Vicki Lawrence was at an airport when she was recognized as the portrayer of Thelma Harper, the no-nonsense, sharp-tongued matriarch who debuted in the “Family” sketches of “The Carol Burnett Show” and later headlined the sitcom “Mama’s Family.”
The fan was trying — without success — to convince her young daughter that the chic woman in front of her was actually dowdy Mama from the TV. So, Lawrence provided the proof.
In that distinctive Mama voice, one part Southern drawl, one part exasperation and all bullhorn, she bellowed at the girl: “Get the hell out of here, you’re driving me crazy!”
“Her eyes got so big,” Lawrence says with a laugh years later as she recounts the anecdote during a telephone call. Lawrence brings her “Vicki Lawrence and Mama: A Two-Woman Show” to the King Center in Melbourne on May 5.
“I’m really lucky, I still love doing this,” says the Emmy winner, who has fronted her own talk show, the game show “Win, Lose or Draw,” guested on a slew of TV programs, starred in many a play, recorded a No. 1 hit pop single and, of course, got her start on “The Carol Burnett Show.”
Well, there is one drawback.
“The audiences are heavenly, the traveling is hell,” Lawrence says. Then she thinks of a way to make even that fun — imagining the TSA opening her bag to find the gray wig, “clodhopper” shoes and other curious odds and ends that transform her into Mama.
“I just wonder what they’d think,” she says with a laugh.
Mama’s beginnings
Lawrence caught her big break while in high school after writing to Carol Burnett, who was taken first by the similarities in their looks, then by Lawrence’s talent.
Lawrence debuted on the long-running variety show on its first episode, in 1967. She was 24 years old, in her seventh season on the show, when senior citizen Thelma Harper made her first appearance, the sourpuss mother to Burnett’s hapless Eunice.
Now Lawrence is 75 and can appreciate aspects of Mama a bit more. She jokes about “the warranty running out” on an aging body.
And she has a new respect for Mama’s no-holds-barred repartee.
“You do reach a certain age where you don’t have time to quibble or mince words,” Lawrence says of Mama’s tell-it-like-it-is style. “You just say what you mean. I think Mama has earned that right.”
Mama’s transition
After the Burnett show ended, Thelma was given a spin-off series, a more traditional sitcom called “Mama’s Family,” that still can be seen regularly on channels like CMT and Logo.
But the shift to the new show wasn’t always a smooth one.
NBC network executives wanted to make up Lawrence to look like an actual senior citizen, something that had never happened on Burnett’s show. It was her husband, makeup artist Al Shultz, who pointed out the folly of that idea.
“Al was the one who said, ‘Why would you want to change the face everybody knows?'” she recalls. “I literally did nothing to play Mama. It takes much longer to do me up!”
More problematic than Mama’s appearance was her dour personality, funny as a supporting character in a short sketch but less entertaining as the star of a full-length comedy.
“When we transitioned her from Carol’s show and put her into her own sitcom, it didn’t work,” Lawrence says. “Mama was really mean. Some of it was borderline sad.”
As Mama would say, “Well, what the…?”
Lawrence put her foot down.
“We did two shows I didn’t think were funny, and I stopped production,” she says.
Enter funny guy Harvey Korman, a mentor, friend and former colleague on the Burnett show.
“She has to become a sitcom star now,” he advised Lawrence. “You can’t expect people to come home from work, open a beer and watch her yell for half an hour.”
But Lawrence wasn’t sure how that would work: “I don’t think she’s ever even smiled before,” she remembers thinking.
Again, it was Korman who provided the answer.
“Mama is you, and you are her,” he told Lawrence. “Anything you can do, Mama can do.”
And so Lawrence went with it: Mama ran for mayor, did dirty dancing, entered a beauty queen pageant.
“She could do anything,” Lawrence says with a chuckle.
Many of her favorite episodes involved showing off Lawrence’s own fancy footwork.
“I loved when I got to dance,” she says, pointing not only to the dirty dancing episode but also to one memorable bit in which Mama leads a seniors’ tap dance troupe.
Mama’s co-stars
But there was still trouble ahead. NBC kept moving the show from time slot to time slot, eventually canceling it after two seasons.
“I don’t think any of the young guns understood,” Lawrence says today. “They didn’t understand a younger woman playing an older woman, and they didn’t understand rural comedy.”
The sitcom featured two sitcom queens and future “Golden Girls” — Rue McClanahan and Betty White. Both got their “Golden” gigs during the hiatus after the show’s cancellation, meaning they couldn’t be part of the subsequent revival in syndication, where “Mama’s Family” became a hit.
Lawrence remembers running into White before “The Golden Girls” debuted.
“Vic, I just did a pilot,” White told her, “and I think this is the one.”
The show thrived in its second incarnation, becoming the highest-rated comedy in first-run syndication.
“It ran smoothly, everyone was kind,” Lawrence says. “Thankfully, we had no divas on that set. Instead we had way too much fun.”
By the end of the show’s run, they would wrap an episode in four days, she says. One episode concerning multiple comic misinterpretations of an anonymous love letter sticks in her mind as a model of their efficiency: It was shot in one take. Minus commercials, each episode ran 24 minutes.
“We were in and out of the studio that day in half an hour,” she says.
She still sees Dorothy Lyman, who portrayed her daughter-in-law Naomi, and Allan Kayser, who played Mama’s grandson Bubba.
“He was really fun to work with, and he was so adorable,” Lawrence says of Kayser. Plus, he had a genetic edge as he was cast as red-haired Eunice’s son: “He’s a redhead.”
She misses Ken Berry, who played her son Vint and died in 2018 at age 85.
“You could always count on Kenny; he was a rock, such a great scene partner,” she says. And he had a secret talent.
“He was a phenomenal dancer,” Lawrence shares. “If ‘Dancing With the Stars’ had been on then, Kenny would have been huge on it.”
The show ran for four more years, ending in 1990.
Mama’s portrayer
Lawrence is grateful about starting her career alongside Burnett, with whom she still speaks regularly, and the likes of Korman, Tim Conway and Lyle Waggoner, all of whom have died.
“How special it was to grow up on ‘The Carol Burnett Show’ and be taught by the best comedians in the world and work for a woman who was so inclusive of the cast,” Lawrence says. “I feel like I touched the golden age of television. Movie stars wanted to be on her show.”
She lists notable names, still with a touch of awe in her voice: Gloria Swanson, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Jimmy Stewart — dancing with all the brothers of The Jackson Five. “It’s sort of mind-boggling, really.”
The glamour extended off the sound stage into the city of Hollywood — even if Lawrence sometimes missed out.
When her husband was asked to accompany Elvis Presley out of town to do his makeup for a show, Lawrence was due to give birth at any time and pointed out she wouldn’t be able to go.
“He said, ‘Who said anything about you?'” she recalls with a laugh. “If the baby starts to come, cross your legs until I get back. It’s the King.”
But on another occasion, she did have her own brush — make that collision — with a superstar.
Coming out of a restaurant, she ran into John Wayne, literally.
“I think I came up to his chest,” she recalls. “I looked up, and he actually said, ‘Excuse me, little lady.’ It was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s John Wayne.'”
Mama’s development
If Lawrence was experiencing Hollywood, Mama is more down-home. Much more.
“I just watched a lot of old ladies,” Lawrence says of developing the character. “And I was trying to find an older version of what Carol was doing with Eunice. The physicality of it added to the reality.”
Husband Al thought she looked “too cute” under the Mama drag in the early days of the “Family” sketches when Lawrence didn’t have a lot of time to change costume between bits.
“He said, ‘Really, you need to take five minutes and take the eyelashes off and knock the makeup down,” she recalls.
Just as important as the look is Mama’s way with words. Some would call her forthright. Others would call her sarcastic, wise-cracking, opinionated and blunt.
As Mama would say, “Well, good Lord!”
Does Mama’s distinctive voice ever emerge when Lawrence isn’t in character?
“Once in a while,” says Lawrence, a mother of two. “It came out a lot when I was raising the kids.”
Mama’s stage show
“Vicki Lawrence and Mama: A Two-Woman Show” is presented in two parts. In the first act, Lawrence shares anecdotes, comedy and music. Then Mama takes the stage to tell the audience what’s what.
“What I wanted from the show was to push Mama into the new century and deal with what’s going on,” Lawrence says. “And God knows there’s a lot going on.”
Of course, politics plays a part in that — and that’s a line Lawrence walks carefully.
“Every audience is different. Marjorie Taylor Greene got a big laugh last night and applause,” Lawrence says, referring to the right-wing congresswoman. “Sometimes Marjorie Taylor Greene gets a groan.”
But while “it’s fun to tackle subjects that make people nervous,” that’s not the point of Lawrence’s stage show: “I just want everybody to laugh and have a good time.”
And Mama’s take on current issues is likely to draw laughter.
“Her opinions are often just a little bit off,” Lawrence says. “She’s got her ideas — but they aren’t quite right.”
For the stage show, Lawrence had a writer help craft Mama’s segment.
“He would write funny stuff,” she says. “But it would not be in Mama-ese. I would have to translate it into her language.”
Mama’s enduring appeal
“I assumed the audience was going to be older people who saw ‘The Carol Burnett Show,'” Lawrence says of starting up the stage show some 20-plus years ago. “But from the get-go, there were younger people in the audience. They saw ‘Mama’s Family’ and fell in love with her.”
After all, the character is a bracing tonic when times get tough. Mama has a tart tongue, for sure, but a big heart as well.
Lawrence remembers a group of college-age young men at one show who told her: “We wouldn’t have gotten through without Mama.”
And, of course, Mama — for better or for worse — is relatable.
“Everybody has some crazy lady in their family somewhere,” Lawrence says. “I think we all know her.”
Follow me at facebook.com/matthew.j.palm or email me at mpalm@orlandosentinel.com. Find more arts news at OrlandoSentinel.com/entertainment.
‘Vicki Lawrence and Mama: A Two-Woman Show’
- Where: King Center for the Performing Arts, 3865 N. Wickham Road in Melbourne
- When: 7 p.m. May 5
- Cost: $30 and up
- Info: kingcenter.com
