In the mid-’70s — decades before it was trendy to be “bi” and risky to be gay — Lily Tomlin was offered the cover of Time. All she had to do was come out. “I was more insulted than anything,” she says. “I felt it was a bribe: ‘We need a gay person, and we’ll take anybody!'”
Anyone who’s seen her — from “Laugh-In” though her Ruth Madoff-ian turn on the FX series “Damages” — knows she’s hardly “anybody.”
In town recently for Leslie Jordan’s one-man off-Broadway show “My Trip Down the Pink Carpet,” Tomlin has the same hairdo and impish smile she sported in Broadway’s “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” 25 years ago.
“Gimme some of that hot sauce, you ol’ hillbilly,” she tells Jordan over breakfast. They met a few years back, making HBO’s “12 Miles of Bad Road.” The series tanked, but the friendship flourished.
Watching Tomlin shake hot sauce over her egg whites, it’s hard to believe she’s 70 — and that she and writer Jane Wagner have been partners, in work and in life, since 1971.
It’s something Tomlin’s neither tried to hide nor thought to trumpet. But it explains why “Pink Carpet,” Jordan’s tale of a gay man coming to terms with Hollywood and himself, was something she’d produce.
“I think sex just scares most people,” says Tomlin with a shrug.
“So much is built into filling out the outline of who someone is . . .
“I got pretty early on that people were all struggling. When I saw pictures of my mother as a baby — when I got that she had been a baby, that everyone had been a baby — I thought, ‘Well, it’s all over.’ Because there’s no way anybody could know anything.”
What she does know is her integrity isn’t for sale. AT&T once offered her half a million dollars (“and that was just for New England!”) if she’d play her fidgety telephone operator, Ernestine, in a commercial.
Tomlin said no — then went on “Saturday Night Live” as Ernestine saying, “We don’t care, we don’t have to. We’re the phone company!”
Which brings us back to Time. When the cover offer came, in 1975, she was making the comedy album “Modern Scream.” Feeling “kind of teary” that the mag wanted to play up her life, not her art, she ran it past her friend Vito Russo. He reminded her how Cliff Gorman, the star of “The Boys in the Band,” made a point of telling everyone he wasn’t gay.
“He was afraid he wouldn’t get work,” Tomlin recalls.
“So his interviews, bless his heart, were all, ‘People have asked me what it’s like playing a gay man on the screen . . . ‘ ”
Inspired, Tomlin took his interviews and flipped them. On her album, an interviewer asks her what it felt like “to see yourself on the big screen, playing a heterosexual woman.”
Replies Tomlin: ” ‘Well, I’ve seen these women all my life — I know how they walk, I know how they talk!”
She ended up on Time’s cover two years later, but on her own terms. It was a flattering piece that mentions Wagner as a “friend and collaborator” with whom she happens to share a house.
Tomlin says she really came out on that comedy album.
“Of course, in my case, nobody paid any attention,” she says. “They just think I’m a nice girl.”
Nice or not, she dreamed of doing a reality-TV show long before real desperate housewives came on the scene — if only to take on critic John Simon.
She’s still smarting over his calling her “horse-faced” in the 1975 film “Nashville.” She envisioned a scene in which she’d be dining at Orso with friends, only to spot him sitting nearby.
“I was going to go to his booth and say, ‘John Simon? Lily Tomlin. Neighhhhh!’ “
Lily on love & Lily
* On love, and what to do about it: “Someone once said to me, ‘If I thought I were gay, I’d beat down the door of the nearest psychiatrist.’ And I said, ‘If I was in love with my refrigerator, I’d buy it lamb chops.’ ”
* Why she never married: “The wardrobe alone is nothing I want to deal with.”
* Gay breakups: “I don’t like it when certain lesbian couples leave their partner in a bitter divorce. I think we should be a little better than this.”
* Oversharing in the information age: “Many times I joke that I yearn for the age of repression.”