Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [38]
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VALUES (HOW MUCH IS THAT DOG CRAP IN THE WINDOW?)
Southern California was a scrubland before the movies arrived in the early twentieth century. By 1966, however, Hollywood sat at the core of a metropolis, and the television industry was drifting westward, too. Since the 1950s, when CBS built its Television City at the corner of Beverly and Fairfax on the site of a former sports stadium (which in turn sat on the site of a former oil field), network programs had been steadily migrating toward the wide-open West Coast, away from the suffocating congestion of midtown Manhattan. In March the Carlin family moved from the comedian’s native city to an apartment in the Beverly Glen section of Los Angeles. He brought along a recording of New York City street sounds.
In the long view, Carlin would probably soon be reading for parts in motion pictures. In the shorter term, he had found steady work, at least for the summer. GAC had placed Carlin as a regular performer and comic writer for the thirteen-week summer replacement show The Kraft Summer Music Hall. Sponsored by the food company Kraft, the long-running series had originated on radio in the 1930s and was first brought to television in 1958, with Milton Berle hosting. The dazzling smile of the rookie host hired for the summer of 1966 belonged to John Davidson, a singing, banjo-picking son of two Baptist ministers from Pittsburgh. Like Carlin, he was a future Tonight Show guest host.
Ken Harris worked the deal with NBC. Realizing he wasn’t especially fond of being an agent, Harris had a proposition for Bob Golden, Carlin’s manager: He would move to the West Coast and become the comic’s comanager, with Golden handling the business back in New York. At GAC, Craig Kellem would become Carlin’s responsible agent. “We all agreed on that,” says Harris, now living in the Pacific Northwest. “I still have the telegrams.”
Kraft Summer Music Hall—produced by television veteran Bob Banner, who was executive producer of The Jimmy Dean Show and had helped launch the career of Carol Burnett—was unabashedly cornball stuff. The supporting cast included a folksy singing duo called Jackie & Gale—Gale was Gale Garnett, who had a 1964 hit, “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine”—and a squeaky-clean singing act called the Lively Set. A musical comedian named Biff Rose played Davidson’s sidekick—Don Knotts to the host’s Andy Griffith, as Rose put it. “It was straw hats and striped jackets, real hokey Middle America,” says Harris. “It was real strange when you put George in that context, but he did fine.” Among other duties, Carlin joined other cast members in singing “Winchester Cathedral.” Neither the client nor his new comanager were complaining as they drove to work at the NBC studios each morning in blazing sunshine. “It was exciting,” says Harris. “Hollywood in the sixties.”
In fact, something was in the air, and it had a pungent smell. Even the most benign television productions were beginning to acknowledge the creeping influence of the emerging counterculture. The certifiably kooky Rose, for example, would soon move on to a short-lived recording career with arch Tom Lehrer-style saloon songs such as “American Waltz” (“We all love to dance our American waltz/It’s our dream come false”). The Kraft series would feature guest appearances by a few old Carlin associates—Richard Pryor, whose rapid ascent was running neck-and-neck with Carlin’s, and a new comic duo featuring a chunky, curly-haired Chicagoan named Avery Schreiber and his fellow Second City alumnus, Carlin’s former partner, Jack Burns.
Davidson says he recognized instantly that Carlin was having a hard time getting comfortable,