Hooked into Lily

The voice sounds like an air-raid siren with adenoids. The face, a passably good copy of a pickle, is caught between a snarl and a smile, the snarl usually winning out. "You are not talking with just anyone's fool," she snorts indignantly. "I am a high school graduate." Who could doubt that Ernestine, the world's most famous telephone operator, has her diploma--or that Lily Tomlin, her creator, is the funniest, most inventive comedienne to come along since Elaine May?

In one of her Ernestine routines, she is dunning an invisible Gore Vidal --whose name she pronounces "Veedle"--for $23.64. When "Mr. Veedle" talks back, she threatens him with all those recordings that the phone company has been making of his calls over the years. "I think blackmail is such an ugly word," she tells him in a voice that mixes honey with brine. "Let's just call it a vicious threat."

In another bit, Ernestine complains to Joan Crawford that she was robbed of a dime by a Pepsi-Cola machine. "I want it back, all ten cents of it," she informs Crawford, a highly publicized member of Pepsi's board of directors. Unless she gets it, Ernestine promises, Pepsi's phones will be ripped out a six-pack at a time. "You don't understand," she tells anyone who disputes her authority. "This is the telephone company. We are not subject to city, state, or federal legislation. We are omnipotent."

Real People. Tomlin's satire delights in big, powerful targets like the phone company and the FBI. (Ernestine suggests in one skit that her company and the FBI work together, since they both tap phones.) "There is bite in her comedy," says Producer George Schlatter, who gave Tomlin her big break on NBC's Laugh-In in 1969. "But she never goes for a joke outside the character. She won't burn herself out because people are interested in her characters, who are real people."

They are all based on real people, at any rate. Mrs. Earbore, the Tasteful Lady, is a takeoff on the country-club women of Grosse Pointe, Mich., whom Tomlin observed while she was growing up in Detroit. Edith Ann, the 5 1/2-year-old thug--Tomlin's best known routine after Ernestine--derives from a little girl she met in a Pasadena hotel. "I wanted to do a child," she says, "and I'd probably thought about Edith Ann for years without being conscious of it. I had some trouble making her scruffy; the Laugh-In producers wanted her to look like Shirley Temple."

Edith Ann is not only unlovable; she is a kid you want to kick. "I don't usually get a cold," she says in a voice borrowed from an emery board. "I have leprosy." Her chief concern in life is finding some place to play doctor with Junior Phillips, her six-year-old boy friend. Like other little girls, Edith Ann dresses up--but she puts a doll under her dress so that she looks pregnant.

Attention, Diners. Tomlin's first acting experience was in a production of The Madwoman of Chaillot at Wayne State University. After two years of college, she headed for a show business career in New York, where one of her first acts was as a waitress at a Broadway Howard Johnson's. "Attention, diners," she announced over the loudspeaker one evening. "Your Howard Johnson's waitress of the week, Miss Lily Tomlin, is about to make her appearance on the floor. Let's all give her a big hand!" Tomlin's peculiar brand of humor was not one of the 28 flavors that Howard Johnson's featured --though she got double tips that evening--and the next day she went on to another job. Soon she was entertaining patrons of Manhattan coffeehouses and cabarets--without waiting on tables.

Almost fanatical about her privacy, Tomlin, 33, today lives alone in a one-bedroom house off Sunset Boulevard. She is a militant feminist, and has used the proceeds from her first hit record to buy the movie rights to Cynthia Buchanan's comic novel Maiden, about a disastrously liberated California virgin, in which she eventually hopes to star. Indeed, despite her busy schedule of comic skits on TV variety shows--she is still a Laugh-In regular--and the concert circuit, Lily considers herself first and foremost an actress, and she hankers to play the heavy dramatic parts of a Glenda Jackson. Jackson seems to have cornered the market on Elizabeth I, but the mind boggles at what Tomlin might do with, say, the hidden humor of Victoria Regina.

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