Don't Touch Her Silverware

Judy Carne had been on Love On a Rooftop. Larry Hovis was on Hogan’s Heroes. Ruth Buzzi had shown up on That Girl. But there were other people who appeared every week on Laugh-In that came from who-knows-where.

Take Lily Tomlin as an example. I didn’t know she had come from a restaurant. Well, actually, that’s not the whole story. She did that to make pay bills as she worked on her act and her career before George Schlatter hired her as a replacement for the third season.

One of her pre-Laugh In champions in the press was columnist Earl Wilson. Yeah, when you hear his name, you think of vaudeville and Broadway, of Jack Benny and Georgie Jessel. But he watched the new talent coming up, too. He wrote about Tomlin twice in 1968 (likely saving some comments for a second column), the year before she joined Rowan and Martin.

This story is from April 30, 1968.

NEW YORK — Lily Tomlin, the tall attractive daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Guy Tomlin, 215 N. Sunnyside, South Bend, has a marvelous sense of humor. She’s one of the stars in a satiric revue, “Photo Finish,” at the Upstairs at the Downstairs, where she wrote two of the funniest sketches in the show.
Lily started out two years ago as a comedienne at the Cafe au Go Go in Greenwich Village. She loves the Village and lives nearby, in the Lower East Side, also known as the East Village.
“I had two fish which died because it gets cold at night,” she said. “The landlord shuts the heat off after 11 p.m. But it’s a beautiful apartment. It’s a fourth floor walkup, has five rooms, and even has a window."
STAR DASH
SHE WAS born and raised in Detroit before her parents moved to South Bend and she to New York.
“Dad used to take me and my brother Richard to the race track all the time,” she recalled.
“He’d send Richard and me to place the bets. We’d go to the window and just stand there with the money in our hands. The horse would never come in, so Dad never missed the money, which we just kept.”
It was a sense of humor only they, as children, appreciated. . .for they were afraid of telling their father about it. Today Lily's making that humor work for her. She was recently interviewed by Johnny Carson’s staff and may soon appear on his show as a refreshingly new talent.
In one of her sketches at the night club, she sits on a high stool, dressed in a shawl and granny glasses. As she flicks the ashes of her cigar into the plastic rose on the lapel of her fur mini-coat, she sighs the end of a song she wrote about computer dates:
And we’ll both have found something
We’ve waited an awfully long time for—
A relationship
That’s tender, loving and very gentle . . .
And then I’ll hurt him.

A cigar appears in another anecdote in Wilson’s column around October 1st.

NEW YORK — Not many waitresses get interviewed, but then Lily Tomlin was not just a waitress—she was "waitress of the month” at Howard Johnson’s at Broadway and 49th.
“There was really only one other waitress there but she worked another shift,” Lily Tomlin said. "I would get at the mike and say, ‘Attention diners! Your waitress of the week, Lily Tomlin, is about to make an appearance on the floor. Let’s give her a hand!’ Then I’d walk out and nod and take a lot of bows.
"IT WAS FUN BUT THEN one day something snapped.
"I would get my silver all cleaned and put aside for the lunch rush. I was very jealous of all my cleaned silver. One day the cook was very busy and wasn't buttering and I had to butter. People were snapping their fingers for service. The waiters started raiding my silver. I ran out of silver! You run out of silver in a lunch rush! I went berserk, I flipped.
"I rapped on the counter and I shouted, 'All right this is the last time anybody takes my silver! I’m not serving another thing!’
“And the waitress of the week quit right there in the middle of the lunch rush! I’ve heard that more mental breakdowns occur in the restaurant business than anywhere else, and I believe it.”
LILY, WHO’S IN HER mid-twenties and comes from Detroit where she went to Wayne University, uses some of these experiences as a basis for her comedy act at the Playboy Club.
One character she portrays is a girl whose boy friend took her to dinner at the Automat. “When I got back with my mince pie, my date was gone and the table had been moved. I said to myself ‘That just goes to show that something was wrong somewhere’ but I didn’t let it bother me; I just went right on smoking my cigar.”

In between the two columns, a feature story about her and her show appeared in Robert Wahls’ column in the Daily News of June 16th:

ONE OF THE brightest new faces of 1968 apparently eluded the tireless Leonard Sillman— that of an associate comedienne in "Photo Finish," the revue at Upstairs at the Downstairs. This is a pre-Hair satire in which the comic, Lily Tomlin, satirizes not the right people but the up-tight people. That is, the non-flower folks.
Between professional engagements, Miss Tomlin, a rangy brunette, was twice annointed Miss Waitress of the Week while serving at Howard Johnson's at 49th St. and Broadway. The lunch crowd was grist for her up-tight observations. Today her star up-tight is Laverne, who carries the power of positive thinking to a paranoid state.
"Laverne is like this: the whole world is wrong, and she is right. And she's convinced, because, after all, hasn't she this bright blue light flaming in her eyes?" Miss Tomlin explained. "She has, and let the buyer beware."
Confined Stork
In repose at the Grenadier the other night, Lily sat like a confined stork over whom someone has draped a hobin's-egg [sic] blue mini dress with a square neck. Her hair could be a wavy stretch wig of black. It isn't. It is her own.
Repose is probably the wrong word, for Lily, compulsively so, is always on. When she tells you she was born in Detroit after her momma and poppa drove north from western Kentucky to pick up a new Dodge, you wait for the punch line.
"Poppa's family was a tenant farmer family on the Ford place. Momma was Lillie Mae Ford. She spells it with an 'ie' and not a 'y' like me."
Miss Tomlin waited for me to write that down.
"They went to Detroit also because there was too much kin in Kentucky and all the way into Tennessee."
All her kin folk and the Southern heritage probably help Lily when she satirizes Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson in conversation with George Hamilton's mother. Describing the Great Society, Lily says: "It's just me an' Lyndon an' 5,000 head of nasty cattle. George didn't understand Lynda Bird.
"I know I get some of my characters from the kinfolks. There's Lud and Pad and Odie Mae and Ermadee. They seem to fit into my characters. You know, I write most of my own material. I suppose it's all based on what I heard about us, the first families of western Kentucky.
"You see, I didn't see much of the southern family, except when they were passing through or we were visiting. We lived in Detroit in the old neighborhood, 12th St. and Claremont. . .near Buddy's Barbecue, and I was daddy's girl and sang "Shoo Fly, Don't Bother Me,’ That's when I was taking ballet and tap."
Miss Tomlin came to Manhattan just over two years ago to study mime and pantomime in order to refine her natural gesticulations. She spent a week at the Cafe Au Go Go synchronizing her movements and her monologue.
"I got an agent out of the exposure. But after he signed me, he turned into a travel agent, cruising the Caribbean. Then I wrote some more skits and tried them at the Improvisation. I got another agent, Ashley-Famous, which sounds real good.
Carol Her Carol
"With them I've turned down a 20th Century contract, then I signed for a new Gary Moore variety, which died. I wasn't sorry. They kept forgetting and calling me Carol for their ex, Carol Burnett. Then William Dozier put me under contract to follow Batman with Wonderwoman. The fad passed. I never did Wonderwoman, and I'd have been so good."
Lily has a flat in the East Village, which she refers to broadly as the Lower East Side. Miss Tomlin shares her floor with her brother, Richard, who has attached a tricycle to the kitchen ceiling as a pop art decoration. This sends them both.
"And I have a tremendous collection of old gowns, antiques really, which I bought for from 85 cents to $3 around St. Mark's Place and on Third Ave. Some I even picked up in Los Angeles when I was waiting to play Wonderwoman."
As her experience broadened, Lily found that she could do 50 minutes as a stand-up comedienne. While standing up, she does a barefoot tap dance. But she positively does not ride the tricyle on the kitchen ceiling in the East Village.
"That's one trip I've never been on," Lily explained. "When I travel, I always stop at Howard Johnson's."

Laugh-In was satiric enough for some of Tomlin’s characters to fit in for a few years until she went on to, perhaps, bigger things. I suspect, for many years, she’s been able to afford her own silverware.