A Lotus Grows in the Mud (15 page)

Presenting an award to the wonderful George Schlatter, my director and mentor on
Laugh-In.
(George Schlatter Productions)

“G
ood morning, Miss Hawn,” the security guard greets me cheerily as I pull in to the NBC parking lot for the last time.

“Morning, Jim,” I reply with a smile that doesn’t quite reach my eyes.

Steering my maroon Chevrolet Corvette into the slot, marked by a sign on the wall that reads
LAUGH
-
IN
:
GOLDIE HAWN
, I head with a heavy heart for the door I have opened every working day for the last three years, in beautiful downtown Burbank.

As I walk down that long, long corridor to the studio, passing people I have come to know and love, I can hardly believe I am leaving the show today. Peering in through every doorway, I am wistfully aware of how much I have taken everything for granted. Five days a week, I have walked this corridor without thinking. Now I really look at the stages, the rehearsal halls I’ve worked in, the room where my bikini-clad body was painted with words and symbols, the newsroom.

Past Hank, the funny makeup man, the one I joked with all the time about the double chin he insists I don’t have, I wave and giggle. Past Tom Brokaw, the new NBC anchor, who greets me each morning with a smile and a bright hello. I must admit, I have a bit of a crush on him.

Looking into one rehearsal hall, I remember the day I danced there in a tight red sweater jumpsuit. Glancing up, I could hardly believe my eyes. Elvis Presley had wandered in to watch us rehearsing.

I stop, soaking up the memory now, and still taste how it felt to see the King standing there, emitting such incredible sexual energy. I
thought I was going to swoon just being in the same room. That man and his music made my teenage hormones rage. Despite my promises to my father to listen to only classical music, I lived head to toe for rock and roll.

Elvis was introduced and walked over to me, reached out and touched my tousled hair. “Why, Goldie,” he said, smiling that crooked smile of his. “No wonder you’re so funny. You look like a chicken that’s just been hatched.”

Walking on down the corridor, I remember the time we all chased George Schlatter, the producer and director of
Laugh-In,
when he had us working on a sketch until three in the morning. Dick Martin, Dan Rowan, Ruth Buzzi and I were dressed in overalls, supposedly to paint a wall, but it was so late and we were so tired and none of us wanted to get covered in paint. With one look, we yelled, “Get George!” instead. We chased him down this hallway with rollers dripping paint until he ran upstairs and locked himself in his booth.

Turning down a side corridor into the
Laugh-In
hallway, the place where our little family gathers every week, I step into my dressing room that looks just the same as it always has. There is the old telephone, the bowl of fresh fruit, the makeup table and the ugly brown couches. Only now they don’t look so ugly anymore.

Usually from here, I can hear George’s voice bellowing down the hallway. Usually, he pops his head around each dressing-room door. “How are my crazy inmates?” His large physique fills the doorway, as do his big blue eyes. He is a man who laughs easily and with all his heart. He looks like a big strong bear on the outside, but, boy, is he soft and mushy on the inside.

But George doesn’t come this morning. Everything is quiet. I know why.

N
obody knows me better than George. He sees my soul. He gets the way my brain works and the way my heart feels. He always used to say, “Goldie is as dumb as a fox.” He knows me so well. I can’t fool him, nor would I ever try. He is one of the great loves of my life.

The first time I met him, he came onto the set of
Good Morning World
and stood there, staring at me disconcertingly. I was summoned to his office at NBC a few days later and sank to the bottom of his big red leather wing chair.

“Now, what do you do?” George asked, looking down at me and laughing.

“Well, I dance.”

“No. I mean, what do you do, Goldie Hawn?”

I hesitated. “Wh-what do you mean?”

“Well, tell me about yourself.”

“Er, I did a bit of acting on
Good Morning World,
but that didn’t work out, and, really, I’m a dancer. I mean, is that what you want to know?”

He laughed deep and loud. “Well, can you sing?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell a joke?”

“No. Not to save my life!”

“And where are you from, Goldie Hawn?”

The interview went on. I told him all about myself, but I still didn’t know what I was being interviewed for. At the end he said, “I’ll tell you what, would you like to be on
Laugh-In
?”

“I don’t know. I can’t tell a joke, and I can’t be funny like that,” I said. “I’ve never done a review or anything, so I’m not sure what I would do on the show.”

George laughed again. “Well, I don’t know what you’re going to do on the show either, so why don’t we give it a try? Three shows and we’ll see if it works out. What do you say?”

“Well, okay. Thanks.”

I left his office thinking, Wow, what was that all about? This is crazy. I just got three shows from a man who doesn’t even know what he wants me to do!

The first time I arrived at the Burbank Studios, I got lost and had to ask someone the way. I walked into the rehearsal hall and found the cast standing around a piano, singing songs and laughing. There seemed to be a cacophony of creative indulgence.

Gee, this sure looks like fun, I thought, hugely relieved.

Cher, an icon of the time, was standing with them, rehearsing for the show as that week’s special guest. She was the epitome of the sixties and looked like a million dollars with her long black hair and her platform boots and her beautiful white Mongolian lamb coat.

“So, you’re Goldie Hawn,” she said in her unique voice, looking me up and down. “We’ve been waiting for you. We wanted to see what you looked like. We thought you were a myth.”

I was so intimidated. I couldn’t find the words, so I giggled. Ruth Buzzi beckoned me to the piano. “We’re just running through some stuff with Billy.” She pointed to Billy Barnes, the musical director. “Just watch the others and fall in when you can.”

I stood there with the whole cast as they sang, “What’s the news across the nation? I have got the information…” and as I joined in, Cher put an arm around me. I melted and started to feel safe again. Yes, yes, yes, I am back, I am back, I am back in the chorus again!

Next came a read-through of the script, sitting around a table, each of us reading our lines in turn. This was my newfound family—Ruth Buzzi and Arte Johnson and Jo Anne Worley. I liked all of them. But staring at my lines, I couldn’t see what was funny about them. They seemed to be straight introductions: “Here’s Dick and Dan with the news of the future!” or “Okay, now over to Ruth.” My lines just weren’t funny like everyone else’s.

Oh boy, this is going to be so frigging boring, I told myself on the way home, wondering what Art Simon had gotten me into.

The day of the shoot, I was all ready, if a little nervous. “Okay, Goldie, you’re up!” I rushed out of my dressing room, wearing a pillbox hat, skimpy top, bangles and a turquoise Pucci miniskirt. Taking my place at the podium, the studio was in darkness and silent. There were three cameras, little lights shining all around me and someone holding up cue cards. I’d never seen cue cards before and I squinted at them anxiously.

“Okay, Goldie,” George said from his booth somewhere high up in the darkness above me, “all you have to do is read the words off the cards when the red light goes on.”

But what George didn’t know—and I didn’t tell him—is that I am
mildly dyslexic and sometimes mix up words when I read. So when the red light flashed and the cue cards began rapidly flipping over and over, instead of reading, “Dick and Dan, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Laugh-In
is proud to bring you the News of the Future,” I read: “Dan and Dick…I mean, Dick and Dan is…I mean, are…Oh.”

I started to laugh because I felt so stupid. I mean, how simple could this be and I screwed up? The more nervous I got, the more I giggled. The more I laughed, the more we all laughed.

Holding my hand up against the bright lights to see if I could see George, I called up to the booth. “Wherever you are, George, can I please do this again? I screwed up. George? Where are you, George?”

His deep voice boomed out across the studio through the speakerphone. “No, Goldie. That will do just fine.”

“No, but please, George, give me another chance.”

“We like you just the way you are, Goldie,” came the reply. “Keep the cameras rolling, fellas.”

“No!” I protested, still giggling at myself and thinking of my father, who always told me never to take myself too seriously.

“That’s right, Goldie,” he said, “it was just perfect. Next time I want you to do it again just like that.”

And so a career was born.

By being a little bit absentminded and accidentally inverting my words, being nervous and then laughing at myself, a character emerged. I guess part of her was me. I guess this part of me had popped up in the high school play when I kept fainting like Olive Oyl; it was there when Ronnie Morgan slammed a plate into my face; it was onstage when I inadvertently made the audience laugh as Juliet. I was even called the “giggly girl” in a Disney movie I’d done called
The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band,
with Buddy Ebsen and Lesley Ann Warren. It also starred a popular child actor of the time named Kurt Russell.

Suddenly, I was the Ditzy Ding-a-ling, the Dumb Blonde, the Bubblehead. Some sections of the press accused me of setting back the Women’s Liberation Movement. My answer to one reporter from
Good Housekeeping
was, “But I am already liberated.” One time, a reporter asked me if I felt any responsibility for the Women’s Liberation Move
ment. I looked at him and said, “Well, it first depends on what you mean by liberation. I mean, it’s important to be liberated from my fears. I don’t think burning bras is going to do that. I think laughing out loud is a great liberator. So I guess I think I’m doing my part.”

On
Laugh-In,
I learned how to exercise a muscle that would allow me to empty my mind and laugh. That way, I could be surprised when the guys, bless their hearts, deliberately switched my cue cards or sabotaged my lines by holding up rude words instead. Or pretend that dear Dan, God rest his soul, actually made me laugh. Everyone always expected me to smile, or be silly, which I didn’t always feel like. But when that red light came on I had to forget everything and pretend it was all new to me. Laughing was sometimes hard work.

One in every four Americans watched
Laugh-In
at its peak. It was a national love-in, a Monday-night ritual. I suddenly had exposure I could never have dreamed of. Along with everyone else in the cast, I was in the nation’s living rooms every week and people felt they knew me, could come up to me, talk to me and touch me.

In the beginning, the sudden attention freaked me out, but now I was better able to handle it because of the intensive work I was still doing in analysis.
Laugh-In
became my healing ground.

I also got married. His name was Gus Trikonis. He was Greek, and I was completely in love. I wore lilies of the valley in my hair and dressed in a flowing green pantsuit. I was twenty-three years old. We were married by a judge in a Honolulu courthouse in 1968. Art Simon, my manager and dear friend, was our only witness. Afraid to tell my mom and dad for fear of their disapproval, we eloped.

Skipping out of the courthouse and down the street with childish excitement, I was now a married lady. Wending our way back to our beach hotel, I couldn’t stop staring at the ring sparkling on my finger, which meant I finally belonged to someone. I was living my dream; I was an honest woman, I was going to have children and live happily ever after. But first I had to tell my mother.

Once she started talking to me again, Mom handled it pretty well. And, eventually, she fell in love with Gus too. He grounded me in those early years. It was so important for me to be married then, as my star was
rising. I wasn’t dating other men; I wasn’t handed around. Gus helped me grow up. He led me through my formative years in show business and helped me through the analysis of my own journey of self-discovery. He was patient and calm and kind. Through him, I learned to appreciate the simple pleasures in life—the comfort of sharing a home, planting a garden and cooking a meal. He opened up new worlds to me—of philosophy and of art—and taught me to ask the bigger questions in life. He introduced me to meditation, and taught me about the workings of the mind and the spirit. Thanks to him, for all of my time on
Laugh-In
I led as normal a life as I could. I stopped by the supermarket every night to buy something to cook for my new husband. I knitted sweaters for him. I even planted roses.

I talked on the phone for hours each night with Ruth Buzzi, catching up with what we’d missed that day. Nobody could believe we could talk for so long about so little. Our time together on that show seemed to be almost one continuous conversation, punctuated with peals of laughter about the silliest things. Life was simple, calm and idyllic. I had a secure job, a secure marriage and the security of money in the bank. Everything was just perfect.