Just to have a laugh and sing a song

People often search their lives for meaningful signs, something that might telegraph the future. As a child, Carol Burnett’s was just outside the one-room apartment she shared with her grandmother on Wilcox Avenue.

“Every morning, I would walk out of [our] little building, look up and there would be the Hollywood sign,” the 74-year-old clown princess of comedy said during a recent interview at the Beverly Hilton. “That was when you could feel that you could touch the sign!”

The actress, who went on to become one of the most successful television stars of her day, is featured tonight in the documentary “Carol Burnett: A Woman of Character,” part of PBS’ ongoing “American Masters” series.

The 90-minute piece is a warmhearted look at the lively and resilient Emmy winner who overcame a traumatic childhood -- both parents were alcoholics -- as well as heartaches in later years, including the death of her oldest daughter, Carrie Hamilton, from lung cancer.

The special features fresh interviews with Burnett, as well as clips from a recent one-woman show in Santa Barbara, where she now lives, a healthy supply of clips from her long-running CBS variety series “The Carol Burnett Show” -- including the “Gone With the Wind” curtain dress classic -- and chats with friends and co-workers including Julie Andrews, Tim Conway, Harvey Korman and Vicki Lawrence.

As Burnett recalled her early years in Hollywood, she stopped at the summer of 1951, when she was an usherette at the old Warner Brothers theater at Wilcox and Hollywood Boulevard.

“It was 65 cents an hour,” she recalls with a smile. “We had to wear a harem-pants outfit, these funny little jackets with fake gold braid epaulets and a fez hat. The manager was certifiable. He would line all of us girls across the lobby and proceed to give us signals as to where we would report: ‘You, Aisle 1. You, Aisle 2.’ ”

Burnett, who was a freshman at UCLA at the time, was generally the spot girl. “I stood in the middle of the lobby in the amber spotlight to direct customers as they would come in.”

But she eventually was fired after she tried to dissuade a couple who wanted to be seated during the last five minutes of the Alfred Hitchcock thriller “Strangers on a Train.” “I said, ‘It’s Hitchcock. It would ruin it for you. Please don’t go in.’ ”

But the couple complained so loudly in the lobby that the manager came over. “He said, ‘Burnett!’ and then ripped off an epaulet. I was drummed out of the corps in front of Aisle 2.”

Years later, when Burnett was going to get her star on Hollywood Boulevard, she was asked where she wanted it located.

“I said, ‘Right in front of that theater,’ ” she said gleefully. “It’s no longer the Warner Brothers theater and has been closed down forever. Recently, my husband and I were redoing our house and we were making a small media room. We got ahold of the powers that be and they gave me the door to Aisle 2 that I was fired in front of. They also gave me those little, tiny exit signs that are above the door. I just have this feeling about Hollywood Boulevard -- it’s mine. It’s mine.”

Her family had “definite” problems -- she and her daughter Carrie wrote a play, “Hollywood Arms,” about her early life that opened on Broadway five years ago -- but Burnett says she never felt unloved. “I knew my grandmother loved me,” she said. Although her mother was never very nice when she got drunk, “she never hit me. I would kind of disappear into the ether, ignore it or go to a movie.”

Although on relief, her grandmother would save money every week so they could go to the double bills in the second-run theaters.

“It was a quarter for her and, until I was 12, it was 10 cents for me. There would be double features at the Vogue, the Iris and the Hollywood. We would sometimes hit as many as four double bills a week, which means I saw eight movies a week. Then I would come home and my best girlfriend and I would act out the movies, doing Betty Grable, Joan Crawford, Tarzan and Jane. The movies were my escape. And then to grow up and have my own show and where I could have Betty Grable actually be a guest. Lana Turner, James Stewart. The people I grew up idolizing. . . .”

Burnett is grateful that “I am the age I am and raised the way I was.

“When we would see those eight movies a week, that gave me the courage to think that there was nothing I couldn’t accomplish,” she added. “There was no cynicism in the movies. The bad guys got their just dues. So when I went to New York, I had the Mickey-and-Judy mentality -- I will just audition. . . . I’ll get a job. I was so naive, that it worked.”

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