Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [37]
When “The Indian Sergeant” went over well on The Mike Douglas Show, Carlin was asked back, and he appeared three more times that autumn and seven times the following year. As the bookings began to mount, the comic was picking up a pool of allies at GAC. Like Harris, Craig Kellem was a junior agent, a real go-getter. After working on a CBS show called The Reporter with another climber named David Geffen, who soon went off to the mailroom at William Morris, Kellem applied for a job as an assistant in the TV variety department at GAC. “You were there to get the guys coffee and type the letters,” Kellem recalls, “schlepping, learning the business. Those were extremely colorful days. Stars were born coming into your office, doing their little comedy routine, and two weeks later they’d be on The Tonight Show.”
Kellem initially worked for an agent named Ed Leffler, who represented the Beatles on their first U.S. television appearances. Leffler let his protégé listen in to his phone conversations on an earphone so he could learn the business. Within six months Leffler quit the agency (eventually managing the careers of the Carpenters and Van Halen), leaving Kellem to be promoted into his spot. “All of a sudden, I was an agent. I probably looked fourteen years old,” jokes Kellem. But he had chutzpah. He took over the job of placing the agency’s most reliable clients—Tony Bennett, the Supremes, “meat-and-potatoes comics like Pat Cooper,” an Italian joke slinger born Pasquale Caputo—on Today, The Tonight Show, and Ed Sullivan, where GAC “probably booked a third of the talent.” Sullivan, notorious for pulling the plug on guest acts after dress rehearsal, kept the young agent on his toes. “I always had a couple of guys like Cooper in the wings,” Kellem recalls. “I’d call and say, ‘Is your tuxedo pressed, and do you have six minutes?’ That went on all the time.”
Though he had inherited a plum gig, Kellem was eager to make his own mark. “You need to find talent you can develop that you think has a future,” he says. For him, as for Harris, George Carlin was that talent. “He just cracked me up. He reminded me of a horny used-car salesman, or a cute game-show host. He had all these contemporary media references, with a silly little grin on his face. I was crazed about this guy. I took the sledgehammer approach—you just do everything. Your energy is greater than the resistance that comes your way.” Kellem, Harris, and Golden, Carlin’s manager, fed off their mutual enthusiasm for their client. “More than just about any other agent, Craig got it,” says Golden. “He immediately saw that this was something special, and he became a very intense part of the team. He was lobbying like crazy within the agency to get George jobs.”
With both Griffin and Douglas squarely on his side, Carlin was beginning to feel that he’d been discovered. His first full-fledged prime-time exposure came in February 1966, when he was invited to audition for The Jimmy Dean Show. The country star best known for “Big Bad John,” a story-song about a heroic miner that was a number one pop hit in 1961, was an Air Force veteran, a television personality, and a future sausage mogul who’d occasionally served as a Tonight Show guest host. Golden says that Carlin auditioned right in Dean’s own high-rise office, with producers and staff in the room. Dean, he says, “was a terrific performer, kind of forbidding. Early morning, Dean walks in, doesn’t say a word, motions for George to start. He did ‘The Indian Sergeant.’ All of a sudden Jimmy Dean falls off his chair. George was instantly booked on the show.” In his first of two appearances, Carlin performed “The Newscast.”
“I guess the rest of the world knew an entirely different George Carlin than the one who did our show,” says Dean. “He had a good haircut, he wore a fine-looking business suit and tie. He was impeccably attired,