Carlin’s allotted monologue segments also contributed to the show’s first big internal controversy. Billy Crystal, whom Michaels had recently spotted at Catch a Rising Star, had turned down a showcase on a new Cosby special to appear on Saturday Night. At the last minute his six-minute segment was bumped from the show. Michaels was committed to keeping newcomer Andy Kaufman’s “Mighty Mouse” lip-synching routine, a small masterpiece of modern Dada, and his only other option was to take air time from his host. “I probably didn’t have the nerve to cut Carlin,” the producer recalled. Crystal’s devastation at being left out clouded his relationship with SNL for some time.
Then there was the matter of Carlin’s last bit. Called “Religious Lift,” it was a piece he’d been working on for several months. He had performed a version of it, with a blatant use of cheat sheets and the hoarse throat and grinding jaw of a man in the throes of a binge, on Mike Douglas a few months earlier. We’re so egotistical about God, he joked on both shows, that we face our dashboard Jesuses toward us, rather than on the road ahead watching out for traffic, as they should be. The routine was incisively Lenny-esque.
As soon as Saturday Night ended, with cast and crew breathing a collective sigh of relief, Dave Tebet called from his hotel suite to complain to Ebersol about Carlin’s antireligion soapboxing. The NBC switchboard was lighting up with complaints, he claimed. One caller said he was phoning on behalf of Cardinal Cooke, archbishop of New York. Heading home from the wrap party, a dejected Ebersol walked past St. Patrick’s Cathedral, checking to see whether the office lights were on. On Monday morning he heard that the call had been a hoax. Try as he might, Carlin couldn’t draw the ire of every archbishop in the country.
There had been talk of Carlin agreeing to host several episodes of the new show, but after the first one, neither side brought it up again. (He returned once, hosting in November 1984, during Michaels’ several-season hiatus from the show he had created.) Despite a nationally televised plug for his new album—he had held up a copy of the LP, An Evening with Wally Londo Featuring Bill Slaszo, as the closing credits began to roll—the record was his first on Little David that failed to go gold. It did earn the comic another Grammy nomination, but Carlin was about to be knocked off his three-year perch atop the comedy world. Ironically, his appearance on the first Saturday Night Live seemed to underscore the notion that a new kind of funny was about to sweep the culture.
8
WASTED TIME
Robert Klein looked like a grad student still hanging out with the underclassmen. The thirty-three-year-old stood on the stage of the theater at Haverford College, a prestigious liberal arts school founded by Quakers in suburban Pennsylvania, on New Year’s Eve 1975, wearing a preppy red-, gold-, and green-striped pullover, his wavy hair touching the back of his fashionably wide collar. The occasion was a television special called An Evening with Robert Klein, the inaugural episode of a groundbreaking comedy series, On Location , produced by an upstart cable television network called Home Box Office.
The idea was that comedians would no longer be confined by the time limits and arbitrary standards set by network broadcasters. Working for a privately owned, subscription-based company, they could do a full, uncensored set, just as they would in a nightclub. “This is mature,” marveled Klein. “We’re grown up. We can say anything. . . . Shit! How do you like that?”
Three years after Carlin debuted “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” Klein still hadn’t listened closely to Carlin’s records, not wanting to absorb his material or be daunted by his success. (“I remember I was scared, almost, to listen to FM & AM,” he says.) The FCC’s jurisdiction over the new cable network, HBO, was unresolved, and Klein, not an especially dirty comic—a few years later he recorded a routine called “Six Clean Words You Can Say Anywhere”—gladly took advantage of the opportunity. In a bit about an NFL broadcast on Thanksgiving, he joked about the inadvertent dialogue picked up by engineers and their “soundcatchers” at field level: After a tackle, he said, he distinctly heard a player holler, “I’ll get you, Taylor, you cocksucker!”
“My mother dropped the turkey,” Klein said with an impish grin.
Television was about to undergo a radical transformation. Cable programming would bring explicit content into homes across the country for the first time, and HBO was leading the way. Originally known as the Green Channel, the newly renamed Home Box Office went into operation in the test town of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in early November 1972. In rough weather, a technician held the microwave receiving dish in place as the network transmitted its first offering to subscribers, the Paul Newman and Henry Fonda film Sometimes a Great Notion. “It is said that every successful business needs a dreamer, a businessman, and a son of a bitch,” wrote one early chronicler of the network. Company founder Chuck Dolan, ousted just months into HBO’s first year of service, was the dreamer; Jerry Levin, a former divinity school student and antitrust lawyer, was the businessman; and Michael Fuchs, who rose from director of special programming to president and then chairman of the HBO board, was considered by some to be the SOB.
Though the three major broadcast networks and American institutions such as movie theater owners and Major League Baseball all fought hard to block the incoming cable providers—abetted by the FCC, which envisioned itself protecting the Big Three from the interlopers—HBO got a major break when the networks declined to oppose its request to transmit via satellite. Meanwhile, the cable network challenged the FCC’s claim to regulation by filing a lawsuit, scoring a significant victory when the District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruled in its favor. During calendar year 1976 HBO presented a potluck of programming, including an exclusive Bette Midler concert, quirky sporting events such as roller derbies and a rodeo held in New Jersey, and fourteen repeats of Gone With the Wind, in addition to its monthly On Location series.
Although the comedy show was new, the same wasn’t necessarily true of all its talent. Fresh young comedians Steve Martin and Freddie Prinze followed Klein with On Location specials of their own, but so did known quantities Pat Cooper, Phyllis Diller, and language mangler Norm Crosby, as well as old revolutionaries such as Sahl and Berman. The series had already been on about a year and a half by the time Carlin taped his own HBO debut in the summer of 1977 at the University of Southern California.
The front office at HBO was well aware that Carlin could be counted on to make the most of this chance to speak his mind. As the comic himself said years later, the new cable giant came into being to solve a technical problem—“crappy reception”—but it was bundled with a big bonus for comedy: freedom. Three freedoms, to be exact: the freedom for stand-up comics to choose their own topics, freedom from commercial interruption, and freedom to use the entire language. The “Comedians’ Bill of Rights,” Carlin called it.
Stand-up comedy epitomized the kind of “event” programming HBO envisioned for itself, says Levin, the company president, who later went on to run Time Warner. “We were looking for something that would dramatize the nature of the medium itself—that is, subscription, free-flowing, and I don’t mean just language. Comedy in a nightclub setting was a hard-ticket value item.” Like boxing, the other signature presentation of the network’s early years—HBO launched its new satellite feed system with a showcase event, the heavily hyped “Thrilla in Manila” title fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier—comedy had a rawness that suited the new venture well. Both featured lone gladiators in the spotlight. “Both, in a not-so-subtle way, reinforced to the consumer that they were getting box-office value from something even though it was coming through their TV set,” Levin says.
Carlin’s ninety-minute set, taped at USC in early March 1977, debuted just as the D.C. Court of Appeals’s reversal of the FCC order on WBAI was being handed down. Determined not to self-censor, HBO nevertheless went to considerable lengths to cover its heinie. It summoned former Life magazine columnist Shana Alexander, known to television audiences as the liberal half of the weekly
“Point/ Counterpoint” segment on 60 Minutes. “A portion of Mr. Carlin’s performance needs special introduction,” Alexander said in a taped disclaimer that ran at the top of the program.
His target is language—how we use it and abuse it. Some would simply say that tonight’s language is very strong. Others would say it goes beyond this, and would find it vulgar. Aristophanes, Chaucer, and Shakespeare were vulgar too at times. Anyway, the segment is controversial.
Mentioning the court’s ruling, she called the comic an important performer: “one of this generation’s philosophers of comedy, defining, reflecting, and refining the way we see our own time.” His act “contains language you hear every day on the streets, though rarely on TV.” It was up to viewers to make up their own minds about the content.
“It was an adult medium, and people were paying for it,” says Levin. Another of HBO’s core concepts was to make R-rated movies available to subscribers. “I remember the first time I played an R-rated movie for some people at Time Inc. They were appalled that we were running that on TV. I said, well, that’s the concept. If you can see it in a theater, why can’t you see it at home?” Landing Carlin, the radical reformer of harsh language, was “a kind of capstone symbolism of what we were trying to do,” says Levin. “If some people thought it was exploitative, well, then they thought George Carlin was exploitative. I personally thought he was one of the most brilliant, not just comedians, but commentators we had.”
Another disclaimer toward the end of his HBO debut read “THE FINAL SEGMENT OF MR. CARLIN’S PERFORMANCE INCLUDES ESPECIALLY CONTROVERSIAL LANGUAGE. PLEASE CONSIDER WHETHER YOU WISH TO CONTINUE VIEWING.” Not that he hadn’t already cursed during the set. Doing a bit about cats, he’d noted how they make every clumsy mishap seem like it was intentional. After smashing into a door, he joked, a cat will go behind the couch to hide its pain. Only when it’s out of sight will it react: “Fuckin’ meow!”
HBO was happy to have him, but the broadcast networks were as wary as ever. Pop singer Tony Orlando, a close friend of Freddie Prinze, wanted Carlin for his variety show, which had a new name, The Tony Orlando and Dawn Rainbow Hour, for the 1976 season. After a couple of years on CBS, the show was being revamped as a sketch-and-performance show, mimicking SNL to a degree. “I was never quite sure of it. It seemed like a bit of a rip-off to me,” Orlando recalled. “We weren’t about being hip. But, if we were going for Saturday Night Live, who better than George Carlin?”
When his producer told Orlando that Carlin’s drawing power was slipping and he might be available, the “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” singer implored the CBS brass to bring him in. As Orlando recalls, it was his duty to hand down the network’s conditions: Carlin would have to trim his hair (he agreed), and he’d have to promise not to goad the Standards and Practices Department. “You couldn’t even use the word ‘pregnant’ on our show, let alone anything stronger,” according to Orlando. For his part, Carlin asked that his six-minute segments be followed by commercial breaks, so the pieces would stand alone.
In several episodes in the 1976 season, which turned out to be the show’s last, Carlin worked hard on his contribution. After several years of packed schedules, he could sense that opportunities were dwindling. “You can’t be the hot new guy in town forever,” he reasoned. Each week he strode onto Orlando’s stage with an old brown briefcase under his arm, pulling out a torn sheet of paper that read “Time for George” and pinning it to a bulletin board.
The segments were conceptual, covering such themes as “Time,” “Age,” and “Rules.” They suited Carlin’s clinical approach to comedy. In the first, he examined the various ways we describe time: “What’s the difference between a jiffy and a flash?” We can never truly live in the present, he said. Just as we identify it, it’s moved on to the next moment. “There’s no present. Everything is the near future, or the recent past.” The “Rules” segment explored the universal language of parental reprimands (“Because I said so!” “You’ll break your neck!”). It was the kind of observational humor—a grown-up looking back at childhood—for which a young Jerry Seinfeld soon became well known.
Though the show was good exposure, Carlin was once again exploring a starring vehicle for himself. As a warm-up, he took a cameo part in the film Car Wash. Based on a screenplay written by future director Joel Schumacher, it was a slapdash, low-budget production calculated to bring comedy to the same audiences that had made sleeper hits of black dramas such as Shaft and Super Fly. Carlin’s Little David label mate Franklin Ajaye, wearing his hair in an enormous Afro, had the starring role. Guests included Richard Pryor, playing a highfalutin preacher, and Professor Irwin Corey, whose surreptitious activity around the car wash makes him a suspect in a bombing threat. Carlin, who cut a deal to write his own lines, didn’t have to stretch much to play a transplanted New York cabbie. In a striped T-shirt and a flat leather cap, he tells a customer, a drag queen played by Antonio Fargas, “I ain’t got nothin’ against you people. I ain’t got nothin’ against any people. That’s what I think we need—more love in the world.” Stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, he hollers out the window: “Ya bastards!”
“I probably talked to George on Car Wash more than I did at Little David,” says Ajaye. “I was a young actor, making hardly any money. He was in and out in a couple of days.” To Ajaye, acting was much easier than stand-up: “almost like a vacation. . . . Everyone from Don Rickles to Milton Berle, Jonathan Winters—every comedian can act on some level. You’re already doing an act on the nights you don’t want to be there [onstage].”
Carlin was at the Roxy when Ajaye recorded his lone album for Monte Kay, Don’t Smoke Dope, Fry Your Hair! (1976), on which the younger comic made Carlin’s language pale in comparison. Getting into college was easy for a black man in the wake of the race riots, Ajaye joked. All he had to do was write on his application, “I’ll burn that motherfucker down!”
Motherfucker was still in its infancy. “It would seem to be an American Negro invention,” wrote a British anthropologist in 1967, who marveled at how the word was “curse, expletive, epithet, and intensive all at once.” The word was not noted in print until the 1960s, the writer claimed, and was probably “not much older” than that in common usage. Ajaye, for one, got plenty of use out of it: In one of his routines he used it to embellish a stoned trip with a friend to Disney-world, in which a disgruntled Mickey Mouse calls Goofy a “bucktoothed motherfucker.”
Now motherfucker and the rest of the Milwaukee Seven were about to have their day in the highest court in the land. The prospect of that kind of language rattling off the Spanish marble friezes high above the justices’ heads was thrilling for some, and a looming nightmare for others. “As we used to say,” says Thomas Schattenfield, “you don’t want to get up in front of nine old men and say, ‘Please pass the fucking salt.’”
Though Schattenfield had been the Arent Fox attorney working most closely with Pacifica, he had argued against appealing the FCC’s declaratory order. The FCC’s action on the “Filthy Words” complaint—putting a notice in WBAI’s license-renewal file—had been, he felt, a “fairly decent” outcome. The Court of Appeals’s decision in favor of Pacifica made the FCC’s petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court inevitable. “My feeling was that by going to the Supreme Court, it would be nothing but disaster,” says Schattenfield.
With Schattenfield absenting himself, that left the young Tillotson preparing the brief with a colleague, Harry F. Cole. The aging Plotkin, whose lengthy lapse during his argument at appeal had been a source of concern around the office, would argue the case. Tillotson was disappointed. “It was the one opportunity in my lifetime to argue a case before the Supreme Court,” he says, “and I think I would’ve done a better job.” Plotkin was known to be tough on the hard-charging junior partner: “He wasn’t good at giving Tillotson a chance,” says Schattenfield. Still, when the senior partner read the brief, he was impressed. “He told me, ‘David, this thing sings,’” recalls Ti
llotson.
When the Court of Appeals ruled on the FCC order in March 1977, Justice Edward Tamm determined that the commission was in essence censoring Carlin’s “Filthy Words.” It was “a classic case of burning the house to roast the pig,” he said, invoking an old line from Justice Felix Frankfurter. Chief Judge David Bazelon, who joined Tamm in the decision to reverse the FCC’s order, made his own case. The critical point, he felt, was that the commission itself had characterized Carlin’s words as “indecent” speech, which, unlike obscenity, is constitutionally protected. But the dissenting judge, Harold Leventhal, agreed with the FCC’s contention that it was merely “time-channeling” such language, not censoring. His opinion gave the FCC’s lawyers, led by Joseph A. Marino, a clear guideline for their Supreme Court challenge. (Leventhal, however, took it upon himself to comb through the complaint, questioning the indecency, for instance, of the word tits, “because it is neither a sexual nor excretory organ.”) With the FCC petitioning for a writ of certiorari, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in January 1978.
Filing amicus briefs on behalf of Pacifica were ABC, the Authors League of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Representatives of Morality in Media and the United States Catholic Conference filed on behalf of the FCC. The biggest surprise came from the Solicitor General’s office, which had sided with the FCC at the Court of Appeals. At the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Wade McCree filed an amicus brief on behalf of Pacifica, and not simply because his office believed the appeals decision was not subject to review. “They took our view that it [the FCC order] had a broad chilling effect on First Amendment rights,” says Tillotson, who had only recently convinced the FCC to back down from an attempt to sanction stations playing songs with lyrics that could be construed as promoting illegal drug use. “I can remember meeting at the Justice Department to discuss strategy. They were one hundred percent with us.”
Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin Page 20
