One of the things I think of first, when I think Lily Tomlin, for some reason isn’t on her IMDb page. Or her Wikipedia page. However, I will never forget it. I wasn’t allowed to stay up for it, but it was in the days when my older sister would babysit for us when Mom was in class, and it was easier to watch things I wasn’t supposed to when Elaine was babysitting than when Mom was home, so I saw it anyway. It was an episode of NOVA about intelligent life in the universe. The part that destroyed sleep for me that night was a group of nine scientists on split screen, or maybe it was sixteen, talking about the Drake Equation. This is the equation that supposedly tells us the likelihood of extraterrestrial life, breaking it down by numbers. The problem, of course, being that all numbers are speculative. And the last question is, “how many planets are there with intelligent life other than Earth?” One of the scientists solemnly said, “Zero.”
Lily Tomlin, one-woman show The Search For Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe notwithstanding, may seem an odd choice for that documentary, though it wasn’t the start of her relationship with PBS. (She, like so many other celebrities, has done Sesame Street a number of times.) And indeed, a lot of what she did was lighten things up by being Ernestine or whoever. On the other hand, I recall that they also showed her asking intelligent questions of the various scientists, and she seemed to understand the answers.
Tomlin’s persona has as long as I can remember included that intelligence. Maybe that’s why I have so many fond memories of her despite the fact that I haven’t seen all that much that she’s been in and mostly remember her from comedy bits from the ’70s. She was on Laugh-In, which Nick at Nite played when I was a kid, and I don’t think it’s just the difference in their appearance that meant she not given the sort of punchline that went to Goldie Hawn.
Of course, even beyond intelligence, a lot of Tomlin’s comedy relied on a more acerbic take on life. Ma Bell approached her to do Ernestine in an actual commercial for them; she responded with the bit shown above (there don’t seem to be any high-quality stills available), the famous “We Don’t Care—We Don’t Have To” commercial, which I believe she did for Saturday Night Live. Even child character Edith Ann had a snarky edge to her.
Apparently, she’s never had a formal coming-out, though she did marry her partner of forty-five years in 2013. She says that, in the ’70s, no one would have considered writing about her sexuality if she hadn’t formally announced it, and she didn’t, so no one ever talked about it. While I appreciate that she has a right to her privacy, I’m pretty sure that the reason the media didn’t talk about it was that you could still sue someone for calling you homosexual in the ’70s, because it was so debilitating to your career. Maybe that wouldn’t have been true for as long if more people had been willing to take the risk.
I once asked my mother about my middle name. My real name is Edith Rose. I’d known for years that the “Edith” part came from my mom’s favourite aunt. (It’s a very “great aunt” sort of name and part of why I go by Gillian, which is my Renaissance faire name.) So I said, “But why Edith Rose?” And the most explanation I got from Mom is that she had no interest in calling me Edith Ann, because she actually wasn’t fond of the Lily Tomlin character all that much. I should ask her one of these days what she thought of her in Prairie Home Companion, my favourite Altman movie.
