Bob Mackie Says He’s ‘Always Embraced’ Famous ‘Curtain Dress’ Carol Burnett Wore on Her Sketch Comedy Show

Carol Burnett had several unforgettable costumes during her eponymous show’s 11-year run. 

The pieces created for The Carol Burnett Show were the work of in-house costumer Bob Mackie, who created upwards of 70 looks per week for Burnett and her guests. 

Of the more than 16,000 outfits Mackie crafted during his tenure, multiple stand out, among them, Burnett’s curtain dress, which she famously wore to portray Scarlett O’Hara in the sketch Went With the Wind!, a comedic take on award-winning film Gone With the Wind.

While Mackie has put several costumes on the auction block, he donated this one to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

During the Newport Beach Film Festival's Conversation with Bob Mackie and Carol Burnett on Sunday, Oct. 20, Mackie told Turner Classic Movies' Dave Karger, who moderated the discussion with Burnett, that he “always embraced” the costume. 

“Anytime you get a good laugh, you're happy,” Mackie said. “It can be the worst joke in the world, but if you get a laugh, you're happy.”

The consume pays homage to a scene in the award-winning movie when Scarlett O’Hara (played by Vivien Leigh) devises a plan to create a new dress using her mother’s curtains much to Mammy's (played by Hattie McDaniel) shagrin.

“For those of you who can’t sit for four hours and watch Gone With the Wind, here’s our version,” Burnett once reflected on the origins of the sketch. 

During the conversation with Karger, Burnett and Mackie also reminisced about the fanfare over the looks she wore during her show’s Q&A segments. 

“Well … [when] we started out, Carol was just going to wear a little robe over her first costume on the first show that we did, and nobody was very happy with that,” Mackie recalled. “A week later, all of a sudden she had to have a brand new gown every week, which was fine with me."

Added Burnett, "I never wanted to see what I was going to wear for Q&A until I went to the fitting. It was always a surprise: 'oh, what's my dress this week?' ”

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Burnett also shared the the Q&A portion originated from executive producer Bob Banner’s desire to have the audience connect to the real Burnett.

“Instead of having a comedian come out to warm up the studio audience, he said, ‘you should come out and be the warm up and do Q&A, and we tape it.’ And I balked at the idea at first because, I said, what if nobody wants to ask a question or what if they do and I don't have a snapping answer.

“She continued, “He said, the reason is we want the audience to know you before you get into the wigs and the blackout teeth and the fat suits and all of that… let people get to know who you are. And so I said, ‘Okay, we'll do it four times, four weeks, and if it doesn't work, we'll forget it.’ But I started to like it because it wasn't written, people would start raising their hands. Some of 'em would come up and want to sing … so sometimes we just had the best time.”

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Mackie called the show’s end “a little bittersweet.”

“I just loved doing the show. I loved making the laughs happen when they happened,” he said. 

Though the two don’t see one another “as often as we'd like,” Burnett says, they’ve taken every opportunity to work together over the years. .

“Once we stopped doing the show, I started doing more specials … like with Placido Domingo and Beverly Sills. And again, Julie Andrews and Bob always designed those specials. So we still were working together. And I did a Broadway show. He designed that. So anytime I had to do something, I said, Bob, are you busy? Can you do this?”