Seven Dirty Words (21 page)

David Tillotson was a young lawyer who understood the cultural revolution Pacifica represented. While still in law school in the mid-1960s, he had served in a summer program at Arent Fox. After graduating he took a job in the Latin American bureau of the Agency for International Development, but his post was soon abolished because of what his superiors felt were Tillotson’s leftist sympathies. He returned to the law firm in time for the license hearing for the Houston and D.C. stations. The unusual hearing, the attorneys believed, was less an administrative review than a referendum on Pacifica’s pattern of behavior and a blatant violation of the network’s First Amendment rights. Tillotson had his first taste of playing hardball with the commission when he was asked to draft a petition for extraordinary relief from the hearing. To the lawyers’ amazement, the petition was granted. The FCC backed off, and the network got its new licenses.

With Arent Fox on their side, in mid-1975 WBAI and Pacifica appealed the FCC’s ruling in the Carlin case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, arguing that the reprimand would have a chilling effect on future broadcasts. The FCC countered that its obligation to protect minors from inappropriate subjects took precedence over the station’s First Amendment rights.

At the appellate level, Plotkin and his associates found a sympathetic court. “I don’t remember a tremendous amount of sparring over those arguments,” recalls Tillotson. The young lawyer was especially proud of an appendix to the brief that he had filed, which featured copious examples of “indecent” words used in respectable newspapers and magazines (including the
Washington Post
, which had recently quoted a White House photographer saying his trip to Vietnam had been “really shitty”) and in literary works, including the Bible (featuring a Latinized version of one of Carlin’s Seven Words,
pisseth
) and Hemingway (“We had more wire strung than there were cunts in Texas”). The FCC ruling was “overbroad,” two of the three appellate justices determined. The decision set the stage for Carlin’s historical moment—the Supreme Court hearing of
FCC v. Pacifica
. The comedian’s rhetorical question—What, in fact, does it mean to have freedom of speech in this country?—was going to get a hearing. Better yet, he was not required to participate. Unlike Lenny Bruce, who drove himself to the brink by obsessing over his legal problems, Carlin himself was not on trial. He could sit back and watch, knowing that his comic premise—the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television”—had forced the judicial system to interpret precisely what sort of jurisdiction the FCC could claim when it came to taboo language.

THE CASE would not be argued before the Supreme Court until April 1978, nearly five years after the WBAI broadcast. In the meantime Carlin had a career to pursue, much of which still required him to watch his language.

He was making regular appearances on
The Midnight Special
, Burt Sugarman’s late-night rock ’n’ roll showcase, which aired Fridays on NBC, after Carson. The director was Stan Harris, who had worked on
The Smothers Brothers
and a short-lived precursor to
Midnight Special
called
The Music Scene
. Jeff Wald had leverage with the show, which was an ideal forum for Carlin’s new direction, with its hip musical guests and raspy radio veteran Wolfman Jack at the announcer’s microphone. After the pilot was sold, Helen Reddy hosted the inaugural episode in early 1973, with Carlin and Kenny Rankin making guest appearances. Two years later Reddy took over for a year as the sole regular host in the show’s nine-year history. Carlin, the third comic invited to host the show, after Cosby and Pryor, was a frequent master of ceremonies until 1977, sharing the stage with Waylon Jennings, Glen Campbell, Lou Rawls, and many others. At one point he secured a billing for his friends in Travis Shook and Club Wow.

“I wanted to talk a little bit about words,” he said during one segment for the show. “Words are—well, they’re everything. They’re true to you. They betray you. They say too much. They don’t say enough.” From the particular focus of the “Seven Words,” he was unraveling his own clinical fascination with the entire language. For this appearance he stuck to a lighthearted analysis of nonsense words and phrases that we don’t often stop to consider—
Kit and caboodle
.
Odds and ends. This, that and the other
. “I’ll take this, and that.” “You gotta get the other—it’s a set.” It was the sort of linguistic deconstruction he would later develop into a comic trademark.

His brief run with Wald and Ron De Blasio was coming to an end. Wald had stepped aside from artist management, concentrating on promoting his wife’s blooming singing career. He still saw Carlin, his fellow New Yorker, socially. They took their daughters to horse-riding lessons in Malibu together. Carlin invested in the farm; one time Wald got testy with the rancher. “I was gonna go up and shoot him on behalf of me and George,” he claims.

De Blasio stuck with Carlin for another year or so. By this time the manager was handling the career of Freddie Prinze, a fast-rising comic who would soon be starring in the NBC sitcom
Chico and the Man
. (Prinze, who committed suicide in 1977, was once romantically linked to Lenny Bruce’s daughter, Kitty.) De Blasio was also on the verge of signing Richard Pryor. With his manager concentrating his efforts elsewhere, Carlin drifted into an arrangement with Monte Kay at Little David. Jack Lewis, Kay’s right-hand man, handled the day-to-day obligations. Working with Lewis came naturally, as they were often on the road together. “There were no hard feelings,” says De Blasio. “He was very comfortable with Jack Lewis.”

But Lewis was a bit of a wild man, not exactly a great influence. Lewis, says Franklin Ajaye, a budding comedian who signed with Little David after cutting two albums for A&M, was “a very eccentric guy. Monte was very quiet, business-oriented. Very mild-mannered. Jack was kind of crazy and loud.” Rankin, too, despite his gentle singing style, had a wild streak, says Ajaye, who often opened for Rankin when the guitarist wasn’t on the road opening for Carlin.

While a law student at Columbia University, Ajaye had broken into comedy in the early 1970s by studying Carlin, Klein, and Pryor. Booked into the Playboy Club in San Francisco for a week, he had trouble connecting with the clientele. He had quit his job at a clothing store to take the gig. “It wasn’t really a progressive place,” he says. “I could only make the Bunnies and the band laugh.” Told to shave his beard (“Comedians don’t wear beards”), he protested. “George Carlin wears a beard,” he said. “It was exactly the kind of place in those days that George wouldn’t want to play. I got fired.”

Little David had a small carpeted office on Sunset Boulevard, on the second floor of a Tudor-style stucco building that once housed an upscale auto dealership. Kay welcomed casual visits from the artists on his roster, who sat around with their feet up on the desks. “Monte was a very good business man. He cut very good deals,” Ajaye says.

His whole thing was creative freedom. Whatever you wanted to do, he gave you that freedom, and he tried to find the places that made it work. Obviously George couldn’t play the swanky clubs anymore. It was almost like they created a market, which was the college kids. It was a very passionate time to be a comedian, a thinking time.

Yet the seventies were also clearly a decade of hedonism. Years of high tension over civil rights, Vietnam, and the generation gap were giving way to cultural fatigue, and seemingly relentless bad news such as the 1973 energy crisis and Watergate made many disgusted citizens long for oblivion. And comedy reflected that feeling.
Occupation: Foole
was nominated for a Grammy, alongside Cosby’s
Fat Albert
, Klein’s debut, and albums from
National Lampoon
and the impressionist David Frye. The award winner, however, was
Los Cochinos
, the third album from the stoner comics Cheech and Chong.

For his fourth album with Little David, Carlin moved away from the boyhood nostalgia that had dominated
Class Clown
and
Occupation: Foole
.
Toledo Window Box
, named for an imaginary strain of homegrown dope, had a cover image of the comic in a T-shirt illustrated with a bushy pot plant. On the back, the picture on the T-shirt was reduced to two barren stems, and Carlin had a bleary-eyed, blissfully vacant expression on his face. (The T-shirt drawings were by Drew Struzan, an album-cover artist who would soon be widely noted for his iconic movie posters for George Lucas and others.)

Recorded in July 1974 at Oakland’s art deco-style Paramount Theatre, a lavishly designed former movie house, on
Toledo Window Box
the comedian was idly thinking up “goofy shit,” with little design or theme. Other than brief bits on “God” (a primitive draft of the skeptic’s rant that would end up as one of Carlin’s last notable routines, “He’s Smiling Down”) and “Gay Lib,” social issues were almost entirely absent from the set. With one eye on the new kings of comedy, Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, Carlin riffed at length on drug use, poking around in nursery rhymes and fairy tales for illicit references. Snow White’s Seven Dwarves, he suggested, were all users: Sleepy was “into reds”; Doc was “the connection.” Carlin, encyclopedically knowledgeable about comedy, surely knew that Murray Roman had explored the same premise a few years earlier.

Though he spoke often about finding the real George Carlin in his material, on
Toledo Window Box
he relied more than usual on his stock voices, lapsing repeatedly into his seasoned New York accent and throwing in a little Wolfman Jack for good measure. He aired out a category that would become a Carlin staple, the absurdity of oxymorons—
jumbo shrimp
,
military intelligence
. And he frittered away much of the album on juvenilia such as snot (“The Original Rubber Cement”) and, once again, farts. The album went gold, Carlin’s fourth in a row to do so. Still, it was uninspired. The rush of his successful transformation was wearing off, and his binges were wearing him down. And Brenda was fighting her own battle, with alcoholism. She was involved in multiple incidents of drunk driving; at one point, before she went through rehab, her weight plummeted below ninety pounds. On a trip to Hawaii the couple were both so out of control that their daughter, not yet a teenager, felt compelled to write up a pact, demanding that they agree to stop using drugs. Putting Kelly in the middle of his and Brenda’s addictions was his “biggest regret,” Carlin recalled.

Within a few years Carlin would really be struggling to find a new direction for his work. “When I look back on those years,” says Chandler Travis, “as much fun as we had—and we did have a good time—I felt like if I’d been smoking a little less pot, I probably would have produced more and the music would’ve changed quicker. I think that’s true for George’s stuff as well. He got into the whole hippie thing. There were some years there when he didn’t know what was next. He wasn’t that anxious about it. I think if we weren’t all doping it up so much, he would’ve changed quicker.”

With the exception of a few staples—
The Tonight Show
,
Mike Douglas
—Carlin’s TV gigs were drying up. He did an appearance on Dinah Shore’s daytime show, and another on a Gladys Night and the Pips special that also featured Vegas regulars such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Robert Goulet. Worst of all, he did
Perry Como’s Holiday in Hawaii
.

The seasoned host, wearing a huge white lei around his neck, introduced the bearded comic so that he could have a few words. “Yeah, I got a few words for you,” Carlin teased, standing in front of the tiki torches. After breezing through a few innocuous words he joked were poorly coined—
hernia
should be “hisnia,”
migraine
should be “yourgraine”—he addressed the words with which he’d become inextricably linked, even for Como’s luau crowd. There are, he marveled, more words to describe dirty words (lewd, naughty, foul, vile, and so on) than there are dirty words themselves: “Imagine all those words
describing
dirty words, and all I could think of were seven of them.” He looked considerably less comfortable in a taped bit on the beach, in which he put on a Royal Navy officer’s tricornered hat and knee breeches to portray Captain James Cook in a sad adaptation of his long-dormant “Indian Sergeant” routine.

There was one exception to the network mediocrity he was subjecting himself to, which turned out to be a major one, although no one involved could be so sure at the time. NBC was looking for something to fill its late-Saturday time slot. For years network affiliates had been running Carson highlights on the weekends, but now the notoriously work-averse host wanted to reserve his best repeats to fill the additional weeknights he was planning to take off. Impressionist Rich Little was considered for a show, as was the game show panelist and host Bert Convy. Eventually, however, NBC president Herbert Schlosser decided to go with something different. He invited twenty-seven-year-old Dick Ebersol, an ABC executive who assisted Roone Arledge in that network’s powerful sports department, out to his home on Fire Island. Ebersol had just turned down Schlosser’s offer to run NBC Sports. Determined to get this guy in the fold somehow, the company president made an offer: How would Ebersol like to take a shot at Saturday night?

The young producer quickly decided the show should set itself apart from Carson, the king of late-night comedy, by appealing to the generation under thirty. To line up credibility for the project, he convinced Pryor to come aboard. Pryor’s commitment led to verbal agreements with Lily Tomlin and Carlin. But Pryor, who was growing increasingly distrustful of television and its restrictions, soon reneged.

Back to square one, Ebersol began discussing ideas with thirty-ish comedy writer and producer Lorne Michaels, who had written for Phyllis Diller,
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In
, and the Burns and Schreiber show. Michaels had also produced a pair of specials for Tomlin. He was enthusiastic, and told Ebersol that he wanted to create “the first show in the history of television to talk—absent expletives—the same language being talked on college campuses and streets.” The idea, he said, was to cross
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
with
60 Minutes
. Ebersol told Schlosser he wanted Michaels to produce the show.