There was a woman in our first apartment house who was a model, so she was home a lot between calls. She began to come over and hang with Brenda and they drank in the afternoon. I didn’t find out about that until later; there was a lot I didn’t know at the time or realize. I was getting too busy too quickly. Or perhaps I didn’t want to know or realize. Marijuana can do that to you.
Brenda was used to being out on the road with me, doing everything with me and for me. Now I had agents and a manager and people who handled booking and flights and money. They’d taken her place. She told me later that there was a point in ’67 when she literally couldn’t sign her own name. She just couldn’t write the words “Brenda Carlin.” She was losing her identity. So she got drunk.
With me on the road, or sitting around some fucking TV studio for days on end, she had to be mother and father to Kelly. Then I’d come home with an armful of presents and it would be: “Daddy’s home! Fun time!” Which cast her as the domestic tyrant, the one who said No. Time for bed. Time for school. She hated being that. So she got drunk.
I don’t remember when Brenda’s drinking became something more than Brenda drinking something. But I do know we began to fight. She would say she felt like a piece of furniture. That I was just walking around her as if she weren’t there. I didn’t know what she meant. I just swallowed everything. You have to be aware of feelings before you can deny them and push them down. In a lot of ways, for a lot of reasons, I wasn’t even aware of my own feelings. The ones that would manage to break through, I would immediately say: “That can’t be.”
We’d notice odd things about Kelly. We’d find her sleeping on the floor in the morning, instead of in the bed. We never understood why at the time. And Kelly couldn’t watch me on television. She’d put her head down so she couldn’t see me on the screen. She couldn’t handle it for some reason. We didn’t understand that either.
There was something about me and Brenda’s chemistry that we didn’t have to consciously say, “We’ll stick this out for our child, we have to make this work.” We felt bound together. In spite of all that was going on there was an inevitability about that. I never had a thought of leaving Brenda. There was a feeling that the good times were still good enough. And often, when she was sober, which was in the morning of course, she’d sound really sensible. She’d say, “Yeah, I’m going to watch that.” It was still just the beginning of things. And I was smoking a lot of pot. I could hardly blame her for drinking to keep up.
So there we were: a successful young couple with plenty of money, a nice house in Beverly Hills. With a mountain of grass. And a lake of booze. And a beautiful daughter who couldn’t watch her daddy do what he did for a living.
I always said Kelly has an old soul. Perhaps even then, in the wisdom of her four years on earth, she sensed that I was on a treadmill to nowhere. Without a clue how to get off.
10
THE LONG EPIPHANY
George performing at the Kiel Opera House, 1973
(Copyright G. Robert Bishop)
On June 5, 1968, just after midnight, while I was working at Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco with Lana Cantrell, Robert Kennedy was shot dead at the Ambassador Hotel down in L.A. I told them I wasn’t going on for the second show. They—whoever They were, Bimbo I guess—insisted that I go on. No way. In fact I decided as I watched the coverage through the night that I wasn’t going back the next night either. Fuck Bimbo.
Then the Chicago convention police riot happened and that brought people down on one side or the other with more firmness than they might’ve had before. I was no exception.
It’s funny but I never find myself responding very much to events of great magnitude. There’s a part of me that knows that’s exactly what’s supposed to happen. I will sometimes marvel at the timing or circumstances or setting or the individuals involved. “Weird” is the word that occurs to me most often. “That’s fucking weird.” Weird—but never unexpected.
I didn’t respond with rage to any of what was happening in 1968. Dr. King’s murder in April was depressingly predictable. There was a sinking feeling: that something good was ebbing away and being encouraged in that direction by the usual forces. The establishment was winning—its war, its assassins, its secret government—and that fact overpowered and debilitated me more than it enraged me.
I’ve always been the kind of person—whether it comes from being half shanty, half lace-curtain Irish I don’t know—who needs to be changed, rather than instigating change myself. I could never make life-changing decisions in a split-second. I’m always open to change but I need to have it happen in a natural, organic, timely fashion.
I always say that everything in nature works very, very slowly. Okay, what about a volcano? Well, an eruption may seem like split-second drama, but it’s actually the end result of a long process that’s gone on for years far below the earth’s surface. My change when it came was like that, drawn out over several years, then exploding in a series of eruptions.
By now—1968 and ’69—everything about my comedy seemed rote. On the Smothers Brothers, where I remember feeling at home, feeling we’d taken over, where even the things about the show that were the same, such as blocking and standing around like a dick for hours, had a different flavor … even there, on the only comedy show that was actually taking a stand against the war, I did … “The Indian Sergeant.”
Why the fuck didn’t I sit down a month before and write something daring for Tommy Smothers?
One time I did do something revolutionary and subversive—without even realizing it. For The Jackie Gleason Show I’d written a piece, which aired in January 1969, called “The J. Edgar Hoover Show.”
… with Ramsey Clark and the Orchestra and the Joe Valachi Singers and, special guest, Joe Bananas’ sister Chiquita!
Naturally, I played host J. Edgar Hoover:
I just came from a stakeout. It was backyard barbecue. Ha ha ha! Laugh it up or we’ll lock you up! Time to meet the guys who really make the show possible—the rotten, vicious criminals … Let’s take a look at Pretty Boy Cliff. (holds up a picture of a gorilla) Cliff is four foot eight and weighs 350 pounds. Other than that he has no distinguishing features. Cliff is wanted for stealing a circus train and attempting to drive it to Havana. He fancies himself a lady-killer—and so do the police … They’ve got the lady to prove it … Join us again tomorrow night when our guest might be someone hiding out near you. If he is tune us in, turn him in, and drop out … of sight!
Apart from that mildest of dope references in the last line, about as harmless a piece of TV fluff as you could imagine. Nonetheless, as I discovered thirty years later, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, it got my FBI file started. Apparently a week after the airing the director himself received a copy of a letter which a Mr. (NAME BLACKED OUT), a former special agent, had sent to Jackie Gleason in Miami. Mr. (NAME BLACKED OUT) had “commented on appearance of one George Carlin, an alleged comedian … and that the subject of Carlin’s material was the FBI and Mr. Hoover and that his treatment of both was shoddy and in shockingly bad taste.”
BuFiles, it appeared, contained “no information identifiable with Carlin.” But the best part of the covering letter was the kicker: “The [Miami] Office advised that from their prior contacts with Jackie Gleason and specifically with Mr. Hank Meyers, Gleason’s Public Relations Director, who is also an SAC Contact [i.e., an FBI stoolie], they are of the opinion that Gleason holds the Director and the FBI in the highest esteem and that Gleason himself thinks that the Director is one of the greatest men who has ever lived.”
How different my life might’ve been if I’d known the FBI considered me the satirical equivalent of Huey Newton. As it was, the most revolutionary thing I did at the time was fly to London to do … This Is Tom Jones.
It was a particularly low point. Like all other guests we had a suite in the Dorchester. So Brenda and I decided to have a party. In the suite that night were Jim Brown, a bunch of musicians,
including Mama Cass—and Mia Farrow. (Nobody knew it was Mia Farrow, because she didn’t say anything—just sat there under a big hat. After she left, somebody said: “Wasn’t that Mia Farrow?”) Mama Cass had her aide-de-camp with her, which I thought was a really cool thing to call your assistant. And Jim Brown was very angry about a lot of shit. Which I certainly understood.
I was wearing a suit. I was awkward and goofy. It was my party but I felt really out of place. I was living with a lot of private misery. All these fucking stupid TV shows with all that lighting shit, meaningless banter, all that garbage, all that wasted time and energy. My brilliant act, which was doing so well, had nowhere to go. I was writing and performing material that went around in circles, media material taking off on media form, television about television. And while I was powerfully attracted to the life my rock and folkie friends led—as a comedian, how did I go about leading that? There were very few counterculture comedy centers—one terrific group in San Francisco called the Committee, who’d been on Smothers with me, but that was about it. I felt inadequate compared to an outfit like the Committee. I felt I’d somehow stained myself with this middle-class show-business shit.
And however much kinship I had with the counterculture, it brought up again the eternal dilemma: of longing to belong but not liking to belong—even though the group I wanted to belong to now were non-belongers.
Maybe it wasn’t belonging that I longed for so much as being able to fulfill my proper role. I wasn’t doing my job. I wasn’t using my mind to produce the external evidence of my inner state. I was superficially skimming off the top these mild and passable parodies. The very fact that they were parodies is telling. There was nothing of me in them.
I looked at what my friends were doing, the music they were making, the doors they were opening, the stands they were taking, the changes they were acknowledging and instigating. Then I looked at the people in TV studios and nightclubs where I did my superficially skimming act, mostly for the parents of the people I admired. I felt like a traitor to my generation.
George Carlin has become a showbiz mystery. One of the very best young contemporary clowns, he had a splendid comic spirit, a fresh new outlook on comedy, got the top TV bookings, has been considered for several terribly remunerative TV-talk-show chairmanships, his material was attractive to teenagers, college kids and mature marrieds; his records sold friskily and all seemed right in his straight future … Carlin now seems an artistic drop-out. His clothes, incensed hangdog demeanor, long pony-tail-style hairdo, grubby pants, a totally unwashed, shambling, savagely apologetic aspect as if speaking straight from a hobo jungle, combine in his new “style,” essentially no style at all beyond a belligerent, truculent “statement.”
Thus spake Jack O’Brian, the self-described “Voice of Broadway,” in 1973, following a rowdy concert I’d done at the Westbury Music Fair in Long Island. I couldn’t have been happier with his words if I’d written them myself. Yes, Jack, you dopey old bigot, you hit the nail right on the head.
How had I become an unwashed, shambling, savagely apologetic hobo with grubby pants and an incensed, hangdog demeanor? Well, it hadn’t been easy. I think it all began with that long, pony-tail-style hairdo.
I once said, I always had long hair—only I used to keep it inside my head. But letting it come out where people could see it was a drawn-out process. Looking back on it I’m not even sure where and when it began. It was a barely conscious decision—almost as if the hair decided to come out of its own accord. My hair had a mind of its own.
Terrible things were happening to me. But because of them, my life began to change. In the fall of 1969 I was fired from the Frontier Hotel in Vegas—where I had an extremely lucrative two-year deal—for saying the word “ass.”
I had been working into my act a little short thing about, “I got no ass. You might notice, I go right from the shoulders to the heels, like most Irish guys. No ass. When I was in the service, black guys used to see me in the showers and say, ‘Hey, man, where yo’ ass at? Stud got no ass.’”
That was it. They fired me. Closed me after the very first show. Here’s what happened. The show had been reserved exclusively for players in the Howard Hughes Invitational (golf tournament) and their guests. These people, who had been at the Hole No. 19 or whatever they call that bar thing at golf courses, show up fucking half drunk. The Frontier starts the show about an hour late to accommodate them. I come out and they’re really unruly. They’re not a good audience. And just as a matter of principle I’m not happy with these golf cocksuckers anyway.
I do the ass routine and I’m told in between shows that Robert Maheu, the Mormon who ran the place and was Howard Hughes’s keeper, had gotten complaints from the audience: “The people didn’t appreciate what you said. Don’t bother with the second show. You’ll get your money for the rest of the week.”
Being fired from the Frontier for saying “ass.” A harbinger—don’t you love that word?—of all that was to come.
Then there was acid. I know exactly when I first did acid—it was in October 1969 while I was playing a major, now long-defunct jazz club in Chicago called Mister Kelly’s. Next to my record of that booking, which was otherwise uneventful, is written in a trembling hand the word “acid.” Actually in the course of a two-week gig I did acid multiple times, maybe five, maybe ten. (After the first couple of trips your numeracy tends to decline.)
Fuck the drug war. Dropping acid was a profound turning point for me, a seminal experience. I make no apologies for it. More people should do acid. It should be sold over the counter. Acid finally moved me from one place to the other; allowed change to take place—change that had been rumbling underground all this time, but which I still needed to have happen to me rather than initiate. (I suppose I did initiate it by dropping the stuff but I couldn’t know what would transpire; at least I had the illusion that change had happened to me rather than through me.) Suddenly all the conflict that had been tormenting me between the alternative values and straight values began to resolve.
But. This radically different, utterly changed, reimprinted, reprogrammed person had to now go play the Copacabana in New York. The Copa was the quintessential place I did not belong. I’d only agreed to do it (long before the acid) when management said: “It’s Christmas. Oliver is headlining (Oliver was a pseudo-folkie who’d had a number one song). There’ll be a lot of people who don’t normally go to a place like the Copacabana. So you’ll get a younger, TV-audience crowd. You’ll be okay.”
The Copa was owned by Jules Podell, an old-line, semi-gangster type with this big pinkie ring that he would tap loudly on the table when he didn’t like something.
So I did my act: “Indian Sergeant,” “Hippy-Dippy Weatherman,” “Wonderful WINO,” all the standard stuff, but less convincingly than ever. Sometimes midway through the show, not having my heart in it, with Podell sitting out there, I’d start in on the Copa itself: “These dumps went out of style in the 1940s and they forgot to close.”
Tap tap tap tap.
Some nights I’d lie down on the floor under the piano and describe its underside: “There are vertical and diagonal pieces of wood with little nails in them and one of them says, ‘New York City 00-601.’” Or still lying on the floor I’d describe the ceiling of the club—unfavorably. Another time, I brought the Yellow Pages onstage: “I’m now going to read from ‘Upholsterers.’” Which I did. There’d be a few embarrassed, unbelieving laughs. Perhaps there were some people in the audience who’d heard of Dada surrealism and thought it was Dada. But not a lot. And always from the table out there in the darkness: tap, tap, tap, tap, tap!
This went on for three entire weeks, the tirades and Dada shit alternating with the not even halfhearted performances. Every night I would ask to be fired onstage. I would say, “Please fire me.” Podell wouldn’t do it. Just the tapping.
Then, on my next-to-last night, during the first show, in the final minutes of my final piece … they slowly turned down
the lights on me. Ever so slowly, as if the sun were setting. Then, just as slowly, they turned my volume off. At the end I was standing onstage, in the dark, in total silence. In a way it was kind of perfect. The lights had gone down on that part of my life.
It was January 6, 1970—the Feast of the Epiphany. A great start to a watershed year. I’d now been fired from two of the supposedly more prestigious and certainly more high-visibility mainstream locations in the country. And while the Frontier could be written off as a temporary lapse, a minor infraction, I’d flaunted my disgust and conflict and unhappiness every night for three weeks in the media capital of the world.
I got at least one good review from a very unexpected source: my mother. She wrote me a letter, enclosing reviews of a Samuel Beckett play she’d just seen. This is what devout-Catholic-Eisenhower-Republican Mary had to say to her wayward son about his latest developments:
Dear George:
I should be on the check-out line at the supermarket but I must say these words to you. Please read these reviews. You will someday be a Beckett or a Joyce or maybe a Bernard Shaw. You seem to have their kind of disturbance … Some day you will release what you have down inside of you and it will be listened to and heard.
They condemn you for idolizing Lenny Bruce—how little they really know what you see in his courage, sincerity and daring. Please George insist on being yourself. Don’t let anyone change you or silence you. I am so hungry for a heart-to-heart with you … Why have I got this restlessness—this groping for answers which I sometimes feel I have passed on to you? Do you follow me George? Why can’t I quiet this undisciplined questioning of what goes on around us? Why am I caught up by it?
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