Name: Barbara Cartland on Letterman, April 26, 1983
Uploaded: 2020-02-05T21:16:08.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Barbara Cartland on Letterman, April 26, 1983' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-02-05. Transcript available. By request. Dave's hair is almost in full bloom.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Barbara Cartland on Letterman, April 26, 1983' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-02-05. Transcript available. By request. Dave's hair is almost in full bloom.

my next guest tonight has sold over 350 million books this weekend she presided
over a romantic
book lovers convention here in new york city seated i am told on a gold and red
velvet throne
we're delighted that she's here tonight to sit on these brown cushions please
welcome
barbara cartland ladies and gentlemen
should i i never know what to do should i open this gift or save it it's very
very special i'm the
only person in the world who can give it you the only only and it's terribly
terribly lucky
it really is it's very exciting shall i explain what it is well let's open it
up then you can
explain then you can read what's inside why don't you explain your dress if you
want to explain
something that's that's that's a piece of work that's amazing isn't it yes it's
it's a last sort
of hartnell hartnell's the person in in england norman hartnell's made for the
queen the queen
mother he's now dead and then this is almost the sort of end of a year you know
and after this is
going to be no more people who make this by hand now are those actual jewels on
there or simulated jewels
or well and they're not valuable but they are sewn on by hand and nowadays
nobody sells things on by hand
they stick them on with a bit of bit of glue you know so this is very very
unique and they're selling
them in england i saw the antiques and curiosities i look inside and read it to
the people and they'll
understand it's very exciting that okay well it's an acorn first of all here it
is there's a little acorn
uh this acorn has been picked from the oak planted by queen elizabeth uh the
first of england on the
spot where she killed her first stag in the beautiful grounds of camfield place
essenden in the county of
hertfordshire the home of the famous authoress barbara cartland preserved
forever in 22 karat gold well
that's very nice now it's the real acorn and it brings you all the luck in the
world it's creepy and i'll
tell you why it's made by a white witch made by a white witch yes it's done by
a white witch and she was a
little girl in toronto the witch which the local witch was dying and she said i'm
going to give you
my past she said i don't want your past she said i can't help it you have to
have them and if she
makes it for anybody she's fond of marvelous things happen i produce so many
babies i just warn you on it
people who wanted babies just be careful and uh people and marvelous things
happen to you they
rarely do i mean if you want to be a millionaire you'll be a millionaire but
please don't put it in
your car put in your pocket put it in my both my sons carry one we all carry
them it's creepy people
write to me from all over the world saying wonderful things happen to them and
it's uh there's chocolate
on the inside right so really it's a joke i know i know that's that's beautiful
thank you very much
barbara thank you very much oh let me give you something we have these sponges
we give out
that's all we have but you can you can use that now uh first of all we've been
talking tonight about
350 million books yes you've sold that many books well so get the guinness book
of records say so i
didn't count them they did yeah that's an amazing feat uh now tell me what
happened this weekend at the
big uh uh book conference they were supposed to be dubbed there right it could
only happen in america
it could only happen in america when kathleen forks said she was going to have
a love train going
across america i just didn't believe it it came across america everybody met it
and all the people
were on board and i met them at the station you see and then we had the the big
day and i was the
queen of romance of the world and it really was rather wonderful it really was
i mean it was
quite exciting and uh all these girls girls some of them are much older who'd
written these books on
love were all accumulated together so they become a force you know if you get a
collection of people
together so now romance which was always the cinderella people said oh you
write romance
do you know sort of upper class way now we're we're we're acknowledged yeah
success now you know at
this thing you were going to be covered in doves is that right they were going
to turn
that was thank goodness that was said oh she said you're going to have lovely
doves flying on your
head i said are they house trained they said yes they'll be rehearsed they
rehearsed them and they
weren't oh thank goodness i mean i didn't think queen romance looked very well
with doves yeah uh how
many different books have you written what do you mean by that well you've sold
350 million right yes
how many different books oh 300 i'm on my 362nd book but they're not all novels
last year i wrote 25 books 23
three novels two uh uh prestige books one was barbara carton celebrities which
came out this week in
america now you you write you have one contract for two novels a month right
now how how can you turn
out that volume of stuff without repeating stories well i never well we know
the duke is going to marry
the virgin on the last page because my heroines my heroines are never allowed
to go to bed till the ring on
the finger this is barbara carton's purity for young people i write about very
young girls i think it's
actually wrong for them to be promiscuous about 18 18 and i think it's wrong
for a young girl to be
promiscuous they should be protected and looked after and so i never have a
heroine who goes to bed
before marriage and the thing wait a minute let me just say and the other thing
is that i work very hard so
it sounds they are but i work every day like you go to the office or you come
here i work on a chapter
every day yeah but you roughly 60 000 words per book no no no not about this oh
no your publishers
have a fit because he's have to charge so much so much extra money how many 50
000 and i give them
about 45 000 because i punctuate in a funny way i punctuate very small
paragraphs uh now do you ever
have a uh an unhappy ending or is it always happiness oh once i had an unhappy
ending i can't tell you how
awful it was it sort of came right it was time of the french revolution for the
girls going to convent
at the end i then had frantic telegrams from a girl in australia saying lest
the duke gets army which
was her name i'm going to commit suicide so she went on and on setting it so i
changed the ending i'm in
the second edition i couldn't have the girl killing herself it was too
ridiculous but don't you see no
actually it's very interesting women identify with what they read that's why it's
very important
you shouldn't have too much bromography if you're turning everything you're
turning out all of these
books and you're working so hard every day and they all have to have happy
endings how do you keep
them from being uh very similar well they're not because they're in different
parts of the world i've
just done two books in america one in in hawaii um which i went to and i did
the last king of hawaii
it's very interesting and he was the first monarch that ever came to to america
yeah it wasn't it's a
statement that's one of your states and the other one i did in san francisco i've
got two american
backgrounds you could do one in uh bermuda with dr tyson and his wife uh we
have to go away uh i'm
i'm sorry for pointing at you barbara cartland and i will be right back
thank you welcome back to the show this is uh barbara cartland and uh in
addition to you you must not
have much time for anything else you're so busy writing all the time yes well i
do a lot of other
things too i i'm on the health i'm the queen of preventative health in england
and i work very
hard and i get 10 000 letters a year from what i don't want any more from all
over the world including
america all people writing about health because you know orthodox medicine in
many cases have failed
completely and vitamins vitamins you call them really make all the difference
to people's lives
and it's what's keep me going and they're only pure foods the same astronauts
do you want to
do you want to mention your age or is that oh yes i should be 80 82 in july
they're pretty impressed by that now uh now you made a uh an unusual
contribution to uh the field
of aviation didn't you well that was rather exciting because um two raf young
officers and myself we
thought out quite on our own that if an airplane towed a glider you could have
a series of gliders
dropping off with commercially which would be very cheap this was in 1931 and
so we thought we saw
i said well i'll make the glider and those glider only cost a hundred pounds
that's two thousand
dollars two two hundred dollars think of it about a day and uh so the the we
started to make it and
then the daily mail offered a thousand pound price a lot of money in those days
was the first person
who glided the channel they had no idea it could be done they didn't know it
could be told you see
so a german got up very early in the morning and won that and so when i got my
glider fixed on the
airplane we went across country to give the first glider air mail at reading
and the mayor was going
to meet us and i'm the only person i think in the world who stopped an english
cricket match
because we tied handkerchiefs on the toe string and they stood like this and
stopped playing cricket
don't you think i was frankly smart i was very impressed yeah and then when
when i did this is your
life we i expect you have it in america in england they do this is your life
they the young air force
officer appeared who was now a group captain and said i we had helped
enormously the royal air force
to help with gliding the development of gliding unfortunately the germans have
developed it even
quicker and they did a lot in the invasion of crete but even so we did use gliders
in the war now what
are they using for in the war well they they the germans landed them on crete
with troops in them
you see they brought them over one airplane then the gliders glided down yeah
and with a lot of
troops on board they also used them a lot for supplies too how many flights did
you make in a
glider well i i was the in the airplane because you weren't in the glider i had
the young the young
air force man was the glider and he won the gliding prize at one time and then
the air ministry
said it was dangerous and so they stopped him you had to hand glide but the
actual towing of gliders was
started by me well that's exciting i i've been in a glider myself in fact it's
quite tricky yeah people who
who are sailplane uh uh enthusiasts claim that it's actually safer than with
motorcraft but i i don't
know and then the people who fly motorcraft say oh that's crap i mean you know
you got my glider fell
down in the end and broke into a thousand pieces because they're very very
light you see sure so if
you do fall on your nose i mean that's that there's no more glider yeah
whatever happens to you but
but i mean there there of course is no engine to fail so you can pretty much
land it anywhere it's just
if you're clever i feel very good were you good at it well i just was writing i
guess i was as good as
a passenger yeah i always do what i can do oh no no no no no no i went up with
a guy it's quite
complicated yeah it's exciting though very interesting noise just that the
wishing of the air going past
you uh where were we oh yeah it was nice to meet you uh we're just i'm just
back from vacation and i'm
about half loopy so forgive me uh nice to meet you barbara cartland pleasure uh
stay right there uh
thank you uh barbara thank you very much for being here thanks for the acorn
and i hope you sell
some books for heaven's sake so also uh my thanks to richard lewis uh rick sheckman
we will reschedule
tomorrow night uh we will have shelly winters and tom greeson good night folks
thanks paul