Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin

by James Sullivan

  But Carlin was still stung by the previous year’s episode at the Frontier. He was feeling devilish; during the engagement he came up with a way to test the management’s tolerance while seemingly keeping his own innocence intact. He’d been thinking about how certain comedians got away with working “blue.” For years Buddy Hackett, who was so firmly entrenched at the Sahara Hotel that owner Del Webb made him a vice president, had been doing raunchy jokes about sex and ethnicity. Redd Foxx, an old friend of Malcolm X who became one of the first black performers to work for white audiences in Las Vegas, was an underground celebrity for his risqué “party” records long before the launch of his television show Sanford and Son. Both of those Vegas regulars said the word “shit,” Carlin noted onstage. “I don’t say ‘shit’ in my act,” he said. “I may smoke a little, but I don’t say it.”

  Carlin had been smoking “shit” habitually since he was thirteen years old. “I’d wake up in the morning and if I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to smoke a joint or not, I’d smoke a joint to figure it out,” he once admitted. “And I stayed high all day long. When people asked me, ‘Do you get high to go onstage?’ I could never understand the question. I mean, I’d been high since eight that morning. Going onstage had nothing to do with it.” Now he was outwardly identifying with the real-life Al Sleets of the world, acknowledging his predilection for getting high right there in his act. In a guest appearance on the syndicated Virginia Graham Show, Carlin confessed his “secret” dependency on national television. The hostess was delighted to hear it. The composer Henry Mancini had only recently told her the same thing, she said. “Virginia Graham was a real shit-stirrer,” Carlin remembered.

  It may have been the admission; it may simply have been his sneaky way of slipping the word “shit” into his act. It may have been the fact, according to the comic, that this particular crowd was largely composed of salesmen from Chrysler and Lipton Tea, some of whom took exception to the comedian’s observations about God and country. In any case, when he strode offstage at the Frontier, Carlin was summarily dismissed from the remainder of the engagement. This time he felt a strange sense of elation. “They did the job for me,” he told Brenda. “They broke it off. This is good.”

  Though he’d been renting Phyllis Diller’s Vegas house, he’d never felt a part of the fraternity of Vegas comics. Now he didn’t have to pretend he did. “I never went over to Don Adams’s house for dinner,” Carlin soon told Rolling Stone. “I never bought an alpaca sweater, and I never learned how to play golf.”

  His clash with the Vegas audience was mirrored a few weeks later when another comic innovator, Robert Klein, had his own showdown in the desert. With his newfangled style, like a dry-witted social studies teacher, the mildly shaggy Klein was embarking on a career path similar to Carlin’s. He did his first Tonight Show in 1968 and had just completed his own summer replacement TV hosting gig. Opening at the Las Vegas Hilton at year’s end for Barbra Streisand—then Vegas’s biggest attraction, alongside Elvis, both making $125,000 a week—the comic left the stage in a pique one night when a customer threw a pencil at him. Streisand’s manager, Marty Erlichman, was irate. Now his singer would have to go on early. After the show, Streisand consoled her opening act. “She was so sweet,” says Klein. “She completely sided with me, and she made her manager go out and get Chinese food for us.”

  On another night Rodney Dangerfield, who had taken Klein under his wing, brought the legendary Jack Benny to see the up-and-comer. When Klein said the word shit in his act, Benny laid down a verdict. “The kid works dirty,” he said.

  “That was a heartbreaker,” says Klein. “I had a few rough nights there.” Increasingly the old guard of funnymen, and the slot machines and scantily clad cocktail waitresses that marked their natural habitat, were proving a fatal combination for comic insurgents like Klein, Pryor, and Carlin.

  Trusting his intuition, Carlin soon took matters into his own hands. Again ready for new management, he took a meeting with Ron De Blasio and Jeff Wald. The two talent managers had recently left Campbell-Silver-Cosby, a production and management agency owned in part by Bill Cosby. Among other enterprises, Campbell-Silver-Cosby operated a record label called Tetragrammaton, distributed by Warner Bros. The imprint had released albums by the rock band Deep Purple, Carlin’s fellow John Davidson Show alumnus Biff Rose, and an unusual comedian, a Lenny Bruce soundalike named Murray Roman, whose twisted wit included a record with an all-black cover called Blind Man’s Movie. Tetragrammaton also became the U.S. distributor for John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Two Virgins, with its full-frontal-nudity cover photograph, when Capitol Records refused to sell it. Carlin, avid record collector that he was, knew the label well.

  Wald was a piece of work. A streetwise product of the Bronx, he got into the entertainment business as a gofer for the songwriter and civil rights activist Oscar Brown Jr., who introduced his pugnacious young assistant to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. After managing Brown’s career for a time, Wald took a job in the William Morris mailroom, comparing notes with his friend David Geffen. “I sold grass in the mailroom on the side,” Wald told one writer. He was a ruthless businessman in the making and a wicked practical joker, pissing in the plants of an interoffice rival after hours.

  He married an aspiring singer from Australia named Helen Reddy, and they moved to Chicago, where Wald spent a few years booking the rooms at Mister Kelly’s and the London House. There he befriended performers including Pryor, Miles Davis, and Flip Wilson. On the night that King was assassinated, Pryor was opening a run at Mister Kelly’s. “By the second show, the National Guard had surrounded the club and closed us down,” recalls Wald. He and Pryor drove through the city, smoking a joint and lamenting the destruction that was already underway: “There were troops and people shooting, rioting, and he was crying. He was supposed to do The Ed Sullivan Show the following week, and he didn’t do it.”

  Feeling restless in Chicago, Wald had told Cosby that he wanted to be in Hollywood, and the star put him in touch with his manager and business partner, Roy Silver. Wald’s first experience at Campbell-Silver-Cosby was working with the agency’s newest signee at the time, Tiny Tim. Though the money came rolling in, he soon took the advice of Norman Brokaw, the chairman of William Morris, to go into business for himself. With a $30,000 loan from his old employer, Wald put out his shingle, taking De Blasio with him.

  By the time Carlin and Brenda walked into the office, Wald was working hard to get his wife’s career off the ground. De Blasio took the meeting. “I gave the pitch to Carlin,” says De Blasio. “He was pretty much my responsibility.” The comedian made it clear: He was hungry to find an audience that would understand where he was coming from. De Blasio, who would soon be working with Pryor and David Steinberg, assured Carlin that he and Wald could help. “I’d worked with Cosby, so I knew the comedy area very well. If you’re working with Cosby, you certainly know what comedy is about, especially in those years. I saw what he wanted. I knew the area he was playing was at that time a graveyard.”

  Wald had vague memories of Carlin from his days at Café Au Go Go, where Oscar Brown Jr., was a regular. “Howie Solomon chased me around the club once with an axe,” says Wald. “Those were fun days. You could walk in a two-block radius and see Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens, Carlin, and Pryor.”

  Before his new managers could create a plan to put Carlin in front of hipper audiences, he had some outstanding contracts to fulfill. In November he traveled to Wisconsin to appear at the Lake Geneva Playboy Club, the jewel of the franchise, with its ski resort and a hotel lodge architecturally influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright.

  Carlin had been on a Hefner television show, Playboy After Dark, earlier in the year, just after starting his beard. Between performances by the Modern Jazz Quartet and Johnny Mathis, he appeared on a couch on the bachelor-pad set, gazing glassy-eyed at a blonde named Connie, who cooed that she loved Taurus men: “They’re so lovable. They grow great beards, and they�
��re sooo funny.”

  On Carlin’s other side was Hefner, wearing a tuxedo, gripping his pipe in his front teeth. After some awkward banter with the host, Carlin got up to deliver his routine to the roomful of swingers. Standing in front of the fireplace, he dusted off a hunk he’d been using for years, a satire of cough-and-cold-remedy commercials. Funny how your pharmacist knows more about you than anyone, he said: “He knows what you’re hooked on. He knows what you take too much of. He knows”—nudge, nudge—“where you put the ointment.” Then he segued into some newer material, beginning with a nimble romp through a grocery list of snappy product names—No-Doz, Dentu-Grip, Ora-Fix. He imagined the day when birth control would be marketed over the counter: Preg-Not, Embry-No, Mom Bomb. It was the sort of clever wordplay for which the emerging George Carlin, the word-junkie and list-maker, would become justly noted, broaching volatile topics through the disarming use of playful language.

  His sense of mischief did not go over so well in Lake Geneva. Carlin was beginning to lampoon the Vietnam conflict in his act. “Of course, we’re leaving Vietnam,” he said, referring to the Nixon administration’s claims. After a pregnant pause, he let out a suppressed snort. “We’re leaving through Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. It’s the overland route!” Gotta remember why we’re over there in the first place, he said. Then he stopped short, adopting the blank expression of someone who has suddenly forgotten how to spell his own name.

  The audience in the Penthouse Room included several military veterans, and they began to heckle him and question his patriotism. What he said in reply has been lost to posterity, though the club’s entertainment director, Sam Distefano, reported, “George made a gesture with his finger and a remark. In so many words, he told the audience they were jerking themselves off.” According to Jerry Pawlak, then the Playboy Club’s maitre d’, he’d been preoccupied with business until someone notified him that customers were arguing with the entertainer. He looked up just in time to see Carlin stalk offstage. “I’ve only had three people walk offstage on me,” Pawlak recalled. “Joan Rivers, Buddy Rich, and Carlin.” Some in the audience, he said, were incensed. He had to convince one Marine not to follow the comedian backstage. “It was terrible. We had to comp everyone for the show.”

  The whole episode brought to mind another Lenny Bruce joke: that he didn’t mind when people walked out on him, except in Milwaukee, “where they walk toward you.” In his hotel room Carlin grew nervous when he heard voices calling outside his door. He called De Blasio, who had yet to start earning commission on Carlin’s dates. “He said, ‘Listen, I think I got myself in trouble,’” says De Blasio. Carlin had already been notified that he was fired from the engagement, and that he should check out in the morning. “He said, ‘Right now, I got people outside my door.’ I said, ‘Oh, my God. Stay there and don’t confront them. Call the manager and ask for security.’”

  De Blasio hung up and called the Playboy Mansion in Chicago. He knew Hefner well; Cosby was a good friend of the magazine mogul. He got Bobbie Arnstein, Hefner’s assistant and chief of staff, on the phone and demanded to speak with Hefner, blustering about how Hefner professed to be an advocate of free speech. “This is something Hef can’t get into right now,” Arnstein told him.

  Meanwhile, Carlin drove down to Chicago, where he got in to see Hefner. “Hefner is saying to me that he has to wear two hats in this situation,” he recalled. On the one hand, he was a great fan and champion of subversive comedy. On the other, “Well, you see, I have to do business with these assholes.”

  De Blasio figured that someone in the press would pick up the story and run with it, so he tipped off Variety, hoping to head off bad publicity by shaping the news from his client’s side. “I got a guy named Murphy,” he says. “I thought, boy, this is great. I’ve got all the Irishmen on my side.” The story appeared on the front page of Variety the following Wednesday. According to the report, the early show had gone smoothly, but Carlin’s “routine about materialism in American society, press censorship, poverty, Nixon-Agnew, and the Vietnam War apparently incensed the late-night crowd.” A club manager named L. W. Pullen was quoted as saying the performer had “insulted the audience directly and used ‘offensive language and material.’” The story noted that Carlin had been canceled in Vegas a few months prior for using “vulgar” language.

  The front-page exposure made Carlin’s new approach common knowledge around the industry. “We got phone calls from everyone,” says De Blasio. “Mostly people who wanted to know if George was OK. A couple people said, ‘What the fuck are you doing? Are you crazy? This is going to ruin him!’ I said, I don’t think so.” Kellem, who was nearing the end of his tenure as Carlin’s agent, saw the article and panicked. “Not only did they not like him, but he kind of got chased off the stage,” he says. “It’s one thing getting a bad review. It’s another when they run you off the plantation.”

  Among those who contacted Wald and De Blasio was Monte Kay, Flip Wilson’s manager. Kay and Wilson could see what Carlin was trying to do, and they thought they could help.

  A hip Brooklynite who had his own apartment in the Village by the age of fifteen, Kay’s youthful enthusiasm for swing and bebop led to a close friendship with disc jockey Symphony Sid Torin, with whom he produced concerts, including a notable appearance at New York’s Town Hall by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. As a manager, he handled Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, and the Modern Jazz Quartet, among others. Like many of the artists he represented, he tended to favor dashikis, and he wore his hair in a Jewish ’fro. When Kay began dating his first wife, the black singer and actress Diahann Carroll, “it never occurred to me that he was white,” she wrote in her autobiography.

  Kay “felt the music pushed the races together when nothing else did,” says his daughter with Carroll, Suzanne Kay Bamford. “I wouldn’t say he was an idealist—he just believed this was something that could bond people, could help dissolve these silly separations.” When Kay got into comedy with Wilson, the transition was natural. “Comedy did the same thing,” says his daughter. “It could poke fun at institutions. It dissolved some of those divisions when everybody was in the room together, laughing. He was drawn to it at a deep level because it did good in the world.”

  By 1970 Wald already had what he considered a “long-term relationship” with Kay and Wilson, from the comedian’s performances at Mister Kelly’s. “Basically, we smoked a lot of grass together,” he says. Kay and Wilson had just established a boutique record label together, Little David, a subsidiary of Atlantic Records. Kay had briefly been an executive with the parent company, befriending the influential brothers Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun. But he was ill-suited for a corner office with a nameplate on the desk, so they agreed to let him run an imprint instead. Little David launched in 1970 with Wilson’s fourth album, The Devil Made Me Buy This Dress, which won the good-natured comedian a Grammy award.

  Though their friendship was relatively brief, Wilson’s support of Carlin came at just the right time. Born into an enormous New Jersey family, Clerow Wilson Jr. got his nickname in the Air Force, when fellow airmen told the hyperactive cut-up he was “flipped out.” As a comedian he became a fixture at the Apollo Theater and other black stages, such as the Regal in Chicago, before breaking into television on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show. By the late 1960s Wilson was well-known to the American audience for his signature catch phrases, “What you see is what you get!” and “The devil made me do it!” He had a wacky repertoire of characters, including the Reverend Leroy, pastor of the Church of What’s Happening Now, and Geraldine Jones, a sassy, finger-wagging woman for whom Wilson dressed shamelessly, like Uncle Miltie, in drag. Following a highly rated special on NBC in 1969, Wilson’s own variety series kicked off in the fall of 1970 with the British interviewer David Frost and Big Bird, the huge feathered puppet from the new Sesame Street children’s series, as the guests.

  The first thing Wilson and his manager could do for Carlin was give him a reco
rd deal. Three years after the release of Take-Offs and Put-Ons, RCA still held an option on Carlin’s next album, though nothing was imminent. De Blasio felt no allegiance. It was safe to assume, he felt, that RCA would have little interest in helping Carlin reach out to the college crowd. “They were busy chasing Perry Como’s next hit,” he says. Atlantic, on the other hand, was an R&B and jazz label, home to giants such as Ray Charles and John Coltrane. The company had been making inroads with young rock fans, having recently muscled its way into the new arena by signing the British bands Led Zeppelin and Yes. It seemed like a natural fit. Monte Kay “loved to help people who he thought were outside the mainstream,” says his daughter. “That’s why he named the company Little David. It was always the little guys’ rights he wanted to fight for.” The label’s logo was an illustration of the young David, who slew the Philistine giant Goliath, dressed in a tunic and carrying a slingshot.

  Carlin’s new managers began booking him into the old folk clubs and underground showrooms he’d effectively left behind after the Village years. Wald got him started with a meager $250 for a one-night booking at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, where Lenny Bruce was once arrested for obscenity and Richard Pryor recorded his debut album in 1968. Carlin had no complaint about the money, says Wald, “because he was doing material he wanted to do, and the audience was responding.” Before the switch, he’d been earning a few hundred thousand dollars a year, much of it in Vegas. “I always brag that I took him from two hundred fifty grand to twelve grand,” says Wald. “He was smart enough to know that if you do the work, the money comes.”