Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [27]
After John Kennedy was elected, Hefner received a call from the new president’s father, Joseph Kennedy. He was planning to be in Chicago and wanted to have dinner with the celebrity magazine publisher. “I didn’t know him,” says Hefner. “We had dinner together at a restaurant at the Drake [Hotel], right across Michigan Avenue from the Playboy Club. After dinner I took Joe Kennedy and the rest of our party up to see a show at the club.” Burns and Carlin were on the bill. “They did a parody of President Kennedy,” says Hefner, “and Joe Kennedy was not amused. It was my first experience with Carlin managing to not amuse certain people. I, of course, was distressed, because it was very funny.”
Between the grueling cross-country driving, the girl in Dayton, and the nagging feeling that he should be doing stand-up on his own, Carlin soon realized his heart wasn’t in it. “We didn’t work very hard, and the act wasn’t growing,” he said. “I think that was mostly my fault, because after we split up, Jack became a tireless writer with Avery Schreiber and with Second City. I just never wanted to sit down and make up new routines, and I became a bit of a drawback to him. I guess I was subconsciously saving myself for my own act.” On June 3, 1961, he married Brenda Hosbrook in her parents’ living room in Dayton. They honeymooned in Miami, where Burns and Carlin were booked into the Playboy Club. Carlin’s mother invited herself for a visit with the young couple.
During one layover with Brenda in Dayton, while Burns was on the East Coast, the owner of the Racquet Club, Bill Brennan, asked Carlin for a favor. The folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary had to cancel two nights of shows when Peter Yarrow fell ill. Carlin agreed to fill in, performing amended versions of the team’s act and a few things he’d been working on for himself. Flying solo, he made the audience laugh. He could feel that he was ready to do this on his own.
In March 1962 Burns and Carlin mutually agreed to part. On the last day of a two-week run opening for Vic Damone at the Living Room, they split up, celebrating late into the night at the Maryland Hotel. Burns enrolled in improv classes at Second City. Carlin kicked off his solo career at the Gate of Horn, the cramped folk music club where Odetta and Memphis Slim, among others, had cut live albums. He was booked as the opening act for Peter, Paul, and Mary.
For the rest of the year Carlin and Brenda stayed on the road in the Dart, wearing a groove between the Hosbrook home in Dayton and Mary Carlin’s apartment in the old neighborhood. The new groom caught his first solo break when Sahl filled in one week in June as a guest host on The Tonight Show. Paar had left the program for good in March, and his replacement, Johnny Carson, was contractually obligated to fulfill his contract as a game show host before taking over in October.
Sahl, the brainy progressive, was at odds with the decision makers at The Tonight Show all week. “I put George on and Woody [Allen], and NBC didn’t want either one of them,” he says. Allen, who had been writing comedy for Tonight, Ed Sullivan, Sid Caesar, and others since he was nineteen, had debuted his neurotic stand-up persona the previous year. “I had a hell of a time getting them booked,” says Sahl. “I also put on Ella Fitzgerald with a mixed trio, and they didn’t want that, either.” Sahl, a Kennedy insider who occasionally wrote lines for the president’s speeches, had Carlin do his Kennedy impersonation. Stages were packed at the time with comedians doing Kennedy impressions; Vaughn