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Early on Lily knew the definition of money: independence. When she was seven, she sent away for "a whole bunch of old sleazy stuff advertised in the back of a comic book, like itching powder and hand buzzers. It came C.O.D. and cost $11. My poor mother was intimidated enough to pay for it, but when I got home from school, she said, 'You can't have it until you can pay me back.' I said, 'How's a kid supposed to get any money?' 'You could,' she answered, 'do errands for people.' That was a revelation to me. I don't know why I hadn't thought of it myself. There were about 40 apartments in our building, and so I sent around a list of things I would do—like go to the store or take down the garbage for 10c. From then on I had money to buy what /wanted, or I could chip in the extra $2 to buy a more glamorous pair of shoes." Clerking jobs in dime stores followed when she reached 14, the legal working age. Lily has never stopped working since.
Then, now and always she has done precisely what she wanted. When she was 14—about the age many girls in 1953 were starting to put on lipstick —she hitchhiked from Detroit to Chicago without telling her mother. In high school she would skip twelve or 13 days of school if she didn't think her hair had set right. At about the same time, she began putting on two-piece bathing suits, and, after locking the door to her parents' room, she would climb up on her mother's dressing table to lie on her side and study her image in a horizontal mirror. "What I wanted, more than anything else," she says, "was that Esther Williams full roundness in the hips. Mine were flat. That bit I do in my show about putting padding in my hips when I was a high school cheerleader—absolutely true."
By her own description, Lily was not a lovable child—and was an even less lovable adolescent. Her new show has a hilarious routine in which Mom and Pop Tomlin sit in the living room arguing about cake. It doesn't have frosting tonight, complains Pop. It doesn't have frosting, answers Mom, because frosting gave you a rash last Tuesday. Oh, says Pop. Sure it was Tuesday? Yup, says Mom. And so on. Every few minutes Lily comes through screaming, "Stop talking about that cake!" Explains Lily: "That was pretty much how the Tomlins were when I was 13 or 14. 1 was really Miss Loathsome, but my parents were great!"
After high school Lily entered Detroit's Wayne State University as a premed student because "I wanted to be a doctor. What I really wanted was to have autonomy. In those years—remember, this is 15 years ago—you either had to be exceptional or be married. I never wanted to be dependent on anybody, and I was darned good in science." In her spare time she acted in school plays, and, after dropping out of Wayne State, she did a year's stint at Detroit's Unstabled, a Greenwich Village-like cabaret.