NOT THAT CARLIN was ready to be that comic. In early September he appeared on The Tonight Show for the first time in the Johnny Carson era, putting a little extra effort into the Hippie-Dippy Weatherman bit, which he’d been performing on autopilot for some time. As the beatifically spacey Al Sleet, he delivered the forecast without breaking character, while Carson cackled off-camera. Although he didn’t return to Carson’s set at the NBC Studios for two years, it was the start of a long association, with Carlin making more than a hundred appearances.
Less memorable were his spots on The Roger Miller Show and The Hollywood Palace, an old-fashioned ABC variety hour taped at the former Hollywood Playhouse with a rotating pool of guest hosts. The show, notable for introducing the Rolling Stones to an American audience, was a hodgepodge of celebrity sketches, monologues, and performances. In April, appearing alongside the vapid British folk duo Chad & Jeremy, Carlin was introduced by host Martha Raye. In thick-framed glasses and tightly pegged pants, he sat behind a stock-issue desk on an otherwise empty stage and read “The Newscast” from notes. The segment let him roam from mildly Sahl-like wisecracks about current events (“Tonight the world breathes a little easier, as five more nations have signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Today’s signers were Chad, Sierra Leone, Upper Volta, Monaco, and Iceland”) to surreal nonsense. “Quickly now, the basketball scores. We are running late. 110-102, 125-113 . . . and an overtime duel, 99-98. Oh, here’s a partial score: Cincinnati, four.”
Safely disguised as the cartoonish Al Sleet, he also dropped a sly reference to his own daily habit as he delivered the weather forecast: “Tonight’s low, twenty-five. Tomorrow’s high, whenever I get up, heh heh heh.”
“George was always a little subversive that way,” says Ken Harris. “When I met George, he was a pot smoker. Being with him on the road, he’d wake up in the morning, and before brushing his teeth, he’d smoke a joint. And throughout the whole day. It didn’t seem to affect him much, except to make him happier.” After the Carlins moved into a rented Spanish villa-style house on Beverwil Drive, Carlin finally convinced his reluctant West Coast manager to try smoking with him. “He was my guide,” says Harris. “I think it was a Peter, Paul and Mary record we were playing—we had just bought new stereo equipment together. And he said, ‘Now just pick out one instrument and focus on it.’ It was the first time I ever got stoned.”
The show business veterans with whom Carlin was rubbing elbows had little idea they had a budding hippie in their midst. “Folks, it’s great to see new comedians come along. If there’s one thing the world can always use, it’s a smile,” said Jimmy Durante, introducing the twenty-nine-year-old Carlin as “one of the best” on another Hollywood Palace episode, taped in late 1966. That particular show must have felt like a real carnival to the clean-cut young stoner, featuring as it did a group of trained elephants and the momentary singing sensation known as Mrs. Miller, a matronly housewife from Claremont, California, who ignored the raucous laughter that accompanied her truly horrendous singing. Carlin did a version of his “Wonderful WINO” routine, poking lighthearted fun at the youthful generation that he was beginning to realize he had more in common with than his own.
“I’m sure you’re aware of the fact that teenagers today are the most powerful group in the country,” he began, explaining the premise of his Top 40 parody. “First of all, there are more of them than ever before, and teenagers are so much better organized today than they ever have been before. . . . Many of them are armed.” This was the sort of surefire, cheap-shot joke that was beginning to strike him as disingenuous. At a time when American culture was being increasingly influenced by dissatisfied, idealistic twenty-year-olds, he was still toiling to think of ways to make their middle-aged elders laugh. His next birthday would be his thirtieth, situating him squarely in the middle of the yawning generation gap. Carlin was starting to realize he should be appealing to his juniors, not his seniors.
Yet the “Wonderful WINO” routine underscored the debt he owed his predecessors. The bit had a pronounced resemblance to a 1958 spoof called “Chaos, Parts 1 and 2,” a 45 rpm. single recorded by Bob Arbogast, a radio personality and comedy writer, and his partner, Stan Ross. A quick-selling novelty record that was reportedly suppressed by radio stations when they realized they were the butt of the joke, “Chaos” (set at KOS—“Chaos Radio”) featured Arbogast’s rapid-fire patter, snippets of song parodies, a mock commercial for a product for teens who feel left out by their lack of acne (“Pimple On”), and an update of late baseball scores—“five to one, fourteen to three, and four to nothing.” The similarities of Carlin’s own radio routine are too apparent to ignore. “He had to have heard it,” says Arbogast’s son, Peter, a sports announcer for the University of Southern California. Arbogast was accustomed to finding his material recycled elsewhere. He also came up with a comic segment called “Question Man,” which was adopted (with credit) by Steve Allen and (without) by Johnny Carson, as the long-running Tonight Show bit Carnac the Magnificent. Although Bob Arbogast sometimes joked about Carlin owing him a phone call, says his son, he shrugged it off. “You can’t put any copyright on comedy,” says Peter. “People take each other’s bits and use them all the time.”
With Carlin’s television exposure adding up, the nightclub gigs were improving. He played the Drake Hotel in Chicago twice in 1966; moved up in Dayton from the Racquet Club to a much bigger stage, Suttmillers; and did Las Vegas for the first time, opening for the singer Jack Jones (“The Impossible Dream”) at the historic Flamingo. Along with the prestige and increasing income came a distinct feeling that his act was being monitored at the more upscale clubs. “I told him to be very careful what he did at Suttmillers,” says Dayton promoter Shane Taylor. “But he wanted to work there—the money was good.” Over Thanksgiving weekend Carlin was booked into the Roostertail in Detroit, a swanky, split-level function complex along the city’s riverfront. Opened in 1958 as a fiftieth birthday gift for the wife of owner Joe Schoenith, the club was operated by Schoenith’s son Tom from his twenty-first birthday. The club had a tradition of attracting top talent, in part by giving the entertainers lavish gifts—a car for Wayne Newton, diamond watches for the Supremes. “We gave Tony Bennett his first acrylic paint set,” says Schoenith. “They were wined and dined when they came here.”
Although they didn’t roll out quite that sort of red carpet for the lesser-known Carlin, the venue was the setting for the taping of his first solo comedy album. Comedy hadn’t been a real priority for RCA Records since the label had enjoyed some success with the pseudo-evangelical put-on artistry of Brother Dave Gardner, a drumming, scatsinging, deep-South Lord Buckley who was a Jack Paar favorite before he was busted for marijuana in 1962. The record company assigned a young A&R (artist and repertoire) man, Tom Berman, to produce Carlin’s Take-Offs and Put-Ons, which gathered all of the comic’s top-drawer material to date—“The Indian Sergeant,” “Wonderful WINO,” “The Newscast”—in one place. The album also featured an eight-minute hunk about advertising and a routine called “Daytime Television,” which introduced another of Carlin’s farcical characters, a cross-eyed, featherbrained game show contestant named Congolia Breckenridge. Though the cover featured a grid of black-and-white photo-booth shots of the comic’s seemingly bottomless reserve of puerile facial expressions, he and his producer were on the same wavelength about the deceptive depth of Carlin’s material. “It’s a risky business to take comedy too seriously,” wrote Berman in the album’s liner notes, before proceeding to do just that. “What had seemed funny or outrageous or ridiculous becomes much more than that after repeated listening. . . . In the company of Carlin’s people”—Biff Burns, Al Sleet, the “tragic heroine” Congolia—“we become very susceptible to laughter and veiled tears.”
The feeling in the Carlin camp was that it was only a matter of time before the comic began fielding offers for sitcoms and films. Old friend Jack Burns beat him to it. When Don Knotts left his Emmywinning role as
Andy Griffith’s bungling deputy on the beloved The Andy Griffith Show, Burns was hired as his replacement for the show’s sixth season. His role as Deputy Warren Ferguson introduced the country to Burns’s comic trademark, a pompous, all-purpose demand for recognition: “Huh? Huh? Huh?” But Knotts’s endearing Barney Fife character proved impossible to replace, and Burns was dropped from the show after eleven episodes.
Meanwhile, Burns’s old partner made his first appearance as an actor on the new ABC sitcom That Girl, which starred Danny Thomas’s daughter, Marlo, as a mod-ish aspiring actress in New York City. In an episode that aired in late 1966, Carlin played the star’s agent, George Lester. Working the phone from his client’s apartment, he kibbitzed with a booking agent on the other end of the line: “That’s the trouble with this business. You can’t trust anybody. Trust me, Martin.”
In January of the new year he prepared to take his first bow on the big cheese of the variety hours, The Ed Sullivan Show. Nearing the end of its second decade on the air, the implacable gossip columnist’s program still represented the pinnacle of television success for singers, dancers, novelty acts, and comedians. Newsweek noted the rising star’s impending appearance with a short feature, commending his “highfidelity ear for the transistorized pop gabble of the mid-’60s.” Carlin’s reliance on the fertile source material of electronic entertainment—his slick anchormen and disc jockeys and clueless game show contestants—was noted as a potential dead end. “Eventually, he’s going to have to branch out,” Johnny Carson told the unnamed reporter. “If you base all your material on one subject, sooner or later you reach a point of diminishing returns.”
Though GAC handled the Sullivan show and booked a disproportionate number of its guest spots with in-house talent, Carlin had resisted making his debut there for some time. “I heard they chewed young comedians up,” he said. “Just before you go on they come and they say the roller-skating chimpanzees went long, so we need you to cut another minute. This is a live show, you’re about to go on in another five or ten minutes. . . . I was afraid of that.” Though he’d never had many qualms about performing, to Carlin, Sullivan represented the most unforgiving, least appealing aspect of show business, and he was frankly daunted. The audience inside CBS’s Studio 50 on Broadway, the Ed Sullivan Theater (now home of The Late Show with David Letterman), “were dead. Just dead people. Yes, they laughed at Myron Cohen, and Jack E. Leonard could mow them down with energy.” But the studio audience in Sullivan’s theater, he felt, was preoccupied with being seen, overdressed in minks and pearls and waiting for the house lights to go up when the host introduced a special guest in the crowd—“Joe Louis or Babe Ruth’s widow or somebody. . . . On those Ed Sullivan shows I began to realize I didn’t fit. I was missing who I was.”
By this time Kellem, Carlin’s responsible agent, had also become Sullivan’s agent. “I lived at the Sullivan show,” he says. “September to June, or whatever it was, I was there.” Television had no more nerve-racking stage. “It was blood and guts, man. You saw the veins in the neck, the eyes. There was something viscerally very pleasing about it, and it was exciting.” When he finally felt ready, Carlin appeared in a lineup that included the bandleader Woody Herman, singer Mel Torme, comedian Nipsey Russell, an acrobatic troupe called the Seven Staneks, and the banjo sing-along group Your Father’s Mustache.
Despite his reservations, Carlin made three more appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1967 and eleven in all, taping his last commitment in the waning days of the show in early 1971. If the Sullivan show was a powerful symbol of television’s boxy limitations, Carlin’s next gig was especially confining. In May, just as the Summer of Love was blooming—the hit song of the moment was Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”—Carlin spent an uncomfortable week as the center square on the smug game show The Hollywood Squares.
He did a series of dates—Cleveland, Toronto, Phoenix, Warwick, Rhode Island, and Wallingford, Connecticut—as part of the package tour with John Davidson and Joey Heatherton. And for the second summer in a row, he was cast as a writer and featured performer in a summer replacement series. This one was a placeholder for The Jackie Gleason Show, whose portly superstar was a critical client for GAC. The variety program was called Away We Go, after Gleason’s signature catch-phrase. “It was manifest destiny for George Carlin at the time to get his own TV show,” says Kellem. “We sold the show with Carlin as the star via Jackie Gleason’s company.” Carlin was paired with Buddy Greco, a Sinatra-style singer from south Philadelphia, with the infamously profane drummer Buddy Rich (who’d once appeared on a Lenny Bruce special on local New York City television) leading the house band.
“Things were going very well for me,” says Buddy Greco, who still performs at his own nightclub in Cathedral City, California. “I was doing movies, had hit records. I got a call from CBS. They wanted to do a series, and they said, ‘Who would you like?’ I said, you gotta give me my best friend, Buddy Rich. And they said, ‘We need a comic.’”
Greco, who has worked with virtually all of the Buddy Hackett-Shecky Greene Vegas tummlers (Borscht Belt comedians) in his long career, says he could tell that Carlin was a little different, though he was still perfectly presentable. “When he worked with us, you could see his ears,” he says. “He had a short haircut, a shirt and tie.” The sketches sometimes required the show’s frontmen to make fools of themselves, including one number called “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.” “I have videos of George and I and Buddy in tutus,” Greco says. “Can you believe Buddy Rich in a tutu? I was a tough kid from Philly. We’re tough guys. It was such a funny thing to see. We went along with it. It was hilarious.” But the best material, he says, was the improvised humor the three stars came up with away from the camera. “We did more stuff on the steps of CBS in the back,” Greco recalls. “So off-the-wall. I wish we could have recorded those.”
Little more than a year removed from those $5 nights at Café Au Go Go, Carlin suddenly had a steady, very respectable income, earning $1,250 a week for the summer series. “It quickly got to a point where we didn’t have to worry about George making a living,” says Bob Golden. Their experience on Away We Go, he says, was “kind of strange. There were a lot of egos involved. In a sense, CBS and the Gleason production company, they didn’t care. They were just happy to have something to fill the time with. But between Buddy Rich and Buddy Greco’s wife, there was always insistence that everyone do the same amount of time. It got to be pretty funny at times.”
During this period Carlin’s friend Bob Altman spent many nights on the couch in the front room of the house on Beverwil Drive, where, he says, the famously meticulous Carlin had already amassed “a whole fuckin’ wall full of file cards” containing lists of ideas and premises for new material. He says that Carlin was beginning to express his affinity with the counterculture by wearing the sloganeering buttons that were popular at the time. “He used to wear all the buttons—‘Free the whales,’ or whatever the fuck—and it would drive Buddy Greco crazy.” Lana Cantrell appeared as a guest on the show’s second episode. In the fourth week, Pryor had a guest spot. In the fifth, the musical guest was Spanky and Our Gang, another new client of Kellem’s at GAC.
Spanky and Our Gang was a folk-rock vocal group from Chicago whose first single for Mercury Records, “Sunday Will Never Be the Same,” was on its way to becoming a million-seller. (The following summer one of the band’s singles, the civil rights song “Give a Damn,” was banned for profanity in several cities.) Carlin was already good friends with the group’s big-voiced singer from Peoria, Elaine “Spanky” McFarlane, whom he’d met several years before on the Playboy Club circuit, when McFarlane was part of a vocal group called the Jamie Lynn Trio. “At the Playboy Clubs, there were several rooms of entertainment—the Library, the Speakeasy,” she recalls. “George was with Jack Burns. We met in the entertainer’s lounge over the pool table. Not on the pool table,” she is quick to amend, letting out a hearty chu
ckle.
Carlin quickly became good friends with McFarlane’s new band mates, including the West Virginia-born, Coral Gables-raised bassist Paul “Oz” Bach, an actor by training and an amateur comedian by reputation, who had performed with such folk fixtures as Fred Neil, Tom Paxton, and Bob Gibson. As Spanky and Our Gang’s debut single was climbing the charts, they spent an evening with Carlin in New York City, where he was preparing to tape another Tonight Show appearance the following day. The band was in the middle of an engagement at a Midtown club called The Scene, says McFarlane. On a night they all had off, Carlin came to the band’s hotel to visit. “We didn’t have anything to smoke, but we had heard you could smoke bananas—the peel,” she says with a laugh. “You scrape the inside of the peel, bake it in the oven, and smoke it. It was hilarious.” The next night, on Carson, Carlin joked about trying to get high from banana peels. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I hope my parents aren’t watching,’” says McFarlane.
Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin Page 10