Carol Burnett remembers when she first met 28-year-old Bob Mackie: It was 1967, and she invited him over to talk about his possibly doing costumes for her brand-new series, The Carol Burnett Show.
“I opened the door, and there’s this boy standing there,” she said Sunday evening at the Newport Beach Film Festival. “He looked like he was 12. … He said, ‘I’m Bob Mackie.’ I couldn’t get over it.”
She knew some of his work — he already had an Emmy for Alice Through The Looking Glass — but she didn’t know that he’d also designed the iconic dress Marilyn Monroe wore to sing “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy in 1962.
Within just a few minutes of welcoming Mackie into her home, she knew that he would be perfect for her show, and she was right. The Carol Burnett Show is one of the most successful and influential series in TV and comedy history, and the costumes played an integral part.
It’s a testament to their success that they drew an overflow crowd of more than 200 people of all ages Sunday to talk about a collaboration on a show that ended some 45 years ago. The Q&A was held, appropriately enough, in Fashion Island, the upscale outdoor mall that hosts much of the Newport Beach Film Festival, and came in honor of Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion, a new documentary directed by Matthew Miele that played at NBFF earlier Sunday and plays again Tuesday.
Carol Burnett and Bob Mackie on Their Comic Collaborations
Asked how many costumes Mackie made for her show, Burnett, 91, did some quick tallying.
“We did 279 shows. And Bob did every stitch of clothing for everybody on every show, which amounted to about 70 costumes a week,” she said. “OK, do the math: 279 shows, 70 costumes a week. He designed about 17,000 costumes.”
(An aside: 70 times 279 is actually 19,530 — even more costumes! — but we had the benefit of doing the math with a calculator, and didn’t have to do it in front of a crowd.)
Mackie, 84, wasn’t just great in terms of quantity — Burnett noted that he often made massive contributions to the comedy of the show, and the characters. Burnett said he had a major impact, for example, on shaping her famous Mrs. Wiggins character.
“Tim Conway wrote those characters originally. He wrote Mrs. Wiggins to be this kind of doddering old lady, which I could do now,” she said, to audience laughter.
“Bob said, you know, we’ve been playing a lot of old ladies. Why don’t we make her into this blonde bimbo who the IQ Fairy never visited?”
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He gave her a push-up bra and tight skirt and high heels. Burnett noted that the skirt was baggy in the rear, requiring her stick her butt out — which led to the trademark “Wiggins walk.”
But Mackie’s most famous dress for the show may be the “shower curtain dress” Burnett wore to lampoon Scarlett O’Hara’s elaborate clothes in Gone With the Wind. The shower curtain got such a big audience response — you can watch it here — that the show had to cut some of the laughter out.
“I didn’t even decide ’til the night before we really taped,” Mackie said. “Somehow we got the best lap we’ve ever had.”
“I said, ‘Bob, this is going to be one of the greatest sight gangs in the history of television,'” Burnett said, eliciting an applause break. “And now it’s in the Smithsonian.”
She recalled that when she made her entrance in the dress, the laughter went on so long that “I had to bite the inside of my teeth to keep from laughing myself.”
Mackie was recruited during the 11-season run of The Carol Burnett Show to also do costumes for The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, and later, after Cher and Sonny Bono parted ways, Cher. Mackie was able to work with Carol Burnett and Cher simultaneously because their studios were side by side. His collaboration with Cher would come to be as famous as his work with Burnett.
Burnett has won seven Emmys, and Mackie nine. But Burnett always felt that Mackie was snubbed by Oscar voters.
“There’s one thing I know — it’s in the documentary. I have to repeat it: He was robbed of an Oscar for Pennies From Heaven,” Burnett said, referencing the 1982 Steve Martin film that evoked 1920s and ’30s musicals.
Moderator Dave Karger, a TCM host who will appear in an upcoming show with Burnett focused on some of the classic movies she’s spoofed, asked Mackie what it was like to be on stage with her, so long after he first showed up on her doorstep.
“Well, you know. She’s so damn good. You can’t help it. Just go with it,” Mackie said. “She’s brilliant.”