Seven Dirty Words (4 page)

Although he was becoming a popular personality at KJOE, now that he was no longer in the Air Force, Carlin had no need to be in Louisiana. He packed up and returned to New York, enrolling in the Columbia School of Broadcasting. It took him all of two weeks to realize that he already had more than enough on-the-job training at KJOE to learn everything the school could teach him about broadcasting. He quit and headed right back to Shreveport, where he would stay for another year.

In radio, the typical objective for on-air talent was to keep moving into larger markets. Homer Odom, an acquaintance who later managed the Bay Area’s KABL for McLendon, offered Carlin a job with Boston’s WEZE, a “beautiful music”-style station and a network affiliate that broadcast NBC soap operas such as the long-running
Young Dr. Malone
. Carlin went up to Boston and took a job running the board—unglamorous duty that he justified by reminding himself he’d moved into a bigger radio market. It was here that he had his run-in with Cardinal Cushing. Spinning popular balladry and orchestrated pop songs by Perry Como, Tony Bennett, and their ilk in his part-time role as an after-hours disc jockey, the devoted R&B fan bridled. “I had to play that and keep a straight face and make believe I liked it,” he remembered. After three months he knew he was in the wrong place. When Carlin took the news van to New York, the furious station manager tracked him down at his mother’s apartment. There’d been a prison break at the new maximum security facility in Walpole that they should have covered. Prison breaks happen all the time, Carlin argued; they could cover the next one. “They thought that was a poor attitude for a professional,” he recalled. Sure enough, when he returned with the truck, he was unceremoniously relieved of his job.

The one bright spot of Carlin’s short stay in Boston was his instantaneous rapport with a WEZE newsman and Boston native named Jack Burns. Born in November 1933, Burns was almost four years older than Carlin. The two men shared an attitude toward the military: Burns, who spent his teen years living the peripatetic life of his father, an officer in the Air Force, realized he was no serviceman as soon as he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1952. After serving as a sergeant in Korea, he gladly took his discharge and headed back to Boston, where he studied acting and broadcasting at the old Leland Powers School of Radio and Theater in Brookline.

Jeremy Johnson, an aspiring actor who’d done a hometown Bob and Ray-style radio show with a partner before enrolling at the Powers School, met Burns there and quickly became a friend and drinking buddy. They first became acquainted on the set of a student-run radio comedy—“variety stuff,” recalls Johnson, like Fred Allen’s
Allen’s Alley
, primarily consisting of mock interviews with outlandish characters. “We used to go to parties together and drink—quite a bit, actually,” says Johnson. One time, after passing out on the floor and staying overnight, Johnson woke up and saw his friend still snoozing. He staggered to his feet, stood over Burns, and woke him up by putting the fear of God into the hung-over acting student: “I am omnipotent!” he boomed. “I am omnipresent!”

After graduating from Powers, Burns spent some time in New York, studying acting at Herbert Berghof’s studio and performing in an off-Broadway production of
Tea and Sympathy
, the controversial Robert Anderson play about an effeminate young man, originally directed on Broadway by Elia Kazan. Soon, however, he was back in Boston, where he took a job as a radio newsman. By the time Carlin arrived at WEZE, Burns was the station’s news director. Carlin, the newcomer, moved into an apartment with Burns and another roommate. While the New Yorker was jeopardizing his own livelihood in radio, Burns was establishing himself as a bona fide newsman, interviewing Senator John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, and traveling to Havana to interview Fidel Castro. “I was staying at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in Havana and it was . . . well, I really believe life is like a B-movie without the music,” Burns once recalled. “The blonde told me she was working with anti-Castro forces and she needed to use my telephone because hers was bugged. Fantastic! People with beards running around, carrying guns. The last I saw of the blonde was when they dragged her and the phone from my room. Somebody suggested it might be time for me to return to the States.”

After Boston, Carlin quickly landed on his feet. He heard from a Shreveport acquaintance who’d become a sales manager at KXOL, a competitor of McLendon’s KLIF in the Dallas-Fort Worth market. “Anybody who came to Dallas-Fort Worth knew that was the place to be in radio,” says “Dandy” Don Logan, a fellow Shreveport radio personality who spent some time in Texas himself. “It was a real hotbed for DJs. They had a lot of what they call ‘six-month wonders.’” Media figures who would become nationally recognized, such as CBS newsman Bob Schieffer, game show host Jim McKrell, and
The Price Is Right
announcer Rod Roddy, were all products of the Dallas-Fort Worth radio scene around Carlin’s time. Starting in July in the seven-to-midnight slot, Carlin took to calling it the “homework” shift, taking dedication requests from young lovebirds and peppering his banter every Friday night with the all-important high school football scores. “Developed great rapport with teenage listeners by not putting them on,” he wrote a decade later for an early press kit.

In between spinning new songs from singers such as Connie Francis, Bobby Darin, and Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon on
The Coca-Cola Hi-Fi Club
(later known as
The Teen Club
), Carlin began extending his comic premises on-air. KXOL was a popular station with local advertisers, known for its brisk in-house production of ads and jingles. The DJ who preceded Carlin each afternoon once did an entire hour so packed with commercials that he had time to play just one song, Carlin recalled, “and it still sounded like pure entertainment.” But during the evenings Carlin had relatively few commercial obligations, and he used the time to his advantage. “It was nice—the log book wasn’t very crowded, so you could have a little fun,” he recalled years later, in a tribute to the station. “It was so relaxed, in fact, that one night I did two whole hours in a British accent. Apparently, no one thought anything of it. . . . It was a chance to express my goofy self at night.”

“Everything George said was funny,” recalls Pat Havis, then a Fort Worth resident, a twenty-year-old divorcee and mother of a baby daughter, living on odd jobs and listening to her favorite DJ at night while she did the household chores. “He helped me laugh at myself, and everything in general.” Though a newcomer to Texas, Carlin was quickly established as an asset for KXOL. His name was prominently featured in ads on benches at bus stops across the city, says Havis. One of Carlin’s recurring bits, the “Hippie-Dippy Weatherman,” depicted a gently addled hippie character years before the long-haired, glassy-eyed hippie archetype came into mainstream usage. (The term
hippie
, generally presumed to have been adopted by Beat Generation hipsters in reference to their younger collegiate followers, was not yet widely recognized, though by some accounts it had been used on the radio as early as 1945 by Stan Kenton, one of Carlin’s musical heroes.) Carlin’s Weatherman sounded as though Maynard G. Krebs, Bob Denver’s absent-minded, bongo-playing jazzbo on
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
, had taken up meteorology. Adopting the deliberate, bemused voice of a chronic stoner (without making explicit references to marijuana), the disc jockey offered absurd parodies of weather reports, just as Henry Morgan had a decade earlier.

Within a matter of weeks, Carlin’s career took a serendipitous turn. Arriving unannounced at the station one day was Jack Burns, his short-term Boston roommate, who explained that he was en route to Hollywood, hoping to give the entertainment industry “one last chance at me.” He had an idea that he might become the next James Dean, Carlin recalled. By sheer coincidence, one of the station’s news-casting positions had become available the day before, and Carlin convinced his friend to take it, at least temporarily. Badly in need of new tires for his car, Burns accepted, and he immediately began delivering five-minute news broadcasts during Carlin’s evening program.

They took a place together at the Dorothy Lane Apartments in Fort Worth’s historic Monticello neighborhood, and their conversations picked up where they’d left off in Boston. Mostly they talked about the things that made them both laugh. Comedy in America was undergoing some radical changes at the time. Mort Sahl was already established as the next generation’s politico humorist, an off-the-cuff cold war commentator with a trademark newspaper tucked under his arm. His grad-student analyses of global politics and the American system were a wholesale shift from the broad gags of Gleason and Uncle Miltie. The jokes of the new comedians were crafted for insiders—campus current events connoisseurs and coffee shop intellectuals. “If things go well, next year we won’t have to hold these meetings in secret,” Sahl joked. His humor had a whiff of grad school about it, as he ad-libbed lofty barbs about fleeting political role-players and policy communiqués.

Other comics were bringing Freudian analysis and frank talk about the sorts of things previously reserved for private company onto the spartan stages of San Francisco’s legendary hungry i in North Beach and its big-city counterparts in Chicago and New York. Many guardians of good manners felt affronted, just as the new comedians intended. Lenny Bruce, the onetime strip-club emcee, was fast becoming “the most successful of the new sickniks,” as
Time
magazine declared in a July article on comedy’s emerging emphasis on previously
verboten
subjects such as sex, race, religion, and morality. The Compass Players, a group of improvisational comics with ties to the University of Chicago, opened their permanent theatrical home, the Second City, in 1959. One of their alumni, Shelley Berman, debuted his neurotic humor that year on the album
Inside Shelley Berman
, for which the “onetime Arthur Murray dance instructor with a face like a hastily sculpted meatball,” as one writer put it, won the first-ever comedy Grammy award. And a husky Ohioan named Jonathan Winters, a “roly-poly brainy-zany” whose mountainous head seemed overstuffed with caricatures, had recently become a regular on Jack Paar’s
Tonight Show
, bewildering viewers with his loony menagerie of ordinary people, all nearly as bizarre in their own way as the manic-depressive who channeled them.

For two sharp-witted young men who shared a predilection for subversion, the comedy renaissance of the late 1950s was at least as thrilling as a run-in with a mysterious blonde in Castro’s Cuba. Unlike the old Borscht Belt burlesque men, who were more or less interchangeable—bellyaching, as Carlin often noted, about middle-of-the-road indignities such as crabgrass, “kids today,” wives, and mothers-in-law—the new wave of comics “began to emerge with significant identities of their own. Shelley Berman couldn’t do Mort Sahl’s act. Mort Sahl couldn’t do Lenny Bruce’s act. They were just different.” What each of these men did was to challenge authority, the establishment, “the country itself. We were drawn to that.”

Up to this point Carlin, still only twenty-two, had been effectively apolitical. Though he’d begun questioning the church’s authority from a young age, he’d grown up blindly accepting his mother’s belief in the strict jingoism of newspaper commentators such as Walter Winchell and Westbrook Pegler. Pegler, a featured writer for the sensation-minded Hearst syndicate, was a Roman Catholic sometimes accused of anti-Semitism, a prominent foe of labor unions, communism, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. “In my home Westbrook Pegler and Joe McCarthy were gods, and I picked up a lot of that,” Carlin once explained. For him, Burns “opened the door” to political enlightenment. “I began to realize that the right wing was interested in things and the left wing was interested in people, that one was interested in property rights and the other was interested in human rights. I began to see the error of what was handed to me through the Catholics, through the Irish-Catholic community, through my mother, through the Hearst legacy in our family.”

Burns recognized an opportunity to affect Carlin’s unexamined way of thinking. “At that time George was fairly conservative,” he later told the writer Richard Zoglin. “I always had a progressive agenda. I thought it was the duty of an artist to fight bigotry and intolerance. We had long, interesting conversations, good political discussions.” They also, by Carlin’s account, spent plenty of time sitting around the apartment in their underwear after their radio shifts, drinking beer (Jax, or Lone Star), listening to long-playing comedy records, and watching Paar on
The Tonight Show
. Their “comedy affinity,” as Carlin put it, naturally led to the makings of an act together, as they impersonated the voices on the comedy albums they spun endlessly and improvised mock interviews, Bob and Ray style, with a repertoire of oblivious blowhards.

By the time they felt ready to go public with their act, Burns and Carlin had developed a stable of wrongheaded, inflexible stock characters of the kind that would later achieve infamy with
All in the Family
’s Archie Bunker. As local radio personalities, the pair went from fantasy comedy duo to actual stage time almost literally overnight. The place to be in Fort Worth in 1959 was the Cellar, a basement-level “coffeehouse” just opened beneath a hotel at 1111 Houston Street. Serving vodka and whiskey on the sly in paper cups, the Cellar was the open-mike playroom of Pat Kirkwood, a race car driver who, according to local legend, won the room in a poker game, and Johnny Carroll, a true rock ’n’ roll lunatic who was good friends with rockabilly star Gene Vincent and had once been signed by Sun Records. Thrashing at his electric guitar while seated behind a drum kit, stomping on the kick drum and the high-hat pedal, Carroll was a howling, overstimulated one-man band. Fueled by Desoxyn tablets hidden in a metal ashtray stand, the rockabilly wildcat ran the club as an anything-goes showcase, paying amateur dancers with booze and frequently giving the stage over to “King George Cannibal Jones,” an eccentric junk percussionist named George Coleman who later recorded as Bongo Joe. “You must be weird or you wouldn’t be here,” read one scrawl on the blackboard-style wall of the club.