Sharon Westbrook

Carol Burnett was 68 when she buried her eldest daughter. Carrie Louise Hamilton died on January 20, 2002, at 38, of pneumonia that followed lung cancer which had already reached her brain. The woman who had spent decades making millions laugh found herself unable to face the morning. Grief did not arrive as a stranger. It arrived carrying the same familiar luggage—alcoholism, poverty, fractured hopes, and a love that had always been real and never simple. Burnett was born in San Antonio on April 26, 1933, to Joseph Thomas “Jody” Burnett, a movie-theater manager, and Ina Louise Creighton, a publicity writer. Both parents drank. After they separated, Carol and her younger half-sister Chrissie were raised mainly by their maternal grandmother, Mabel “Mae” White, in a cramped Hollywood boarding-house apartment. Money was so scarce that someone might arrive with a chicken to fry, or clothes might arrive already worn by someone else. Down the hall, adults fought over liquor and unpaid bills. In that one-room world, the girl who would become a star practiced drawing perfect families that did not exist outside her imagination. Both parents died young of alcoholism—her father in 1954 at 47, her mother a few years later at 46. Carol, still a teenager, became responsible for Chrissie. The same girl who had lived on hand-me-downs reached Broadway in 1959 in Once Upon a Mattress. By 1967 The Carol Burnett Show had made her a household name. Viewers saw the ear tug that said hello to Nanny, the Tarzan yell she had taught herself as a child, the open-mouthed laughter. They did not see the weight she carried from the boarding-house years. In 1963 she married producer Joe Hamilton. They had three daughters: Carrie, born December 5, 1963; then Jody and Erin. Carrie was creative, bright, and, by her teenage years, caught in addiction. Burnett has spoken of that period without softening it. She put Carrie into treatment before she turned 18, during a stretch of years Carrie later called hell—years when her daughter hated her for doing the only thing a mother could do. It was not the television version of motherhood. It was love that chose the painful step first and then waited years to be understood. Carrie eventually got clean. She became an actress, writer, singer, and playwright. Mother and daughter later worked together adapting Burnett’s memoir One More Time into the play Hollywood Arms, drawn directly from the childhood poverty and the women who had raised her. In August 2001 Carrie was diagnosed with lung cancer. It spread to her brain. Five months later, cancer-related pneumonia took her. Burnett had already buried both parents. Now she was burying a daughter. She did not pretend the grief was graceful. She has said she did not want to get out of bed. Her husband told her she owed it to Carrie and to the director Hal Prince to finish what they had started. She went to Chicago for the play her daughter would never see. In the hotel room, birds-of-paradise flowers waited—the same flower Carrie had tattooed on her shoulder. A bottle of champagne arrived labeled “Louise,” Carrie’s middle name and the name of Burnett’s own mother. On opening night it rained. Burnett has said she and Carrie always loved the rain, and she felt her daughter near. What stayed with her most was Carrie’s fierce way of living. A person lives on, Burnett has reflected, in the people they touch, in the inspiration they give, in the way they alter someone else’s plan even for a moment—get them to think, rage, cry, laugh, argue, or walk around the block dazed. She has said she never got over Carrie. She learned to breathe around the empty space. Some hearts keep laughing because stopping would hurt too much. 🌹