Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [29]
In custody he encountered the comic he’d just been watching perform. How did Carlin get himself arrested? Bruce asked. “I didn’t want to show them my ID,” replied the man who owed his career to Bruce’s recommendation. Bruce, even more familiar with the sensitivities of law enforcement than the habitually reckless junior comic, was amused. “You schmuck!” he teased.
Bruce’s performance, including his onstage arrest, was recorded by Playboy, which was planning a feature story on the comic at the time. Hefner, working late at the Playboy Mansion, missed the show. “Shel Silverstein, one of my closest friends, who was living in the mansion at the time, was in the audience that night, and he came back and told me that Lenny had been arrested,” Hefner says. “In the days that followed, I gave Lenny my lawyer to defend him, and I gave him a neck-tie to wear. He didn’t own any ties.” Like many of Bruce’s fans, Hefner maintains that it was the comedian’s contempt for the Catholic Church—his signature bit “Religions, Inc.” in particular—that made him a target of law enforcement. They went after the drug talk and the four-letter words only because they were prohibited by the First Amendment from acting against his religious satire. “It remains for me unreal that it would be possible for someone to be arrested in the middle of a nightclub act, appearing in front of a completely adult audience,” says Hefner. “Chicago was a very Catholic city at the time. One of the cops said to him, ‘As a Catholic, I’m offended by you,’ and Variety picked up that quote. So it was very clear what was going on there.”
Carlin paid close attention to Bruce’s snowballing legal troubles as he went on with his own solo career. Brenda was often on the road with her peripatetic husband, laughing loudly from the back rows to boost his morale when the reaction of the crowds, especially for the late-night sets, left something to be desired. They traveled as far afield as Regina, Canada, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, so that Carlin could play small coffeehouses. At the Sacred Cow in Chicago, he had to compete with a brawl in the audience while he was doing his act. The club folded that week, during his run.
There were days when Carlin’s career seemed to be bottoming out. Walking with Brenda on Rush Street during one of their many layovers in Chicago, he blurted out his uncertainty. “Do you think anybody’s ever going to recognize me on the street?” he asked his wife. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Someday everybody’s going to know your name.”
In June 1963 the couple had a daughter, Kelly. Carlin called his old Shreveport roommate, Jack Walsh, to tell him the news. (The last time they’d seen each other, Walsh told his buddy he’d named his own daughter Kelly.) The Carlins had had difficulty getting pregnant for some time, and Brenda was diagnosed with a “tipped uterus.” Carlin often joked that their participation in a limbo contest at one of the Playboy Clubs tipped his wife’s uterus back just enough so that she could conceive.
With the baby in tow, life on the road quickly became untenable. In early 1964 the Carlins took an apartment in Mary’s building in Morningside Heights. Having earned just $11,000 the previous year and spent most of it on the road, the comedian decided the prudent thing to do would be to focus his energy on New York, where he could boost his reputation with steady nightclub work and, with a bit of luck, draw the attention of the network talent bookers, whose shows were still based in the city.
The nightlife in Greenwich Village was teeming with bohemia, as it had been for decades. Since the arrival of the neighborhood’s first espresso machine in the 1930s, coffeehouses had sprung up in what seemed like every other doorway, attracting a chess-playing, enlightenment-seeking, policy-debating clientele. Three decades later, many of these meeting places were luring customers by promoting events