Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin

by James Sullivan

  There were plenty of other opportunities for him to express his displeasure with military service. During a simulated combat drill at Barksdale that December, Carlin, cold and tired, slipped away from his guard duty post. “I left my gun on the ground and went up into the crawlway of a B-47, smoked a joint, and went to sleep,” he said. The judge told him he’d been inclined to lock him up, but because it was Christmastime, he let him off.

  The offenses continued to pile up. In July 1957 Carlin was given a general discharge under honorable conditions—not a dishonorable or bad-conduct discharge, but one that nevertheless implied considerable behavioral issues. In a letter to “Airman Third Class George D. Carlin,” his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Edward E. Matthews, described his decision “to have you eliminated from the Air Force as unproductive.” The officer cited several incidents: his failure to report for guard duty, a driving-while-intoxicated charge in February, a reckless driving episode the previous November, and “Disrespect to Air Policeman, Failure to obey a lawful order by an Air Policeman and Disobeying a direct order from an Officer” on June 24, 1955. Carlin was also reminded of the numerous times he’d been chastised about his personal appearance, the condition of his room, and “drinking alcoholic beverages to such an extent that you could not control your actions.”

  While he was busy misbehaving his way out of the Air Force, Carlin was also expanding his role at KJOE, where he took over the afternoon drive-time shift. As a modest nine-station market, Shreveport radio was deeply competitive. When Carlin arrived, KJOE had a commanding fifty-two share, meaning the station could claim more than half of all listeners in the area. But KEEL, another AM Top 40 station, was in hot pursuit, with incoming owner Gordon McLendon vying for the loyalty of the city’s young rock ’n’ roll fans. McLendon, known as the “Old Scotchman,” was already something of a nationally known figure in radio, having been instrumental in the development of the Top 40 format. The founder of the Liberty Radio Network, which pioneered national baseball broadcasts, McLendon would later establish the country’s first all-news station, WNUS, in Chicago. He had come to Shreveport after learning that Monroe had been secretly monitoring KLIF, McLendon’s influential station in Fort Worth, and directing his disc jockeys to program their broadcasts accordingly.

  Though Carlin’s stint in Shreveport was relatively brief, he was a real asset to KJOE. With Monroe taking the morning shift and Vern Stierman covering the midday slot, Carin brought up the rear, before the station went off the air at sundown. Carlin’s Corner made him a bona fide local personality, with listeners tuning in to hear the latest songs from the Everly Brothers, Johnny Mathis, Elvis Presley, and the rest of the era’s chart regulars. “Stick around,” he’d implore his listeners. “Good things happening here on Carlin’s Corner.” A born motor mouth, he was more conversational, more easygoing than the unctuous boilerplate announcing types he later played in his act. “His voice was different—it didn’t sound like a straight announcer, the Tommy Turntables of the day,” says Howard Clark, a hard-partying fellow Shreveport radio novice who was later noted for his tag line—“This is Howard Clark, high at noon”—on San Francisco’s KFRC. “He was very warm, one-on-one sounding, rather than those standoff-ish announcers. That was very intriguing to me.”

  Carlin moved in with a friend from the Air Force, Jack Walsh, a Georgia native who had been a navigator in the Strategic Air Command. Walsh, like Carlin and Monroe, had been involved with the theater group, and Carlin began telling his roommate that he should look for work in radio. Walsh, a bright, well-spoken man who shared Carlin’s affinity for jazz and comedy, soon got a job at KRMD, a twenty-four-hour Shreveport station. Though Walsh was five years older than his roommate, he was evidently less schooled in the ways of the streets. According to his widow, Dot Walsh, Jack once asked Carlin why his “cigarette” smelled the way it did. The two bachelors arranged a warning system for each other: If there was a tie hanging from the doorknob of their apartment, the other roommate had a girl inside and needed privacy.

  Walsh, who went on to gain some renown in Atlanta on radio station WAKE—under the alias Stan “The Man” Richards, he was inducted into the Georgia Radio Hall of Fame—played a significant role in the development of his roommate’s comic sensibility: He turned Carlin on to Lenny Bruce. One night he brought home a copy of Bruce’s conceptual first album, Interviews of Our Times, pressing his roommate to listen to it.

  Despite his youth, Carlin was not a big fan of the new rock ’n’ rollers he was playing on KJOE. He preferred the jazz and vocal music he’d loved in New York. “I grew up with real rhythm and blues,” he said. “I hated when the whites took over the music. . . . I just had that little cultural divide, where I was more of a black-music person and I was playing this hybrid of black music and country that came to be called rock ’n’ roll.” Unquestionably, though, he recognized the new cultural groundswell as a powerful social force—“nothing short of a revolution. You could sense that and feel that, especially in the white South.”

  One of those revolutionary figures, Elvis Presley, was well-known to the Shreveport audience, where he’d made his national breakthrough in 1954 on the Louisiana Hayride, a live country music broadcast for flagship station KWKH. Oddly, Carlin’s biggest moment of Shreveport infamy involved the music of the blues-loving poor boy from Tupelo, Mississippi. In early 1957 Stan Lewis received a routine shipment of promotional records from RCA. Along with several new releases, the box contained one wayward copy of Presley’s latest recording, “All Shook Up,” not quite due for release. Realizing instantly that he had a piece of vinyl gold on his hands, Lewis took it down to his buddy Monroe’s station, where Carlin became the first disc jockey in the country to play the song, which would become Elvis’s seventh number one. After this broadcasting coup Carlin, not yet twenty, was featured in the nationally syndicated news. McLendon was incensed, demanding that Lewis, who serviced all the local stations, tell him why he’d given the record to KJOE.

  Although he was becoming a popular personality at KJOE, now that he was no longer in the Air Force, Carlin had no need to be in Louisiana. He packed up and returned to New York, enrolling in the Columbia School of Broadcasting. It took him all of two weeks to realize that he already had more than enough on-the-job training at KJOE to learn everything the school could teach him about broadcasting. He quit and headed right back to Shreveport, where he would stay for another year.

  In radio, the typical objective for on-air talent was to keep moving into larger markets. Homer Odom, an acquaintance who later managed the Bay Area’s KABL for McLendon, offered Carlin a job with Boston’s WEZE, a “beautiful music”-style station and a network affiliate that broadcast NBC soap operas such as the long-running Young Dr. Malone. Carlin went up to Boston and took a job running the board—unglamorous duty that he justified by reminding himself he’d moved into a bigger radio market. It was here that he had his run-in with Cardinal Cushing. Spinning popular balladry and orchestrated pop songs by Perry Como, Tony Bennett, and their ilk in his part-time role as an after-hours disc jockey, the devoted R&B fan bridled. “I had to play that and keep a straight face and make believe I liked it,” he remembered. After three months he knew he was in the wrong place. When Carlin took the news van to New York, the furious station manager tracked him down at his mother’s apartment. There’d been a prison break at the new maximum security facility in Walpole that they should have covered. Prison breaks happen all the time, Carlin argued; they could cover the next one. “They thought that was a poor attitude for a professional,” he recalled. Sure enough, when he returned with the truck, he was unceremoniously relieved of his job.

  The one bright spot of Carlin’s short stay in Boston was his instantaneous rapport with a WEZE newsman and Boston native named Jack Burns. Born in November 1933, Burns was almost four years older than Carlin. The two men shared an attitude toward the military: Burns, who spent his teen years living the peripatetic life of his father, an officer in the
Air Force, realized he was no serviceman as soon as he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1952. After serving as a sergeant in Korea, he gladly took his discharge and headed back to Boston, where he studied acting and broadcasting at the old Leland Powers School of Radio and Theater in Brookline.

  Jeremy Johnson, an aspiring actor who’d done a hometown Bob and Ray-style radio show with a partner before enrolling at the Powers School, met Burns there and quickly became a friend and drinking buddy. They first became acquainted on the set of a student-run radio comedy—“variety stuff,” recalls Johnson, like Fred Allen’s Allen’s Alley, primarily consisting of mock interviews with outlandish characters. “We used to go to parties together and drink—quite a bit, actually,” says Johnson. One time, after passing out on the floor and staying overnight, Johnson woke up and saw his friend still snoozing. He staggered to his feet, stood over Burns, and woke him up by putting the fear of God into the hung-over acting student: “I am omnipotent!” he boomed. “I am omnipresent!”

  After graduating from Powers, Burns spent some time in New York, studying acting at Herbert Berghof’s studio and performing in an off-Broadway production of Tea and Sympathy, the controversial Robert Anderson play about an effeminate young man, originally directed on Broadway by Elia Kazan. Soon, however, he was back in Boston, where he took a job as a radio newsman. By the time Carlin arrived at WEZE, Burns was the station’s news director. Carlin, the newcomer, moved into an apartment with Burns and another roommate. While the New Yorker was jeopardizing his own livelihood in radio, Burns was establishing himself as a bona fide newsman, interviewing Senator John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, and traveling to Havana to interview Fidel Castro. “I was staying at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in Havana and it was . . . well, I really believe life is like a B-movie without the music,” Burns once recalled. “The blonde told me she was working with anti-Castro forces and she needed to use my telephone because hers was bugged. Fantastic! People with beards running around, carrying guns. The last I saw of the blonde was when they dragged her and the phone from my room. Somebody suggested it might be time for me to return to the States.”

  After Boston, Carlin quickly landed on his feet. He heard from a Shreveport acquaintance who’d become a sales manager at KXOL, a competitor of McLendon’s KLIF in the Dallas-Fort Worth market. “Anybody who came to Dallas-Fort Worth knew that was the place to be in radio,” says “Dandy” Don Logan, a fellow Shreveport radio personality who spent some time in Texas himself. “It was a real hotbed for DJs. They had a lot of what they call ‘six-month wonders.’” Media figures who would become nationally recognized, such as CBS newsman Bob Schieffer, game show host Jim McKrell, and The Price Is Right announcer Rod Roddy, were all products of the Dallas-Fort Worth radio scene around Carlin’s time. Starting in July in the seven-to-midnight slot, Carlin took to calling it the “homework” shift, taking dedication requests from young lovebirds and peppering his banter every Friday night with the all-important high school football scores. “Developed great rapport with teenage listeners by not putting them on,” he wrote a decade later for an early press kit.

  In between spinning new songs from singers such as Connie Francis, Bobby Darin, and Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon on The Coca-Cola Hi-Fi Club (later known as The Teen Club), Carlin began extending his comic premises on-air. KXOL was a popular station with local advertisers, known for its brisk in-house production of ads and jingles. The DJ who preceded Carlin each afternoon once did an entire hour so packed with commercials that he had time to play just one song, Carlin recalled, “and it still sounded like pure entertainment.” But during the evenings Carlin had relatively few commercial obligations, and he used the time to his advantage. “It was nice—the log book wasn’t very crowded, so you could have a little fun,” he recalled years later, in a tribute to the station. “It was so relaxed, in fact, that one night I did two whole hours in a British accent. Apparently, no one thought anything of it. . . . It was a chance to express my goofy self at night.”

  “Everything George said was funny,” recalls Pat Havis, then a Fort Worth resident, a twenty-year-old divorcee and mother of a baby daughter, living on odd jobs and listening to her favorite DJ at night while she did the household chores. “He helped me laugh at myself, and everything in general.” Though a newcomer to Texas, Carlin was quickly established as an asset for KXOL. His name was prominently featured in ads on benches at bus stops across the city, says Havis. One of Carlin’s recurring bits, the “Hippie-Dippy Weatherman,” depicted a gently addled hippie character years before the long-haired, glassy-eyed hippie archetype came into mainstream usage. (The term hippie, generally presumed to have been adopted by Beat Generation hipsters in reference to their younger collegiate followers, was not yet widely recognized, though by some accounts it had been used on the radio as early as 1945 by Stan Kenton, one of Carlin’s musical heroes.) Carlin’s Weatherman sounded as though Maynard G. Krebs, Bob Denver’s absent-minded, bongo-playing jazzbo on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, had taken up meteorology. Adopting the deliberate, bemused voice of a chronic stoner (without making explicit references to marijuana), the disc jockey offered absurd parodies of weather reports, just as Henry Morgan had a decade earlier.

  Within a matter of weeks, Carlin’s career took a serendipitous turn. Arriving unannounced at the station one day was Jack Burns, his short-term Boston roommate, who explained that he was en route to Hollywood, hoping to give the entertainment industry “one last chance at me.” He had an idea that he might become the next James Dean, Carlin recalled. By sheer coincidence, one of the station’s news-casting positions had become available the day before, and Carlin convinced his friend to take it, at least temporarily. Badly in need of new tires for his car, Burns accepted, and he immediately began delivering five-minute news broadcasts during Carlin’s evening program.

  They took a place together at the Dorothy Lane Apartments in Fort Worth’s historic Monticello neighborhood, and their conversations picked up where they’d left off in Boston. Mostly they talked about the things that made them both laugh. Comedy in America was undergoing some radical changes at the time. Mort Sahl was already established as the next generation’s politico humorist, an off-the-cuff cold war commentator with a trademark newspaper tucked under his arm. His grad-student analyses of global politics and the American system were a wholesale shift from the broad gags of Gleason and Uncle Miltie. The jokes of the new comedians were crafted for insiders—campus current events connoisseurs and coffee shop intellectuals. “If things go well, next year we won’t have to hold these meetings in secret,” Sahl joked. His humor had a whiff of grad school about it, as he ad-libbed lofty barbs about fleeting political role-players and policy communiqués.

  Other comics were bringing Freudian analysis and frank talk about the sorts of things previously reserved for private company onto the spartan stages of San Francisco’s legendary hungry i in North Beach and its big-city counterparts in Chicago and New York. Many guardians of good manners felt affronted, just as the new comedians intended. Lenny Bruce, the onetime strip-club emcee, was fast becoming “the most successful of the new sickniks,” as Time magazine declared in a July article on comedy’s emerging emphasis on previously verboten subjects such as sex, race, religion, and morality. The Compass Players, a group of improvisational comics with ties to the University of Chicago, opened their permanent theatrical home, the Second City, in 1959. One of their alumni, Shelley Berman, debuted his neurotic humor that year on the album Inside Shelley Berman, for which the “onetime Arthur Murray dance instructor with a face like a hastily sculpted meatball,” as one writer put it, won the first-ever comedy Grammy award. And a husky Ohioan named Jonathan Winters, a “roly-poly brainy-zany” whose mountainous head seemed overstuffed with caricatures, had recently become a regular on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show, bewildering viewers with his loony menagerie of ordinary people, all nearly as bizarre in their own way as the manic-depressive who channeled them.

  For tw
o sharp-witted young men who shared a predilection for subversion, the comedy renaissance of the late 1950s was at least as thrilling as a run-in with a mysterious blonde in Castro’s Cuba. Unlike the old Borscht Belt burlesque men, who were more or less interchangeable—bellyaching, as Carlin often noted, about middle-of-the-road indignities such as crabgrass, “kids today,” wives, and mothers-in-law—the new wave of comics “began to emerge with significant identities of their own. Shelley Berman couldn’t do Mort Sahl’s act. Mort Sahl couldn’t do Lenny Bruce’s act. They were just different.” What each of these men did was to challenge authority, the establishment, “the country itself. We were drawn to that.”

  Up to this point Carlin, still only twenty-two, had been effectively apolitical. Though he’d begun questioning the church’s authority from a young age, he’d grown up blindly accepting his mother’s belief in the strict jingoism of newspaper commentators such as Walter Winchell and Westbrook Pegler. Pegler, a featured writer for the sensation-minded Hearst syndicate, was a Roman Catholic sometimes accused of anti-Semitism, a prominent foe of labor unions, communism, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. “In my home Westbrook Pegler and Joe McCarthy were gods, and I picked up a lot of that,” Carlin once explained. For him, Burns “opened the door” to political enlightenment. “I began to realize that the right wing was interested in things and the left wing was interested in people, that one was interested in property rights and the other was interested in human rights. I began to see the error of what was handed to me through the Catholics, through the Irish-Catholic community, through my mother, through the Hearst legacy in our family.”