Laugh Lines: Conversations With Comedians (2 page)

While I was eager to chat with comic genius Lily Tomlin, I hesitated to answer her phone call.

“
One ringy-dingy, two ringy-dingy” rang in my head, conjuring the image of Tomlin, hair pulled tight in a bun, puckering the face of one of her most-famous creations: Ernestine, switchboard dominatrix.

Of course, in anticipation, I also had visions of Lily as a little girl, kicking her feet back and forth in a giant rocking chair as perpetually curious tot, Edith Ann, one of dozens of characters Lily has created for the stage and screen.

I spoke to Lily while she was touring theatres across the country, and was tickled at how genuine she was. Did I mention hilarious?

Corey: I know you’ve been doing live shows for some time, but what is it like for you to transform from character to character onstage?

Lily Tomlin: I did it even as a child. I was entranced by character stuff. I had a grade-school teacher who would read dialect poems before we went home on Friday. I grew up with radio, too. We didn’t get a TV ’til I was 10. There would be poems that were little scenes, little stories, and they were very character-driven. They were done in dialects: German, Russian, Yiddish, Italian, black, Swedish, and I just thought it was so funny and wonderful. That’s how radio was, too.

I lived in an old apartment house in Detroit with lots of characters, every kind of person you could imagine. Totally changing neighborhood; always changing. My parents were Southern, came up from Kentucky to work in the factories. I grew up in basically a black neighborhood with a big Jewish contingency, too.

We entered the neighborhood being working-class white Southerners. I was born in Detroit, but my parents were both from the South, and I went there every summer. There were well-off Jews and well-off Gentiles and middle-class Jews and middle-class Gentiles. The rich stratum peeled off. They didn’t want to be in the same neighborhood. This was back in the ’40s.

This is hard to talk about. Don’t say, ‘back in the ’40s.’ People say, ‘What?’ They can’t even compute it.

And, so then poor blacks come in, and my neighborhood was like the center of the universe for me. Within blocks were large houses and people with money. I went to school with some of those kids. I went to their houses. I was just socially aware. I couldn’t help it. Like an underplate of humanity of every kind.

I knew right away that the people who were very rich really didn’t know anymore than anybody else knew. I was sort of conditioned to think they were rich because they did the right thing or they were good people. They were raised in the Christian Baptist Church. I was led to believe that people were rewarded for being good.

Of course, I learned that wasn’t true either. I guess I was empathetic toward all of them—most of them—even ones who were half off their rockers. I was more sympathetic to them than anyone. It was a great thing to live that way. I don’t know if anyone lives that way anymore.

Maybe in New York they do. (laughs)

Corey: Your portrayals are very real and sympathetic. When you first started taking on male characters, was there a decision there? ‘I’m gonna go ahead and switch genders for a character.’

Lily: I first thought I shouldn’t do men unless I can do as broad a range of men as I can women. I didn’t think it was fair. The first male character I did full out was Rick, in my first Broadway show. He was hanging out in singles bars and discos, trying to pick up girls. I thought, ‘He’s kind of easy to do.’ I haven’t really succeeded aside of doing Lud, of the pair Lud and Marie. I think Lud is fairly successful, but he’s pretty much like my dad. (laughs) So I had a lot to deal with there.

It’s very hard to create a male character without facial hair and stuff like that. I do Lud without anything. I do characters certainly without costumes. I did Paul in ‘The Search (for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe).’ He was bodybuilding and punching a bag. If you have a good activity, you can do it.

Everybody doesn’t sound extremely masculine anyway. It’s just how much you can make someone believe and make yourself believe.

I have done singers. I did Pervis Hawkins, the messiah of soul. I did Tommy Velour, a Vegas combo of everybody. Those are for particular projects. Pervis was for my Presidential special, showing Lily’s broad-based support. (laughs) And Tommy was from a special about going to Vegas for the money.

Corey: We got to hear your great singing again in ‘Prairie Home Companion.’

Lily: That’s right. I read someone’s blog, which said, ‘Well, we know Lily can’t sing.’ I thought, ‘Golly, I worked like hell to learn that old alto part. I worked for three months every day.’ Meryl Streep sings very well and has sung many roles. Garrison Keillor even said to me, ‘You have a classic alto. In the day, you would have sung a cappella in church.’ I felt really buoyed by that. This guy said, ‘Well, we know Lily can’t sing.’ I wrote him anyway and said, ‘That’s enough to take a person’s dreams away. I planned to sing a role on Broadway someday.’

Corey: I just saw a Newsweek cover story on extraterrestrial life. Your bag lady character Trudy’s reality could soon be our own. Are you incorporating any of that?

Lily: I haven’t gotten into that yet, but I should, eh, because Trudy is an earth contactee. I could try. I’m glad you bring my attention to that. Sometimes you think you’ve put a theme aside, and you shouldn’t. You may have just been ahead of the curve; you need to re-plug. I don’t know what I’m saying.

Corey: When you travel with shows like this, do you travel with Jane (Wagoner, your partner)?

Lily: No, Jane never goes on the road. There used to be a joke with the ‘Search’ company. There were fans who’d seen ‘The Search’ many more times than she had.

I go out with my stage manager, who’s also my lawyer. (laughs) She stopped practicing. She’s a lawyer with an interesting history: she was in the Peace Corps, and she was a special ed. teacher. And all these at different times in her life. She had some health problems with her eyes. She just stopped practicing a year or two ago. She has a hard time reading and writing briefs without a lot of extra magnification. Anyway, she’s great.

When she was in the Peace Corps, she had written me a letter. I didn’t remember it quite 30 years later. We were reacquainted; we were working on issues up in the Bay Area. She became my lawyer. She’s been my lawyer for several years. She should have been a roadie. She shouldn’t have been a Peace Corps person or a special ed. teacher or a lawyer; she should have been a roadie.

Corey: Has Edith’s view of the world changed much in the last 40 years?

Lily: (laughs) That’s really shocking. Edith? Of course, she’s a child, and children are still emotionally children. The stuff around them changes, like she has to download her mother’s iPod or upload it—whatever you do. See, I don’t know. She’d be doing it for me. And all the other stuff she has to do, more modern stuff. She’s still a kid, and she’s always been a little ahead.

Corey: Either Edith or ‘9 to 5’ had to be my first exposure to you. On ‘Sesame Street,’ did you get a chance to work with Jim Henson?

Lily: I did, right before Jim died. In fact, I was with him just a week or two before he did die. I was shooting a thing in Disneyworld with him and the Muppets. Ernestine did. I had dinner with him and like eight days later he was dead. I don’t even know if that exhibit is still at Disneyworld.

Corey: They still have a 3D Muppet movie there.

Lily: On ‘Sesame Street,’ what I loved was that little baby. What’s her name? Natasha? Ernestine taught her how to use a switchboard. That was one of my favorite things. The guy’s lying down beneath me and has the puppet stuck up between my legs. Ernestine sitting at the switchboard and that little baby is jumping up and down on my lap. I was a puppet freak anyway as a kid. I love puppets. To me they’re absolutely real.

Corey: Especially those.

Lily: I’d go to Kentucky in the summers, and I was always making these little sock puppets. I would take my puppets and walk across the field to a neighbor or some relative who was bed-ridden, and I’d get down at the foot of the bed on my knees and do a puppet show for the homebound person. I was doing magnificent work, even as a child. (laughs)

Corey: Lifelong entertainer. You do question-and-answer periods at your shows, opening yourself up to endless possibilities. Have you gotten anything that caught you off guard?

Lily: No, not really. They’re pretty open with me, and I've never had any real fear of the audience for some reason. It always seemed like a family reunion. In Flint, one time we did have a little action, because Michael Moore’s from Flint, and they hate him or they love him.

The war was pretty hot. A lot of people were for the war. In the Q&A someone wrote me a question. I’m just reading them cold. They said, ‘Who would you rather have for President, George W. Bush or the Marquis de Sade?’ I started riffing on that. Of course, people started yelling, ‘We don’t want to hear your politics.’ ‘My boy’s in Iraq.’ I said, ‘I know. We want him to come home. He shouldn’t be in Iraq. This is a horror.’ ‘You shut up and sit down.’ They almost started a fist fight. I said, ‘Come on up onstage. You can express yourself. You can have my mic. Everyone can come, and you can say what you feel. We can have a discussion about this.’ It didn’t happen that way. It was more like ‘I’ll come over there and strangle you.’

It didn’t shock me. I actually like a little rabble-rousing, as long as no one gets hurt. A guy bit his finger off a couple days ago in California.

That’s the only time they got really like physical, like stand up from their seats and stuff. I draw a fairly harmonious group. Even if they have different views they are…I don’t know whether to use the word open-minded or compassionate or something.

Corey: People try to attach labels to us in the gay community: partner or husband or wife. With you working with Jane professionally as well as personally, is there a particular title you prefer?

Lily: I usually say ‘my partner.’ Frankly, I’m for marriage. To me, I don’t know why people want to imitate. I always say something to the effect of, ‘I personally have some reservations about the issues of same-sex marriage. If all of us homosexuals start imitating heterosexuals, it could be a very slippery slope.’ That’s usually enough for me, but to kick it a little bit, ‘What’s next, monster truck rallies?’

Corey: It’s one of those issues I’ve been torn about. We did get engaged moving to California. That does leave us in limbo right now.

Lily: You certainly didn’t have same sex marriage in Missouri, did you?

Corey: That was one of the first states to vote in the amendment.

Lily: Amended the Constitution, right. Maybe because we’ve been here so long, I don’t know. Just Jane won’t go on the road. They’d be saying at the church, ‘Well, where is Jane? Someone call the house and see if she’s ready.’ ‘She’s en route, but she’s stopping at Neiman’s to buy a scarf.’

Corey: As collaborators over the years, how do you balance the professional with the personal?

Lily: I’m extremely flexible. We have such a similar sensibility. Of course, Jane really is not driven to work as I am. I like to perform. She doesn’t really want to work that much. She does when she has to. If I beg enough.

Corey: Do you get sentimental at all or schmaltzy as you approach 40 years together?

Lily: Not in that kind of overview. Here’s our 40th anniversary. Not like that. It’s such a daily thing. It’s so organically part of the base that I don’t. Just like I had my birthday, and I couldn’t be less interested in my birthday. It was nice. I got a lot of stuff from people, greetings and stuff. That’s a nice way to stay in touch from time to time.

It’s just totally in our skin. We live it in the skin. If I planned a big party for her, she would kill me. Nothing she would hate worse than to walk into a big surprise party, but she’d be so gracious. She’s Southern. She’s from Tennessee. Totally Southern girl. Everybody adores Jane. They’re tried of seeing me because she won’t go half the time. When Jane comes, it’s a real event. And they all seek her counsel. She’s very, very engaging.