Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [31]
Officer James Ryan had been assigned by his superior, Sergeant James Solden, to monitor the comedian’s performance at the Jazz Workshop. Ryan notified the sergeant about the use of the eleven-letter word; in between sets. Solden then approached Bruce and informed him he was going to jail. The police force was trying to clean up North Beach, he explained, and an entertainer using a word like cocksuckers was, he felt, part of the problem. Solden told the comedian he couldn’t envision “any way you can break this word down. Our society is not geared to it.”
“You break it down by talking about it,” Bruce replied.
Bruce had endured a number of arrests for drug possession in Philadelphia and Los Angeles by the time he arrived in the Village for ten nights of shows at Café Au Go Go in late March 1964. His third night at the club was attended by a license inspector named Herbert S. Ruhe, a former CIA agent in Vietnam, who frantically jotted phrases in a notebook as Bruce performed—“mind your asses,” “jack me off,” “nice tits.” Ruhe’s findings were just the sort of evidence District Attorney Frank Hogan was looking for. Hogan, an Irish Catholic moral crusader with close ties to Cardinal Francis Spellman, had been instrumental in bringing obscenity charges against Edmund Wilson’s 1946 story collection Memoirs of Hecate County. Hogan ordered four plainclothes vice-squad officers to attend Bruce’s next show, while he searched for a prosecutor on his staff who would be willing to take the case. Using a small wire recorder concealed on one of the officers, the patrolmen made a barely audible recording. They took the transcript to a grand jury, which authorized the arrest of Bruce and Café Au Go Go owner Howard Solomon on charges of violating Section 1140-A.
“But that’s prostitution,” Bruce protested the following night, as the officers intercepted the comic and the club owner in the dressing room just before the ten o’clock set. Don’t get technical, one of the officers countered, “It’s one of them numbers.” Now facing charges, Bruce defiantly fulfilled the rest of his commitment at the club, forging onward with his off-color jokes: He spelled out the offending words.
At Café Au Go Go, Carlin joined the pool of Lenny’s disciples, taking as little as $5 a night, sometimes just a burger, to keep the crowd occupied between musicians’ sets. Weekends were better, when he could make as much as $65 opening for a headliner like the pianist Bill Evans. Carlin set up shop in the club, working a total of ten weeks in 1964. Ochs, the rabble-rousing topical songwriter, was a regular. Jazz saxophonist Stan Getz introduced the New York audience to his new quartet at the club, recording an album there featuring the Brazilian singer Astrid Gilberto. With a piano onstage, Howard Solomon asked Bob Golden, a session guitarist who could play some fair piano, to sit in whenever special guests dropped in to try their hand at a song or two, which was often. “Just about anybody called a celebrity on the New York scene was there,” says Golden. “Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, people like that. I was the house band.”
After taking the stage at the café a few times, Carlin approached the piano player, who was evidently friendly with the owners and seemed to know most of the performers. “George came up to me and said, ‘I’ve been listening to you play, and you’re pretty good, and I know you’re making ten times as much as I am,’” Golden recalls. “‘But I know I’m ten times a better comic than you are a pianist’—which, of course, was very true—‘so how about becoming my manager?’ It was a life-changing moment for me.”
By this time Murray Becker was out of the picture. By some accounts, he’d gotten cold feet when Carlin was nearly pinched in Chicago for possession