Lily Tomlin remembers 1970s audience becoming ‘deathly still’ when she told Johnny Carson she didn’t want kids

Lily Tomlin is always plenty busy but right now she’s especially so with two major projects to promote: the feature film Grandma and the Netflix comedy series Grace and Frankie opposite Jane Fonda.

Lily is doing a lot of interviews to talk them up and one of them was with HuffPost Live on Monday.

She recalled the time in the early 1970s when she guested on NBC’s The Tonight Show.

Host Johnny Carson asked her the question.

It wasn’t ‘Are you gay?’ But it might as well have been.

Carson asked Tomlin, then one of the stars of TV’s Laugh In, about being single without children.

When Tomlin answered that she wasn’t interested in having kids, she remembers the audience became ‘deathly still.’

‘So finally I broke the ice. I said [to Carson], ‘Well, who’s got custody of yours?’ Tomlin told

‘He laughed. He said “touche” or something like that, and he got off of it.’

Then in 1975, TIME Magazine offered Tomlin its cover if she would use it to announce she is gay. It was 22 years before Ellen DeGeneres chose the very same venue to do so.

Tomlin, now 75, simply wasn’t ready.

‘I wonder if I’d come out on that ’75 cover of TIME if I would have had as long a career as I’ve had, because it would have been an inopportune time to make such a grand statement,’ Tomlin said. ‘I mean, Ellen didn’t really come out until 20 years later.’

She got the cover anyway in 1977 with an article about her phenomenal success on Broadway.

‘I wasn’t totally forthcoming,’ Tomlin says of that time in her career. ‘Everybody in the business knew I was gay, and certainly everybody I worked with and everything like that. I just never had a press conference to announce it.’

Tomlin has been in a relationship with writer-director Jane Wagner since 1971. The couple, frequent professional collaborators, were legally married in 2013.

‘It’s been a long life,’ Tomlin says. ‘I’ve been really lucky.’