Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [3]
One night Cardinal Cushing went on the air from his remote location with some spontaneous comments about the Little Sisters of the Poor. By the time he began praying the rosary, he’d fallen behind schedule. At 6:59 the cardinal was just midway through the Fifth Sorrowful Mystery of the Rosary. Carlin was on the edge of his seat, panicking about the news. There was only one thing to do. At seven o’clock on the nose, he pulled the cardinal’s feed and cut to the broadcast: “The NBC News, brought to you by Alka-Seltzer.”
Within minutes the phone rang in the studio. “I want to talk to the young man who took off the Holy Word of Gawd,” boomed Cardinal Cushing. Carlin, alone in the studio, nervously admitted he was that young man. Then he did something he wouldn’t do again for as long as he lived: He “hid behind the government,” as he recalled years later. He explained to the imposing clergyman that he was bound by law to follow the program log from the Federal Communications Commission. If he didn’t accommodate a network newscast and its paying advertisers, he could lose his job. It was the first, and decisively the last, time that George Carlin would take the side of the FCC. In the morning the station manager backed his junior staffer, telling the archbishop’s office he’d done the right thing.
The exoneration was short-lived. Weeks later Carlin took the station’s mobile news unit for the weekend and drove to his native New York to score some weed.
It was a fireable offense, and fired he was. So much for a career in Boston. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last, that he felt trapped by expectations. A decade after his apprenticeship in radio, just as he was becoming a prime-time television personality and nightclub headliner, he threw away his burgeoning success to pursue a seemingly quixotic vision of himself as a voice of the oozing counterculture. Throughout his performing life Carlin had run-ins with the tipsy crowds and heavy-handed moguls of Las Vegas, where top-shelf comedians could make big money in steady engagements as long as they played nice. When he finally landed a sitcom of his own, in the mid-1990s, he couldn’t wait to get the hell out of it. Groucho Marx famously joked that he wouldn’t join any club that would have him as a member. Carlin wasn’t joking. Catholic school, the Boy Scouts, the Air Force, the chummy world of network television—it didn’t take him long to recognize that his natural vantage point was from the outside.
HIS CAREER WAS BORN at age thirty-three, when he realized that his work was his life, that comedy could be more than just clowning: a calling. It was born during his first appearances on The Tonight Show, Merv Griffin, and Ed Sullivan; it was born on the stage of the Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, where Lenny Bruce had been arrested for saying the word cocksucker. Or it was born at age thirteen, when he discovered the skewed analytical benefits of smoking marijuana, or when Brother Conrad helped the budding voice artist purchase a primitive Webcor tape recorder, or even earlier than that, when his mother instilled in her second son a lifelong reverence for the dictionary.
In truth, his actual birth was a mistake. George Denis Patrick Carlin was conceived during a period of separation for his parents, a slick-talking newspaper advertising salesman named Patrick Carlin and an executive secretary named Mary Bearey. Patrick Carlin, the national advertising manager for the Sun newspaper, the conservative broadsheet then in head-to-head competition with the New York Times and the Herald Tribune , had previously worked at a couple of Philadelphia papers and done a stretch at the