While Carol Burnett is a comedian willing to do anything for a laugh, according to Julie Andrews, she was allegedly “humbled” at one point in her history.
Insights into the effort by Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett to make Mike Nichols laugh
It all began on the day of the inauguration of Lyndon B. Johnson. Julie Andrews, Carol Burnett and Mike Nichols were all staying at the same hotel (The Graduate, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Closer). And one night, Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett were waiting for Nichols to share a cup of hot chocolate in their pyjamas, People posted. Explained Andrews:
“As we sat in the darkened hotel hallway on the sofa in front of a row of three elevators waiting for him, we felt pretty silly and thought, ‘Let’s do something to make him laugh.’ We decided to pretend to make out…. He had called our room and said he was coming right down, so we thought, well, the first person out of the elevator would be Mike. But he wasn’t…”
While Andrews and Burnett pretended to make Nichols laugh, the doors of the elevator swung open and several men – none of them Nichols – came out.
The lift was’ packed with people from the Secret Service,’ and later Lady Bird Johnson (maybe) turned up.
A swarm of Secret Service men came out as the elevator doors swung open, and all of this occurred on the very day that Lydon B. Johnson was inaugurated. The elevator kept closing and opening, Andrews explained, but Nichols never came out.
Andrews said that Burnett was persuaded that Lady Bird Johnson was the woman who later left the elevator and returned to see if the two women were really Andrews and Burnett. All was too much for Burnett to handle. Andrews narrated:
“…Carol was laughing so hard that she went around the back of the sofa we were sitting on because we both had tears running down our faces because we were being so silly.”
