Vicki!: The True-Life Adventures of Miss Fireball

by Vicki Lawrence, Marc Eliot

Vicki Lawrence, the comic co-star of The Carol Burnett Show, describes the high school fan letter that led to her meeting Carol Burnett, her achievements on Mama's Family, and her syndicated talk show. 50,000 first printing.

Genres: Memoir, Autobiography, Nonfiction, Comedian, Biography Memoir, Biography

238 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1995

About the author

Vicki Lawrence is an American actress, comedienne, and singer, who was frequently a game show panelist in the 1970s and 1980s. She is best known for her co-starring role on The Carol Burnett Show, alongside Carol Burnett, from 1967 to 1978, and as the sharp-tongued matriarch, Thelma Harper (the main character on Mama's Family, airing from 1983 to 1990, which was spun off from The Carol Burnett Show's The Family sketches). She has also been credited as Vicki Lawrence Schultz.

Reviews

[Colleen · Rating 1 out of 5]

So I finished Vicki! last night, and don't read on if you don't want spoilers, but everyone should read the book as well and see if your opinions jive with mine.


25% of the book: her aborted talk show that lasted for two seasons, her fights with the W Group, and her arch-nemsis Derk Zimmerman.


25%: what a crazy bitch her mother was and the cold fish her dad was. Her sister makes a brief appearance (they were too far apart in age to be close apparently--4 years I guess is an insurmountable gap) but not to worry, her first paycheck from the CB show was spent in packing a naughty 13 year old off to Christian Science boarding school is Missouri. She also laments that they're not closer now but notes in book "What can I say, she is large. She carries a lot of baggage. Literally and figuratively. One day, I was coming out of the ladies' room right by my show's offices when she walked by [sister is also a makeup artist at NBC]. She was with someone and stopped talking long enough to shoot me a dirty look. I wanted to stop her and say, "Don't you ever get tired of all of this ugliness?"'


25%: random miscellaneous crap. How much she loves animals and rescued her abused dog from first husband, but had to leave the second dog (that he used for punt kicking practice) in a crate filled with feces because she just had room for one. Oh, and the cat she got for her kids and purposely made sure it got pregnant so she could teach her kids the miracle of life. Then the cat escaped from Vicki's clutches and got run over by a car, so it had to get special pins in its legs and kept immobile. But it escaped again and busted the pins. So she called Betty White for advice. Put it to sleep or pay a bunch to fix the pins? Betty White told her to take it to the vet and have it get surgery. Which Vicki did and renamed the cat the Six Million Dollar Cat. She let it outside again where I think it intentionally comitted suicide via car. Because this time it was dead. But really, Vicki really really loves animals.


She talks about how poor she is and how Mama didn't really pay that well--but then talks about the hassle of having three houses. Oh and how she's tough on her kids--if there's too much stuff on the floor, then the maids don't have to clean their rooms.


Yachting.


Her love of oil paintings of yachts.


20%: her love life. Which is frankly gross. Her evil drunken first husband. Al of course I'm not counting in the percentages here, because he's mentioned every other page. The many different boys she dated in school. How she was mega popular and the head cheerleader and how other kids were jealous of her popularity. First time she got french kissed. The time on the bearskin rug in front of a fireplace. How she didn't realize she was pregnant until four months along and then when it dawned on her had to rush and get married.


2%: The Carol Burnett Show (see more that I gleamed below)


1%: Mama's Family


And that's the book.


Tim Conway is mentioned really once, and here, I'll type out what she has to say:


"Carol hated it when the "Family" sketches got screwed up. She never liked breaking the so-called fourth wall. But, whenever Tim was in them, forget it....


That night Dave knocked on my door and said, "I only have one note. Tim's story is going to be different. Good luck."


Al happened to be in my dressing room [shocker!]. I turned to him and said, "How come Tim gets away with this shit all the time and nobody gets back at him? That really pisses me off."


A said, "Well get back at him."


This if you guys recall is that one from Showstoppers where she got bleeped out. Tim went on some adlib story and cracked up everyone but Vicki...here I'll continue her riveting tale:


"Finally, Carol managed to get her line out. "Okay, Mama, it's your turn..."


I just stared at her, which made her laugh even harder, and then I said, "You sure that little asshole's finished?"


Harvey Korman?
Jury is out...she talks about her love of Harvey, but mixes it with half-hearted insults. Also brings up that he didn't typically shower for weeks because he thought that it was making his hair fall out faster. And that he was so rank she refused to do scenes with him until he bathed. Also, he was really sweaty. Oh, and took tons of valium.


She goes on about how she was great friends with him and his wife and went away with the wife for a weekend, where the wife cheated on Harvey with some ballet dancer. "Incidentally, during the Australia trip Donna had an affair with Edward Villella, and I was the only one who knew about it. She was running in and out of Villella's room every five minutes, just as happy as could be!" Life magazine called that ballet dancer "the greatest athlete in the world" and "According to Donna, the answer was a definite yes."


So I'm sure Harvey & his ex-wife (that he was married to for almost 20 years) and their two kids and gaggle of grandkids really liked those paragraphs.


She tried to get Harvey to come on her crap talkshow and he told her "NO! ABSOLUTELY NOT! LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!" and hung up on her.


Carol Burnett
She denies that she refers to Carol as the "C Word" which because she is denying this, makes me think that she does. Because otherwise, why the fuck would you include that in your memoirs? And yeah, it was a fan letter that started it all, though she didn't give a rat's ass about Carol Burnett. She wrote fan letters to everyone, following the footstep of her father, who wrote so many fan letters to the King of Belgium, the FBI investigated him.


She says CB's husband sexually harassed her during the entire run and slept with half the dancers and crew on the set. That he was a jerk to Carol and everyone absolutely hated him. For the entire time she was on the CB show, she said she was paid far less than anyone else and when she got pregnant (well when she eventually figured it out), he tried to fire her saying pregnancy was a gross deformity. Carol hired her back.


She goes into all the nonsense CB put up with and how bad she felt for her and that after the divorce CB wanted nothing to do with her for a number of years, saying she needed more time before she could talk to Vicki again. Which is weird...


How Vicki handled the Mama's Family thing is strange too. So Carol's ex-husband (that she supposedly hates) calls her up and asks her to do the show, she immediately agrees and is pumped. The following day Carol calls her and asks her the same thing. Oops too late!


Carol: "I'll do Eunice, you do Mama. Doesn't that sound like fun?"


I said, "It does, but I just signed with Lorimar to do Mama's Family for Joe."


It became a very abrupt conversation and Carol hung up. I then went to Al and asked him what he made of the whole thing. He agreed it was really weird. I wondered if I was about to get caught in the middle of yet another struggle between the two of them. I would much rather have worked for Carol than Joe. No. Let me amend that. I would have rather worked for anybody than Joe."


---


My take on it. If Carol's evil ex husband that she hated called her out of the blue with an offer, wouldn't the nice thing to do would be say "I'll think about it." and fucking call Carol Burnett and loop her in on it?


Shady.


She does go on quite a bit about yeah, love for Carol, and how she owes everything to her, and that's its the nicest shadow to hang out in, but oh, btw she'd have made it without her as well, because Vicki is awesome. Even beat out Gildna Radner for an Emmy. Interestingly enough, there's no real human insight or neat little anecdotes (other than that "little asshole" blurb from above) about the ELEVEN years the CB show was on air.


The last season, CB called her one day and said "I'm not coming back next year and I wanted you to hear it from me before you read it in the press." [note--CAROL HAS CLASS]. As a result, there was no final episode, no teary goodbyes, no wrap party, nothing...I was a little surprised, but ready to make changes in my life as well."


She also talks about how she didn't go to Carol's husband's funeral and didn't call or anything, so things got a bit icy with CB then too.


Lyle:
She only has random nice things to say about him.


Recurring Theme Throughout the Whole Book:

Much like Katherine Hepburn wetting the bed or Ray Milland randomly vomitting, Vicki has a theme too.


People who walk in on her in the bathroom, usually on the toilet or in the middle of putting on pantyhose. It seriously is mentioned for no good reason maybe a dozen or more times in the book. Why she felt a need to include all this in her memoirs I don't know.


Sample in case you think I'm making this up:


"No sooner did I sit down when a soldier walked in and caught me in the act! He took one look at me sitting on the toilet, and to tell you the truth, I don't know which one of us was more embarrassed. There was nowhere for me to go, so I sat there staring at him, he looked at me, and he went running!"

I do have to give her credit for something. Or her editor. Or some lacky at the publishing house.

Her book does have a giant comprehensive glossary at the end, and I love it when books do this. It makes it easier going through and finding references to specific people.

Though there wasn't the below like there should have been if I was doing this book:

Lawrence, Vicki

---Surprised in bathroom, 2, 17, 53-56, 83, 97, 114, 167, 189-190, 205, 217, 243

[Mediaman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This raw, blunt book has Vicki Lawrence throw everyone she knows under the bus, from her crazy mother to her producers & writers to even Carol Burnett. Probably the only person who gets away clean is her second husband--who comes across as way too good to be true. He's a Hollywood make-up artist who quits his career to handle hers and raises this reader's suspicions because he seems just too perfect (what is this guy hiding?).

Vicki is certainly pushy and vocal about what she doesn't like about people. She always has a chip on her shoulder, mostly due to her bizarre mother, codependent father, and jealous sister. She details the story of how she got the Carol Burnett job at age 18 (yes, it was due to a letter she wrote Carol but there's a lot more to it because Vicki was never really a fan of Carol Burnett's to start with!). There's probably a bit too much about Burnett in this book and her divorce with her producer/husband is mentioned throughout but only makes things confusing in relation to the Lawrence story. Vicki complains a lot about how she was underpaid and mistreated--yet somehow she moves from mansion to mansion (including a year in Hawaii), while turning into a bit of a cyclone herself. She gets a well-deserved reputation for being difficult to work with and spends the opening and closing of the book defending herself regarding the mess at her cancelled talk show.

This is a fairly well-written celebrity autobiography, though the timelines get confusing in spots and she tends to skip back and forth too often. There are also many cases where she fails to complete a storyline. It's a book that names names and takes no prisoners. The only problem is that Vicki thinks a bit too highly of herself and does no introspection, refusing to admit that she could cause any of her own problems. It could use a more behind-the-scenes stories of the shows she worked on, but in terms of a memoir it's quite a page-turner and I wish more celebrities would so openly stick it to those in the business who got in their way. Vicki Lawrence deserves the crown she won for Miss Fireball.

Read in 2014 and 2023.

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, honestly, I was never a big fan of the Carol Burnett show. I never even took notice of Vicki Lawrence until the 1990s when she did that hot mess of a talk show! I loved that show! It was so chaotic, and she would just say anything that came to her mind, at a time when talk show hosts really did not do that. I picked up her book for a fast, fun read...I am not sure what to think about it. She clearly had a horrible narcissist for a mother. But she also had a lot of lucky breaks, and she worked hard, too. I guess one thing that kind of seemed odd to me is that she always seemed to be looking for an authoritative male or seemed to give credit or blame to various men...she is a competent, talented professional and should give herself more credit. Lastly, when she said she was embarrassed because someone caught her watching Rush Limbaugh, I almost fell out of my chair. Oh, Vicki, do you really watch him?!?

[Dale Stonehouse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Her writing is every bit as funny as her comedy roles, and not taking life too seriously is a gift to be admired. Anyone who liked her acting will love this book; an added bonus is the story of her number-one pop music hit "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia."

[Kristopher Michaels · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an incredible book about one of the funniest woman on TV. A fun read but an eye opener also of the abuse by her mother and ex-husband. Lot of back stage stories to boot. Love the book and Vicky.

[April · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was pretty good she talked on her family especially her mom and her love life and the change of her family last name and mostly the book consisted of her talk show more than her claim to fame Mama’s Family better than I thought. She did complain about her talk show

[Lorraine Campbell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Her assistant writer didn't do her any favors. Poor grammar, choppy story telling. Aren't they supposed to write better than the celebrity?

[Maura · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this up thinking I'd get to read a bit about how Vicki was on the Carol Burnett Show and Mama's Family and won't she have some really funny stories. What I learned was that Vicki likes to complain, blame other people for her problems, air her friends' dirty laundry and play herself up as this innocent victim who in reality is the greatest actress in the world. Some of the things that she mentions about other people had me wondering if these friends of hers would really appreciate seeing this stuff in a book. Some of her stories make me think things are shady...what could you possibly do to make Carol Burnett so angry that she doesn't speak to you for years? My biggest impression is that Vicki Lawrence has the potential to be a real bitch and to make a lot of enemies. She doesn't seem to get along well with everyone. There were humorous bits in here, don't get me wrong, but the picture she reveals of herself is not very flattering.

[Anita · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a fun read about Vicki Lawrence's rise to stardom. I remember her fondly as "Mama" from 'The Carol Burnett Show'. Some might consider her as Carol's shadow or sidekick, but she was a tour de force on her own -- albeit, not without hardship and setbacks. This book is a very candid account of the many ups and downs, personal and professional. It is by no means a 'complete' memoir (it does end with "to be continued"), hence the 3.5* rating.

[Amy Dingman rush · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although Vicki didn't have as colorful a childhood as Carol Burnett (which I'm sure she was thankful for), it wasn't an easy one. This autobiography is interesting as it not only gives readers a glimpse into Vicki's life, but also into The Carol Burnett Show and beyond.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Learn a lot about the backstage of both Carol's and Vicki's show