Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin

by James Sullivan

  Era did not actually issue the album until 1963, the year after the team broke up. To capitalize on the success of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Clubs, the label took the liberty of releasing the record as Burns & Carlin at the Playboy Club Tonight. The hit-and-miss track listing was a representative sample of the pair’s green act, featuring “Mothers Club,” in which Burns portrayed a series of blueblood society ladies in falsetto, and “War Pictures,” a half-baked Hollywood send-up, as well as “Killer Carlin”; the beatnik bit; the satire of Edward R. Murrow’s interview program, Person to Person; the “Capt. Jack and Jolly George” routine; and Carlin’s Bruce and Sahl impersonations. The verbose liner notes, perhaps written by Becker, were typeset on the back of the record jacket in the shape of a womanly hourglass figure.

  “The world has known many teams—Adam and Eve, Stanley and Livingstone, Sears and Roebuck, spaghetti and meatballs,” read the punch-drunk copy. For those not yet hip to the latest addition to this “lustrous list,” the anonymous writer pointed out that Burns and Carlin were comedians, “and twice as funny as most. Because there are two of them.” Their style was described as “not sick but definitely ailing humor”; their minds were “more unbuttoned than buttoned-down.” Jack Burns, the copy helpfully noted, “is not George Burns, although this wouldn’t be such a bad idea for an aspiring young comic.” In his formative years, Carlin “learned how to play one-old-cat, teased girls, [and] survived a case of adolescent pimples” before joining the Air Force. In a canny bit of foreshadowing, the team’s brief career at KDAY was noted primarily for the disc jockeys’ good fortune at having “escaped the attention of the Federal Communications Commission long enough to jolly up goodly portions of early-rising Los Angeles, including Murray Becker,” who “concluded that they had a much bigger potential than competing with time signals, freeway reports, and stomach tranquilizers.”

  Becker, who had served in the U.S. Navy with Lenny Bruce, invited the comedian and his wife, Honey, to Cosmo Alley to see the act that featured a guy doing a spot-on impression of Bruce himself. Becker was also acquainted with Sahl’s manager, Milt Ebbins, a Rat Pack insider with connections to the Kennedy clan, and he put in calls to get Sahl into the room as well. Both avant-gardists soon made the scene. Sahl was stunned to see that this newcomer, Carlin, had perfected an impression of him, nailing the Canadian-born humorist’s clipped, articulate delivery, his sudden expulsions of laughter, and his habit of segueing to a new idea by saying “Right. Onward.”

  “He had a great ear,” says Sahl. “He had the cadence down. Like any good impression, it was revealing. I’m not that conscious of what I’m doing—I was busy doing it. He got it down because he listened to the records.” After catching the act, the established comic pronounced his protégés “a duo of hip wits.”

  Though legend has it that Bruce was equally impressed, Sahl is somewhat skeptical. “Lenny was terribly competitive,” he recalls. “He said repeatedly to me, ‘The teacher’s grading on a curve. If there’s one A, I want it. I don’t want to share it with the others.’ I told him the country is starving for laughter and there’s room for plenty of As.” By most accounts, however, Bruce was even more effusive in his praise for Burns and Carlin than his counterpart was. His presence at Cosmo Alley was not lost on his young admirers. “We didn’t know the legendary quality of this encounter at the time,” said Carlin, “but we knew how important he was to us and what he represented. . . . I heard Interviews of Our Time, and I was changed forever.”

  The “sickest” comic contacted agent Jack Sobel, who was with General Artists Corporation (GAC), then a chief rival of the William Morris Agency in the world of entertainment bookings. Get these boys signed, Bruce recommended. Sobel responded immediately, sending a telegram to GAC’s West Coast office: “Based on Lenny Bruce’s rave reaction, hereby authorize the West Coast office to sign Burns and Carlin to exclusive representation contract in all fields.”

  After just a few months in Hollywood, mere weeks into their showcase at Cosmo Alley, Burns and Carlin had a manager, a performance recording in the can, the imprimatur of the two most highly regarded progressive comedians of the day, and an agency. GAC, which had grown out of the big-band-oriented Rockwell-O’Keefe booking agency, primarily handled pop singers by the early 1960s: Connie Francis, Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Frankie Avalon. Despite an aversion to the newfangled rock ’n’ roll, the agency would soon beat out even more skeptical agents at William Morris to sign a British outfit called the Beatles to their first American performing deal.

  When GAC arranged for Burns and Carlin, its newest clients, to open for the cabaret singer Bobby Short in Chicago, the duo eagerly hit the road in the Dodge. In Oklahoma they drove through a driving summer rainstorm. When it passed, the two comics saw a double rainbow over the horizon. “We felt that was an omen,” Carlin said.

  After the engagement at a jazz room called the Cloister Inn, Burns and Carlin picked up a few more dates around the Midwest. In Dayton, Ohio, then part of a bustling Midwestern nightclub circuit established during the heyday of big band swing, they performed at a hip new venue called the Racquet Club. Located in a sleek, modern facility, the place was a members-only club with tennis courts, a pool, and a dining room. It also had a tiny performance space, open to the public, in which customers could see the pool lights through plate-glass windows behind the entertainers. Operated by a recent University of Dayton graduate named Bill Brennan, who married into the locally well-known Huber construction family, the Racquet Club was envisioned as a younger, more happening alternative to Suttmiller’s, a much larger, more traditional showroom across town. The place, says Shane Taylor, a local promoter who was friendly with Brennan, might have held a hundred people on a particularly packed night. “I’m talking about squeezed,” he says. “A table for four became a table for eight.” The club featured comedy (including Dayton native Jonathan Winters and Lima, Ohio, housewife turned comedienne Phyllis Diller), jazz singers (Mel Torme), and vocal groups (such as the Four Freshmen and the Crosby Boys, Bing Crosby’s sons, who had one of their first engagements at the Racquet Club). At the time, Brennan’s place had an electric air about it: “When you walked in, you felt like the music was being played for you,” recalls Taylor. “You walked in clicking your fingers.”

  In this lively setting Carlin began flirting with the hostess, a local resident named Brenda Hosbrook. “Brenda and I clicked on all levels right away,” Carlin later said. They went out together every night that he and Burns were in Dayton, and they called and wrote each other while Carlin was on the road.

  Burns and Carlin made their way to New York, where they and Becker were scheduled to meet some of the agents in GAC’s headquarters. Two of the New York agents, Peter Paul and Shelly Schultz, took the act to see Bob Shanks, the talent coordinator at The Tonight Show. For Burns and Carlin, it was almost laughable. Half a year after leaving Fort Worth, where they’d sat in front of the television in their underwear, joking about the crude things they’d say to Jack Paar if they were ever invited onto his show, here they were, actually auditioning for it.

  Paar had taken over NBC’s Tonight Show from original host Steve Allen in 1957 following a brief, unsuccessful attempt with a different format. The casually conversational Paar, a native of Canton, Ohio, who called his own show “a night light to the bathroom,” had a natural rapport with his audience and the camera, and he loved to feature comedy on the program. Jonathan Winters, the brainy improv duo of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and a very young Carol Burnett were just a few of Paar’s many comedic guests. Atypically for those early years of television, with its stone-faced announcers and farcical vaudevillians, Paar wore his considerable emotions on his sleeve. Prone to hysterical fits of laughter, he was also unafraid to shed tears if he was upset or feeling sentimental. “Being natural, being yourself, being honest is very hard work,” he said on a retrospective program decades after quitting The Tonight Show, leaving the franchise to his successor, Johnny Carson. “I�
�m not an actor. All I am is what I am.”

  What he was, among other things, was a facile storyteller with a particular love for language. One night in February 1960, Paar told a joke on the show about a cultural misunderstanding over a “W.C.” At NBC, the Standards and Practices department determined the joke to be too risqué for broadcast, and they preempted that portion of the show, replacing it with news coverage. Paar was outraged. The next day the press—not aware of the content, the mild double-entendres, of the joke, aware only that it had been cut—claimed the host had said something “obscene.” Eliciting an admission from NBC’s president that the joke was harmless, Paar asked for permission to air the edited segment, to let the audience judge for itself, but he was denied. That night he addressed his audience. He’d spent a sleepless night, he said, “wrestling with my conscience,” and he’d decided to quit The Tonight Show. Like Fred Allen on radio, who once had to defend a joke about a woman who could have found a better husband in a cemetery (the S&P man felt the quip might offend cemetery caretakers), Paar was exasperated by the seemingly constant struggle with his own company’s watchdogs. “There must be a better way of making a living than this,” he said. NBC, he said, had been wonderful to him, “but they let me down.” With that, Paar walked offstage, leaving his flummoxed sidekick, Hugh Downs, to improvise the rest of the show.

  Less than a month later, Paar returned to the show without missing a beat. “As I was saying . . . ,” he said as he began his monologue.

  Burns and Carlin were enamored of Paar—his wit, his morality, and the genuine appreciation for comic risk-taking he shared with both his predecessor, Steve Allen, and his successor, Carson. Their choice of material for their first shot at the show was serendipitous. They’d been doing impersonations of NBC’s nightly news team, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, for some time. More recently, they’d added Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy—both men having just been nominated by their respective parties to run for the presidency—to their growing repertoire of public figures. At first it was Burns, the Bostonian, who did Kennedy, with Carlin taking on Nixon, hunching his shoulders and puffing his cheeks, as dozens of comics would do in the 1970s. They soon switched, however, when it became apparent to both men that Carlin’s version of JFK was even more accurate, and funnier, than Burns’s.

  As young, blithe, and matter-of-fact about their rapid ascent as they were, Carlin’s stomach churned during the audition. After being told they’d earned a spot on an upcoming show, the elated trio of Burns, Carlin, and Becker discussed their plans as they rode the elevator from Studio 6B down to ground level at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Burns had something to attend to at home in Boston; he was headed out of town to thumb a ride up I-95. Becker was going to stop in the office of the network’s legal department to fill out some paperwork. Gesturing in succession to his two young funnymen, he barked out their respective marching orders: “You go to Boston. You take a shit. I’ll go to the legal department.” It was a moment about which Burns and Carlin would never tire of reminding each other.

  3

  ATTRACTING ATTENTION

  It seemed too good to be true. Less than a year after fantasizing about it, Burns and Carlin were about to appear on The Tonight Show.

  Maybe it was too good to be true. As it happened, Paar wasn’t hosting the night they were scheduled. The guest host was Arlene Francis, whose work on a pioneering daytime women’s show called Home led Newsweek to call her “the first lady of television.” Bob Shanks, then a young talent coordinator and writer on The Tonight Show, figures Paar must not have been eager to have the act on his show. The guest hosts typically got the B-list, he says.

  Shelly Schultz was the GAC agent booking television appearances, introducing new talent such as Phyllis Diller, whom Paar loved. He has another theory—that the show’s writers slotted Burns and Carlin on a night when Francis was the guest host to shake up a dull program. Francis, Schultz recalls, “was deadly. They would have put them on to give the show a lift.” The Tonight Show writers, he says, were reluctant to book untested comic acts on nights when Paar was hosting, because the host could be brutal. “They put up a big grid a couple weeks ahead of time,” recalls the former agent, who worked for The Tonight Show from 1962 until 1970. “They listed all the people who were submitted for those days, and they tried to put together a show that would be cohesive. They were all scared shitless of putting comedy on, because Paar was allegedly a comedian. . . . Paar was very hands-on, and he could make your life miserable.” If an act bombed, Schultz says, “He’d say, ‘Who’s responsible?’ He made everybody crazy.”

  Burns and Carlin went on with the Kennedy-Nixon bit. “It was very current and timely, a month before the election,” Carlin recalled. “I think that’s how we got the job.” In their dark suits and Brylcreem, they seemed like fine young gentlemen. “My mother would say, ‘You look reasonable,’” Carlin recalled.

  They may have looked reasonable, but for a moment they felt euphoric. It was, however, a brief moment. For the next year, other than an unmemorable spot on Hugh Hefner’s short-lived syndicated program Playboy’s Penthouse, the agents at GAC had no luck returning their young comedy team to television. In Chicago, where Mort Sahl was playing Mister Kelly’s, he bumped into Murray Becker at Eli’s Delicatessen. Sahl says he and his best friend, the late Herb Sargent (who later became a writer and producer for Saturday Night Live), “made every effort to get ’em going.” He convinced his San Francisco friend Enrico Banducci, the avuncular, beret-wearing proprietor of the hungry i, the experimental nightclub, to give the team a trial run. Without a lot of high-profile gigs, they did more than their share of “one-nighters,” corporate parties for salesmen’s associations and other business groups.

  They played the Tidelands in Houston, where Bob Newhart had recently recorded his Button-Down Mind album. They did the Crystal Palace in St. Louis, the Embers in Indianapolis, the Casino Royal in Washington, D.C., and Freddie’s in Minneapolis. They played Storyville in Boston’s Kenmore Square, where Billie Holiday and Dave Brubeck had recorded. Many of the club dates they landed, though, fell short of glamorous. “Some really great toilets,” Burns recalled wryly. Drinking on the job, they sometimes found themselves challenging hecklers to step out into the alley. At a cinderblock club outside Akron, they took the stage on the first night of a weeklong engagement, to discover that their audience consisted solely of the softball team sponsored by the bar. “They had their cleats on, and their uniforms,” Burns recalled. “And George and I are up there doing political satire.” Five minutes into the set, with the room barren of laughter, one of the ballplayers got up, strode over to the jukebox, and punched a few buttons. Show over. The owner pulled the act aside and threatened to take the week from them if they didn’t cut the jokes about government agencies. “Don’t you work dirty?” he demanded. So they went out to a Woolworth’s and brought back a few ridiculous props—a yo-yo and a fright wig—for the second show. Burns, addressing his partner as “Georgina,” asked him how he was feeling. “Pretty shitty,” Carlin replied. “And we just started doing crap jokes for about fifteen minutes,” Burns said, “and that got us through the week.”

  In Dallas Carlin stopped in to pick up some shirts he’d left at a dry cleaner. While the attendant dawdled, police officers suddenly materialized and ordered Carlin up against the wall. Burns was rounded up, too, and the partners were detained at the local precinct. It turned out to be a case of mistaken identity: Carlin had a newspaper clipping in the pocket of one of his shirts that described a stickup by two armed men in Chicago. On a tip from the cleaner, the cops were convinced they’d found the perpetrators. The comedians were released when they explained they’d saved the page because of the story on the other side of the police log.

  Sahl, a good friend of Hugh Hefner, helped the team make their way onto the Playboy Club circuit, the fast-growing network of lounges dedicated to the magazine’s bon vivant lifestyle of sports cars, fashiona
ble accessories, and smart-set entertainment, with chicks on the side. “Playboy itself and I personally were very interconnected with what was going on in the clubs and the comedy scene in Chicago in the late 1950s,” says Hefner, who first became interested in publishing a magazine as an aspiring cartoonist. “We did profiles on almost all the major new comedians who[m] Time magazine lumped together and called ‘sick’ comedy—Lenny, Mort, Jonathan Winters, Shelley Berman, [Don] Rickles.” During the 1960 presidential campaign, the magazine sponsored a mock candidacy by the manic stream-of-consciousness comic “Professor” Irwin Corey. “We did a promotion with him at what was called Bughouse Square, a park on the Near North Side of Chicago,” says Hefner. Corey joined the soapboxers in Washington Square, well known as a haven for free speech, to announce his candidacy.

  After John Kennedy was elected, Hefner received a call from the new president’s father, Joseph Kennedy. He was planning to be in Chicago and wanted to have dinner with the celebrity magazine publisher. “I didn’t know him,” says Hefner. “We had dinner together at a restaurant at the Drake [Hotel], right across Michigan Avenue from the Playboy Club. After dinner I took Joe Kennedy and the rest of our party up to see a show at the club.” Burns and Carlin were on the bill. “They did a parody of President Kennedy,” says Hefner, “and Joe Kennedy was not amused. It was my first experience with Carlin managing to not amuse certain people. I, of course, was distressed, because it was very funny.”