The year 1968 began with accolades for Carlin, starting with a Grammy nomination for Take-Offs and Put-Ons. In the Best Comedy Recording category, the album was up against Flip Wilson’s Cowboys and Colored People, the posthumously released Lenny Bruce in Concert, and a record by former country music radio personality Archie Campbell, who would soon become a star of Hee Haw. The fifth nominee, Bill Cosby’s Revenge, was virtually preordained as the winner, with Cosby in the midst of a six-year streak of winning every comedy Grammy. Carlin took home a consolation prize when he was honored as one of the “Hollywood Stars of Tomorrow,” as the outstanding young male performer in the variety format for Away We Go. Carlin beat out Pryor (for his work on The Merv Griffin Show) and Flip Wilson, a future colleague.
He was reaching a certain level of acceptance in Hollywood. “I became known as a reliable prime-time variety show comedian,” said Carlin. In February Gleason grabbed Carlin for his own variety hour. Sullivan wanted him back for more; so did Carson. Anything-goes producer Chuck Barris, angling to capitalize on the recent successes of The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game, booked Carlin for two weeks on a mercifully short-lived game show called How’s Your Mother-in-Law? In January Barris’s production company made Carlin a guest host for Operation: Entertainment, a USO-style grab bag shot at various military bases. One week after celebrity impersonator Rich Little hosted the show’s debut episode, Carlin emceed a taping at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.
For some nagging reason, none of these opportunities felt quite right. One particular letdown was Carlin’s first film role. Eyeing the comic acting career of Jack Lemmon, who turned a largely uneventful resume as a television role player into box-office stardom (Some Like It Hot, The Apartment), he took a supporting role as a goofy carhop in With Six You Get Eggroll, a romantic comedy showcase for the perennial American sweetheart, Doris Day. By 1968 Day was old enough to be offered a part as the disillusioned Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. Uncomfortable with the character’s seduction of a twenty-one-year-old college boy, she turned down the part in favor of Eggroll, an innocuous tale of a widow and widower (Brian Keith) who make halting, mishap-riddled attempts to connect.
As Herbie Fleck, Ye Olde Drive Inn’s carside attendant in a white waiter’s jacket, a bowtie, and a boat-shaped soda jerk’s hat, Carlin clowned shamelessly for the camera, warily monitoring the budding romance between his regular customer, Day’s character, and the interloper, played by Keith. “Dame must be a masoquist,” he clucks, mangling the word, when Day’s character apparently gets stood up.
“He sort of mugged his performance,” says Jamie Farr, who had a supporting role in the movie as an exotic hippie. Farr was living with his wife a few blocks from the Radford Studios—CBS Studio Center, on Radford Avenue in Studio City—where the film was shot. “George would stop by with a six-pack of beer,” he says. Despite the camaraderie, the experience on the set, Farr says, was “not a milestone moment, probably, for either of us.” In fact, Carlin’s part was a joke, and he quickly came to regret it. “He felt like furniture,” says Golden. “Anybody could’ve done it. I know that had a bit of an effect on him. Plus, Doris Day was going through a horrible time in her life and marriage at the time. It permeated the entire experience for everyone.”
Overnight, Carlin dashed his own dreams to build a Danny Kaye-type acting career for himself. He wouldn’t appear again in a feature film until 1976. “I found out . . . that I couldn’t act in movies,” Carlin said. “I found out I can’t do this shit. Man, they want you to change a little bit here, get out of Doris Day’s light, don’t lean in too far, lean back, you’re off-mike, you’re out of the light, you can’t do this, stand there, keep your legs crossed, remember this, say it with a little bit of sadness. . . . Fuck all that!” He might have remembered Evan Esar’s definition of actor in his Comic Dictionary: “A man who tries to be everything but himself.”
In May Carlin opened a three-week engagement at the Frontier Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, the first lengthy residency of a high-paying, three-year commitment. The first venue to book Elvis Presley in Vegas, the Frontier was then owned by the billionaire Howard Hughes, who’d bought the complex for $14 million in late 1967. Carlin’s live gigs were growing tonier, which meant his audiences were increasingly removed from the cultural transformation then taking place on the streets, not just in San Francisco but in every major city and college town across the country. For years Carlin’s running partners had been the folk and rock musicians he befriended on the nightclub circuit, many of whom were fellow pot smokers, and most of whom were jumping into the hippie pool with both feet. They certainly weren’t the targeted ticket buyers for Jack Jones or Joey Heatherton. Harris, who was traveling regularly with Carlin at the time, remembers that his client was growing conflicted. “He’d often come offstage angry—‘Those assholes.’ He was playing for these audiences he didn’t have much respect for, and he was trapped by his own success. He was struggling inside.”
The folkies had laid the groundwork; now pop and rock were socially motivated, too. Meanwhile, Carlin was catering to the middle class—the same people his musician friends were rebelling against. “The music was protest, and I was hearing people who were using their artistic talent to further their ideas and their philosophies,” he recalled. “It was starting to dawn on me that I’m not using my abilities to further these thoughts and ideas that I agree with. . . . I’m entertaining these businessmen and shit in these nightclubs, doing people-pleaser shit.”
Something had to change, and it soon did. At the beginning of the Frontier gig, Carlin called Golden, then Harris, and told them both he needed to let them go. “At a time when he really should’ve been happy, he obviously was not at all pleased with how things were going,” says Golden. “I understood totally why he was unhappy, yet as a manager, you know—if it wasn’t broke, don’t fix it. Finally it got to a point where it was like, ‘Hey, let’s part friends.’ I knew I was not capable of selling what it was he now wanted to do.” Golden went on to manage a few musicians and entertainers—guitarist Kenny Burrell, flutist Hubert Laws—before becoming the talent and marketing director for the Blue Note Jazz Club.
Harris tried to take the split in stride, too. “The first thing you learn is that everybody leaves,” he says. “At some point, they get unhappy, and they shoot the people around them. You’re kind of conditioned to that.” Still, he couldn’t help but think he’d failed his client. “I felt very bad. I maybe felt I didn’t do a good enough job.”
Carlin’s new manager was Bill Brennan, the Racquet Club owner from Dayton, Ohio, whose wife was a close friend of Brenda’s. In June Carlin did a week at Bimbo’s near San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, a plush cocktail room just up the avenue from the hungry i and the Beat bookstore City Lights. A month later he appeared on The Joey Bishop Show, ABC’s short-lived answer to Carson, featuring Carlin’s fellow Cardinal Hayes alumnus Regis Philbin in the sidekick role. It was just weeks after Bishop had conducted an uncharacteristically solemn show, on the night after presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was shot to death at the Ambassador Hotel. His guest that night was a Los Angeles radio reporter who had an audiotape of the immediate after-math of the shooting.
In August Carlin returned to the Frontier for three more weeks. Another Sullivan, another Gleason, and another week at Paul’s Mall in Boston rounded out a relatively quiet last few months of the year, which closed with rehearsals for an upcoming role on an episode of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
In their third (and what would prove to be final) season for CBS, the folk-singing comedy team of Tom and Dick Smothers was becoming a flashpoint for the counterculture, grappling with the network’s Standards and Practices Department over their program’s socially and politically charged content. The brothers and their writers, including Rob Reiner (soon to be known as Mike Stivic, aka “Meathead,” on All in the Family), part-time composer Mason Williams (“Classical Gas”), and a then-unknown Steve
Martin, were testing the public’s capacity to confront the polarizing issues of the day—the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, the emergence of the pill—with humor.
Though guests during the show’s inaugural season in 1967 were hardly controversial—Jack Benny, the Turtles, Nancy Sinatra, and Frank Sinatra Jr.—by the time Carlin appeared, the Smothers Brothers were feeling besieged. In Pete Seeger’s first network television appearance since the days of the Hollywood blacklist, the veteran folk agitator savaged the war effort with his song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” which was cut from the broadcast. CBS then demanded that the producers submit completed episodes several days before airtime, so the network would have time to review the content. At the beginning of the third season, Harry Belafonte sang “Don’t Stop the Carnival” accompanied by a montage of clips from the recent Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where police in riot gear had clashed violently with protesters. That segment was removed, too, as was a biblical satire by stand-up newcomer David Steinberg.
Carlin was familiar to the Smothers Brothers. He’d been a guest in July on the awkwardly titled The Summer Brothers Smothers Show, a replacement series hosted by Glen Campbell. “We met him in the early sixties, when it was still Burns and Carlin,” says Tom Smothers. “We kept bumping into them in Chicago.” While Carlin was showing faint signs of letting his hair grow out during the December rehearsals—he had sideburns and the makings of a ducktail—other performers on the show were fully committed to the youth movement. The musical guest was the Doors, with their lion’s-mane singer Jim Morrison wearing leather pants. The San Francisco comedy troupe called The Committee featured future sitcom players Peter Bonerz (The Bob Newhart Show) and Howard Hesseman (WKRP in Cincinnati), whose facial hair was full muttonchop. Even Dick Smothers, who had taken the summer off while his brother worked behind the scenes on the Glen Campbell replacement series, came back for the third Smothers Brothers season with shaggier hair and a mustache. “I was so goddamn envious,” says Tom Smothers. “The following summer I let my hair grow—I thought maybe I’d have curly hair too. It was long and stringy, and I grew a mustache, and it was long and stringy, too.”
On the Smothers’ set at Television City, Carlin was introduced to Lenny Bruce’s old friend Paul Krassner. The Realist, Krassner’s magazine of hardcore sociopolitical satire, was a key voice in the development of the American counterculture. It was launched in the late 1950s as a moonlighting project out of the New York office of Mad magazine, where Krassner was a contributor. Krassner’s sense of outrage was acute, and he had an uncanny ability to drum it up in others. In response to reports that Jackie Kennedy had demanded deletions from William Manchester’s 1967 book The Death of a President, Krassner wrote a notorious, black-comic essay called “The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book,” imagining graphic sexual congress between Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the corpse of the assassinated president.
Kurt Vonnegut once lauded the “miracle of compressed intelligence” of a Realist bumper sticker that read “Fuck Communism.” Forcing jingoists into a conundrum—either confront the taboo over four-letter words, or give the Reds a pass—was “nearly as admirable for potent simplicity,” Vonnegut wrote, “as Einstein’s E = mc2. [Krassner] was demonstrating how preposterous it was for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie Pavlovian fear and alarm.”
The Realist, Carlin wrote years later, was critical to the conversion he was about to undergo. A “rule-bender and law-breaker since first grade,” he’d been leading a double life throughout the 1960s, straining to please “straight” audiences even as his “sense of being on the outside intensified. . . . All through this period I was sustained and motivated by The Realist, Paul Krassner’s incredible magazine of satire, revolution, and just plain disrespect,” Carlin wrote in an introduction to one of Krassner’s books. “I can’t overstate how important it was to me at the time. It allowed me to see that others who disagreed with the American consensus were busy expressing those feelings and using risky humor to do so.”
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was equal parts consensus-bucking and primetime inanity, with singers and dancers in straw hats and mod fashions straight from the department store rack. Following the hosts’ topical opening gag (Tommy in a gas mask and riot helmet) and the Doors’ pantomimed version of “Wild Child,” Carlin dusted off “The Indian Sergeant,” introduced by Tom Smothers as a routine that had “already become a classic.” In a suit and tie, Carlin gamely donned a headband with a single feather sticking out.
Later in the program he joined the hosts—all three dressed in matching red turtlenecks and black slacks—in a peppy rewrite of folk songwriter Tom Paxton’s “Daily News,” interspersed with comic vignettes drawn from newspaper headlines. One, “Church Split on Birth Control,” gave Carlin a chance to appear onstage in a priest’s collar. Dick Smothers, playing a reporter, noted that the priest was liberal, having just gotten married. How did the Father feel about the Pope’s denunciation of birth control? Oh, Carlin replied, he could never contradict the Pope on birth control. But what if he should find out that his wife has been taking the Pill? “Well, I think I’d have to file for divorce,” he joked. Corny, but like Krassner’s “Fuck Communism” sticker, it was also a succinct jab at institutional hypocrisy. Although he was still going through the whole song and dance just to get the opportunity, little by little he was slipping social commentary into his comedy.
In the strange brew of 1960s culture, at the intersection of thread-bare vaudevillian showmanship and staged Laugh-In-style anarchy, there might have been no other way for him to advance his craft. “The art’s gotta be out there before you can put the content in,” says Tom Smothers. “If you’re singing protest songs, you better be a fuckin’ good singer. And you better be funny if you’re gonna do social commentary.” Hollywood had accepted the thirty-one-year-old Carlin as a funny guy. Now he was ready to let his hair down.
5
THE CONFESSIONAL
It was simple, solipsistic advice, useful nevertheless: “The more you know about yourself, the more you stand to learn.” As Carlin strained to balance his fast-moving career with his growing impulse to be true to his comedy, he heard this axiom on, of all places, a game show. On a short-lived Chuck Barris creation called The Game Game, ordinary people matched wits with a celebrity panel, answering a series of questions designed to illuminate their personal psychologies. How do you vote: by party, issues, candidates, or the advice of friends? What traits, if any, do the people you’ve dated share? How do you choose your toothpaste?
Sitting alongside actor Andrew Prine and Valley of the Dolls author Jacqueline Susann, his slicked hair curling at the edges, Carlin strained for geniality as he endured the excruciating twenty-three-minute taping. Answering a weird question about how the contestants would handle a potential housemate accused of “unruly behavior,” he replied that it wouldn’t bother him. “I’m not very ruly,” he explained.
His unruly urges were beginning to show. Making his second appearance on the Gleason show in January 1969, Carlin managed to attract the attention of the FBI. Introduced by the host as “a real oddball,” Carlin wondered why incidental television programming—the test pattern, or the sign-off hour “Star-Spangled Banner”—was never nominated for Emmy Awards. Having laid out the premise, Carlin imagined that the FBI’s late-night “Most Wanted” report had a production budget like The Tonight Show’s. His mock host, “J. Edgar Moover,” then performed a monologue of aggressively bad jokes: “Did you hear the one about the two guys planning to rob a bank? So did we. We put ’em in jail.”
Several days after the broadcast, Gleason’s office received two letters of complaint. “The crime wave is not a subject for levity or humor,” wrote the first aggrieved viewer, from Dallas, “and the Department of Justice is not a subject to be made fun of, any more than it would be proper to make light of the U.S. Constitution. The hippies and the yi
ppies might be taking serious things lightly but the majority of the people in the United States are law abiding citizens and do not appreciate anyone making fun of crime.” The second letter, sent from Connecticut, referenced the appearance by “an individual named George Carlin. I believe he was supposed to be a comedian.” Carlin’s spoof, wrote the viewer, “was shoddy, in shockingly bad taste, and certainly not the sort of thing one would expect on your show.” The correspondent then noted that he was a former special agent of the FBI.
In the field of law enforcement there are no more respected names than the Federal Bureau of Investigation and J. Edgar Hoover. In the field of entertainment there is no greater personality than Jackie Gleason. It’s a shame that a third-rate hanger-on would use the generosity of one to belittle the reputation of the other.
An internal FBI memorandum ultimately determined that the appearance of this “third-rate hanger-on” “was in very poor taste,” and that “it was obvious that he was using the prestige of the Bureau and Mr. Hoover to enhance his performance.” The author of the memo proceeded to (clumsily) document part of Carlin’s routine, bringing to mind Lenny Bruce’s exasperation when he had to listen to the detective in his New York obscenity trial fumble his own material in court. Bureau files, the deputy noted, “contain no information identifiable with Carlin.” The Miami FBI office, which acknowledged prior contact with Gleason and his PR man, Hank Meyers, helped settle the matter by filing the helpful addendum that Gleason himself “thinks that the Director is one of the greatest men who has ever lived.”
Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin Page 11
