Seven Dirty Words (7 page)

Bruce’s performance, including his onstage arrest, was recorded by
Playboy
, which was planning a feature story on the comic at the time. Hefner, working late at the Playboy Mansion, missed the show. “Shel Silverstein, one of my closest friends, who was living in the mansion at the time, was in the audience that night, and he came back and told me that Lenny had been arrested,” Hefner says. “In the days that followed, I gave Lenny my lawyer to defend him, and I gave him a neck-tie to wear. He didn’t own any ties.” Like many of Bruce’s fans, Hefner maintains that it was the comedian’s contempt for the Catholic Church—his signature bit “Religions, Inc.” in particular—that made him a target of law enforcement. They went after the drug talk and the four-letter words only because they were prohibited by the First Amendment from acting against his religious satire. “It remains for me unreal that it would be possible for someone to be arrested in the middle of a nightclub act, appearing in front of a completely adult audience,” says Hefner. “Chicago was a very Catholic city at the time. One of the cops said to him, ‘As a Catholic, I’m offended by you,’ and
Variety
picked up that quote. So it was very clear what was going on there.”

Carlin paid close attention to Bruce’s snowballing legal troubles as he went on with his own solo career. Brenda was often on the road with her peripatetic husband, laughing loudly from the back rows to boost his morale when the reaction of the crowds, especially for the late-night sets, left something to be desired. They traveled as far afield as Regina, Canada, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, so that Carlin could play small coffeehouses. At the Sacred Cow in Chicago, he had to compete with a brawl in the audience while he was doing his act. The club folded that week, during his run.

There were days when Carlin’s career seemed to be bottoming out. Walking with Brenda on Rush Street during one of their many layovers in Chicago, he blurted out his uncertainty. “Do you think anybody’s ever going to recognize me on the street?” he asked his wife. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Someday everybody’s going to know your name.”

In June 1963 the couple had a daughter, Kelly. Carlin called his old Shreveport roommate, Jack Walsh, to tell him the news. (The last time they’d seen each other, Walsh told his buddy he’d named his own daughter Kelly.) The Carlins had had difficulty getting pregnant for some time, and Brenda was diagnosed with a “tipped uterus.” Carlin often joked that their participation in a limbo contest at one of the Playboy Clubs tipped his wife’s uterus back just enough so that she could conceive.

With the baby in tow, life on the road quickly became untenable. In early 1964 the Carlins took an apartment in Mary’s building in Morningside Heights. Having earned just $11,000 the previous year and spent most of it on the road, the comedian decided the prudent thing to do would be to focus his energy on New York, where he could boost his reputation with steady nightclub work and, with a bit of luck, draw the attention of the network talent bookers, whose shows were still based in the city.

The nightlife in Greenwich Village was teeming with bohemia, as it had been for decades. Since the arrival of the neighborhood’s first espresso machine in the 1930s, coffeehouses had sprung up in what seemed like every other doorway, attracting a chess-playing, enlightenment-seeking, policy-debating clientele. Three decades later, many of these meeting places were luring customers by promoting events catering to the youthful folk-revival crowd.

By 1964 Bob Dylan, the Village folk scene’s most visible representative, had become a national phenomenon, with versions of his songs performed by Peter, Paul, and Mary and his onetime girlfriend, Joan Baez, introducing the shy guitarist’s thorny music to the mainstream. Aging radicals and self-serious campus philosophers rubbed elbows in the cafés and dive bars of Bleecker Street and the surrounding neighborhood with thrill-seekers from the outer boroughs and stifling small towns across the country. Folk mainstays such as Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs, and Fred Neil shared the stages at the Gaslight, Café Wha?, Gerde’s Folk City, and Bitter End with such future pop stars as Jose Feliciano, John Denver, and Emmylou Harris.

The neighborhood was crawling with creativity. At the Village Vanguard, Max Gordon’s long-running jazz room on nearby Seventh Avenue, contemplative musicians such as Bill Evans and John Coltrane settled in for long residencies. The Vanguard, the Gaslight, and other clubs had featured plenty of spoken-word acts during the heyday of the Beats. By 1964, however, the spoken-word acts were more apt to be angling for laughs.

“Greenwich Village was a way of looking at the world,” says comic actor Larry Hankin, who, with his odd-duck style, opened for the Blues Project during the band’s long residency at Café Au Go Go. “I would imagine it was like Montmartre when the Impressionists were there.”

The daytime show at Café Wha? was “an extravaganza of patchwork,” Dylan recalled, “a comedian, a ventriloquist, a steel drum group, a poet, a female impersonator, a duo who sang Broadway stuff, a rabbit-in-the-hat magician, a guy wearing a turban who hypnotized people in the audience, somebody whose entire act was facial acrobatics.” Musicians working the Village included a ukulele player and distinctive falsetto vocalist named Tiny Tim and a one-of-a-kind everyone knew as Moondog, a blind poet who played bamboo pipes and whistles in “a Viking helmet and a blanket with high fur boots.”

Weird was the norm in the Village, and the comedians represented it well. In his oversized spectacles and checked newsboy cap, a local legend named Stanley Myron Handelman made self-deprecation an art form. Bill Cosby, a student athlete from Philadelphia, broke in at the Gaslight in 1962 with an imaginary conversation between Noah and the Lord. David Frye, who did uncanny impressions of movie stars (George C. Scott, James Mason), liked to warm up in the bathroom before his sets. Sitting in a toilet stall one night, he startled a customer with his steady stream of familiar voices. “What kind of place you running here?” the disturbed patron asked the owner.

Another newcomer, raised by his grandmother in the brothel she ran in Peoria, Illinois, was a jittery young man named Richard Pryor. He made his Village debut at Manny Roth’s Café Wha? in 1963. Soon he was opening at the Village Gate for Nina Simone, who rocked the quivering comic like a baby to calm him down before his set each night. “In 1963, the Village was alive,” Pryor recalled. “Full of cats similar to me. A bunch of hobos looking for work.”

Carlin dove right into this cacophony of voices. He began by plying his trade at a handful of hootenannies, the folk crowd’s quaint name for an open mike night, at Café Wha? and the Bitter End. Across the street from the Bitter End was a red canopy advertising the entrance to Café Au Go Go. Down a flight of stairs and behind a full-length curtain, the good-sized room (capacity 350) featured a semicircular stage surrounded by butcher-block tables, with benches lining the walls. Murals depicting show folk hung on the brick walls. When Carlin first appeared at Café Au Go Go, the club had just been the target of a sting operation, with the New York district attorney’s office bagging the man who was butting heads with law enforcement officials across the country—Lenny Bruce.

The bleary-eyed Bruce had first been arrested for his use of language in October 1961, at Art Auerbach’s Jazz Workshop in San Francisco’s bohemian North Beach neighborhood. Onstage, he’d joked about his first gig in the city, just across Broadway at a small, dreary hideaway popular with gays and lesbians called Ann’s 440. “What kind of a show is it?” he’d asked his agent. “Well, it’s not a show,” his agent replied. “They’re a bunch of cocksuckers.”

Officer James Ryan had been assigned by his superior, Sergeant James Solden, to monitor the comedian’s performance at the Jazz Workshop. Ryan notified the sergeant about the use of the eleven-letter word; in between sets. Solden then approached Bruce and informed him he was going to jail. The police force was trying to clean up North Beach, he explained, and an entertainer using a word like
cocksuckers
was, he felt, part of the problem. Solden told the comedian he couldn’t envision “any way you can break this word down. Our society is not geared to it.”

“You break it down by talking about it,” Bruce replied.

Bruce had endured a number of arrests for drug possession in Philadelphia and Los Angeles by the time he arrived in the Village for ten nights of shows at Café Au Go Go in late March 1964. His third night at the club was attended by a license inspector named Herbert S. Ruhe, a former CIA agent in Vietnam, who frantically jotted phrases in a notebook as Bruce performed—“mind your asses,” “jack me off,” “nice tits.” Ruhe’s findings were just the sort of evidence District Attorney Frank Hogan was looking for. Hogan, an Irish Catholic moral crusader with close ties to Cardinal Francis Spellman, had been instrumental in bringing obscenity charges against Edmund Wilson’s 1946 story collection
Memoirs of Hecate County
. Hogan ordered four plainclothes vice-squad officers to attend Bruce’s next show, while he searched for a prosecutor on his staff who would be willing to take the case. Using a small wire recorder concealed on one of the officers, the patrolmen made a barely audible recording. They took the transcript to a grand jury, which authorized the arrest of Bruce and Café Au Go Go owner Howard Solomon on charges of violating Section 1140-A.

“But that’s prostitution,” Bruce protested the following night, as the officers intercepted the comic and the club owner in the dressing room just before the ten o’clock set. Don’t get technical, one of the officers countered, “It’s one of them numbers.” Now facing charges, Bruce defiantly fulfilled the rest of his commitment at the club, forging onward with his off-color jokes: He spelled out the offending words.

At Café Au Go Go, Carlin joined the pool of Lenny’s disciples, taking as little as $5 a night, sometimes just a burger, to keep the crowd occupied between musicians’ sets. Weekends were better, when he could make as much as $65 opening for a headliner like the pianist Bill Evans. Carlin set up shop in the club, working a total of ten weeks in 1964. Ochs, the rabble-rousing topical songwriter, was a regular. Jazz saxophonist Stan Getz introduced the New York audience to his new quartet at the club, recording an album there featuring the Brazilian singer Astrid Gilberto. With a piano onstage, Howard Solomon asked Bob Golden, a session guitarist who could play some fair piano, to sit in whenever special guests dropped in to try their hand at a song or two, which was often. “Just about anybody called a celebrity on the New York scene was there,” says Golden. “Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, people like that. I was the house band.”

After taking the stage at the café a few times, Carlin approached the piano player, who was evidently friendly with the owners and seemed to know most of the performers. “George came up to me and said, ‘I’ve been listening to you play, and you’re pretty good, and I know you’re making ten times as much as I am,’” Golden recalls. “‘But I know I’m ten times a better comic than you are a pianist’—which, of course, was very true—‘so how about becoming my manager?’ It was a life-changing moment for me.”

By this time Murray Becker was out of the picture. By some accounts, he’d gotten cold feet when Carlin was nearly pinched in Chicago for possession of marijuana. Years later one of Carlin’s friends briefly took on Becker as his manager. “You can be the next George Carlin if you listen to me,” Becker told him. “He had good things to say about George every step of the way,” claims the comic, “but it was said with onion breath. George abandoned him, was the way he said it.”

Golden, frustrated by the studio sessions he’d been getting, jumped at the chance to take on a new challenge. He thought this Carlin fellow was good, that he might be going places. “I was looking for something else to do with my life,” he says, “and he seemed to feel I knew my way around. He sensed that I could be helpful.” Ironically, Golden’s father had been all too familiar with Carlin long before his son and the comedian first met. The elder Golden owned a drugstore on 112th and Broadway, in Carlin’s neighborhood. When Bob mentioned the name of his new client, his father groaned. “He knew him as one of these reprobates who would come into his store late at night to scam drugs,” claiming he’d lost his prescription, Golden says with a laugh. To Golden’s father, giving up a promising career as a musician in favor of managing a two-bit comic with a hankering for mood-altering substances sounded like a lousy career move. “Needless to say,” says Golden, “after a few months of seeing George on TV, and then when George started doing
The Ed Sullivan Show
, that was a complete validation.”

At the time, however, the comedian was closer to food stamps than to Ed Sullivan’s stamp of approval. His idea was to develop a bit that would convince talent scouts he had one piece of material that was sure to go over well on the box. “Hunks,” they called them. Carlin, recalls Larry Hankin, who shared a manager with Woody Allen in those years, was better suited to television than most of his peers in the Village. Unlike those (like Hankin) who worked without a net—just “rapping,” with little preparation or forethought—Carlin fine-tuned his most promising routines, shaping them with an eye toward a four-minute spot in front of the cameras. “He had an incredible sense of the absurd,” says Hankin. “His characters were amazingly funny bozos.” Like Cosby and Allen, both of whom did time in the Greenwich Village clubs, Carlin was “
in
the Village, but not really
of
the Village,” says Hankin. “They had to go through there to see what was going on, but they were doing TV material. I don’t remember anybody else who could get on TV doing what they were doing in the Village, except those three.”

But television bookings were the ticket to lucrative headlining gigs, and none of the new wave comics was immune. “They all act like big non-conformists,” complained old-schooler Joey Adams, a traditional Borscht Belt comic, to
Time
magazine, “but they’re all aiming to get on the Ed Sullivan or Steve Allen show.” Professor Irwin Corey, who was already fifty by 1964, was more sympathetic to the new breed, who so evidently had been influenced by the uncertainties of the cold war. A madcap wordsmith who was blacklisted in Hollywood for his ties to the American Communist Party, Corey, like the truly outlandish Lord Buckley, a self-made aristocrat with gargantuan appetites and an unchecked id, was a kind of spiritual forefather to the next generation of satirists. “The future seems so precarious,” he said, “people are willing to abandon themselves to chaos. The new comic reflects this.”