Seven Dirty Words (12 page)

Later in the program he joined the hosts—all three dressed in matching red turtlenecks and black slacks—in a peppy rewrite of folk songwriter Tom Paxton’s “Daily News,” interspersed with comic vignettes drawn from newspaper headlines. One, “Church Split on Birth Control,” gave Carlin a chance to appear onstage in a priest’s collar. Dick Smothers, playing a reporter, noted that the priest was liberal, having just gotten married. How did the Father feel about the Pope’s denunciation of birth control? Oh, Carlin replied, he could never contradict the Pope on birth control. But what if he should find out that his wife has been taking the Pill? “Well, I think I’d have to file for divorce,” he joked. Corny, but like Krassner’s “Fuck Communism” sticker, it was also a succinct jab at institutional hypocrisy. Although he was still going through the whole song and dance just to get the opportunity, little by little he was slipping social commentary into his comedy.

In the strange brew of 1960s culture, at the intersection of thread-bare vaudevillian showmanship and staged
Laugh-In
-style anarchy, there might have been no other way for him to advance his craft. “The art’s gotta be out there before you can put the content in,” says Tom Smothers. “If you’re singing protest songs, you better be a fuckin’ good singer. And you better be funny if you’re gonna do social commentary.” Hollywood had accepted the thirty-one-year-old Carlin as a funny guy. Now he was ready to let his hair down.

5

THE CONFESSIONAL

I
t was simple, solipsistic advice, useful nevertheless: “The more you know about yourself, the more you stand to learn.” As Carlin strained to balance his fast-moving career with his growing impulse to be true to his comedy, he heard this axiom on, of all places, a game show. On a short-lived Chuck Barris creation called
The Game Game
, ordinary people matched wits with a celebrity panel, answering a series of questions designed to illuminate their personal psychologies. How do you vote: by party, issues, candidates, or the advice of friends? What traits, if any, do the people you’ve dated share? How do you choose your toothpaste?

Sitting alongside actor Andrew Prine and
Valley of the Dolls
author Jacqueline Susann, his slicked hair curling at the edges, Carlin strained for geniality as he endured the excruciating twenty-three-minute taping. Answering a weird question about how the contestants would handle a potential housemate accused of “unruly behavior,” he replied that it wouldn’t bother him. “I’m not very ruly,” he explained.

His unruly urges were beginning to show. Making his second appearance on the Gleason show in January 1969, Carlin managed to attract the attention of the FBI. Introduced by the host as “a real oddball,” Carlin wondered why incidental television programming—the test pattern, or the sign-off hour “Star-Spangled Banner”—was never nominated for Emmy Awards. Having laid out the premise, Carlin imagined that the FBI’s late-night “Most Wanted” report had a production budget like
The Tonight Show
’s. His mock host, “J. Edgar Moover,” then performed a monologue of aggressively bad jokes: “Did you hear the one about the two guys planning to rob a bank? So did we. We put ’em in jail.”

Several days after the broadcast, Gleason’s office received two letters of complaint. “The crime wave is not a subject for levity or humor,” wrote the first aggrieved viewer, from Dallas, “and the Department of Justice is not a subject to be made fun of, any more than it would be proper to make light of the U.S. Constitution. The hippies and the yippies might be taking serious things lightly but the majority of the people in the United States are law abiding citizens and do not appreciate anyone making fun of crime.” The second letter, sent from Connecticut, referenced the appearance by “an individual named George Carlin. I believe he was supposed to be a comedian.” Carlin’s spoof, wrote the viewer, “was shoddy, in shockingly bad taste, and certainly not the sort of thing one would expect on your show.” The correspondent then noted that he was a former special agent of the FBI.

In the field of law enforcement there are no more respected names than the Federal Bureau of Investigation and J. Edgar Hoover. In the field of entertainment there is no greater personality than Jackie Gleason. It’s a shame that a third-rate hanger-on would use the generosity of one to belittle the reputation of the other.

An internal FBI memorandum ultimately determined that the appearance of this “third-rate hanger-on” “was in very poor taste,” and that “it was obvious that he was using the prestige of the Bureau and Mr. Hoover to enhance his performance.” The author of the memo proceeded to (clumsily) document part of Carlin’s routine, bringing to mind Lenny Bruce’s exasperation when he had to listen to the detective in his New York obscenity trial fumble his own material in court. Bureau files, the deputy noted, “contain no information identifiable with Carlin.” The Miami FBI office, which acknowledged prior contact with Gleason and his PR man, Hank Meyers, helped settle the matter by filing the helpful addendum that Gleason himself “thinks that the Director is one of the greatest men who has ever lived.”

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.”