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November 23, 2009

The inspiration for Ernestine

By Mary Therese Biebel mbiebel@timesleader.com
Features Writer
Mary Therese Biebel on Facebook | @TLTLMaryTBiebel on Twitter

The inspiration for Ernestine, the “one-ringy-dingy” telephone operator who delighted in denying customers’ requests, came to Lily Tomlin years ago when she was living in New York, working on improv and hating the phone company.

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Top: Edith Ann is a perpetual 5-year-old whose baby brother had best beware. Bottom: Madame Lupe is the world’s oldest beauty consultant.Ernestine the switchboard operator used to enjoy thwarting people who called the phone company. Nowadays, Ernestine works for an insurance company, Lily Tomlin said, and she still enjoys saying ’no.’

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“Everyone hated the phone company because it was a monopoly,” the comedienne said in a recent interview. “You couldn’t get a phone. You couldn’t get one repaired.

“When I started working on Ernestine, I threatened people: ‘We are omnipotent.’ I had all this bureaucratic power. I had people’s tax returns and taped conversations. I know personal things about them.”

As it occurred to Tomlin that the unpleasant Ernestine must have repressed her sexuality, “My body got twisted. My face got tighter. It was one of those organic things.”

Over the years, other ideas also took root and sprouted in Tomlin’s fertile imagination. National audiences chuckled at characters she created on Rowan & Martin’s “Laugh-In” (1968-73), and a local audience can meet the eclectic crew at 7 tonight in the F.M. Kirby Center.

Sure to be on the agenda are Madame Lupe, “the world’s oldest beauty expert,” and Edith Ann, a perpetual 5-year-old who takes advantage of her baby brother, just as Tomlin herself couldn’t resist lording it over her younger sib.

“My poor little brother, I would have him waiting on me hand and foot,” Tomlin reminisced. “I’d have him making me sandwiches. I’d be 8, and he’d be about 4.”

Those sandwiches of bread-and-butter pickles, served on bread with butter, of course, are a mere sliver of what Tomlin, now 70, remembers as a childhood chock full of experiences.

Growing up in a “downwardly mobile” neighborhood in Detroit, she lived across the street from a parks-and-recreation center where she learned how to put on shows, stitch embroidery, pitch softball and, by age 9, become a jacks champion.

“When you can go from jacks to embroidery to pitching softball to swimming, I think that’s a very rich childhood,” she said.

A Mrs. Fitzgerald at the center guided the children through ballets, including “Cinderella” and “The Frog Prince.”

Thanks to Tomlin’s jumping skill, she was chosen to play the title character. “I could jump so high. I jumped right out of the well,” she said, with a touch of pride.

The one-time frog prince never lost her love for performing.

Tomlin’s long career has included such films as “Nashville” in 1975, “Moment By Moment” in 1978, “9-to-5” in 1980, “The Incredible Shrinking Woman” in 1981 and “Tea With Mussolini” in 1998.

She co-wrote and starred in six comedy televisions specials that bore her name and starred in the HBO special about the AIDS epidemic “And the Band Played On.”

The critically acclaimed actress also played Debbie, the assistant to President Bartlett, on NBC’s “The West Wing,” and she has won Tony Awards for her one-woman Broadway shows “Appearing Nitely” and “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.”

Tomlin’s collaborator on many of her projects is her long-time life partner, Jane Wagner, who, Tomlin says, doesn’t get nearly the credit she deserves.

“She gets so little acknowledgment,” Tomlin said. “When we had ‘Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe’ on Broadway, that piece of writing was so forward – I got goose bumps performing it every night – but the Tony committee said it wasn’t a play so it didn’t get nominated,” she said.

“I didn’t take the Mark Twain Prize (for American Humor, awarded by the Kennedy Center) for a long time (Tomlin accepted it in 2003) because I wanted them to give it to Jane and me. She is much closer to Mark Twain than I’ll ever be.”

The actress prefers live performances to any other kind of work because, as a friend once told her, “Doing a show is the only time of day that you’re in the present.”

When she’s not working, the actress enjoys being with her pets. “I love to lie on the floor and look into my animals’ eyes,” she said.

A strong advocate for animal rights, Tomlin has not yet replaced a dog that died last year, partly in deference to her two aging cats – Roddy, whom Wagner named in honor of actor Roddy McDowell, and Murphy, a once-feral cat who came into Tomlin’s life when she was playing the boss on the television show “Murphy Brown.”