Between the grueling cross-country driving, the girl in Dayton, and the nagging feeling that he should be doing stand-up on his own, Carlin soon realized his heart wasn’t in it. “We didn’t work very hard, and the act wasn’t growing,” he said. “I think that was mostly my fault, because after we split up, Jack became a tireless writer with Avery Schreiber and with Second City. I just never wanted to sit down and make up new routines, and I became a bit of a drawback to him. I guess I was subconsciously saving myself for my own act.” On June 3, 1961, he married Brenda Hosbrook in her parents’ living room in Dayton. They honeymooned in Miami, where Burns and Carlin were booked into the Playboy Club. Carlin’s mother invited herself for a visit with the young couple.
During one layover with Brenda in Dayton, while Burns was on the East Coast, the owner of the Racquet Club, Bill Brennan, asked Carlin for a favor. The folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary had to cancel two nights of shows when Peter Yarrow fell ill. Carlin agreed to fill in, performing amended versions of the team’s act and a few things he’d been working on for himself. Flying solo, he made the audience laugh. He could feel that he was ready to do this on his own.
In March 1962 Burns and Carlin mutually agreed to part. On the last day of a two-week run opening for Vic Damone at the Living Room, they split up, celebrating late into the night at the Maryland Hotel. Burns enrolled in improv classes at Second City. Carlin kicked off his solo career at the Gate of Horn, the cramped folk music club where Odetta and Memphis Slim, among others, had cut live albums. He was booked as the opening act for Peter, Paul, and Mary.
For the rest of the year Carlin and Brenda stayed on the road in the Dart, wearing a groove between the Hosbrook home in Dayton and Mary Carlin’s apartment in the old neighborhood. The new groom caught his first solo break when Sahl filled in one week in June as a guest host on The Tonight Show. Paar had left the program for good in March, and his replacement, Johnny Carson, was contractually obligated to fulfill his contract as a game show host before taking over in October.
Sahl, the brainy progressive, was at odds with the decision makers at The Tonight Show all week. “I put George on and Woody [Allen], and NBC didn’t want either one of them,” he says. Allen, who had been writing comedy for Tonight, Ed Sullivan, Sid Caesar, and others since he was nineteen, had debuted his neurotic stand-up persona the previous year. “I had a hell of a time getting them booked,” says Sahl. “I also put on Ella Fitzgerald with a mixed trio, and they didn’t want that, either.” Sahl, a Kennedy insider who occasionally wrote lines for the president’s speeches, had Carlin do his Kennedy impersonation. Stages were packed at the time with comedians doing Kennedy impressions; Vaughn Meader, the New Englander who would achieve great fame spoofing the president, was about to record The First Family , his ubiquitous, Grammy-winning album. Carlin’s own Kennedy was by then well-honed; he dropped and added Rs like a good Boston Brahmin—“We must lowah the quoter of sugah from Cuber.”
On the show that night, Carlin slipped his fingers in and out of his suit pockets, setting his jaw and hunching his shoulders, emulating the stiff posture of the president with the chronically bad back. He led with a joke about the Kennedy clan’s well-known nepotism: “On behalf of the attorney general, the joint chiefs of staff, the members of the Supreme Court, and the rest of my family. . . .” Sahl attests that Carlin did well on the appearance, though no one at NBC would admit as much. “They’d lose their position of aggression if they did that!” he sputters.
Despite Sahl’s endorsement and an appearance on CBS’s long-running Talent Scouts program, Carlin was unable to muster much career traction over the next two years. Still represented by Becker and GAC, his gigs were typically unexceptional and sometimes downright pathetic. He played the Exodus in Denver, the Colony in Omaha, the Living Room in New York, and four Playboy Clubs that had unfulfilled contracts with Burns and Carlin. A run at the Copa Club in Cleveland was canceled midweek, his first true flop. In Indianapolis he landed a prime booking at the Embers, but his subversive attitude did not go over well with the well-heeled audience. “I can remember doing the supper show,” Carlin said. “That means there are still dishes on the table. Stone silence,” for an excruciating half an hour.
At one point he managed to finagle an audition as a writer for Steve Allen’s syndicated Westinghouse show, but he squandered the opportunity. “It wasn’t a case of the staff missing out on something. I simply wasn’t ready,” Carlin years later told the host, who hadn’t been at the playhouse on Hollywood’s North Vine Street for the tryout. Allen, too, felt he’d missed an opportunity: “Since I have always been able to detect true funniness at a range of at least a thousand yards,” he wrote, “George’s career might have been accelerated, without the year-and-a-half delay, if only I had been present when he came to our theater.” Later, when Carlin began appearing on Allen’s programs, the admiration was mutual. “Steve was an instant fan of his because he was so bright, and so well organized,” says veteran comic Bill Dana, who was a writer and talent scout for Allen before striking out on his own with a deadpan alter ego named Jose Jimenez. “George was an expert at getting a complete knowledge of what he wanted to say, and then backing it up in so many delightful ways.”
In December 1962, while he was playing the Chicago Playboy Club, Carlin, Brenda, and a folk-music friend, a member of the Tarriers, attended one of Lenny Bruce’s performances at the Gate of Horn. Up in the balcony the beer was flowing as Carlin watched his idol’s set. Just as the comic launched into a bit about a marijuana bust, two undercover Chicago police officers stood up. “Show’s over, ladies and gentlemen,” one of the cops announced. The club’s piano player and saxophonist kept playing, archly providing a cool-jazz soundtrack to the bust. Alan Ribback, who had opened the club with music impresario Albert Grossman (best known as Bob Dylan’s mercurial manager), was escorted outside, along with a Swank magazine writer and, eventually, an underage female. Arriving officers began the tedious process of checking all IDs before the patrons were allowed to leave. Carlin and his companion kept drinking. “I was good and juiced by the time they got to us,” Carlin recalled, “and we purposely waited to be almost the last people, just to watch all this going on.”
When it was Carlin’s turn to produce identification, he wise-cracked, “I don’t believe in IDs.” That was enough to get him pinched for disorderly conduct. The arresting officer “sorta grabbed me by the collar of [my] suit and the baggy pant of my ass and bum-rushed me down the stairs,” Carlin recalled. Knowing that his wife was waiting in the lounge near the front door, he hollered over his shoulder, “Tell Brenda I’m going to jail!”
In custody he encountered the comic he’d just been watching perform. How did Carlin get himself arrested? Bruce asked. “I didn’t want to show them my ID,” replied the man who owed his career to Bruce’s recommendation. Bruce, even more familiar with the sensitivities of law enforcement than the habitually reckless junior comic, was amused. “You schmuck!” he teased.
Bruce’s performance, including his onstage arrest, was recorded by Playboy, which was planning a feature story on the comic at the time. Hefner, working late at the Playboy Mansion, missed the show. “Shel Silverstein, one of my closest friends, who was living in the mansion at the time, was in the audience that night, and he came back and told me that Lenny had been arrested,” Hefner says. “In the days that followed, I gave Lenny my lawyer to defend him, and I gave him a neck-tie to wear. He didn’t own any ties.” Like many of Bruce’s fans, Hefner maintains that it was the comedian’s contempt for the Catholic Church—his signature bit “Religions, Inc.” in particular—that made him a target of law enforcement. They went after the drug talk and the four-letter words only because they were prohibited by the First Amendment from acting against his religious satire. “It remains for me unreal that it would be possible for someone to be arrested in the middle of a nightclub act, appearing in front of a completely adult audience,” says Hefner. “Chicago was a very Catholic
city at the time. One of the cops said to him, ‘As a Catholic, I’m offended by you,’ and Variety picked up that quote. So it was very clear what was going on there.”
Carlin paid close attention to Bruce’s snowballing legal troubles as he went on with his own solo career. Brenda was often on the road with her peripatetic husband, laughing loudly from the back rows to boost his morale when the reaction of the crowds, especially for the late-night sets, left something to be desired. They traveled as far afield as Regina, Canada, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, so that Carlin could play small coffeehouses. At the Sacred Cow in Chicago, he had to compete with a brawl in the audience while he was doing his act. The club folded that week, during his run.
There were days when Carlin’s career seemed to be bottoming out. Walking with Brenda on Rush Street during one of their many layovers in Chicago, he blurted out his uncertainty. “Do you think anybody’s ever going to recognize me on the street?” he asked his wife. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Someday everybody’s going to know your name.”
In June 1963 the couple had a daughter, Kelly. Carlin called his old Shreveport roommate, Jack Walsh, to tell him the news. (The last time they’d seen each other, Walsh told his buddy he’d named his own daughter Kelly.) The Carlins had had difficulty getting pregnant for some time, and Brenda was diagnosed with a “tipped uterus.” Carlin often joked that their participation in a limbo contest at one of the Playboy Clubs tipped his wife’s uterus back just enough so that she could conceive.
With the baby in tow, life on the road quickly became untenable. In early 1964 the Carlins took an apartment in Mary’s building in Morningside Heights. Having earned just $11,000 the previous year and spent most of it on the road, the comedian decided the prudent thing to do would be to focus his energy on New York, where he could boost his reputation with steady nightclub work and, with a bit of luck, draw the attention of the network talent bookers, whose shows were still based in the city.
The nightlife in Greenwich Village was teeming with bohemia, as it had been for decades. Since the arrival of the neighborhood’s first espresso machine in the 1930s, coffeehouses had sprung up in what seemed like every other doorway, attracting a chess-playing, enlightenment-seeking, policy-debating clientele. Three decades later, many of these meeting places were luring customers by promoting events catering to the youthful folk-revival crowd.
By 1964 Bob Dylan, the Village folk scene’s most visible representative, had become a national phenomenon, with versions of his songs performed by Peter, Paul, and Mary and his onetime girlfriend, Joan Baez, introducing the shy guitarist’s thorny music to the mainstream. Aging radicals and self-serious campus philosophers rubbed elbows in the cafés and dive bars of Bleecker Street and the surrounding neighborhood with thrill-seekers from the outer boroughs and stifling small towns across the country. Folk mainstays such as Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs, and Fred Neil shared the stages at the Gaslight, Café Wha?, Gerde’s Folk City, and Bitter End with such future pop stars as Jose Feliciano, John Denver, and Emmylou Harris.
The neighborhood was crawling with creativity. At the Village Vanguard, Max Gordon’s long-running jazz room on nearby Seventh Avenue, contemplative musicians such as Bill Evans and John Coltrane settled in for long residencies. The Vanguard, the Gaslight, and other clubs had featured plenty of spoken-word acts during the heyday of the Beats. By 1964, however, the spoken-word acts were more apt to be angling for laughs.
“Greenwich Village was a way of looking at the world,” says comic actor Larry Hankin, who, with his odd-duck style, opened for the Blues Project during the band’s long residency at Café Au Go Go. “I would imagine it was like Montmartre when the Impressionists were there.”
The daytime show at Café Wha? was “an extravaganza of patchwork,” Dylan recalled, “a comedian, a ventriloquist, a steel drum group, a poet, a female impersonator, a duo who sang Broadway stuff, a rabbit-in-the-hat magician, a guy wearing a turban who hypnotized people in the audience, somebody whose entire act was facial acrobatics.” Musicians working the Village included a ukulele player and distinctive falsetto vocalist named Tiny Tim and a one-of-a-kind everyone knew as Moondog, a blind poet who played bamboo pipes and whistles in “a Viking helmet and a blanket with high fur boots.”
Weird was the norm in the Village, and the comedians represented it well. In his oversized spectacles and checked newsboy cap, a local legend named Stanley Myron Handelman made self-deprecation an art form. Bill Cosby, a student athlete from Philadelphia, broke in at the Gaslight in 1962 with an imaginary conversation between Noah and the Lord. David Frye, who did uncanny impressions of movie stars (George C. Scott, James Mason), liked to warm up in the bathroom before his sets. Sitting in a toilet stall one night, he startled a customer with his steady stream of familiar voices. “What kind of place you running here?” the disturbed patron asked the owner.
Another newcomer, raised by his grandmother in the brothel she ran in Peoria, Illinois, was a jittery young man named Richard Pryor. He made his Village debut at Manny Roth’s Café Wha? in 1963. Soon he was opening at the Village Gate for Nina Simone, who rocked the quivering comic like a baby to calm him down before his set each night. “In 1963, the Village was alive,” Pryor recalled. “Full of cats similar to me. A bunch of hobos looking for work.”
Carlin dove right into this cacophony of voices. He began by plying his trade at a handful of hootenannies, the folk crowd’s quaint name for an open mike night, at Café Wha? and the Bitter End. Across the street from the Bitter End was a red canopy advertising the entrance to Café Au Go Go. Down a flight of stairs and behind a full-length curtain, the good-sized room (capacity 350) featured a semicircular stage surrounded by butcher-block tables, with benches lining the walls. Murals depicting show folk hung on the brick walls. When Carlin first appeared at Café Au Go Go, the club had just been the target of a sting operation, with the New York district attorney’s office bagging the man who was butting heads with law enforcement officials across the country—Lenny Bruce.
The bleary-eyed Bruce had first been arrested for his use of language in October 1961, at Art Auerbach’s Jazz Workshop in San Francisco’s bohemian North Beach neighborhood. Onstage, he’d joked about his first gig in the city, just across Broadway at a small, dreary hideaway popular with gays and lesbians called Ann’s 440. “What kind of a show is it?” he’d asked his agent. “Well, it’s not a show,” his agent replied. “They’re a bunch of cocksuckers.”
Officer James Ryan had been assigned by his superior, Sergeant James Solden, to monitor the comedian’s performance at the Jazz Workshop. Ryan notified the sergeant about the use of the eleven-letter word; in between sets. Solden then approached Bruce and informed him he was going to jail. The police force was trying to clean up North Beach, he explained, and an entertainer using a word like cocksuckers was, he felt, part of the problem. Solden told the comedian he couldn’t envision “any way you can break this word down. Our society is not geared to it.”
“You break it down by talking about it,” Bruce replied.
Bruce had endured a number of arrests for drug possession in Philadelphia and Los Angeles by the time he arrived in the Village for ten nights of shows at Café Au Go Go in late March 1964. His third night at the club was attended by a license inspector named Herbert S. Ruhe, a former CIA agent in Vietnam, who frantically jotted phrases in a notebook as Bruce performed—“mind your asses,” “jack me off,” “nice tits.” Ruhe’s findings were just the sort of evidence District Attorney Frank Hogan was looking for. Hogan, an Irish Catholic moral crusader with close ties to Cardinal Francis Spellman, had been instrumental in bringing obscenity charges against Edmund Wilson’s 1946 story collection Memoirs of Hecate County. Hogan ordered four plainclothes vice-squad officers to attend Bruce’s next show, while he searched for a prosecutor on his staff who would be willing to take the case. Using a small wire recorder concealed on one of the officers, the patrolmen made a barely audible recording. They took the transcript
to a grand jury, which authorized the arrest of Bruce and Café Au Go Go owner Howard Solomon on charges of violating Section 1140-A.
“But that’s prostitution,” Bruce protested the following night, as the officers intercepted the comic and the club owner in the dressing room just before the ten o’clock set. Don’t get technical, one of the officers countered, “It’s one of them numbers.” Now facing charges, Bruce defiantly fulfilled the rest of his commitment at the club, forging onward with his off-color jokes: He spelled out the offending words.
At Café Au Go Go, Carlin joined the pool of Lenny’s disciples, taking as little as $5 a night, sometimes just a burger, to keep the crowd occupied between musicians’ sets. Weekends were better, when he could make as much as $65 opening for a headliner like the pianist Bill Evans. Carlin set up shop in the club, working a total of ten weeks in 1964. Ochs, the rabble-rousing topical songwriter, was a regular. Jazz saxophonist Stan Getz introduced the New York audience to his new quartet at the club, recording an album there featuring the Brazilian singer Astrid Gilberto. With a piano onstage, Howard Solomon asked Bob Golden, a session guitarist who could play some fair piano, to sit in whenever special guests dropped in to try their hand at a song or two, which was often. “Just about anybody called a celebrity on the New York scene was there,” says Golden. “Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, people like that. I was the house band.”
Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin Page 7