Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [107]
He was similarly proud of his work on a made-for-television miniseries adapted from Larry McMurtry’s book Streets of Laredo, the last installment of the Lonesome Dove series. Working for Joseph Sargent, who directed the original New York City subway thriller The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Carlin played Billy Williams, a grizzled old Texas knockabout with a pronounced limp, a fringed jacket, and a thin layer of grime that wouldn’t wash off. Billy has a soft spot for Maria Garza, whose estranged son, a ruthless bandit, is sought by the bounty hunter Captain Call, played by James Garner. In a cast that included Sissy Spacek, Sam Shepard, and Ned Beatty, Carlin played a role he could understand—a free agent, a man born genetically incapable of lying down for authority figures. “I despise them lawmen,” he says. “I just hate their stinkin’ hearts.” When a young officer tells him to watch his mouth—“You old-timers got rough tongues”—Billy shoots off the tip of his ear.
Streets of Laredo was Carlin’s “favorite project of all, and the one he did the best in,” says Stephen Book, his acting coach. “He really hit his stride as an actor in that.” Carlin agreed. “I just felt terrific in that role,” he said.
When the offer came, Carlin also felt pretty good about the prospect of finally taking on his own sitcom. With a half-dozen or so years of legitimate acting work under his belt since he had started taking roles again, he was intrigued when the upstart Fox network made him an offer. Launched in 1986, the network quickly established a reputation for taking chances on comedy. The Simpsons, Matt Groening’s long-running animated series, was one of Fox’s first ratings successes. The sketch show In Living Color debuted in 1990, quickly propelling comic actors such as Jamie Foxx and Jim Carrey to stardom. The network even tried Kinison in a sitcom in 1991. “They’re new on the scene, they’re making noise, and they’ve got this word—edgy,” Carlin recalled. “I thought, fine, maybe I fit that.” He owed it to himself, and to his family, he figured, to give the sitcom a shot. Having suffered a third heart attack in early 1991 while driving to Vegas for a gig, he was thinking seriously about scaling back on the road work. Seinfeld had a show, Rosanne Barr had a show, Newhart had his sitcoms, The Cosby Show was a blockbuster. Why not him?
Playing George O’Grady, an underemployed cabbie who gleefully flaunts his ponytail (“It pisses people off,” he says in the first episode of The George Carlin Show), Carlin holds court at the Moylan, a recreation of the real-life Morningside Heights watering hole he’d frequented for years. The cast of regulars included Alex Rocco, the veteran actor who had parlayed his purported underworld connections in his native Boston into a tough-guy film and television career, most notably in the role of casino owner Moe Greene in The Godfather . The show, as Carlin said on the eve of its debut in January 1994, revolved around “nice, controlled anger. . . . It’s a combination of indignance and indifference. Basically, I don’t give a fuck about the world. I’m pissed that we’ve wasted our potential on such moronic things as religion and profit.” Not surprisingly, he concluded, “This character shares some of the attitudes and feelings that I have.” Despite his dyspepsia, he was optimistic about the show, at least for the moment: “If they said I could never do stand-up again in exchange for ten years of this,” he told a reporter,