Seven Dirty Words (9 page)

With his success on the Griffin show, gigs like Angie’s soon became a thing of the past. “The Griffin deal became, I remember rather clearly, like every Tuesday for weeks and weeks,” says Golden. “They signed him to a massive deal, they loved him so much.” But the comic soon encountered a problem: He was running out of new material. “Every Tuesday morning he’d call me up—‘You gotta come over, I got nothing,’” recalls his former manager. “We’d spend the afternoon making each other laugh. It was a panic. He couldn’t be doing ‘The Indian Sergeant’ every week.” One sneaky solution was to write spontaneously updated versions of “The Newscast” (“It’s the third divorce for the fifteen-year-old film queen”), which he could read on-air from notes.

Despite the TV breakthrough, Carlin still struggled for recognition within his own agency. A small-time stand-up comedian could be on the clients’ list at the agency, says one former employee, “and that and twenty cents wouldn’t get you on the New York subway.” After one Griffin taping, Carlin was approached by a young agent from GAC’s television department named Ken Harris. “I went up to say ‘Hi’ after the show,” Harris recalls. “I said, ‘Gee, I thought you were terrific. Do you have an agent?’ He said, ‘Yeah. GAC.’ I felt stupid.” At the office, Harris approached Peter Paul and expressed his interest in working with Carlin.

Harris was a good match for Carlin, an energetic, easygoing young guy who’d been hired in the agency’s mailroom straight out of college. When he was made an agent, he had no idea what he was doing, he says with a laugh, so he flew by the seat of his pants. One thing he knew was that he wanted to work with talent that spoke to his generation. “When I got the job, I asked, ‘Who’s our biggest star?’ When they said Steve and Eydie, I was very depressed.” By contrast, the young wiseguy with the arch take on the modern world seemed like someone Harris could sell.

In September the agency booked Carlin on
The Mike Douglas Show
, another talk show hosted by a onetime big-band singer. Originating in Cleveland in 1961, the show’s success in syndication precipitated a move to Philadelphia a few years later. The show, produced by future media mogul Roger Ailes, had just converted to tape delay after airing live in Cleveland. The switch came after the Hungarian-born actress Zsa Zsa Gabor called Morey Amsterdam a “son of a bitch” live on the air.

When “The Indian Sergeant” went over well on
The Mike Douglas Show
, Carlin was asked back, and he appeared three more times that autumn and seven times the following year. As the bookings began to mount, the comic was picking up a pool of allies at GAC. Like Harris, Craig Kellem was a junior agent, a real go-getter. After working on a CBS show called
The Reporter
with another climber named David Geffen, who soon went off to the mailroom at William Morris, Kellem applied for a job as an assistant in the TV variety department at GAC. “You were there to get the guys coffee and type the letters,” Kellem recalls, “schlepping, learning the business. Those were extremely colorful days. Stars were born coming into your office, doing their little comedy routine, and two weeks later they’d be on
The Tonight Show
.”

Kellem initially worked for an agent named Ed Leffler, who represented the Beatles on their first U.S. television appearances. Leffler let his protégé listen in to his phone conversations on an earphone so he could learn the business. Within six months Leffler quit the agency (eventually managing the careers of the Carpenters and Van Halen), leaving Kellem to be promoted into his spot. “All of a sudden, I was an agent. I probably looked fourteen years old,” jokes Kellem. But he had chutzpah. He took over the job of placing the agency’s most reliable clients—Tony Bennett, the Supremes, “meat-and-potatoes comics like Pat Cooper,” an Italian joke slinger born Pasquale Caputo—on
Today
,
The Tonight Show
, and Ed Sullivan, where GAC “probably booked a third of the talent.” Sullivan, notorious for pulling the plug on guest acts after dress rehearsal, kept the young agent on his toes. “I always had a couple of guys like Cooper in the wings,” Kellem recalls. “I’d call and say, ‘Is your tuxedo pressed, and do you have six minutes?’ That went on all the time.”

Though he had inherited a plum gig, Kellem was eager to make his own mark. “You need to find talent you can develop that you think has a future,” he says. For him, as for Harris, George Carlin was that talent. “He just cracked me up. He reminded me of a horny used-car salesman, or a cute game-show host. He had all these contemporary media references, with a silly little grin on his face. I was crazed about this guy. I took the sledgehammer approach—you just do everything. Your energy is greater than the resistance that comes your way.” Kellem, Harris, and Golden, Carlin’s manager, fed off their mutual enthusiasm for their client. “More than just about any other agent, Craig got it,” says Golden. “He immediately saw that this was something special, and he became a very intense part of the team. He was lobbying like crazy within the agency to get George jobs.”

With both Griffin and Douglas squarely on his side, Carlin was beginning to feel that he’d been discovered. His first full-fledged prime-time exposure came in February 1966, when he was invited to audition for
The Jimmy Dean Show
. The country star best known for “Big Bad John,” a story-song about a heroic miner that was a number one pop hit in 1961, was an Air Force veteran, a television personality, and a future sausage mogul who’d occasionally served as a
Tonight Show
guest host. Golden says that Carlin auditioned right in Dean’s own high-rise office, with producers and staff in the room. Dean, he says, “was a terrific performer, kind of forbidding. Early morning, Dean walks in, doesn’t say a word, motions for George to start. He did ‘The Indian Sergeant.’ All of a sudden Jimmy Dean falls off his chair. George was instantly booked on the show.” In his first of two appearances, Carlin performed “The Newscast.”

“I guess the rest of the world knew an entirely different George Carlin than the one who did our show,” says Dean. “He had a good haircut, he wore a fine-looking business suit and tie. He was impeccably attired, and not a foul word from his mouth.” Yet Dean laughed hardest at the slow-witted Al Sleet, the Hippie-Dippy Weatherman, who was, to the emerging counterculture, unmistakably a heavy dope smoker. For the moment, Carlin could smuggle his drug humor onto television undetected by the Jimmy Deans and the Ed Sullivans of an earlier generation. In another year or two, no one in America could claim to be so naïve.

4

VALUES (HOW MUCH IS THAT DOG CRAP IN THE WINDOW?)

S
outhern California was a scrubland before the movies arrived in the early twentieth century. By 1966, however, Hollywood sat at the core of a metropolis, and the television industry was drifting westward, too. Since the 1950s, when CBS built its Television City at the corner of Beverly and Fairfax on the site of a former sports stadium (which in turn sat on the site of a former oil field), network programs had been steadily migrating toward the wide-open West Coast, away from the suffocating congestion of midtown Manhattan. In March the Carlin family moved from the comedian’s native city to an apartment in the Beverly Glen section of Los Angeles. He brought along a recording of New York City street sounds.

In the long view, Carlin would probably soon be reading for parts in motion pictures. In the shorter term, he had found steady work, at least for the summer. GAC had placed Carlin as a regular performer and comic writer for the thirteen-week summer replacement show
The Kraft Summer Music Hall
. Sponsored by the food company Kraft, the long-running series had originated on radio in the 1930s and was first brought to television in 1958, with Milton Berle hosting. The dazzling smile of the rookie host hired for the summer of 1966 belonged to John Davidson, a singing, banjo-picking son of two Baptist ministers from Pittsburgh. Like Carlin, he was a future
Tonight Show
guest host.

Ken Harris worked the deal with NBC. Realizing he wasn’t especially fond of being an agent, Harris had a proposition for Bob Golden, Carlin’s manager: He would move to the West Coast and become the comic’s comanager, with Golden handling the business back in New York. At GAC, Craig Kellem would become Carlin’s responsible agent. “We all agreed on that,” says Harris, now living in the Pacific Northwest. “I still have the telegrams.”

Kraft Summer Music Hall
—produced by television veteran Bob Banner, who was executive producer of
The Jimmy Dean Show
and had helped launch the career of Carol Burnett—was unabashedly cornball stuff. The supporting cast included a folksy singing duo called Jackie & Gale—Gale was Gale Garnett, who had a 1964 hit, “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine”—and a squeaky-clean singing act called the Lively Set. A musical comedian named Biff Rose played Davidson’s sidekick—Don Knotts to the host’s Andy Griffith, as Rose put it. “It was straw hats and striped jackets, real hokey Middle America,” says Harris. “It was real strange when you put George in that context, but he did fine.” Among other duties, Carlin joined other cast members in singing “Winchester Cathedral.” Neither the client nor his new comanager were complaining as they drove to work at the NBC studios each morning in blazing sunshine. “It was exciting,” says Harris. “Hollywood in the sixties.”

In fact, something was in the air, and it had a pungent smell. Even the most benign television productions were beginning to acknowledge the creeping influence of the emerging counterculture. The certifiably kooky Rose, for example, would soon move on to a short-lived recording career with arch Tom Lehrer-style saloon songs such as “American Waltz” (“We all love to dance our American waltz/It’s our dream come false”). The Kraft series would feature guest appearances by a few old Carlin associates—Richard Pryor, whose rapid ascent was running neck-and-neck with Carlin’s, and a new comic duo featuring a chunky, curly-haired Chicagoan named Avery Schreiber and his fellow Second City alumnus, Carlin’s former partner, Jack Burns.

Davidson says he recognized instantly that Carlin was having a hard time getting comfortable, despite the familiar faces. “I walked into the first production meeting, and they said, ‘This is our writer,’” says Davidson. “Very thin guy, usually standing very erect, but sort of hunched over when he did jokes. Clean-cut. Probably wearing a sweater and slacks. Very business-like, was the impression he gave.” Davidson, who was then just twenty-four, soon found his costar to be “the most liberal guy I knew,” but somewhat bottled up in terms of the stage. “We had Richie Pryor, Biff Rose, this crazy, off-the-wall musical comedian, and Flip Wilson. All of these people were crazier and more fun than George Carlin. He was very contained back then. He seemed to be always festering. You could tell there was much, much more behind what he was saying.”

Early in the run, Carlin and Ken Harris were called into Bob Banner’s office, where the producer laid a sizable offer on the table to handle Carlin’s career. Harris remembers a proposed annual guarantee of $125,000, similar to the deal Banner had arranged with Davidson. Carlin and his West Coast manager politely declined. “It made no sense for George,” says Harris, “but it was nice to be asked.”

On the show Carlin did whatever he thought was expected. In one recurring bit, he worked up a variation on his Al Sleet character—Al Pouch, the Hippie-Dippy Postman, in which he brought phony fan mail for Davidson. “There were a couple of monologues they cut. They just didn’t work,” Carlin later admitted. “I was an undeveloped writer. I was writing superficially from the front of my head.” Yet he felt he deserved some respect. During one taping, Davidson introduced the comic with a bit of levity, calling him “Little Georgie Carlin.” “I was always trying to make him lovable,” Davidson says. “I never thought he was lovable or huggable enough. Later, he asked the producer to ask me not to call him Georgie again. He didn’t want to be like Ricky Nelson. He wanted to be taken seriously.”

Offstage, Carlin was settling easily into the California lifestyle. He’d always been able to down more than his share of beers (“I was amazed he was so thin,” says Davidson), but he was also smoking plenty of pot, a fact that was apparent even to the self-described “goody-goody” Davidson. “I assumed he was smoking grass back then pretty liberally, but he was never stoned at work at all. He was so business-like.” On a visit to the Carlins’ apartment to drop off a script, the host was slightly embarrassed to find the couple’s young daughter running around the house with no clothes on. “They were a free-spirit, liberal kind of family,” says Davidson, who credits Carlin with inspiring him to “loosen up.” “I wished I could be free like that,” he says. “He was very ‘street,’ and I was very WASP-y. I was jealous of what he was. I wished I could be closer to him.”

The two men worked together for some time, including a one-off TV showcase the following year called
John Davidson at Notre Dame
, which featured Judy Collins, the pop group Spanky and Our Gang, and the Notre Dame Glee Club, as well as an extended tour with the starlet Joey Heatherton in 1968. Yet Davidson was well aware that he represented a kind of show business convention that the comic was growing allergic to. “I have a feeling he thought I was too white-bread, that the whole show was just too saccharine,” he says. “I know he wanted to be more cutting-edge than that show was. He took the writing job to make money, for the TV exposure, and he was glad to get it. But I would definitely say he was holding back. He had much more to give inside of him, and he didn’t know how.”

For the moment, however, Carlin wasn’t letting on. “He was loving being on major television and being invited back,” claims Golden. “The jobs were coming in. He was enjoying having the career he always dreamed about.” In July the comic had another breakthrough, of sorts. After a handful of years ironing out his material in basement grottoes and cramped, chintzy backrooms fit for a tarot card reader, Hollywood’s newest comic was set to take the stage amid the potted palms at the Cocoanut Grove, the lavish and legendary nightclub on the property of the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. Kellem had managed to land a double billing for his two pet clients, Carlin and a brassy Australian newcomer, a potential next-Streisand named Lana Cantrell, who’d been making repeat appearances on the Sullivan show and had just recorded her debut album for RCA.

“The question was, who should open for who[m]?” recalls Cantrell, who later became an entertainment lawyer. “Our careers were perfectly parallel at the time. It snowballed very quickly for both of us, but it was very premature to put either one of us at the Cocoanut Grove,” which was accustomed to booking marquee names such as Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland.

Mere days before the engagement was to start, not a single reservation had been taken, so the nightclub’s jittery management held over Eddie Fisher, the veteran pop singer recently divorced from Elizabeth Taylor, as the headliner. “I opened, George did his thing, and Eddie did his thing,” says Cantrell. “It was the longest show in show business history. George wouldn’t cut, and I wouldn’t cut. It was such a strange week. Eddie didn’t want to have anything to do with us.” The next week, Kellem’s odd couple held down the booking together, without Fisher. “We dragged in a few people and got some decent reviews,” says Cantrell.

Though her interaction with Carlin was brief, Cantrell still recalls it fondly. She had experienced outrageous humor up close before. In Sydney, she once opened for Lenny Bruce, who brought a stool onstage and climbed on top of it without a word, prompting an audience member to ask what he was doing.

“It’s a good position to be able to pee all over you,” said Lenny.

Bruce died in August 1966, a victim of his addictions and persecution. His naked body was discovered in the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills home. The graphic police photo seemed one last slap at the comedian who had no reverence whatsoever for the traditional institutions of American life. Dick Schaap wrote a memorable appreciation: “One last four-letter word for Lenny. Dead. At forty. That’s obscene.” At a memorial service at a progressive Greenwich Village church, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky led a Buddhist chant for the dead; they were followed by a performance by the Fugs, the ragtag Village folk-rock group named for Norman Mailer’s euphemistic expletive used throughout his debut novel,
The Naked and the Dead
. Bruce’s friend Paul Krassner, founder of the black-humor magazine
The Realist
, hosted.

From Carlin’s days in Shreveport, when his roommate first introduced him to Bruce’s lethal observations on the
Interviews of Our Time
album, the younger comic had found much to admire in his predecessor’s value judgments and utter disregard for conventional morality. “Lenny’s perception was magnificent,” he told the
New York Times
in a 1967 feature story, the first in-depth profile of the younger comic. “He could focus on the real emotions behind what we say and what we do in our society. He was the immortal [
sic
] enemy of cant and hypocrisy and pseudo-liberalism, which is just another form of hypocrisy. What Lenny was saying should continue to be said until we begin to hear some of it.” On the eve of Carlin’s debut in his next prime-time showcase, a summer replacement series for
The Jackie Gleason Show
called
Away We Go
, the article revealed that he was considering a role on Broadway as Bruce, in a script written by the playwright Julian Barry. Nothing came of it for Carlin, though Barry’s script was eventually produced as the 1974 Dustin Hoffman biopic
Lenny
.

For Carlin, Bruce’s comedy “let me know there was a place to go, to reach for, in terms of honesty in self-expression.” Carlin and Brenda had a cordial relationship with Bruce, who had played the Racquet Club in Dayton and gotten to know Brenda when she was assigned to give him rides to the airport. After Bruce’s death Carlin and his wife remained friendly with his inimitable mother, Sally Marr, who had taught her son everything he knew about speaking his mind. The combination of Bruce’s social surgery and Mort Sahl’s dissection of power were critical to Carlin’s development. Now, with Bruce gone and Sahl off wandering, undermining his own career as he conducted a personal, years-long investigation into the JFK assassination, the floor was suddenly open to a new, intrepid comic who would be fearless enough to address the fraudulence of the American dream.

NOT THAT CARLIN was ready to be that comic. In early September he appeared on
The Tonight Show
for the first time in the Johnny Carson era, putting a little extra effort into the Hippie-Dippy Weatherman bit, which he’d been performing on autopilot for some time. As the beatifically spacey Al Sleet, he delivered the forecast without breaking character, while Carson cackled off-camera. Although he didn’t return to Carson’s set at the NBC Studios for two years, it was the start of a long association, with Carlin making more than a hundred appearances.

Less memorable were his spots on
The Roger Miller Show
and
The Hollywood Palace
, an old-fashioned ABC variety hour taped at the former Hollywood Playhouse with a rotating pool of guest hosts. The show, notable for introducing the Rolling Stones to an American audience, was a hodgepodge of celebrity sketches, monologues, and performances. In April, appearing alongside the vapid British folk duo Chad & Jeremy, Carlin was introduced by host Martha Raye. In thick-framed glasses and tightly pegged pants, he sat behind a stock-issue desk on an otherwise empty stage and read “The Newscast” from notes. The segment let him roam from mildly Sahl-like wisecracks about current events (“Tonight the world breathes a little easier, as five more nations have signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Today’s signers were Chad, Sierra Leone, Upper Volta, Monaco, and Iceland”) to surreal nonsense. “Quickly now, the basketball scores. We are running late. 110-102, 125-113 . . . and an overtime duel, 99-98. Oh, here’s a partial score: Cincinnati, four.”

Safely disguised as the cartoonish Al Sleet, he also dropped a sly reference to his own daily habit as he delivered the weather forecast: “Tonight’s low, twenty-five. Tomorrow’s high, whenever I get up, heh heh heh.”

“George was always a little subversive that way,” says Ken Harris. “When I met George, he was a pot smoker. Being with him on the road, he’d wake up in the morning, and before brushing his teeth, he’d smoke a joint. And throughout the whole day. It didn’t seem to affect him much, except to make him happier.” After the Carlins moved into a rented Spanish villa-style house on Beverwil Drive, Carlin finally convinced his reluctant West Coast manager to try smoking with him. “He was my guide,” says Harris. “I think it was a Peter, Paul and Mary record we were playing—we had just bought new stereo equipment together. And he said, ‘Now just pick out one instrument and focus on it.’ It was the first time I ever got stoned.”