Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin

by James Sullivan

  In New York Carlin played the Bitter End and the Focus. At the latter, on the Upper West Side, owner Larry Brezner saw a nervous wreck who was unrecognizable to his own fans, who had filled the place to see him. “Everyone had come there to see George Carlin, but they had no idea it was him,” Brezner said. “People walked right by him. I mean, nobody recognized him. He looked like any freak hanging out in the place.”

  In Pasadena he played the Ice House, then a decade-old folk den that was starting to handle more comedy bookings. He’d just bought a new Trans Am, which he parked on a side street near the club. During his set someone sideswiped the car, caving in the door. Carlin took that as a sign, a test of his decision to change direction. He’d splurged on “a nice, new, mainstream car, an old-fashioned toy,” and now it was badly damaged. How much would he be willing to sacrifice for his comic peace of mind?

  Significantly, Kay and Wilson helped their new colleague by inviting him to write for The Flip Wilson Show. Working alongside comedy-writing veterans such as Mike Marmer, an old television hand who’d written gags for Milton Berle, Ernie Kovacs, and Steve Allen, Carlin also made several appearances on the program. His first spot, in February 1971, featured skits with fellow guest Joe Namath and a two-man version of “The Newscast” with Wilson, rechristened the “What’s Happening Now News,” with the comics sitting at a pair of desks in loud plaid jackets. Carlin did Al Sleet and sports reporter “Biff Barf,” who provided some new scores (“Cal Tech 14.5, MIT, 12 to the third power”) and plugged an upcoming appearance at which he would be “presenting the National Two-Man Pallbearing Championships.”

  Also that month, he returned to the Ed Sullivan Theater for an episode that would turn out to be one of the last for the host, then approaching twenty-five years on television. The comic’s new look was especially startling on the old, familiar Sullivan set. Young comedian David Brenner, also booked on the show, was a big Carlin fan. He made his manager promise not to let him leave without an introduction. After running through his own rehearsal, Brenner sat down in the theater to watch the other acts, which included the Everly Brothers, singers Shirley Bassey and Jerry Butler, and a unicycling team called the Brockways. “A stage hand comes along and he sits next to me,” Brenner recalled. “He’s got a beard, he’s wearing a cap, and he’s got on old jeans. . . . We sat there about a half hour watching the show.” During a break, Brenner rousted his manager to remind him about introducing him to Carlin. “You were just talking to him for a half hour,” his manager replied.

  At the rehearsal Carlin told two topical jokes that came to the attention of producer Bob Precht, Sullivan’s son-in-law, who had the unenviable job of informing rock ’n’ roll acts such as the Rolling Stones and the Doors that they were expected to alter their potentially offensive lyrics. “Ed had a big tent,” says veteran director John Moffitt, who got started in television as a production assistant on the show before moving up to the director’s chair. At a time when households only had one TV set, Sullivan’s show drew in the whole family. “The kids would watch for a musical group. The mom would watch for an opera star or a matinee idol, and the husband would watch for sports figures, like the Mets singing ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game.’ So Ed was very protective—you don’t go too far, one way or the other.”

  Yet Moffitt maintains that Sullivan is sometimes unfairly characterized as a prig. “Ed was, in his own way, very liberal. He gave black performers opportunities before it was fashionable.” When Bob Dylan wanted to perform his “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues” on the show, Sullivan told him he could do it, but he was overruled by CBS censors. Dylan walked. Sullivan, says Moffitt, had no problem with Elvis Presley’s gyrations; it was Standards and Practices that made the show shoot him from the waist up.

  The first of Carlin’s jokes involved the confrontational Alabama politician George Wallace, whose campaign to regain the governor’s office was marked by racially charged rhetoric. Wallace, who would soon join the Democratic field as a presidential candidate for 1972, routinely referred to Northern elites as “pointy-headed intellectuals.” Noting this, Carlin asked, “Have you ever seen the sheets they wear down there?”

  The second joke concerned Muhammad Ali’s ongoing struggle to be reinstated in boxing after his conviction for refusing, as a conscientious objector, to be drafted. Stripped of his title in 1967, the former heavyweight champ had finally been permitted to box again in the fall of 1970. Within months the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn his conviction by unanimous vote. Although his stance was unpopular in the mid-1960s, by the turn of the decade the American public was increasingly turning against the war, and a majority felt that the boxer was being unfairly punished. Ali’s job, Carlin joked, was to beat people up. The government wanted him to kill people. “He said, ‘No, that’s where I draw the line. I’ll beat ’em up, but I won’t kill ’em.’” And the government replied, “Well, if you won’t kill ’em, then we won’t let you beat ’em up.”

  After rehearsal, Bob Precht told the comic that he could do either the Wallace joke or the Ali joke—but not both. “Oddest censorship I ever experienced,” Carlin recalled. He chose the Ali joke.

  Bringing that joke, and his new hair, onto the Sullivan stage was daring enough. But Carlin reserved his real television coming-out for a springtime appearance on The Mike Douglas Show, during a week of special episodes broadcast live from a seaside amphitheater at the United States International University in San Diego. Without preamble, he jumped into new material that he had tried out on the Sullivan show, a bit of poetic doggerel called “The Hair Piece”:I’m aware some stare at my hair. . . . But they’re not aware, nor are they debonair. In fact, they’re real square. They see hair down to there, say beware, and go off on a tear. I say, no fair.

  Hair, and not just Carlin’s, was demanding an inordinate amount of attention at the time. After an appearance as a morning show guest host on ABC, fellow comic Robert Klein had received a copy of a letter protesting the network’s hiring of such a “sloppy and hippy character. . . . He is actually dirty-looking with that despicable hair and untidy appearance.” Carlin would get a lot of mileage over the next year or so out of his “Hair Piece.” It may have been a silly little poem, but it was also, like Krassner’s “Fuck Communism” slogan, a masterful bit of cerebral jujitsu. He turned the audience’s potential discomfort with his appearance back on themselves, by pointing out the absurdity of the cultural bickering about men with long hair. “I’ve had my extra hair for about a year now,” Carlin noted. “Actually, it’s the same hair I’ve always had. It just used to be on the inside.”

  He segued from the Vietnam jokes he’d done in Wisconsin into a parody of “America the Beautiful,” satirizing our national urge to modernize the world by “whipping a little industry on them”: “O beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain/For strip-mined mountains’ majesty, above the asphalt plain.” (Fellow wordplay fanatic Biff Rose had printed a similar verse, “America the Ugliful,” on the back sleeve of his 1968 album The Thorn in Mrs. Rose’s Side: “Oh! Ugliful for racial skies—And ample chance for pain.” Flip Wilson, too, had a signature bit that spoofed the song.)

  But it was in conversation with Douglas, the host, that the comedian really made his case for his countercultural shift. Sitting in a director’s chair under a sunny sky, Carlin said that he was working on a book-length collection of humor, The Secret Papers of George Carlin. He also explained that he was involved with a new nonprofit group, a public policy organization called Committee to Bridge the Gap, which he described as a growing network of college students reaching out to political moderates, “just trying to make it less fearsome for people resistant to change. . . . The planet and the species and the country are in a kind of emergency,” he said. Two decades later he would amend himself. “The Planet Is Fine,” he called one of his favorite routines, but “the people are fucked.”

  For now, though, he was happily enjoying his newfound popularity with the college crowd
. Douglas told his guest that he could tell this was his type of audience. “I spent a lot of time in nightclubs banging my head against the wall,” replied Carlin. “I started as a coffeehouse rapper about seven or eight years ago, and I’m really just coming home. That’s all it is.” Though old show-biz types were lamenting that the younger generation had no sense of humor, Douglas noted, “They’re really just laughing at different things.” The young America had changed everything, Carlin agreed. Music, clothing, morality. Why not comedy?

  “The Myron Cohens, the Jack E. Leonards were becoming passé,” says Jeff Wald. “People realize when you’re false. The sensibility George had didn’t fit the material he was doing. He was not being true to who he was. As soon as he became who he really was, which was a pot-smoking, hip guy, then the success started—the real success. I guess making a quarter-million was pretty successful, but he wasn’t happy. He was getting into trouble. He was being a phony, in a way.”

  That spring Carlin stumbled onto another opportunity that gave him an added boost of confidence. Mort Sahl had been scheduled as the opening act for the rock band Spirit at the outdoor amphitheater of what was then known as Santa Monica City College, but he had to cancel due to illness. Asked to fill in, Carlin was nervous. Though he was doing the clubs again, a rock ’n’ roll audience was another story. “I’d never done a real college-audience-in-the-Sixties kind of thing,” he remembered.

  With about 400 students in attendance, the show took place at midday. “These are rowdy rockers,” recalls Uncle Miltie’s nephew, Marshall Berle, who was managing Spirit at the time. As a young agent, Berle had signed the Beach Boys, Ike and Tina Turner, and others to the William Morris Agency before moving into personal management. At the college gig with Spirit, he was amazed that the promoter would book a comedian to open a rock ’n’ roll show. “This was the psychedelic era, at a time when everyone was getting high,” he says. “Carlin comes out, and he’s getting laughs. I remember saying, This guy’s got a lot of balls.”

  To Carlin’s great relief and elation, the audience gave him a standing ovation. “I killed. I thought, ‘This is it, man.’”

  To make a great leap forward in his art—and in fact Carlin was beginning to let himself think of his craft in terms of artistry—he’d taken several giant steps back. How he got where he went next, he could never have predicted.

  6

  SPECIAL DISPENSATION

  Habitually, Carlin came down on the side of the outlaws. That was rarely more clear than the night Specs O’Keefe came to dinner.

  Joseph “Specs” O’Keefe was one of the masterminds of the infamous Brinks job in Boston in 1950. For nearly two years, eleven coconspirators planned an armed break-in at a downtown Brinks office, staging dry runs and removing various locks to have duplicate keys made. When it was time to carry out the crime, the thieves dressed in pea coats and Halloween masks, overwhelming surprised security guards inside. The immaculate heist netted O’Keefe and his cohorts nearly $3 million in cash and money orders, making the robbery the biggest in U.S. history to that point.

  After a hit on his life failed, O’Keefe finally agreed to cooperate with law enforcement officials, only days before the statute of limitations would have expired. O’Keefe served four years in prison. Eight of his partners were sentenced to life behind bars.

  Years later O’Keefe was in Los Angeles, working odd jobs under an assumed name. He met Carlin while making a package delivery—booze—and the comedian, always fascinated by the underworld, invited the ex-con to his house for dinner. Jeff Wald and his wife, Helen Reddy, were also invited. It was, says Wald, one of the most unusual evenings he ever spent. Both men were deeply intrigued by his background and perversely delighted to be in his company. (When O’Keefe died a few years later, says Wald, one newspaper claimed the thief had a circle of friends in show business: Wald, Reddy, Carlin. “It was hilarious.”) Carlin, of course, was looking forward to getting away with a transgression or two of his own.

  THE CELLAR DOOR was a lively folk and jazz room at the bottom of 34th Street in the brownstone neighborhood of Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Richie Havens and Miles Davis had both cut live sessions at the club in 1970. Over two nights in late July 1971, Carlin made the recordings that would become his first album for Little David. He called it FM & AM.

  On the radio, rule-benders were finding they had a place to experiment on the new FM band. Whereas AM stations were often rigidly formatted, playing popular hits expected to help sell commercial airtime, many stations broadcasting on the upstart FM dial were providing a safe haven where the mind was free to wander. Carlin, the onetime disc jockey and lifelong free thinker, was intrigued.

  FM disc jockeys played a haphazard mix of blues, jazz, soul, and fifteen-minute acid rock tracks. Rather than stick to the logbook, they often expounded at length on whatever topic came to mind. On KPFA in Berkeley, the first listener-supported station in the country, future literary critic John Leonard debuted his free-form Nightsounds program: poetry, jazz, and satire. In New York acting hopeful Bob Fass created WBAI’s Radio Unnameable, an overnight forum in which the host featured regular phone-ins from Yippie agitator Abbie Hoffman and debuted Arlo Guthrie’s eighteen-minute sing-along “Alice’s Restaurant.” At WBCN in Boston, a classical format was gradually phased out in favor of something called “The American Revolution,” a mix of progressive rock ’n’ roll and radical investigative reporting.

  FM grew so quickly that its idiosyncrasies became an instant source of parody. In a ludicrously relaxed voice, Robert Klein lampooned the aggressively nonaggressive style of the “FM Disc Jockey” in a bit by that name on his first album: “We’ll be bringing you the best in musical sounds these next thirty-eight hours.” If FM was hash pipes, macramé belts, and mellow testimonials for macrobiotic foods, AM radio was pop-top beer, white leather, and strident used car ads.

  Carlin saw an apt metaphor for his own career in the two radio bands. He had come of age in the entertainment world, first as an AM disc jockey, playing Paul Anka and “Theme from A Summer Place.” As a comedian he developed an agreeable parody of his old career, mocking the canned, overheated delivery of his fellow DJs—“The boss jock with the boss sounds from the boss list of the boss thirty that my boss told me to play!”—and the disposable culture that bred them. His early work in comedy had been the equivalent of a hit parade for middle-class couples; now he was offering heady amusement for the communards and the war protesters.

  With a recording truck parked outside the Cellar Door, Carlin spent two nights opening for the Dillards, the traditional bluegrass band that had portrayed a fictional act called the Darlings on The Andy Griffith Show. The Dillards had earned themselves some rock ’n’ roll credibility by adopting electric instruments, a move that inspired the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and many of the other groups of the Southern California country-rock movement of the late 1960s.

  Carlin was back in familiar company, among the banjo players, collegiate juicers, and bohemian night owls. Still, he was unsure of himself. He worried that the audience he sought, many a decade or more younger than he, might think of him as “a counterfeit,” a calculating entertainer “trying to cash in on the hippie craze.” As eager as he was to turn the page, he could not quite bring himself to bury some of his old standbys just yet. The routines he cut for FM & AM included an update on “Wonderful WINO” featuring Willie West’s successor (a new Carlin character called Scott Lame) and the vapid housewife Congolia Breckenridge, who joined her husband on an imaginary game show called Divorce Game (“Welcome to Divorce Game, brought to you by National Van Lines!”). There was also a primer on doing an accurate Ed Sullivan impression and, of course, a mock newscast. After Al Sleet bumbled through the weather report for the umpteenth time (“Tonight’s forecast—dark”), Carlin’s high-tenor anchorman remarked with a knowing giggle, “I think we know by now, Al’s been into the mushrooms.”

  Those familiar bits would appear on the record�
�s B side—the “AM” side. Carlin hoped to capture his old persona “in its final form,” contrasting it with his new social perspective. If AM radio was “now being thought of as hokey and old-fashioned, full of commercials,” he said, FM was hip, underground. The album’s “FM” side made Carlin’s metamorphosis unmistakable. Right out of the gate, he went autobiographical, recounting his dismissal at the Frontier—“for saying ‘shit,’” he noted, “in a town where the big game is called crap.”

  Buddy Hackett said it; Redd Foxx said it. Now Carlin, too, was saying shit, without qualms or apology. It might have been seen as an act of defiance, if the bit weren’t so deliberately congenial. Shit, he noted, is “a nice word—a friendly, happy kind of word.” The middle class, he continued, has never been too comfortable with it, though it does slip out on occasion. Mimicking a homemaker who’s just dropped a casserole, he squawked, “Oh, shit! Look at the noodles. . . . Don’t say that, Johnny. Just hear it.”