These guys came from deep in our street experience: they were
cops, dads, bartenders with baseball bats. The first-line authority
figures we'd grown up with as opposed to Congress, big corporations and more impersonal authorities. Putting bigoted or violent
language in their mouths was fun and funny and even to a degree
satirical, exposing them for what they were. In a way they were the
forerunners of later mainstream Irish bigots like Peter Boyle's Joe
and Carroll O'Connor's Archie Bunker. Later still, throughout the
eighties, my Irish street guy was a powerful element in the evolution
of what finally became in the early nineties my authentic voice. He
and his White Harlem relatives are the core of the family of characters that still live inside me.
For the next two years, Jack and I played first-line nightclubs like the
Embers in Indianapolis, Freddie's in Minneapolis, the Tidelands
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in Houston. Bill Brennan, the owner of the Racquet Club in Dayton, flew into Chicago to see us and booked us for the next month.
The Racquet Club was a hugely important booking. Not professionally—after all, this was fucking Dayton, Ohio. But it was where I
met my wife, Brenda.
The nightclub circuit was unpredictable. Some places got what
we were doing. In the Playboy Clubs, for the most part, we did okay.
There were other places where we died. At one club outside Detroit, the owner said, "I haven't booked a live act since Bobby Clark
in 1941. You guys better be good. My softball team's coming in tonight."
It was a cinder-block bar with a jukebox and tables and a little
dance floor. The softball team comes in still in uniform and off we
go. We do the Kennedy bit. Stuff about the European Common
Market. They don't get it or like it. No laughs, nothing. Sweat is
pouring off us. About ten minutes in, somebody puts a quarter in
the jukebox and they start dancing to the music—while we're still
halfway through the act.
The owner came over as we were wrapping up: "I'm taking a bath
with you guys. Don't you work dirty?" We said, "Like Lenny Bruce?"
He said, "Who the fuck's Lenny Bruce? You better get some tits and
ass in this act. You got two more shows and the room don't turn
over." Holy shit. We ran out and bought a fright wig for me and for
the second show did a bit with Jack as Ed Murrow and me as a waitress in the club. We did stuff we'd never done before—or ever again.
We were there for a week. We didn't get fired. A nightmare.
Sometimes it worked the other way around. There was a club
in Allentown, Pennsylvania, whose owner was a great Lenny Bruce
fan. And because Lenny liked us, he booked us. In the ad in the paper it said: "Lenny Bruce's favorite comics." Nobody in Allentown,
Pennsylvania, knew who the fuck Lenny Bruce was either and if
they had they would have hated him. Every night there were maybe
five, six people in this cavernous room. Still the guy booked us back.
And it was the same story every time we played there.
Deep down I didn't want to work. I was lazy because I knew I was
going to be a single at some point. Jack and I being together was just
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a stepping stone. I had no idea what the timing would be but I knew
it was inevitable. We developed a show of solid stuff and a second
show (for when those fucking people in the front tables wouldn't
leave). But once we had that under our belts, we essentially coasted.
Jack used to say that the reason Burns and Carlin didn't work
was because we were very much the same person. We did the same
characters. We were strong willed, Irish, Catholic, veterans. We had
many things in common that made us great buddies, but didn't explode onstage.
The truth was more harsh: I didn't want to expend my best ideas
on the team. I was selfish about my creativity. I refused to put out my
best effort for, and with, Jack.
We broke up in March 1962—or I broke us up. It was at the Maryland Hotel in Chicago, where we'd had our first big booking. Jack
seemed a bit stunned at first, but I think subconsciously he'd known
for a while it was coming. We got pretty stoned and were clowning around and for some reason that seemed funny at the time Jack
threw this paperback out the window into the freezing night. As
he did he suddenly realized all his pay was in the book. He'd put it
there for safekeeping. We ran to the window and watched the twenties and fifties floating down through the snow and we both knew
that by the time we got to the street it'd all be long gone. So we split
my half.
Jack joined the Compass Players in St. Louis (he auditioned with
another hopeful named Alan Alda: both of them made it in) and
then moved to Second City, where he later formed a comedy team
with Avery Schreiber that did far better than Burns and Carlin. He
ended up as a hugely successful TV writer and producer. We've
stayed the best of friends.
A few years ago Jack said that without Burns and Carlin he
would've been working at the A&P as a stock boy for the rest of his
life. Maybe. And quite possibly without Jack I would've ended up
as some dopey old radio cocksucker spewing bigotry into the night.
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7
INTRODUCING
THE VERY LOVELY, VERY
TALENTED—BRENDA!
George and Brenda, 1961
(Courtesy of M a r i o n Rife)
Brenda was bom in Dayton, Ohio, in 1939 at St. Elizabeth's,
an open-door hospital run by the Franciscan Sisters. Fortyodd years later I wound up there one night, after totaling my
car. And experienced a nose-related miracle.
She was the elder of two sisters and Daddy's little girl. Art, his
name was. He took her everywhere, including his favorite saloons,
where he'd sit her on the bar while he drank. Art had been a singer
in Chicago speakeasies during Prohibition and went by the name
"The Whispering Tenor." His wife, Alice, made him quit. He hung
out with these gangsters who, according to her, forced drinks on
him so that he developed a drinking problem. From what I could
tell when I got to know him Art didn't need much forcing. But Alice
didn't like gangsters or alcohol so Art had to give up being the Whispering Tenor.
Alice was the dominant figure in the family and Brenda was
scared of her. She did stuff like marking Brenda's periods on the
calendar with an X. She was nice enough but very controlled
and severe. I think she was Lutheran or Congregational. I don't
know about Art. At one point Brenda had to play the organ in
church.
Art worked as the production manager for Newsweek in the
McCall printing plant. They were the largest printer in the United
States and they printed sixty or seventy titles in Dayton. As a kid
Brenda loved going with her dad to see the huge presses in action
and smelling the printer's ink in the air. When she was older she
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even did pasteup for the foreign edition of Newsweek. All of which
nurtured her high school ambition to be a journalist.
On graduation, she planned to go to college becaus
e she'd gotten
a scholarship to Ohio Wesleyan, but her mother said no: women
didn't go to college unless they wanted to be teachers. She should ve
said, "Okay, I'll be a teacher," and then switched to journalism when
she got to Wesleyan. But she'd always been a sweet, obedient, overachieving child and it didn't occur to her. And her mother was adamant. So Brenda never went to college. And she was very, very angry
about that.
She'd been going with the guy next door for about three years.
Like her, he was "a good kid"—they didn't fool around—but after
the college episode Brenda was in a fuck-you mood and more or
less forced the guy to sleep with her. That very first time, she got
pregnant.
Again her mother was adamant: they had to get married. Again
Brenda went along. Within a month she was walking down the aisle
in a white dress her mother made (she was an expert dressmaker).
Two weeks later, after the honeymoon, she had a miscarriage. She
hadn't needed to get married at all. When she started to miscarry, she
fainted in a downtown department store, but her mother wouldn't
take her to the hospital. She had to miscarry in secret at home.
The poor slob on the other end of all this didn't like it any better
than Brenda did, so as soon as she could she filed for divorce. That
was the breaking point with her parents because she was the first
person in their family who'd ever gotten a divorce. So from being a
wonderful, overachieving, goody-two-shoes child, Brenda became
overnight an alienated divorcee of twenty.
She went to work for a tool company as an executive secretary,
which seemed like a good gig, until she found out the job involved
the executives' tools as well as the ones they sold. She quit after having to organize call girls for visiting salesmen—and being made to
watch them at work, so she could give head herself.
Today Dayton is just another struggling city in the Rust Belt.
Back then, it had a tremendous industrial base: Frigidaire was there,
National Cash Register, General Tire. When it still had jobs and
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INTRODUCING THE VERY LOVELY, VERY TALENTED— BRENDA!
factories, it was a major stop on the entertainment circuit. Comedy
and music acts used it as a kind of test market. Showbiz wisdom was
that if it went over in Dayton, it would go over anywhere.
One of the bigger venues in Dayton, out in a suburb called Kettering, was this place the Racquet Club. By day it was a swim and
tennis club; at night it became a supper club with topflight entertainment.
Brenda heard on the grapevine that the maître d' had had a heart
attack. She immediately drove out there and said, "I heard your
maître d' had a heart attack. I want his job." (She always had balls,
Brenda.) They said, "Where have you worked?" She said, "I haven't,
but I'm really good with people." They were desperate for somebody
to front the place so they gave her a temporary tryout.
She loved it and was really good at it. Her whole life began to
center around the nightclub. Major acts came through all the time,
including at one point in 1960 Lenny Bruce. He and Brenda became good friends—a platonic relationship according to Brenda; it
was one of her friends he fucked—but they hung out, and had a
great time.
Brenda used to pick up money every night for the club. Lenny was
staying at a motel nearby, so she'd pick him up too and drive him
to work. One evening they were passing a field full of flowers and
Lenny yells, "Stop the car!" He jumps out and starts running across
the field, leaping around in the flowers and rolling in them and yelling gibberish. Brenda thought he was insane; she didn't realize he
was high and just wanted to roll around in some flowers like any
other junkie. Then he got back in the car, and they went to the club.
The next Sunday he took things a step further: he sent her out to
the airport to pick up a package. She drove out there, collected the
package and drove back with it. He told her much later it was heroin.
But what did she know? She was just doing stuff for her new friend.
When he left, Lenny signed a picture for her: "You're going to have
my baby. Love, Lenny."
Lenny recommended Burns and Carlin to the Racquet Club and
we got a booking there for August 1960. It was only our second or
third engagement after Chicago. When our publicity photos came
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in, apparently she and her roommate, Elaine, gave us the once-over.
Brenda pointed at me and said, "He's mine." Elaine said, "Jack's
mine." Fresh young meat they called us.
Our first night she caught my eye. And I caught hers: she told me
later I reminded her a lot of Lenny—the same body language. After
our first show I went over to her and asked: "What do you do in a
town like this?" She said, "You can go out to breakfast. Or you can
find someone with a stereo and hi-fi and go home with them." I said,
"Do you have a stereo and hi-fi?" She said, "I do." So she took me
home. For two weeks. We clicked immediately. Our minds clicked,
our humor clicked. We both had the same thought: "This is going
to be fun!"
Then the booking ended and it was time to leave. Brenda said she
was in love. I didn't know if I was or not. But I knew it wasn't just
another fling on the road. Which was what everyone at the club told
Brenda after I'd gone: "You're never gonna see him again."
Burns and Carlin got busy and Brenda had to go into the hospital to have her appendix out so we were both pretty occupied for
a while. I knew I did want to see her again but I couldn't take the
plunge because I knew also that if I did, something decisive would
happen. I was nervous about what that would be. So I did nothing.
Meanwhile Brenda's pining away, thinking her friends in the club
were right after all and she'll never see me again. Finally I called
and we talked and it was so easy I couldn't figure out why the fuck I
hadn't done it before. I was going to be in Chicago on New Year's so
I asked her to come up. She couldn't. I had a couple of things to do
around Chicago but after that I said I'd drive to Dayton. I gave her a
day to expect me.
I got delayed for some reason for a couple of days, figuring I'd get
there eventually. What I didn't know was that when I didn't show on
the first day, Brenda cried all night. And when I didn't show the next
day either, she cried all that night too. She was totally heartbroken,
thought I was just screwing around with her.
By now she was working lunches at the club as well as nights.
When I finally got to Dayton a few days late, in early January, it happened to be lunchtime.
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INTRODUCING THE VERY LOVELY, VERY TALENTED— BRENDA!
I go in the door and she's seating people, giving them menus, taking orders and so on, when suddenly she turns around and sees me
in the doorway. She drops the menus, runs the entire length of the
dining room, jumps into my arms, we go to a motel and no one sees
us for three days.
We lay in bed, we drank beer, I turned her on to grass for the first<
br />
time. I asked her to marry me and she said, "Yes!"
We had to tell her parents, so we met them for lunch and her
mother was sitting there with this pinched and Protestant face.
Brenda and I both had the same thought, which was basically.
"Aargh!" We couldn't do it. So when Art had to go to the bathroom I
went with him. And there, pissing side by side in our urinals, I said:
" I ' d like to marry your daughter." He said: "Oh. Yeah. Okay."
Her dad liked me and felt he had a connection with me because
of his own showbiz experience. Art also liked his beer, which was
something we definitely had in common. So there was an affinity.
But not with her mother. When I told her, "I'm going to marry your
daughter," she looked like she'd gone into shock. I don't know if she
disliked me. She was kind of reserved. Probably she was just very
skeptical of me—a comedian who worked in nightclubs? Where
would that lead? But she saw her daughter was happy with me and
for once dropped the adamant thing.
At least she made Brenda's wedding dress.
Then it was off to New York, For two reasons: to introduce her to
my neighborhood and to meet my mother. In that order: getting a
good review from my old gang was the most important. The place
I picked for her debut appearance was a terrific White Harlem bar
called the Moylan Tavern.
The Moylan was on a street that's long gone called Moylan Place.
Right under the El, off Broadway near 125th Street. They built a
project over it.
It was the classic New York saloon. Being on the common border of several neighborhoods, it had great cross-cultural influences.
There were blacks and Puerto Ricans of all trades, seminarians from
the Jewish Theological Seminary and Union Theological Seminary, Irish construction workers, cops, firefighters, students and
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professors from the Juilliard School of Music, Columbia and Teachers College, retired pensioners and young Irish bucks trying to earn
their wings, every type of New Yorker rubbing up against one another and most of the time in a peaceful manner.
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