Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin

by James Sullivan

  The FBI was too big a target for Carlin to ignore. A year later the Bureau added several pages to his file when the comic reprised his bit about the “Ten Most Wanted” list on The Carol Burnett Show. A viewer from Cocoa Beach, Florida, wrote to Burnett, explaining that although she and her husband considered themselves fans of the show, “tonight our mouths fell open and almost to the floor in utter dismay and shock.” “Malcontents” such as Carlin, she wrote, owed it to their country to offer solutions to, not just snide comments about, its problems: “To destroy rather than build, in my opinion, is not the way our country achieved ‘a walk on the moon.’”

  Forwarded a copy of the letter, Hoover scribbled a note at the bottom before passing it down the Bureau’s need-to-know chain: “What do we know of Carlin?” The answer, surprisingly, never came. At the time, the FBI was devoting countless man-hours to the systematic evaluation of certain celebrities the bureau considered a threat to American security, including Jane Fonda, the Smothers Brothers, the poet and activist Allen Ginsberg, and John Lennon, whose nude portrait with wife Yoko One on the cover of the 1969 album Two Virgins prompted an inquiry from Hoover to the attorney general wondering whether a pornography charge was in order. But Carlin’s own file apparently never grew beyond the twelve annotated pages about his prime-time FBI jokes, as the comedian eventually learned when he filed a Freedom of Information Act request years later. Hoover’s death in May 1972 left the FBI without its longstanding public spokesman. Carlin, however, continued to joke about the director after his death, imagining a Washington, D.C., operative who knew his phone was wiretapped and answered it with a cheery “Fuck Hoover!”

  A milder cussword got the rebellious comedian in trouble next. In October 1969 Carlin checked into Las Vegas for another residency at the Frontier, which had become a key component of his livelihood. After debuting there the previous year, he’d already played two three-week stints in 1969. From $10,000 a week to start, he’d been bumped up to a whopping $12,500, at a time when sitcom actors were lucky to be making $1,500 a week. The money was almost embarrassing. Lenny Bruce had commented on the ridiculous discrepancy between the extravagant sums paid to entertainers and the paltry salaries of schoolteachers: While a teacher in Oklahoma might be making $3,000 a year, he said, Zsa Zsa Gabor was getting $50,000 a week in Vegas. “That’s the kind of sick material that I wish Time would’ve written about,” he said.

  If the money was guilt-making, the marquee lineups Carlin was sharing in Vegas were downright discouraging for a guy who longed to be as hip as Lenny. “I was opening for—try not to smile—Robert Goulet, Barbara Eden, and Al Martino,” he recalled. “I was terribly out of place.” During his October engagement, opening for Goulet, Carlin did an early show for a private group of businessmen in town for the Howard Hughes Invitational golf tournament. The men stumbled in late, drinking heavily. The incident set off the comedian’s long-held antagonism toward golfers. (One joke, years later: “O.J. Simpson has already received the ultimate punishment. For the rest of his life he has to associate with golfers.”)

  For some time Carlin had been referring in his act to his skinny body type, the fact that he had “no ass.” “I’m one of these white guys who, if you look at me sideways, I go from the shoulder blades right to the feet. Straight line. No ass. When I was in the Air Force, black guys used to look at me in the shower and say, ‘Hey, man, you ain’t got no ass. Where your ass at?’” He did the bit for the golf crowd, thought nothing of it, then moved on to another topic. After leaving the stage, Carlin was informed that Robert Maheu, Howard Hughes’s right-hand man, had been in the audience with his wife, and she’d been offended by the joke.

  Maheu, longtime spokesman for the world’s richest man (whom he claimed to have actually glimpsed only twice), was nearly as much of a puzzle as his exceedingly strange employer. During World War II Maheu went undercover for the FBI as a Nazi sympathizer. After setting up his own investigations outfit, he took clandestine assignments from the CIA, including, famously, a plot to assassinate the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, for which he recruited Mafia capo Sam Giancana. As the self-appointed chief executive officer of Hughes Nevada Operations, which oversaw the management of the reclusive investor’s holdings in the state, Maheu saw it as his duty to police the Frontier’s entertainment on the night of the golf tournament. Carlin was abruptly dismissed from the remainder of his engagement—paid and sent home. “I was more or less flabbergasted,” he said.

  He’d just done a week without a hitch at the Holiday House outside Pittsburgh, a ritzy, art deco-style dinner theater with hotel rooms and a pool. Variety reviewed him favorably there, calling the show “a sock.” “We probably paid him $7,500—very good money,” says Bert Sokol, who, as the son-in-law of the club’s owner, was booking the entertainment in those days. The main showroom was big, seating a thousand. Rumored to have mob ties, the Holiday House expected clean material from its comedians, which included plenty of veteran names—Milton Berle, Jack E. Leonard, Totie Fields (“a little risqué for a woman,” Sokol recalls)—as well as up-and-comers like Carlin, David Brenner, and Joan Rivers. “The comedians were restricted with the language they could use on our stage,” says Sokol, who had no problem with Carlin, picking up the club’s two options on him for the following year.

  Provocative content was becoming a hot topic in the entertainment industry. The introduction of the Motion Picture Association of America’s self-imposed film rating system in 1968 served as an acknowledgment that some subject matter, such as that of 1969 Best Picture winner Midnight Cowboy, was inappropriate for young audiences. For comedians, the fact that they were still held to the “clean” standard in clubs and on television, while movies and so-called legitimate theaters were increasingly exploring mature themes and language, seemed unfair. Variety reported on the complaints of stand-up acts in England: Some British comics were being fined for cursing, while their stage-acting counterparts were immune to censure. The article also cited the double standard of what the writer termed “boondock situations,” in which comedians working lower-class barrooms could get away with using profanity, whereas those in finer establishments could not. “Presumably the local constables wink at the hardcore prose,” the Variety correspondent concluded. “Some who’ve played the sticks say it’s tough following a four-letter act.”

  Like so many in his business, Sokol considered Jules Podell’s Copacabana in New York the epitome of classy American supper-club entertainment. “All the stars wanted to work at the Copa,” Sokol says. The club advertised itself as “New York’s heart-quarters for great stars. . . . The Copa is the showcase of show business.” Carlin, however, was not feeling quite so peppy about the place. Booked over the December holidays into the red-leather-upholstered hotel basement on East Sixtieth Street by Irvin Arthur, GAC’s well-connected nightclub agent, from the start of his two-week engagement the comic sensed that he was in for a confrontation.

  The Copa’s connection to the powerful underworld figure Frank Costello was a poorly kept secret. “The Copa was a tough room,” veteran comic Jack Carter once said. “The Murderers Row would come in every show.” And Podell had a longstanding reputation for tyrannical behavior. When singing sensation Johnnie Ray rushed off to an acting gig near the end of a wildly successful run at the club, Podell had staff members toss one of Ray’s record-company handlers into the freezer. In another incident, a hungry busboy grabbed a half-eaten roll off a plate he was clearing. Podell, who saw him do it, sweetly asked the young man if he’d like to take a moment to eat. The busboy was treated to a full meal—steak, dessert. When he was finished, Podell smiled at him. “Glad you liked it. You’re fired!”

  Podell was notorious for a particularly obnoxious habit. “If Jules wanted attention,” remembered Peggy Lee, “he would knock his big ring on the table and everyone would come running.” Podell’s table took a pounding during Carlin’s engagement. The comic was opening for William Oliver Swofford, a fresh young pop star who took
his middle name as his stage name. Oliver had smash hits that year: “Good Morning Starshine” from the Broadway musical Hair, and “Jean,” a ballad written by the poet Rod McKuen, heard as the theme to the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. But the audience’s enthusiasm for the theatrical song stylist from North Carolina did not extend to his opening act. Whether or not they recognized Carlin from The Hollywood Palace or The Ed Sullivan Show, he got nothing but indifference from the paying customers, as the silverware clinked and the chatter continued unabated.

  After a few nights trapped in his penguin suit—Podell insisted that his entertainers wear tuxes—Carlin was desperate to get out of the suffocating atmosphere. “I hated that fuckin’ place,” he said. “It was everything I didn’t want. I died every night.” He started castigating the audience, telling them that places like the Copa had gone out of style twenty years before. Then he began to express his displeasure by killing time in absurd ways—lying on the dance floor and describing the ceiling, for instance, or crawling under the piano and reading from its manufacturing label. Like the performers at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire a half-century earlier, where nonsensical performance was inspired by the horrors of World War II, Carlin was subverting the social contract by knocking it on its ear. He began announcing that he was a Dada comedian. “I’d say, ‘I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Dada school of philosophy; it concerned itself in part with the rejection of a performer by his audience. The point is that it’s as difficult to gain your complete rejection for thirty minutes as it is to gain your acceptance, and I can go either way.’”

  Directly addressing a table of GAC executives one night, Carlin implored them to book him into more appropriate venues, with crowds that would understand him. Podell was enraged—who did this kid think he was, giving lip to his loyal customers? Still, he refused to give the comedian what he wanted. Instead, he let him suffer. “He would never fire me, that fuck,” Carlin remembered. Obligated to pay him whether or not he completed the run, the Copa’s kingpin let him dangle. On the last night of the stint, the sound and light guys effectively ran Carlin out of the building. Before he was finished with his set, they slowly began to dim the lights and fade out the sound. “It was very artistic, very cinematic,” he said. “Very dramatic. It was almost sweet in a way. And I knew I was free.”

  Carlin certainly wasn’t the first to earn Podell’s ire. Shecky Greene was opening for Nat King Cole at the Copa when he tried a joke in a voice that sounded like Popeye. Unbeknownst to him, Podell’s guttural rasp was often compared with Popeye’s. Almost immediately the lights went down and the microphone went dead. The stubborn comic kept doing the joke; the stubborn club bully kept shutting him down. “Three weeks I had of that,” said Greene.

  Craig Kellem was with the GAC gang on the night of their client’s meltdown at the Copa. He’d already sensed Carlin was getting restless, but the agent wasn’t sure how to handle it. Besides, his own star was rising at the agency. “I had made my bones,” he says, “and I wasn’t staying up at night worrying about the fact that the guy was changing.” Like Golden, Kellem struggled to understand why this talented performer would sabotage his own career: “The brand was working, and he was changing the brand. I would love to tell you I was prophetic—that there was greater comedy to come, and in order to do that, he’s gotta become a social spokesman. But that’s not what happened.”

  GAC had already seen another of its young comedy stars suffer a very public identity crisis. Soon after his debut on network television and in the high-rollers’ nightclubs, Richard Pryor began to crack. Opening for Trini Lopez at Basin Street East, he performed while lying on the floor. The manager of the Sands called Pryor’s agent, Sandy Gallin, to complain that the wiry kid was “swinging from the chandeliers” during his week there on a bill with Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. But the real freak-out occurred in September 1967, when Pryor froze onstage at the Aladdin Hotel in Vegas. He’d been trying to fit in as a junior version of Cosby, spinning amusing yarns with little acknowledgment of the problem of race in America, which was then coming to a head.

  “My days of pretending to be as slick and colorless as Cosby were numbered,” Pryor later wrote. “There was a world of junkies and winos, pool hustlers and prostitutes, women and family screaming inside my head, trying to be heard. The longer I kept them bottled up, the harder they tried to escape. The pressure built til I went nuts.” Seeing Dean Martin looking at him expectantly from the audience at the Aladdin, the comedian stood mute for a painfully long time. Who are they looking at? he asked himself. “I couldn’t say, ‘They’re looking at you, Richard,’ because I didn’t know who Richard Pryor was,” he claimed. Finally, he mustered the courage to open his mouth. “What the fuck am I doing here?” he asked, and walked off.

  It was a question Carlin was trying to answer for himself. After appearing as a “Mystery Guest” on What’s My Line, he glumly told the studio audience that he was appearing at the Royal Box in midtown Manhattan, where Frank Sinatra had sat a few years earlier with Gleason and Toots Shor, watching Frank Jr. make his singing debut. Host Wally Bruner tried to get his guest to open up; more than most of his fellow comedians, he noted, Carlin considered himself a writer as well as an entertainer. “It’s the only way,” Carlin replied. “I like to make things from my own head.”

  By his own admission, it was around this time that Carlin began experimenting with LSD and peyote. Hallucinogenic highs were no longer the well-kept secret of the intellectually intrepid underground. Psychedelic music, art, and fashion had been an undeniable part of American life to all but the most naïve Americans since the massive media coverage of the Summer of Love. Users reported “dazzling states of heightened awareness or mystical experiences worthy of St. Teresa of Avila,” noted Time magazine as early as 1966; “others claim insights that have changed their lives.”

  Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, the two former Harvard psychologists whose experiments with mind-altering drugs helped usher in the new age of expanding consciousness, had already been celebrity figures for several years—Leary with his ubiquitous motto, “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” and Alpert, by this time known as Ram Dass, leading the counterculture’s spiritual quest to India and beyond. Paul Krassner accompanied Groucho Marx on the aging vaudevillian’s maiden voyage on the drug; Cary Grant was another film star who admitted he’d taken dozens of trips, as therapeutic treatment, before LSD was banned. “It opened my eyes,” Paul McCartney of the Beatles told Life magazine. “It made me a better, more honest, more tolerant member of society.” World leaders, he suggested, would be ready to “banish war, poverty, and famine” if they would only try it.

  Carlin’s own experimentation with acid didn’t last long, but it helped him to see that he was out of his element with the “straight” crowd. “Those drugs served their purpose,” he recalled. “They helped open me up.” Though he would have future problems with other drugs, he looked back on his LSD period as a positive experience. “If a drug has anything going for it at all, it should be self-limiting,” he said. “It should tell you when you’ve had enough. Acid and peyote were that way for me.”

  Still, he had obligations. He did the Sullivan show, on a night that also featured Bob Newhart, just after wrapping up the disaster at the Copa. He appeared twice more on Sullivan’s stage in a matter of months—the first time alongside singer Bobby Goldsboro, impressionist David Frye, and Pryor (who remained a favorite of the taciturn host); the second with Don Rickles and the Jackson 5.

  His changing perception was beginning to show in his physical appearance. He no longer looked like the dutiful middle-manager type. When he checked into a hospital for a hernia operation, he stopped shaving and quickly decided to keep the beard. Returning to Mister Kelly’s in Chicago for a summertime engagement, Carlin drew a rave from Variety’s reviewer. With other Chicago clubs coasting through the quiet summer season, owner George Marienthal could have followed suit, the unnamed writer pointed out. Instead, Mi
ster Kelly’s had put together a fine lineup, including an “attractive thrush” named Taro Delphi, that would have been a nice draw in a busier season.

  Carlin, “no stranger hereabouts,” unveiled new material “that reaffirms early impressions that he is one of the most creative and engaging laugh producers playing the café circuit.” Though prone to “offbeat routines,” the reviewer continued, “he has the ability to couch them in jargon and imagery that is palatable to a wide range of tastes.” He mixed topics well, alternating “typical grogshop stuff,” like his advertising spoofs, with social commentary, “per his assessment of the country’s burgeoning drug orientation.” Little did the critic know how deeply invested the comic was in his new material; during Carlin’s last visit to Mister Kelly’s the previous year, he’d been in the midst of an acid binge.

  In September 1970, Carlin dragged himself back to the Frontier, which still held options on him through the end of the year. The headline act was the Supremes, who were returning to the hotel after performing their last show with Diana Ross there in January. Carlin was scheduled for three weeks with the group, followed by one more week with Al Martino, the former construction worker from Philadelphia whose singing career would lead to a role in The Godfather.

  Opening night with the Supremes went off without a hitch. In fact, Variety’s reviewer was more impressed with Carlin than with the head-liners, who, performing with the house’s Al Alvarez Orchestra, were “gradually becoming bleached in musical content and direction.” Carlin, the writer suggested, had “come up a modish contemporary fellow complete with a well-trimmed beard.” The “brand-new whimsies” in his repertoire reportedly caused “plethoras of sidesplits,” and, after a momentary lull, his finale about drugs and druggists inspired the audience to show its appreciation with “vigorous palming.”