Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [113]
The reason: He was committed to a new live-in relationship. The comic who had kicked off his sitcom by scoffing at optimism—“Hope sucks”—had found romance with a woman named Sally Wade. She was a comedy writer who had worked on several episodes of the 1970s sitcom What’s Happening. They met at a bookstore. “He and Sally had their first date at our house,” says Orson Bean, the veteran television personality, who was Wade’s neighbor near Venice Beach. “We invited her to a party. She said, ‘Can I bring a date?’ and it turned out to be George.” Carlin soon moved into Sally’s home, where he and Bean would swap jokes when they met in the alley, taking out the trash. Though they apparently never took out a marriage license, Carlin was with his second “wife” for ten years, until the end of his life. “I think Sally kind of saved him,” says Dennis Blair. “The first thing he’d do after the show every night was call her.”
Carlin had been a career loner. The old delicatessen guys, the Dangerfield protegés, and the Comedy Store regulars typically lived for the camaraderie, the one-upmanship, and the old war stories. Carlin was content to travel light, with his laptop and his reading material. When he wanted to air out some new jokes, he usually drove south, to the Comedy and Magic club in Hermosa Beach, where the crowd was less saturated with agents, talent scouts, and other guest-list types than the rooms in LA.
Having hit sixty, however, he was beginning to appreciate his place in the comic pantheon. He joined Robert Klein, Alan King, Jay Leno, Paul Reiser, and others to film a mock opening sequence for Jerry Seinfeld’s HBO special I’m Telling You for the Last Time, in which the comedian holds a funeral for his old routines. Carlin was honored for lifetime achievement at the American Comedy Awards, and Comedy Central ranked him the second-greatest stand-up comedian of all time, behind Richard Pryor. Though he was flattered, “It was a little embarrassing to be placed ahead of Lenny Bruce,” he admitted.
At the American Comedy Awards, Carlin posed for a photo with Pryor and Robert Klein. Klein leaned down to Pryor, in a wheelchair due to his battle with multiple sclerosis, and whispered in his ear, “You were the best I ever saw.” When they walked away, Carlin said out of the corner of his mouth, “That guy’s fucked up!”
“I knew he wasn’t meaning to be cruel,” says Klein. “George was sardonic about it. He actually made me laugh.” Even in the most dispiriting situations, for Carlin there was no such thing as no laughing matter.
Together with Hamza, he agreed to join the founders of a new comedy venture, Laugh.com, as a limited business partner. Marshall Berle, Milton’s nephew, who went from managing Spirit to handling pop metal acts such as Van Halen and Ratt, launched the Laugh.com Web site in the mid-1990s as an outlet for his uncle’s vast archive of Friars Club roasts. “I sold one to a guy named Bob Kohn, who lived in Pebble Beach,” says Berle. “He turns out to be the guy who comes in and saves the company.” Kohn was an Internet entrepreneur who founded the subscription download site eMusic. Together the two men enlisted a who’s who of comedy legends, including Red Buttons, Bill Dana, Jonathan Winters, Phyllis Diller, Shelley Berman, Norm Crosby, and Rich Little, as founding partners. Besides Kohn, another of Berle’s earliest customers was one Rev. Warren Debenham, a comedy historian from the Bay Area who donated a sizable portion of his massive collection to the San Francisco Public Library. After lending his name to the company, Carlin often called Berle with special requests from the Debenham collection, looking for obscure recordings by the Two Black Crows, an old blackface vaudeville act, or the Canadian duo Wayne and Shuster. “He’d come up with guys I never heard of,” says Berle.
Carlin had always looked to the farthest frontiers of comedy. Some of his earliest routines with Jack Burns deliberately trampled the line marking the no-man’s land of tastelessness. The “Seven Words,” of course, were a