Last Words by George Carlin
the rest of my days: "I once followed the skating chimpanzees."
Terrified I always was, but I did do some ballsy and reckless things
on Sullivan. It was traditional for comedians to try out a bit in clubs
to see if it worked and then do it on Sullivan. I tried out things on
Sullivan and if they worked, I'd do them in clubs.
Some of them didn't. Once I brought my brother on. Pat had
never been in front of an audience in his life. Very verbal man, lots
of laughs in private, but no experience whatsoever being funny in
public for money. I wrote a piece using an old character from the
Burns and Carlin days, a corrupt senator called Frebish. Pat was a
newsman, interviewing me. We sat at a desk so that if he dried up,
he could read the questions.
The plan was, Ed would do an intro, Ray Block, leader of the orchestra, would play a short sting, Pat would say, "Good evening, this
is (whatever the funny show name was) and I'm here with Senator
Frebish . . ."
Ed does his intro and . . . Ray Block forgets to play the music
sting. So Pat and I sit there live in front of 50 million people for what
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seems like two months. I hiss: "Go ahead! Start!" Pat looks blank—
where's the music? Eventually, after another month, he starts and
of course the piece just went totally in the sewer. And it wasn't that
funny to start with.
Vegas, on the other hand, was a cinch. I had this act—which was
essentially my 1967 album—that I wasn't really in, so it was easy. All
I had to do was turn it on and let it run. I was a cute, clever, presentable guy and I had a nice double-breasted jacket. I was good-looking
without being overpoweringly handsome, neat hair, slim figure.
And articulate. I said what I said well. I knew how to do those characters and those voices and those radio announcers and those ladies
on TV. I was a nicely packaged commodity, slick, entertaining. I
could give them what they wanted for how long they wanted.
Well, perhaps not quite. When I first played Vegas at the Flamingo in 1966, opening for Jack Jones, my contract laid out very
specifically the time I was to do: nineteen minutes. I thought: "Fuck
nineteen minutes! This is my first night ever in Vegas. This is an
important moment. If I'm going good I'm going till I'm done!"
The audience is fantastic and I end up doing twenty-two
minutes—three minutes over the contract. I come back to the
dressing room and there waiting for me is a male mountain with a
conspicuous bulge in his jacket. He very calmly and slowly tells me
that my three extra minutes have cost the owner of the Flamingo,
Mr. X (I've blanked on the name), some fucking staggering amount
of money in the high six figures (which now would be ten to fifteen times that). They calibrated exactly how much the casino was
earning every single minute of the day. The man-mountain lets me
know that in the future I do not want Mr. X to be "disappointed."
And I have no illusion as to what this means. Part of this woolly
mammoth's job description is rubbing out opening acts who do
more than nineteen minutes and dumping them in the desert. Despite growing up on some pretty mean streets, it was the scariest
fucking moment of my life. From then on I never did a nanosecond
over nineteen minutes.
The real point being: I could do exactly nineteen minutes or ex1 3 0
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actly twenty-nine or thirty-nine. I was by now a consummate pro. I
could do whatever you wanted. Piece of cake.
A random scan of my bookings for '66/'67 shows names like: the
Flamingo, the Cocoanut Grove, The Hollywood Palace, The Perry
Como Show, The Jackie Gleason Show, Lake Tahoe, The Dean Mar-
tin Show and on and on. Next stop on this track I change rny name
to Jackie Carlin, buy some white shoes, gold chains and pinkie rings
and I ' m set for life.
What was happening to me internally was that I'd got not just
seeds of doubt, but saplings of doubt sprouting inside me. About
my acting of course, but about all my goals, about being on this
rigid track, about being rewarded more and more for being cute and
clever and funny.
But not for being George Carlin.
And there was something else too that I could see happening, but
didn't know how to change, that was just as related to the track I was
speeding along on and to the doubt and discontent it caused me.
After Burns and Carlin broke up, Brenda and I were together all
the time. She devoted herself to me and my comedy. She helped
me with the details and logistics, booked travel, kept the books,
made suggestions, she was my sounding board, she sat in every club
I played every night, whether there was one person or it was packed.
She celebrated when I did well, she was there to hold my hand when
things sucked. We did a lot of holding hands.
On the road our days didn't vary much. We wouldn't get up till
eleven or twelve; eat breakfast, hang around and watch TV. If we
were in a city we wanted to see, we'd get out a bit and walk around.
We were confined somewhat because we didn't have much money
to spend. But we were carefree, we did crazy stuff, we kept on clicking as we had at first.
I couldn't be there when Brenda was in Dayton getting ready to
have Kelly. I did fly in when she was actually born and I was up on
a ladder taking pictures when she was just a few minutes old. I felt
bad that I had to leave and go back on the road. I could tell Brenda
wasn't happy.
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But she didn't let that get in her way. When Kelly was just two and
half months old—they were back in New York by then—she packed
her up and they came down to meet me in Florida. That was Kelly's
first road trip. From then on for the next three years, it was just like
before, except there were three of us now. We were together all the
time, on the road or back in New York. And just like before, Brenda
was my manager and bookkeeper, collaborator and comforter.
Then the day after we got to L.A. in March 1966, I had to go to
work on preproduction for Kraft Summer Music Hall. Brenda was
left alone with Kelly, who was not yet three. Suddenly she had nothing to do. She knew no one. She had nowhere to go. So she got
drunk.
She started getting terrible migraine headaches—a pretty good
indicator of stress and tension. But I missed the marker. And she
wasn't inactive. She volunteered at a hospital and she did one big
thing in L.A. that she'd always wanted to try but we couldn't afford till then: take flying lessons. She passed her tests, she became
proficient. But she was used to sharing her accomplishments with
me, and I wasn't there for her to share it. I was too busy. Instead of
boosting her confidence it became a source of resentment. So she
got drunk.
There was a woman in our first apartment house who was a
model, so she was home a lot between calls. She began to come over
and hang with Brenda and they drank in the afternoon. I didn't find
out about that until later; there w
realize. I was getting too busy too quickly. Or perhaps I didn't want
to know or realize. Marijuana can do that to you.
Brenda was used to being out on the road with me, doing everything with me and for me. Now I had agents and a manager and
people who handled booking and flights and money. They'd taken
her place. She told me later that there was a point in '67 when she literally couldn't sign her own name. She just couldn't write the words
"Brenda Carlin." She was losing her identity. So she got drunk.
With me on the road, or sitting around some fucking TV studio
for days on end, she had to be mother and father to Kelly. Then I'd
come home with an armful of presents and it would be: "Daddy's
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home! Fun time!" Which cast her as the domestic tyrant, the one
who said No. Time for bed. Time for school. She hated being that.
So she got drunk.
I don't remember when Brenda's drinking became something
more than Brenda drinking something. But I do know we began to
fight. She would say she felt like a piece of furniture. That I was just
walking around her as if she weren't there. I didn't know what she
meant. I just swallowed everything. You have to be aware of feelings
before you can deny them and push them down. In a lot of ways,
for a lot of reasons, I wasn't even aware of my own feelings. The
ones that would manage to break through, I would immediately say:
"That can't be."
We'd notice odd things about Kelly. We'd find her sleeping on
the floor in the morning, instead of in the bed. We never understood why at the time. And Kelly couldn't watch me on television.
She'd put her head down so she couldn't see me on the screen. She
couldn't handle it for some reason. We didn't understand that either.
There was something about me and Brenda's chemistry that we
didn't have to consciously say, "We'll stick this out for our child, we
have to make this work." We felt bound together. In spite of all that
was going on there was an inevitability about that. I never had a
thought of leaving Brenda. There was a feeling that the good times
were still good enough. And often, when she* was sober, which was
in the morning of course, she'd sound really sensible. She'd say,
"Yeah, I'm going to watch that." It was still just the beginning of
things. And I was smoking a lot of pot. I could hardly blame her for
drinking to keep up.
So there we were: a successful young couple with plenty of
money, a nice house in Beverly Hills. With a mountain of grass. And
a lake of booze. And a beautiful daughter who couldn't watch her
daddy do what he did for a living.
I always said Kelly has an old soul. Perhaps even then, in the wisdom of her four years on earth, she sensed that I was on a treadmill
to nowhere. Without a clue how to get off.
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THE LONG EPIPHANY
On June 5, 1968, just after midnight, while I was working at
Bimbo's 365 Club in San Francisco with Lana Cantrell, Robert Kennedy was shot dead at the Ambassador Hotel down
in L.A. I told them I wasn't going on for the second show. They—
whoever They were, Bimbo I guess—insisted that I go on. No way.
In fact I decided as I watched the coverage through the night that I
wasn't going back the next night either. Fuck Bimbo.
Then the Chicago convention police riot happened and that
brought people down on one side or the other with more firmness
than they might've had before. I was no exception.
It's funny but I never find myself responding very much to events
of great magnitude. There's a part of me that knows that's exactly
what's supposed to happen. I will sometimes marvel at the timing or
circumstances or setting or the individuals involved. "Weird" is the
word that occurs to me most often. "That's fucking weird." W e i r d but never unexpected.
I didn't respond with rage to any of what was happening in 1968.
Dr. King's murder in April was depressingly predictable. There was
a sinking feeling: that something good was ebbing away and being
encouraged in that direction by the usual forces. The establishment
was winning—its war, its assassins, its secret government—and that
fact overpowered and debilitated me more than it enraged me.
I've always been the kind of person—whether it comes from being half shanty, half lace-curtain Irish I don't know—who needs to
be changed, rather than instigating change myself. I could never
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make life-changing decisions in a split-second. I'm always open to
change but I need to have it happen in a natural, organic, timely
fashion.
I always say that everything in nature works very, very slowly.
Okay, what about a volcano? Well, an eruption may seem like splitsecond drama, but it's actually the end result of a long process that's
gone on for years far below the earth's surface. My change when it
came was like that, drawn out over several years, then exploding in
a series of eruptions.
By now—1968 and '69—everything about my comedy seemed
rote. On the Smothers Brothers, where I remember feeling at home,
feeling we'd taken over, where even the things about the show that
were the same, such as blocking and standing around like a dick
for hours, had a different flavor. . . even there, on the only comedy
show that was actually taking a stand against the war, I did . . . "The
Indian Sergeant."
Why the fuck didn't I sit down a month before and write something daring for Tommy Smothers?
One time I did do something revolutionary and subversive—
without even realizing it. For The Jackie Gleason Show I'd written
a piece, which aired in January 1969, called "The J. Edgar Hoover
Show."
. . . with Ramsey Clark and the Orchestra and the Joe Valachi
Singers and, special guest, Joe Bananas' sister Chiquita!
Naturally, I played host J. Edgar Hoover:
I just came from a stakeout. It was backyard barbecue. Ha ha
ha! Laugh it up or we'll lock you up! Time to meet the guys who
really make the show possible—the rotten, vicious criminals . . .
Let's take a look at Pretty Boy C l i f f , (holds up a picture of a
gorilla) C l i f f is four foot eight and weighs 3 50 pounds. Other
than that he has no distinguishing features. C l i f f is wanted for
stealing a circus train and attempting to drive it to Havana. He
fancies himself a lady-killer—and so do the police . . . They've
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THE LONG EPIPHANY
got the lady to prove it. . . Join us again tomorrow night when
our guest might be someone hiding out near you. If he is tune us
in, turn him in, and drop out. . . of sight!
Apart from that mildest of dope references in the last line, about
as harmless a piece of TV fluff as you could imagine. Nonetheless,
as I discovered thirty years later, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, it got my FBI file started. Apparently a week after the airing
the director himself received a copy of a letter which a Mr. (NAME
BLACKED OUT),
on appearance of one George Carlin, an alleged comedian . . . and
that the subject of Carlin's material was the FBI and Mr. Hoover and
that his treatment of both was shoddy and in shockingly bad taste."
BuFiles, it appeared, contained "no information identifiable with
Carlin." But the best part of the covering letter was the kicker: "The
[Miami] Office advised that from their prior contacts with Jackie
Gleason and specifically with Mr. Hank Meyers, Gleason's Public
Relations Director, who is also an SAC Contact [i.e., an FBI stoolie],
they are of the opinion that Gleason holds the Director and the FBI
in the highest esteem and that Gleason himself thinks that the Director is one of the greatest men who has ever lived."
How different my life might've been if I'd known the FBI considered me the satirical equivalent of Huey Newton. As it was, the most
revolutionary thing I did at the time was fly to London to do . . . This
Is Tom Jones.
It was a particularly low point. Like all other guests we had a suite
in the Dorchester. So Brenda and I decided to have a party. In the
suite that night were Jim Brown, a bunch of musicians, including
Mama Cass—and Mia Farrow. (Nobody knew it was Mia Farrow,
because she didn't say anything—just sat there under a big hat. After
she left, somebody said: "Wasn't that Mia Farrow?") Mama Cass
had her aide-de-camp with her, which I thought was a really cool
thing to call your assistant. And Jim Brown was very angry about a
lot of shit. Which I certainly understood.
I was wearing a suit. I was awkward and goofy. It was my party
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but I felt really out of place. I was living with a lot of private misery.
All these fucking stupid TV shows with all that lighting shit, meaningless banter, all that garbage, all that wasted time and energy.
My brilliant act, which was doing so well, had nowhere to go. I was
writing and performing material that went around in circles, media material taking off on media form, television about television.