Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [32]
Golden, frustrated by the studio sessions he’d been getting, jumped at the chance to take on a new challenge. He thought this Carlin fellow was good, that he might be going places. “I was looking for something else to do with my life,” he says, “and he seemed to feel I knew my way around. He sensed that I could be helpful.” Ironically, Golden’s father had been all too familiar with Carlin long before his son and the comedian first met. The elder Golden owned a drugstore on 112th and Broadway, in Carlin’s neighborhood. When Bob mentioned the name of his new client, his father groaned. “He knew him as one of these reprobates who would come into his store late at night to scam drugs,” claiming he’d lost his prescription, Golden says with a laugh. To Golden’s father, giving up a promising career as a musician in favor of managing a two-bit comic with a hankering for mood-altering substances sounded like a lousy career move. “Needless to say,” says Golden, “after a few months of seeing George on TV, and then when George started doing The Ed Sullivan Show, that was a complete validation.”
At the time, however, the comedian was closer to food stamps than to Ed Sullivan’s stamp of approval. His idea was to develop a bit that would convince talent scouts he had one piece of material that was sure to go over well on the box. “Hunks,” they called them. Carlin, recalls Larry Hankin, who shared a manager with Woody Allen in those years, was better suited to television than most of his peers in the Village. Unlike those (like Hankin) who worked without a net—just “rapping,” with little preparation or forethought—Carlin fine-tuned his most promising routines, shaping them with an eye toward a four-minute spot in front of the cameras. “He had an incredible sense of the absurd,” says Hankin. “His characters were amazingly funny bozos.” Like Cosby and Allen, both of whom did time in the Greenwich Village clubs, Carlin was “in the Village, but not really of the Village,” says Hankin. “They had to go through there to see what was going on, but they were doing TV material. I don’t remember anybody else who could get on TV doing what they were doing in the Village, except those three.”
But television bookings were the ticket to lucrative headlining gigs, and none of the new wave comics was immune. “They all act like big non-conformists,” complained old-schooler Joey Adams, a traditional Borscht Belt comic, to Time magazine, “but they’re all aiming to get on the Ed Sullivan or Steve Allen show.” Professor Irwin Corey, who was already fifty by 1964, was more sympathetic to the new breed, who so evidently had been influenced by the uncertainties of the cold war. A madcap wordsmith who was blacklisted in Hollywood for his ties to the American Communist Party, Corey, like the truly outlandish Lord Buckley, a self-made aristocrat with gargantuan appetites and an unchecked id, was a kind of spiritual forefather to the next generation of satirists. “The future seems so precarious,” he said, “people are willing to abandon themselves to chaos. The new comic reflects this.”
For the better part of two years Carlin scraped by in New York. Golden found him occasional work outside the city—taking fifty bucks to play Brown’s Hotel in the Catskills, for instance. He went over well at another jazz club in Boston, Paul’s Mall; bombed at a New York bistro called the Sniffen Court Inn; took a quick trip to Bermuda to play the Inverurie Hotel. Still, Café Au Go Go was his real incubator.
For Carlin, a high school dropout who possessed a lively, inquisitive mind, the electric surge of ideas in the Village was intoxicating. “I wasn’t very well-educated, but I saw this beautiful stream of intelligent comedy coming out of those people”—Newhart,