Comedienne, actress, entertainer, icon: Lily Tomlin has a prolific career that spans over four decades. She is a winner of six Emmys, a Grammy, two Peabody awards and two Tony awards for her one-woman shows on Broadway, including The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. Tomlin brings her world of rich, insightful and funny characters to Chicago in her one-woman show, An Evening of Classic Lily Tomlin.
Amy Matheny: Who were your early entertainment influences?
Lily Tomlin: My early influences were the women doing comedy then. I loved Lucy, and Imogene Coca was on Show of Shows, and I loved her because she did characters. I'd see Bea Lillie on Ed Sullivan, and there was also a woman named Jean Carroll, who is now in her late 90s. We honored her at the Friars club recently. She was the first woman stand-up I ever saw. And she was breezy and very attractive. Now, this is in the '50s, so for what she did she was really kind of subversive and wonderful. She did husband jokes and kid jokes! She was supposed to be sort of this middle-class housewife from Scarsdale and she always had a cocktail dress and a mink stole on … and she did all these jokes. I would just lift them right off of her act and do them.
I would try on my mother's slip like an evening dress and do jokes on the back porch, or I would make a show in the garage and I would throw pearls around my neck and flex my muscles like Bea Lillie, and I'd do something zany that I had seen someone else do on television, and then I would do Jean Carroll's jokes. My favorites were, at that time, 'I'll never forget the first time I saw my husband standing on a hill, his hair blowing in the breeze and he too proud to run after it!', and 'It's not that my husband's stingy. He just has short arms and low pockets.' On and on like that, and she'd say 'My daughter, rotten kid.' She'd have asides like that. I was mad for her.
AM: It sounds like you started at a very young age slipping on characters you had seen or experienced.
LT: Well, I grew up in this old apartment house in inner-city Detroit. I lived in a very mixed neighborhood, just all kinds of people … every age range, every education level, really political, conservative, radicals … it was just this ... microcosm of humanity in my neighborhood. I used to go from apartment to apartment and hang out. I was like a sponge. I was mad for the little pockets of culture. There was an old couple that lived in the building and I would go and sit with them just because. … They wouldn't say much but I liked that they had different furniture and it just smelled differently, and it'd start to get dark and I guess I was just so audacious and assertive and they would say, 'Don't you think you'd better go home? Your mother's gonna be worried.' And I'd say 'Oh God, no. I told my mother I'd be out late!' Sure enough, my poor mother would be in the neighborhood calling me, yelling my name out and I would be swinging home just full of it. Then I'd see her up ahead and she'd just pull a switch off of a tree and rip those leaves off, you know … and I would just run like a turkey. I just adored my life those first 10 or 12 years in that neighborhood.
AM: You started bringing those characters to the public on Laugh In. We started to meet characters like Ernestine and Edith Ann. What was the genesis of those two characters?
LT: Well, Ernestine … I was living in New York and I had met this young guy, Jim Rusk, and I would pay him by the hour to pitch with me. He was a very funny guy. I wanted to do a telephone operator; everybody hated the phone company because it was a monopoly. She was gonna be kind of a tough Bronx operator, but as I improvised and fooled around. … It kind of came out of a repressed sexuality, and my body just tightened up and my face tightened up. I swear that's why she's so popular, because there's this subliminal thing going on. And my hand went into my blouse and I tightened up my face and started to snort. It was just one of those incredibly serendipitous things. She was just so much fun to do because she could get away with any old pun in the world because it would be out of her sensibility. Ernestine ( became ) famous. I would open for Dan [ Rowan ] and Dick [ Martin ] that summer, and I would walk out on the stage in these big arenas and the audience would just roar. It was like the Olympics or something. And I can tell you it has never been that way since. She was just so hot and so popular.
AM: And Edith?
LT: I started working on Edith that summer when I was out with Dan and Dick because I wanted to just do a kid. Just like any actor, you just want that range of people to do. You think you can be anybody. I knew a kid would be a good source of comedy and commentary, so I would do Edith and I would have the audience ask me questions.
Then I was playing in Philadelphia that summer, and I met the manager's little girl. She was about four years old and she had a little speech impediment which I later learned many small children have because their tongue is a little too big for their mouth at the moment, or they haven't gained absolute control of it. So whenever they'd say a 't-h' they'd blow a little raspberry, a real small one. I just about freaked out because it was like a gift from God, from the heavens. I looked at the kid and I thought, 'This is just too wonderful to be true.' So it was not too far from 'And that's the truth.' I just don't give you a breath, do I?
AM: That's okay. … I am loving it! Obviously, [ Tomlin's comedy writer, collaborator and life partner ] Jane Wagner has been a gift to you.
LT: Absolutely.
AM: Where did you meet?
LT: I met Jane in '71. We had mutual friends, but I had never met her. I saw a teleplay about a kid in Harlem [ she had written for ] children's programming. She won a Peabody for it, it was so well-received, critically. It was so wonderful, like [ what ] I craved [ for ] material in a monologue. This story about this child was so satirical and tender and funny, and it was like heightened realism. I was just knocked out by it. I wanted Edith to be more than she had been on [ the TV show ] 'Laugh-In.' I didn't want her just sitting there, and doing little one-liners. So I wrote Jane and asked her to work on the Edith Ann album. And it's become the hallmark of her timing for the last 37 years that I didn't hear [ back ] from her. [ Laughs ] And, suddenly, three days before I go in to record, I receive a bunch of material from her. I persuaded her to come to California and help me produce the album, and Edith Ann took a leap up. I mean my performance even got better. She is a great monologue artist.
AM: Jane has been [ your ] artistic collaborator for almost four decades. What are the qualities about her that make her such a good collaborator?
LT: Well, she's not a good collaborator and she doesn't like to collaborate. I usually have to beg her to write. I always get the most fallout … success. [ Jane's ] so often overlooked. [ However, there is ] the richness of the perceptions, being able to couch all these perceptions in the voice of a character. I could come up with a funny idea and I could try to physicalize it, but there's nothing like having this wonderful language sitting underneath you. I think I sustained the career I did because I had such good material.
Don't miss 'An Evening of Classic Lily Tomlin—One Night Only!' Saturday, Nov. 1, at 8 p.m. at the Rosemont Horizon Theatre; visit Ticketmaster.com
