Carrie And Me: A Mother-Daughter Love Story Part 4

Dr. Peters turned out to be a very special and gifted young doctor whose expertise was in teenaged addiction. I spoke to him daily, and he said Carrie had "come around" fairly fast. That made me feel happy, but I didn't trust my happiness ... not yet. Joe and Carrie would pa.s.s each other in the hall every day as they were going to their separate counseling sessions. It made Joe uncomfortable, but he, too, was relieved that for now Carrie was someplace safe.

After a week in L.A., Jody, Erin, and I drove for a couple of hours down to Joe and Carrie's hospital, and checked into a nearby hotel where we would stay during "Family Week." We were all on edge. The girls hadn't seen their father for over a month, and it had been longer than that since we had seen Carrie. Joe met us at the elevator, and we all hugged. Then we saw Carrie waiting for us down the hall. I flashed back to the first time we saw her after her thirty days at PDAP. And this time, too, she ran to all of us with a wide smile on her face, and tears in her eyes.

Diary entry:

Dare I hope? YES. I'm not going to fear the worst. I'm not going to give fear any more power over me. I'm going to hope for the best.

Every day during "Family Week" families and patients would gather in a large room with chairs arranged in a circle. In the center of that circle two chairs were placed facing each other. The patient could only sit in one of them quietly, not saying a word, while family members would take turns sitting in the other one, pouring their hearts out. They talked about all that had happened, and how badly they wanted their loved one to get well and stay well. Family after family went into the middle of the circle. One of the most powerful feelings came from seeing that we were not alone. All of us here were going through it. There truly wasn't a dry eye anywhere in that room. The only thing that surprised me about that was discovering that I still had some tears left.

Now it was our turn. We were the only family who had two loved ones to deal with. Carrie sat in her chair and heard her younger sisters separately tell her all about their fears for her and how much they loved her. Joe spoke to her next. She took in every word, nodding and crying. Then it was my turn, and I didn't hold back, either. At the end of the session, we all embraced, and when Carrie hugged me she said, "Thank you, Mama."

Now it was Joe's turn to sit in the chair. We went through the same thing with my husband and the father of our three girls. It wasn't easy. Not only did Jody, Erin, and I have to tell him how we felt, but now Carrie had to sit in the chair opposite the one she had just vacated, facing her father and airing her own feelings about his disease, while he just looked at her and wept. It was an incredible experience. Somehow, I knew in my heart that this time Carrie would be okay.

When the week ended, we all went home together, where we had a family powwow. We all agreed that we should go public to ward off any tabloid stories with all their distortions. We wanted to tell our truth about Carrie's drug abuse, so we gave People magazine the story and it made the cover. Over a smiling picture of Carrie and me they ran the headline, "Carol Burnett's Nightmare," which I hated. Carrie laughed about it, calling herself "Mama's Little Nightmare."

Now that we were all back together, it became clear to Joe and me that we had grown too far apart. We decided to separate. We were worried about telling the girls, but it wasn't as difficult as we had antic.i.p.ated. Although they had never mentioned it, they had suspected that their father and I had been having problems for quite a while, and even though they were sad they weren't surprised. Joe and I a.s.sured them that we would remain friends. He went back to work on the show he had been producing before his thirty-day stint in rehab, and Carrie, Jody, Erin, and I flew to the condo in Maui to spend some time healing. And heal we did.

The girls and I sunbathed and swam and hit the local malls and went to the movies. Carrie and I spent hours playing Scrabble. She wiped me out plenty of times fair and square, but she also knew how to get to me. All she had to do when it was her turn was take fifteen minutes before every move and the wait would drive me nuts. When my turn finally came I'd put down the first word that came to mind. I would lose out of sheer boredom. Anyway, that's my story (and I'm sticking to it).

For some silly reason, we gave each other fake names on the Scrabble score pad. I was "Mary" and Carrie became "Clara." When she wanted to play some more, she would pipe up, "Hey, Mary! Wanna go another round at Scrabble?" I would reply, "You betcha, Clara!" And we'd be off and running. All four of us laughed a lot during that time on the island. I had never been happier, and I knew Jody and Erin felt the same way. They had their big sister back.

We celebrated my forty-ninth birthday by spending a weekend on the island of Kauai. We went horseback riding and even took a helicopter tour, landing on a deserted beach for a picnic. We watched the sun set and flew back to the hotel with the score from Superman playing in the helicopter. I had my girl back-all three of them, really.

Celebrating my forty-ninth birthday in Hawaii

As a result of the People magazine article, Carrie and I were asked to appear on various television shows to talk about the h.e.l.l we had all gone through. After those appearances we received tons of letters from parents all around the country, thanking us for shining a light on the dark secrets most families keep when they're faced with the ugliness and fear of their teenagers' addiction. Many said that our coming out of the closet helped them to stop being afraid to face, head on, the problems their kids had, to stop being afraid of them. They realized the best way through the nightmare was to face the truth, take charge, and find the courage to put their kids in a rehab facility, even if they balked. They came to the same realization I had: "You have to love your kids enough to let them hate you."

I remember being interviewed on The Phil Donahue Show. I had decided to accept any and all such invitations, not to offer advice, but to make myself available to answer people's questions about our experience. I appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, The Dinah Sh.o.r.e Show, several news programs, radio shows, and now here I was with Phil Donahue, one of daytime's most popular television hosts, trying to help other parents. So in a way, I guess I was giving advice when Phil said, "On the other hand, it must have been hard at the time for Carrie to be Carol Burnett's daughter ..." I smiled back and said, "Let me put it this way, I wish I'd had me for a mother." The audience applauded. I was embarra.s.sed, but it was the truth.

Carrie, on her own, went on to speak to kids at several junior high and high schools about her drug abuse, how she got into it, and her recovery process. After one of her talks, I received a letter from the a.s.sistant princ.i.p.al of a special high school program in Torrance who thought I might be interested in getting some feedback about Carrie's appearance at their a.s.sembly for two thousand students. He said her message really hit home with the kids and enclosed a few of the critiques that the students wrote.

"In my opinion, I liked the way Carrie presented her speech. It wasn't formal. It was a real live person with a real live story to tell. It was never boring, and very interesting to say the least."

"I thought that the speaker was very good. She didn't bore us with a lecture, and she didn't say, 'Don't do it.' Instead, she told us about her life. She proved to me how drugs and alcohol can really put a burden on anyone's life. I would recommend that more speakers like that are brought to speak to the student body."

"I thought the a.s.sembly was outstanding. It's about time we get to listen to someone that speaks our language. She didn't give us a lot of percentages and figures. She came right out and told the blunt truth. She always had everyone's attention and she never bored you."

"This was the best a.s.sembly we've had so far. She was very honest. Perhaps her use of four-letter words was, at times, too much, but since this approach got the students' attention, it was worthwhile. This school should have more speakers like her."

"It wasn't what she said that made people listen, but the way she said it. She understood her audience completely. Some of the teachers were upset because she didn't use proper language, but personally I thought the program was worth it. She knows how to speak to 'normal' teenagers."

A year later, after getting her high school diploma by taking the GED tests, Carrie applied to Pepperdine University in Malibu and was accepted. A dear friend of the family, an adjunct faculty member, told me about the time he showed Carrie around the campus. He took her to the main theater, which was empty at the time. They stood in the back for a minute, soaking up the vibe before she took him by the hand, walked him down the aisle, and sat him in the center of the fourth row. She then climbed up on the stage, put her hands on her hips, looked around, and said, "Get used to sitting there, Uncle Bill, I'm going to be performing on this stage a lot!"

Carrie majored in Pepperdine's arts program, which included music and drama. She sang in the school's jazz band program and won the lead in a student production of Barefoot in the Park, which was performed in the main theater. The whole family attended and I thought she was terrific, but after all, I was her mother... .

A few weeks later, I received a letter from the director of the theater department at Pepperdine about Carrie's performance. He told me that he was very impressed with Carrie's devotion and dedication and especially her comedic timing. He said everyone loved working with her and congratulated me for having such a "pro" for a daughter.

Carrie had what people in the business call "comedy chops" and she became one of the stars in the theater department. As her dreams of acting were fulfilled, her self-esteem was reborn. I knew we had a budding artist in the family and I was thrilled for her. The "nightmare" was truly over at last.

Sadly, by this time Joe and I had gone ahead and finalized our divorce. Happily, we remained friends until his untimely death from cancer ten years later.

During the next few years, Carrie pursued her goals of acting, singing, composing music, and writing. She appeared in major motion pictures and landed roles in many television series.

Musically, she formed a couple of bands and performed in clubs around Los Angeles. She loved it all, country, folk, rock and roll, jazz ... the whole ball of wax. The music they often played was a mix of the Who, the Rolling Stones, and Rickie Lee Jones.

In the early '90s, Carrie fell in love. He proposed, and they were married in 1994.

The wedding I threw for them turned out to be a pretty unusual event, to say the least. CBS offered us the use of Studio 33 in Television City, where we had taped our variety show for eleven years.

The marriage ceremony was going to take place up on the stage and the guests were going to sit in the audience seats. Along with family and friends, we invited many of the people who worked at CBS and had watched Carrie grow up when she, Jody, and Erin used to come to our early taping of The Carol Burnett Show every Friday. So this was a very special place to hold the ceremony.

Carrie had found the judge she wanted in the Yellow Pages! She showed up early, and was quite the sight-an ample older woman dressed to the nines in cobalt blue sequins, topped with a bright-red velvet turban. Trailing along behind her on a leash was her pet bulldog, Arnold. She explained that she took Arnold everywhere she went because he happened to be her reincarnated dead husband. Everybody ate up the unusual venue, and the kookiness of the judge from the Yellow Pages with her "husband," Arnold. Carrie, of course, simply adored the whole scene!

Some weeks before the nuptials, Carrie and I had gone shopping for her wedding dress. We went to the obvious bridal shops, but being Carrie, she didn't want anything that smacked of convention. So we wound up at a secondhand vintage store, and found a pretty, antique, cream-colored lace number cut low in the back, with a jacket. It suited her. I especially liked the jacket, because it covered the large tattoo of a bird-of-paradise on her right shoulder. Though it was a pretty enough tattoo, I never cottoned to the idea of permanent ink on the body. When she first had it done, I said, "Honey, this is going to be with you the rest of your life! What'll people think when you're an old lady in the old folks' home with this ... this ... bird on your shoulder?" She replied, "Mama, they won't think anything about it, because chances are good that they'll all have tattoos, too!"

Still, I was glad the jacket came with the dress.

Back to the wedding. Everyone was seated in the audience waiting for the ceremony to begin. There was an expectant tension in the air. Carrie's fiance took his place near the judge. Arnold began sniffing and drooling on the groom's pants, and we all tried not to laugh at the thought that the next thing Arnold would do was lift his leg. Carrie didn't want the wedding march. She wanted George Gershwin. So the trio I had hired struck up Gershwin's "Our Love Is Here to Stay" as Carrie made her entrance. She had a pale-pink plume in her hair, and a matching boa around her neck. She had ditched the jacket, and the colorful tattoo on her shoulder completed the ensemble. All I could think was, "Well, that's my girl. Why am I not surprised?"

For their honeymoon, the newlyweds decided to drive all over the country in search of a "getaway," a place to recharge while they still maintained a modest home in Los Angeles. They found their dream location in the small town of Gunnison, Colorado, a little cabin on forty acres that they proceeded to renovate by adding a second-story bedroom and a new roof. Carrie learned how to wield a mean hammer. Friendly neighbors helped them and it wasn't long before they were ready to settle into their home in the mountains.

For the next couple of years, Carrie continued working on her career, going back and forth to Los Angeles to make more guest appearances on various television series and to play her music in clubs. Carrie auditioned for and got the role of Maureen in the first national company of the musical Rent.

It was at this point that I suspected things weren't going well in their marriage. Carrie was traveling a lot but her husband chose to remain alone in their Colorado cabin. They separated in 1998 after four years of marriage.

Carrie and I kept in touch mostly by e-mail, but since she hardly ever mentioned what went wrong with her marriage, I chose not to pry. Eventually, she opened up to me.

From: Carrie

To: Mama