Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin

by James Sullivan

  THE CASE would not be argued before the Supreme Court until April 1978, nearly five years after the WBAI broadcast. In the meantime Carlin had a career to pursue, much of which still required him to watch his language.

  He was making regular appearances on The Midnight Special, Burt Sugarman’s late-night rock ’n’ roll showcase, which aired Fridays on NBC, after Carson. The director was Stan Harris, who had worked on The Smothers Brothers and a short-lived precursor to Midnight Special called The Music Scene. Jeff Wald had leverage with the show, which was an ideal forum for Carlin’s new direction, with its hip musical guests and raspy radio veteran Wolfman Jack at the announcer’s microphone. After the pilot was sold, Helen Reddy hosted the inaugural episode in early 1973, with Carlin and Kenny Rankin making guest appearances. Two years later Reddy took over for a year as the sole regular host in the show’s nine-year history. Carlin, the third comic invited to host the show, after Cosby and Pryor, was a frequent master of ceremonies until 1977, sharing the stage with Waylon Jennings, Glen Campbell, Lou Rawls, and many others. At one point he secured a billing for his friends in Travis Shook and Club Wow.

  “I wanted to talk a little bit about words,” he said during one segment for the show. “Words are—well, they’re everything. They’re true to you. They betray you. They say too much. They don’t say enough.” From the particular focus of the “Seven Words,” he was unraveling his own clinical fascination with the entire language. For this appearance he stuck to a lighthearted analysis of nonsense words and phrases that we don’t often stop to consider—Kit and caboodle. Odds and ends. This, that and the other. “I’ll take this, and that.” “You gotta get the other—it’s a set.” It was the sort of linguistic deconstruction he would later develop into a comic trademark.

  His brief run with Wald and Ron De Blasio was coming to an end. Wald had stepped aside from artist management, concentrating on promoting his wife’s blooming singing career. He still saw Carlin, his fellow New Yorker, socially. They took their daughters to horse-riding lessons in Malibu together. Carlin invested in the farm; one time Wald got testy with the rancher. “I was gonna go up and shoot him on behalf of me and George,” he claims.

  De Blasio stuck with Carlin for another year or so. By this time the manager was handling the career of Freddie Prinze, a fast-rising comic who would soon be starring in the NBC sitcom Chico and the Man. (Prinze, who committed suicide in 1977, was once romantically linked to Lenny Bruce’s daughter, Kitty.) De Blasio was also on the verge of signing Richard Pryor. With his manager concentrating his efforts elsewhere, Carlin drifted into an arrangement with Monte Kay at Little David. Jack Lewis, Kay’s right-hand man, handled the day-to-day obligations. Working with Lewis came naturally, as they were often on the road together. “There were no hard feelings,” says De Blasio. “He was very comfortable with Jack Lewis.”

  But Lewis was a bit of a wild man, not exactly a great influence. Lewis, says Franklin Ajaye, a budding comedian who signed with Little David after cutting two albums for A&M, was “a very eccentric guy. Monte was very quiet, business-oriented. Very mild-mannered. Jack was kind of crazy and loud.” Rankin, too, despite his gentle singing style, had a wild streak, says Ajaye, who often opened for Rankin when the guitarist wasn’t on the road opening for Carlin.

  While a law student at Columbia University, Ajaye had broken into comedy in the early 1970s by studying Carlin, Klein, and Pryor. Booked into the Playboy Club in San Francisco for a week, he had trouble connecting with the clientele. He had quit his job at a clothing store to take the gig. “It wasn’t really a progressive place,” he says. “I could only make the Bunnies and the band laugh.” Told to shave his beard (“Comedians don’t wear beards”), he protested. “George Carlin wears a beard,” he said. “It was exactly the kind of place in those days that George wouldn’t want to play. I got fired.”

  Little David had a small carpeted office on Sunset Boulevard, on the second floor of a Tudor-style stucco building that once housed an upscale auto dealership. Kay welcomed casual visits from the artists on his roster, who sat around with their feet up on the desks. “Monte was a very good business man. He cut very good deals,” Ajaye says.

  His whole thing was creative freedom. Whatever you wanted to do, he gave you that freedom, and he tried to find the places that made it work. Obviously George couldn’t play the swanky clubs anymore. It was almost like they created a market, which was the college kids. It was a very passionate time to be a comedian, a thinking time.

  Yet the seventies were also clearly a decade of hedonism. Years of high tension over civil rights, Vietnam, and the generation gap were giving way to cultural fatigue, and seemingly relentless bad news such as the 1973 energy crisis and Watergate made many disgusted citizens long for oblivion. And comedy reflected that feeling. Occupation: Foole was nominated for a Grammy, alongside Cosby’s Fat Albert, Klein’s debut, and albums from National Lampoon and the impressionist David Frye. The award winner, however, was Los Cochinos, the third album from the stoner comics Cheech and Chong.

  For his fourth album with Little David, Carlin moved away from the boyhood nostalgia that had dominated Class Clown and Occupation: Foole. Toledo Window Box, named for an imaginary strain of homegrown dope, had a cover image of the comic in a T-shirt illustrated with a bushy pot plant. On the back, the picture on the T-shirt was reduced to two barren stems, and Carlin had a bleary-eyed, blissfully vacant expression on his face. (The T-shirt drawings were by Drew Struzan, an album-cover artist who would soon be widely noted for his iconic movie posters for George Lucas and others.)

  Recorded in July 1974 at Oakland’s art deco-style Paramount Theatre, a lavishly designed former movie house, on Toledo Window Box the comedian was idly thinking up “goofy shit,” with little design or theme. Other than brief bits on “God” (a primitive draft of the skeptic’s rant that would end up as one of Carlin’s last notable routines, “He’s Smiling Down”) and “Gay Lib,” social issues were almost entirely absent from the set. With one eye on the new kings of comedy, Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, Carlin riffed at length on drug use, poking around in nursery rhymes and fairy tales for illicit references. Snow White’s Seven Dwarves, he suggested, were all users: Sleepy was “into reds”; Doc was “the connection.” Carlin, encyclopedically knowledgeable about comedy, surely knew that Murray Roman had explored the same premise a few years earlier.

  Though he spoke often about finding the real George Carlin in his material, on Toledo Window Box he relied more than usual on his stock voices, lapsing repeatedly into his seasoned New York accent and throwing in a little Wolfman Jack for good measure. He aired out a category that would become a Carlin staple, the absurdity of oxymorons—jumbo shrimp, military intelligence. And he frittered away much of the album on juvenilia such as snot (“The Original Rubber Cement”) and, once again, farts. The album went gold, Carlin’s fourth in a row to do so. Still, it was uninspired. The rush of his successful transformation was wearing off, and his binges were wearing him down. And Brenda was fighting her own battle, with alcoholism. She was involved in multiple incidents of drunk driving; at one point, before she went through rehab, her weight plummeted below ninety pounds. On a trip to Hawaii the couple were both so out of control that their daughter, not yet a teenager, felt compelled to write up a pact, demanding that they agree to stop using drugs. Putting Kelly in the middle of his and Brenda’s addictions was his “biggest regret,” Carlin recalled.

  Within a few years Carlin would really be struggling to find a new direction for his work. “When I look back on those years,” says Chandler Travis, “as much fun as we had—and we did have a good time—I felt like if I’d been smoking a little less pot, I probably would have produced more and the music would’ve changed quicker. I think that’s true for George’s stuff as well. He got into the whole hippie thing. There were some years there when he didn’t know what was next. He wasn’t that anxious about it. I think if we weren’t all doping it up so much, he would’ve ch
anged quicker.”

  With the exception of a few staples—The Tonight Show, Mike Douglas—Carlin’s TV gigs were drying up. He did an appearance on Dinah Shore’s daytime show, and another on a Gladys Night and the Pips special that also featured Vegas regulars such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Robert Goulet. Worst of all, he did Perry Como’s Holiday in Hawaii.

  The seasoned host, wearing a huge white lei around his neck, introduced the bearded comic so that he could have a few words. “Yeah, I got a few words for you,” Carlin teased, standing in front of the tiki torches. After breezing through a few innocuous words he joked were poorly coined—hernia should be “hisnia,” migraine should be “yourgraine”—he addressed the words with which he’d become inextricably linked, even for Como’s luau crowd. There are, he marveled, more words to describe dirty words (lewd, naughty, foul, vile, and so on) than there are dirty words themselves: “Imagine all those words describing dirty words, and all I could think of were seven of them.” He looked considerably less comfortable in a taped bit on the beach, in which he put on a Royal Navy officer’s tricornered hat and knee breeches to portray Captain James Cook in a sad adaptation of his long-dormant “Indian Sergeant” routine.

  There was one exception to the network mediocrity he was subjecting himself to, which turned out to be a major one, although no one involved could be so sure at the time. NBC was looking for something to fill its late-Saturday time slot. For years network affiliates had been running Carson highlights on the weekends, but now the notoriously work-averse host wanted to reserve his best repeats to fill the additional weeknights he was planning to take off. Impressionist Rich Little was considered for a show, as was the game show panelist and host Bert Convy. Eventually, however, NBC president Herbert Schlosser decided to go with something different. He invited twenty-seven-year-old Dick Ebersol, an ABC executive who assisted Roone Arledge in that network’s powerful sports department, out to his home on Fire Island. Ebersol had just turned down Schlosser’s offer to run NBC Sports. Determined to get this guy in the fold somehow, the company president made an offer: How would Ebersol like to take a shot at Saturday night?

  The young producer quickly decided the show should set itself apart from Carson, the king of late-night comedy, by appealing to the generation under thirty. To line up credibility for the project, he convinced Pryor to come aboard. Pryor’s commitment led to verbal agreements with Lily Tomlin and Carlin. But Pryor, who was growing increasingly distrustful of television and its restrictions, soon reneged.

  Back to square one, Ebersol began discussing ideas with thirty-ish comedy writer and producer Lorne Michaels, who had written for Phyllis Diller, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, and the Burns and Schreiber show. Michaels had also produced a pair of specials for Tomlin. He was enthusiastic, and told Ebersol that he wanted to create “the first show in the history of television to talk—absent expletives—the same language being talked on college campuses and streets.” The idea, he said, was to cross Monty Python’s Flying Circus with 60 Minutes. Ebersol told Schlosser he wanted Michaels to produce the show.

  Before potential cast members were auditioned, the charismatic Michaels began identifying possible hosts. Albert Brooks was asked, but declined; according to Brooks, Ebersol and Michaels got the idea of using a different guest host each week from him. Robert Klein was approached. Eventually, with only months to spare, the repertory company began to take shape: Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, John Belushi from the original Second City in Chicago, and Dan Aykroyd from its offshoot in Toronto.

  Needing a known quantity to anchor the inaugural episode, Michaels turned to one of the show’s talent consultants, Craig Kellem, Carlin’s agent in the 1960s. Kellem recommended they go back to Carlin, who had experience filling in for Carson but was by now an icon to the rowdy young audience the producer hoped to attract. “Trying to get talent for the show was not easy,” Kellem recalls. “Lorne wasn’t that high on using George, but we needed somebody. George Carlin was still George Carlin.” Kellem was a bit puzzled by Michaels’s lukewarm response to having Carlin host. It wasn’t as though the producer, who was becoming fast friends with pop stars such as Paul Simon and Mick Jagger, had no use for performers who’d been around a few years. “Lorne had his own vision of the who’s who of the talent pool out there” in Hollywood, Kellem says. “Some of the people out there fascinated him. Pryor fascinated Lorne, and we did a full-court press. We flew to Florida, met him at a jai alai arena, kissed his ass every which way. For some reason, George Carlin did not have the same fascination.”

  Nevertheless, once the decision was made, Michaels was glad to have a name on which he could hinge the launch. Carlin, he joked to the press, was “punctual, and he fills out forms well.” Still needing a director, he met with Dave Wilson, a television veteran who had recently worked with Jim Henson on the second of two pilots for The Muppet Show. Michaels, wearing a “Dracula Sucks” T-shirt and with his hair in a ponytail, was skeptical about Wilson, who was already in his forties. Looking for a way to dismiss the interviewee, the producer asked if Wilson thought he could relate to Carlin (who was, of course, himself nearing forty). In fact, he could. Dave Wilson was “Wacky” Wilson, the New Hampshire camper whom the boyhood Carlin had unseated as Camp Notre Dame’s drama award winner. They were old friends, Wilson said. Michaels offered to say hello when he met with Carlin on his next trip to California. “I kept praying, ‘I hope George Carlin remembers me,’” Wilson recalled. “Turns out he did, and Lorne, I guess, was sort of impressed by that.” Wilson got the job, and he went on to direct more than 300 episodes of Saturday Night Live over the next two decades.

  As the show came together, the NBC brass at Rockefeller Center grew suspicious. “What was this weird little show with these dirty people riding up and down the elevator?” Kellem puts it. During the week of rehearsals prior to broadcast, Dave Tebet, the network’s head of talent, heard that Carlin was planning to step onstage with a soiled T-shirt visible under his suit. Tebet, worried that some undecided affiliates might choose to drop the show if it didn’t appear professional, laid down an edict. Carlin would wear a clean T-shirt, and he should probably consider a haircut, too.

  How Carlin would appear became “the major focus of the night, weirdly enough,” recalled Michaels. “That was a much greater distraction than can possibly be understood.” Ultimately the comic bounded through the audience onto the stage of historic Studio 8-H, where Toscanini had conducted the NBC Symphony, in a blue T-shirt covered by a jacket and vest.

  Because of Carlin, the ninety-minute show almost didn’t go out as advertised—live. NBC had debated using a six-second delay, so the producers would have a window in which to bleep any offending words. In the end, however, the delay was forgotten. Carlin had agreed to do NBC’s Saturday Night, as the show was originally called, in part because he had a new album to promote. (Though Michaels had asked for fresh material, Carlin essentially did cuts from the new record.) After a “cold opening,” a sketch about an immigrant learning English, featuring Belushi and National Lampoon alum Michael O’Donoghue, Carlin strolled onstage to the band’s energetic theme and Don Pardo’s excited introduction. “Talk about a live show! Wow,” he said to the boisterous studio audience. Without further comment on the concept for the new show, he jumped into a routine from the new album called “Baseball—Football.” It gave him a chance to make a drug joke almost immediately. The rules of football, he noted, had been changed recently: “They moved the hash marks in. Guys found ’em and smoked ’em anyway.” The hunk, later expanded into one of Carlin’s most beloved routines, pointed out the contrast between football’s militarism and baseball’s pastoral sensibility. Alternating between the steely voice of a combat officer and a little boy’s innocent singsong, he joked, “In football you get a penalty. In baseball, you make an error—whoops!” The premise was surely influenced by his first guest-hosting of The Tonight Show, when he and Dave Meggyesy, the former pro football player, got into a discussion of the g
ame’s warlike lingo, its “bombs” and its “blitzes.”

  By his own later admission, Carlin had been on a cocaine bender all week. Getting only a smattering of chuckles out of one line, he asked someone in the front row, “Have I done these jokes before tonight?” Given the near-debacle of New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, it was quite possible he really wasn’t sure. Still, he managed. He introduced musical guests Billy Preston and Janis Ian (Michaels had originally wanted Stevie Wonder and Carole King) and a short film by Albert Brooks. He did two more short monologues of absurd tidbits (“Have you ever tried to throw away an old wastebasket?”) and one final set, well after midnight, questioning God and religion.

  Although Carlin’s presence undeniably lent the show some legitimacy, he also caused his share of problems on a very tense and nervous set. All week he had been unenthusiastic about participating in a sketch. Written by O’Donoghue, the sketch imagined Alexander the Great at his high school reunion. After dress rehearsal, with an hour to go until air time, Carlin told Michaels he wouldn’t do the sketch. The producer had no choice but to cut it.