars. I think I scared him. But I like him; he's so squeaky clean.'')

Now confident enough to strike out on her own, Carol leaves the warm and woolly Garry Moore Show next week; next year she will make guest appearances, has decided not to push on to a TV show of her own. She has had movie offers, has declined them so far because "I know I'd end up playing Binkie, the heroine's best friend.'' Another possibility is the lead in the Jule Styne-Jerome Robbins musical about Fanny Brice next fall. Definitely on the books are an appearance at The Sands in Las Vegas this summer and an early-autumn engagement at Manhattan's prestigious Persian Room. But as for serious "dray-mah," she does not want to pratfall into the trap of so many funny folk who long to play tragedy: "I would miss the laughs. And probably if I did something serious, I'd get them."

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