Seven Dirty Words (13 page)

Carlin certainly wasn’t the first to earn Podell’s ire. Shecky Greene was opening for Nat King Cole at the Copa when he tried a joke in a voice that sounded like Popeye. Unbeknownst to him, Podell’s guttural rasp was often compared with Popeye’s. Almost immediately the lights went down and the microphone went dead. The stubborn comic kept doing the joke; the stubborn club bully kept shutting him down. “Three weeks I had of that,” said Greene.

Craig Kellem was with the GAC gang on the night of their client’s meltdown at the Copa. He’d already sensed Carlin was getting restless, but the agent wasn’t sure how to handle it. Besides, his own star was rising at the agency. “I had made my bones,” he says, “and I wasn’t staying up at night worrying about the fact that the guy was changing.” Like Golden, Kellem struggled to understand why this talented performer would sabotage his own career: “The brand was working, and he was changing the brand. I would love to tell you I was prophetic—that there was greater comedy to come, and in order to do that, he’s gotta become a social spokesman. But that’s not what happened.”

GAC had already seen another of its young comedy stars suffer a very public identity crisis. Soon after his debut on network television and in the high-rollers’ nightclubs, Richard Pryor began to crack. Opening for Trini Lopez at Basin Street East, he performed while lying on the floor. The manager of the Sands called Pryor’s agent, Sandy Gallin, to complain that the wiry kid was “swinging from the chandeliers” during his week there on a bill with Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. But the real freak-out occurred in September 1967, when Pryor froze onstage at the Aladdin Hotel in Vegas. He’d been trying to fit in as a junior version of Cosby, spinning amusing yarns with little acknowledgment of the problem of race in America, which was then coming to a head.

“My days of pretending to be as slick and colorless as Cosby were numbered,” Pryor later wrote. “There was a world of junkies and winos, pool hustlers and prostitutes, women and family screaming inside my head, trying to be heard. The longer I kept them bottled up, the harder they tried to escape. The pressure built til I went nuts.” Seeing Dean Martin looking at him expectantly from the audience at the Aladdin, the comedian stood mute for a painfully long time. Who are they looking at? he asked himself. “I couldn’t say, ‘They’re looking at you, Richard,’ because I didn’t know who Richard Pryor was,” he claimed. Finally, he mustered the courage to open his mouth. “What the fuck am I doing here?” he asked, and walked off.

It was a question Carlin was trying to answer for himself. After appearing as a “Mystery Guest” on
What’s My Line
, he glumly told the studio audience that he was appearing at the Royal Box in midtown Manhattan, where Frank Sinatra had sat a few years earlier with Gleason and Toots Shor, watching Frank Jr. make his singing debut. Host Wally Bruner tried to get his guest to open up; more than most of his fellow comedians, he noted, Carlin considered himself a writer as well as an entertainer. “It’s the only way,” Carlin replied. “I like to make things from my own head.”

By his own admission, it was around this time that Carlin began experimenting with LSD and peyote. Hallucinogenic highs were no longer the well-kept secret of the intellectually intrepid underground. Psychedelic music, art, and fashion had been an undeniable part of American life to all but the most naïve Americans since the massive media coverage of the Summer of Love. Users reported “dazzling states of heightened awareness or mystical experiences worthy of St. Teresa of Avila,” noted
Time
magazine as early as 1966; “others claim insights that have changed their lives.”

Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, the two former Harvard psychologists whose experiments with mind-altering drugs helped usher in the new age of expanding consciousness, had already been celebrity figures for several years—Leary with his ubiquitous motto, “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” and Alpert, by this time known as Ram Dass, leading the counterculture’s spiritual quest to India and beyond. Paul Krassner accompanied Groucho Marx on the aging vaudevillian’s maiden voyage on the drug; Cary Grant was another film star who admitted he’d taken dozens of trips, as therapeutic treatment, before LSD was banned. “It opened my eyes,” Paul McCartney of the Beatles told
Life
magazine. “It made me a better, more honest, more tolerant member of society.” World leaders, he suggested, would be ready to “banish war, poverty, and famine” if they would only try it.

Carlin’s own experimentation with acid didn’t last long, but it helped him to see that he was out of his element with the “straight” crowd. “Those drugs served their purpose,” he recalled. “They helped open me up.” Though he would have future problems with other drugs, he looked back on his LSD period as a positive experience. “If a drug has anything going for it at all, it should be self-limiting,” he said. “It should tell you when you’ve had enough. Acid and peyote were that way for me.”

Still, he had obligations. He did the Sullivan show, on a night that also featured Bob Newhart, just after wrapping up the disaster at the Copa. He appeared twice more on Sullivan’s stage in a matter of months—the first time alongside singer Bobby Goldsboro, impressionist David Frye, and Pryor (who remained a favorite of the taciturn host); the second with Don Rickles and the Jackson 5.

His changing perception was beginning to show in his physical appearance. He no longer looked like the dutiful middle-manager type. When he checked into a hospital for a hernia operation, he stopped shaving and quickly decided to keep the beard. Returning to Mister Kelly’s in Chicago for a summertime engagement, Carlin drew a rave from
Variety
’s reviewer. With other Chicago clubs coasting through the quiet summer season, owner George Marienthal could have followed suit, the unnamed writer pointed out. Instead, Mister Kelly’s had put together a fine lineup, including an “attractive thrush” named Taro Delphi, that would have been a nice draw in a busier season.

Carlin, “no stranger hereabouts,” unveiled new material “that reaffirms early impressions that he is one of the most creative and engaging laugh producers playing the café circuit.” Though prone to “offbeat routines,” the reviewer continued, “he has the ability to couch them in jargon and imagery that is palatable to a wide range of tastes.” He mixed topics well, alternating “typical grogshop stuff,” like his advertising spoofs, with social commentary, “per his assessment of the country’s burgeoning drug orientation.” Little did the critic know how deeply invested the comic was in his new material; during Carlin’s last visit to Mister Kelly’s the previous year, he’d been in the midst of an acid binge.

In September 1970, Carlin dragged himself back to the Frontier, which still held options on him through the end of the year. The headline act was the Supremes, who were returning to the hotel after performing their last show with Diana Ross there in January. Carlin was scheduled for three weeks with the group, followed by one more week with Al Martino, the former construction worker from Philadelphia whose singing career would lead to a role in
The Godfather
.

Opening night with the Supremes went off without a hitch. In fact,
Variety
’s reviewer was more impressed with Carlin than with the head-liners, who, performing with the house’s Al Alvarez Orchestra, were “gradually becoming bleached in musical content and direction.” Carlin, the writer suggested, had “come up a modish contemporary fellow complete with a well-trimmed beard.” The “brand-new whimsies” in his repertoire reportedly caused “plethoras of sidesplits,” and, after a momentary lull, his finale about drugs and druggists inspired the audience to show its appreciation with “vigorous palming.”

But Carlin was still stung by the previous year’s episode at the Frontier. He was feeling devilish; during the engagement he came up with a way to test the management’s tolerance while seemingly keeping his own innocence intact. He’d been thinking about how certain comedians got away with working “blue.” For years Buddy Hackett, who was so firmly entrenched at the Sahara Hotel that owner Del Webb made him a vice president, had been doing raunchy jokes about sex and ethnicity. Redd Foxx, an old friend of Malcolm X who became one of the first black performers to work for white audiences in Las Vegas, was an underground celebrity for his risqué “party” records long before the launch of his television show
Sanford and Son
. Both of those Vegas regulars said the word “shit,” Carlin noted onstage. “I don’t say ‘shit’ in my act,” he said. “I may smoke a little, but I don’t say it.”

Carlin had been smoking “shit” habitually since he was thirteen years old. “I’d wake up in the morning and if I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to smoke a joint or not, I’d smoke a joint to figure it out,” he once admitted. “And I stayed high all day long. When people asked me, ‘Do you get high to go onstage?’ I could never understand the question. I mean, I’d been high since eight that morning. Going onstage had nothing to do with it.” Now he was outwardly identifying with the real-life Al Sleets of the world, acknowledging his predilection for getting high right there in his act. In a guest appearance on the syndicated
Virginia Graham Show
, Carlin confessed his “secret” dependency on national television. The hostess was delighted to hear it. The composer Henry Mancini had only recently told her the same thing, she said. “Virginia Graham was a real shit-stirrer,” Carlin remembered.

It may have been the admission; it may simply have been his sneaky way of slipping the word “shit” into his act. It may have been the fact, according to the comic, that this particular crowd was largely composed of salesmen from Chrysler and Lipton Tea, some of whom took exception to the comedian’s observations about God and country. In any case, when he strode offstage at the Frontier, Carlin was summarily dismissed from the remainder of the engagement. This time he felt a strange sense of elation. “They did the job for me,” he told Brenda. “They broke it off. This is good.”

Though he’d been renting Phyllis Diller’s Vegas house, he’d never felt a part of the fraternity of Vegas comics. Now he didn’t have to pretend he did. “I never went over to Don Adams’s house for dinner,” Carlin soon told
Rolling Stone
. “I never bought an alpaca sweater, and I never learned how to play golf.”

His clash with the Vegas audience was mirrored a few weeks later when another comic innovator, Robert Klein, had his own showdown in the desert. With his newfangled style, like a dry-witted social studies teacher, the mildly shaggy Klein was embarking on a career path similar to Carlin’s. He did his first
Tonight Show
in 1968 and had just completed his own summer replacement TV hosting gig. Opening at the Las Vegas Hilton at year’s end for Barbra Streisand—then Vegas’s biggest attraction, alongside Elvis, both making $125,000 a week—the comic left the stage in a pique one night when a customer threw a pencil at him. Streisand’s manager, Marty Erlichman, was irate. Now his singer would have to go on early. After the show, Streisand consoled her opening act. “She was so sweet,” says Klein. “She completely sided with me, and she made her manager go out and get Chinese food for us.”

On another night Rodney Dangerfield, who had taken Klein under his wing, brought the legendary Jack Benny to see the up-and-comer. When Klein said the word
shit
in his act, Benny laid down a verdict. “The kid works dirty,” he said.

“That was a heartbreaker,” says Klein. “I had a few rough nights there.” Increasingly the old guard of funnymen, and the slot machines and scantily clad cocktail waitresses that marked their natural habitat, were proving a fatal combination for comic insurgents like Klein, Pryor, and Carlin.

Trusting his intuition, Carlin soon took matters into his own hands. Again ready for new management, he took a meeting with Ron De Blasio and Jeff Wald. The two talent managers had recently left Campbell-Silver-Cosby, a production and management agency owned in part by Bill Cosby. Among other enterprises, Campbell-Silver-Cosby operated a record label called Tetragrammaton, distributed by Warner Bros. The imprint had released albums by the rock band Deep Purple, Carlin’s fellow
John Davidson Show
alumnus Biff Rose, and an unusual comedian, a Lenny Bruce soundalike named Murray Roman, whose twisted wit included a record with an all-black cover called
Blind Man’s Movie
. Tetragrammaton also became the U.S. distributor for John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s
Two Virgins
, with its full-frontal-nudity cover photograph, when Capitol Records refused to sell it. Carlin, avid record collector that he was, knew the label well.

Wald was a piece of work. A streetwise product of the Bronx, he got into the entertainment business as a gofer for the songwriter and civil rights activist Oscar Brown Jr., who introduced his pugnacious young assistant to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. After managing Brown’s career for a time, Wald took a job in the William Morris mailroom, comparing notes with his friend David Geffen. “I sold grass in the mailroom on the side,” Wald told one writer. He was a ruthless businessman in the making and a wicked practical joker, pissing in the plants of an interoffice rival after hours.

He married an aspiring singer from Australia named Helen Reddy, and they moved to Chicago, where Wald spent a few years booking the rooms at Mister Kelly’s and the London House. There he befriended performers including Pryor, Miles Davis, and Flip Wilson. On the night that King was assassinated, Pryor was opening a run at Mister Kelly’s. “By the second show, the National Guard had surrounded the club and closed us down,” recalls Wald. He and Pryor drove through the city, smoking a joint and lamenting the destruction that was already underway: “There were troops and people shooting, rioting, and he was crying. He was supposed to do
The Ed Sullivan Show
the following week, and he didn’t do it.”

Feeling restless in Chicago, Wald had told Cosby that he wanted to be in Hollywood, and the star put him in touch with his manager and business partner, Roy Silver. Wald’s first experience at Campbell-Silver-Cosby was working with the agency’s newest signee at the time, Tiny Tim. Though the money came rolling in, he soon took the advice of Norman Brokaw, the chairman of William Morris, to go into business for himself. With a $30,000 loan from his old employer, Wald put out his shingle, taking De Blasio with him.