Okay, we need to settle this. In this post here, I said he'd won eleven. I got that number from this page over on the website of the Television Academy — the people who give out the Emmy Awards. That oughta settle it, right?
Not right. I got this e-mail late last night from my pal Jef Abraham, who's one of the best publicists in the business we call "Show"…
I worked as a Carl's publicist off and on over the years — the last time being in 2018 when Carl was nominated for his 13th Emmy Award for narrating the HBO documentary If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast. This nomination put Carl in the Guinness World Records as the oldest living Emmy nominee. He was 96 years and 114 days old. Carl used to joke says winning No. 13 would create a problem: how to divide the awards evenly among his 3 children.
I had read various articles that gave conflicting numbers as to how many Emmy Awards Carl actually had. I went as far as having his assistant physically count the statues so we would have actual confirmation — 12.
Carl unfortunately did not win his 13th Emmy and eventually his Guinness Record was broken by Norman Lear in 2019 when he won an Emmy for Outstanding Variety Special for Live in Front of a Studio Audience: All in the Family and The Jeffersons at age 97. And in 2020 at age 98, Lear surpassed his own record when he won another Emmy Award.
Today, many of those Emmy Awards at the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, New York.
If Abraham says it, it's so. And I can't help but remember many years ago when I was in New York and I took Mr. Reiner's co-star Imogene Coca out for dinner at Sardi's and then we walked across the street to the Shubert Theatre and saw the musical, Crazy For You. Imogene was living on a high-up floor in a lovely security building in Manhattan and when I took her home and she showed me around her apartment, I saw a broken Emmy on a shelf. It was literally in about four pieces.
I asked her what happened there. She said it fell out the window…but she didn't recall just how that had happened. I told her that I'd heard the Academy replaces damaged Emmy statuettes and if she liked, I'd call up and try to arrange that. She said, "Oh, don't bother. I have another one around here someplace."
That's how I've told that story ever since and that quote from her is absolutely true. What probably isn't true is that she had another one around there someplace. I didn't think to look it up until just now but according to this page, she was nominated six times but only won once — as the Best Actress of 1952. Unless they'd already sent her a replacement Emmy, she didn't have an undamaged one. She deserved many.