Lily Tomlin

Lily Tomlin: America's Great Impersonator of Ordinary People

In 1970, AT&T offered Lily Tomlin half a million dollars to play Ernestine, her nasal, imperious telephone operator, in a commercial. She turned it down on the grounds that it would compromise her integrity. Six years later, on *Saturday Night Live*, Ernestine delivered the corporate motto Tomlin had refused to sell: "We don't care, we don't have to — we're the phone company." It is the whole woman in fourteen words. She built characters out of the American population and then declined to let the American economy rent them.

Detroit

Mary Jean Tomlin was born on 1 September 1939 in Detroit, the daughter of Guy Tomlin, a factory worker, and Lillie Mae Ford, a housewife and nurse's aide — Southern Baptists who had come north from Paducah, Kentucky during the Depression. She grew up in a working-class apartment building whose sheer variety of tenants she later credited with teaching her to watch people, and she has said that observational habit was the education that mattered.

She graduated from Cass Technical High School in 1957 and went to Wayne State University intending to study biology. An audition for a play redirected her, and she left for New York, training at HB Studio and working the nightclub circuit — the Improv, the Bitter End — until television found her. She appeared on *The Merv Griffin Show* in 1965 and *The Garry Moore Show* the following year.

Ernestine, Edith Ann, and the Rest

The breakthrough came in 1969 as a late addition to the cast of *Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In*, and what she did there had few precedents. Rather than telling jokes, Tomlin populated the show. Ernestine the operator arrived with a 1940s hairnet, a snort, and the immortal challenge, "Have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?" Edith Ann was a five-and-a-half-year-old philosopher in an oversized rocking chair who ended her monologues with a raspberry and "And that's the truth." Then came Mrs. Judith Beasley of Calumet City; Mrs. Earbore, the Tasteful Lady; Susie the Sorority Girl; Tess, a bag lady with theories about aliens; Bobbi-Jeanine, a lounge organist; and a series of male characters, including the R&B singer Purvis Hawkins, that she performed in drag.

The records that followed made her a commercial force in her own right. *This Is a Recording*, the Ernestine album, reached No. 15 on the Billboard chart in 1971 — still the highest-charting comedy album by a solo woman — and won the 1972 Grammy for Best Comedy Recording, the first ever given to a woman on her own. *And That's the Truth* followed in 1972 and *Modern Scream* in 1975. In 2024 the Library of Congress selected *This Is a Recording* for the National Recording Registry.

Jane Wagner

In March 1971 Tomlin watched a television special called *J.T.* and tracked down its writer, Jane Wagner. It became the most productive partnership in American comedy and a fifty-year marriage. Wagner co-wrote and co-directed *Appearing Nightly*, Tomlin's Broadway solo debut in 1977, which won her a Special Tony Award and put her on the cover of *Time* under the headline "America's New Queen of Comedy." Wagner then wrote *The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe*, the 1985 one-woman show that remains Tomlin's signature work and won her the Tony for Best Actress in a Play.

Their private life was conducted with a discretion Tomlin has since described without apology. In 1975 her publicist relayed an offer: *Time* would give her the cover if she came out. "I was more offended than anything that they thought we'd make a deal," she recalled. Two years later she got the cover anyway, and the magazines could not agree on whether she lived alone or with Jane Wagner. They married on New Year's Eve 2013, after forty-two years together.

Nashville, and the Second Career

Robert Altman gave her a dramatic film debut in *Nashville* in 1975 as Linnea Reese, a gospel singer and mother of deaf children. It brought an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. *The Late Show* won her the Silver Bear at Berlin in 1977. Then *9 to 5* in 1980, opposite Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton, one of the year's biggest films; *All of Me* with Steve Martin in 1984; *Big Business* with Bette Midler in 1988; *Flirting with Disaster*; *I Heart Huckabees*; Altman's last film, *A Prairie Home Companion*, in 2006; and *Grandma* in 2015, which Paul Weitz wrote with her in mind.

Television kept pace: Ms. Frizzle on *The Magic School Bus*, a four-year run as the presidential secretary Deborah Fiderer on *The West Wing*, recurring parts on *Murphy Brown* and *Will & Grace*, and then, from 2015 to 2022, seven seasons as Frankie Bergstein opposite Jane Fonda in *Grace and Frankie*, which brought her a Primetime Emmy at seventy-five.

Why Lily Is Called a Genius

The faculty is a kind of applied anthropology. Tomlin does not do impressions of famous people; she constructs interior lives for people nobody was looking at — a switchboard operator, a five-year-old, a bag lady, a Calumet City housewife — and gives each one a coherent philosophy, a physical vocabulary and a grievance. The comedy comes from the completeness of the construction rather than from punchlines, which is why the characters outlived their sketches.

The word has real authority behind it. Richard Pryor called Tomlin "a national treasure I'd drop anything, anywhere, to work with her," which from the most demanding comedian of the era is not loose praise. *Time* crowned her queen of comedy in 1977. The awards run to seven Emmys, two Tonys, a Grammy, two Peabodys, the Mark Twain Prize, a Kennedy Center Honor and a SAG Life Achievement Award — recognition across every performing discipline.

The counter-case is one Tomlin herself has never hidden. Her two most celebrated theatrical works were written by Jane Wagner; *The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe* is Wagner's play, and the ideas that make it more than a character showcase are Wagner's ideas. Tomlin is the instrument of that material, extraordinarily, but the authorship is shared and often not hers. She also never won the Academy Award, and the skill on display is craft — observation, mimicry, timing, physical control — rather than intellectual invention. What she has is an ear, and fifty years of refusing to use it cheaply.

Legacy

The honours accumulated into a nearly complete set: nominations across all four major American entertainment awards, leaving her, as the record dryly notes, an Oscar short of both an EGOT and the Triple Crown of Acting. She was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 1998, won a Peabody for career achievement in 2022, and shares a star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars with Wagner.

But the measure of the work is that Ernestine and Edith Ann outlived the shows they were made for, the network that carried them and the monopoly they mocked. Tomlin spent a career insisting that the funniest available subject was the ordinary American talking — and then proved it, one voice at a time, for more than fifty years.

Achievements

• Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play — 1986
• Educated at Wayne State University and HB Studio
• Worked as stage actor, film actor and television actor