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despite the familiar faces. “I walked into the first production meeting, and they said, ‘This is our writer,’” says Davidson. “Very thin guy, usually standing very erect, but sort of hunched over when he did jokes. Clean-cut. Probably wearing a sweater and slacks. Very business-like, was the impression he gave.” Davidson, who was then just twenty-four, soon found his costar to be “the most liberal guy I knew,” but somewhat bottled up in terms of the stage. “We had Richie Pryor, Biff Rose, this crazy, off-the-wall musical comedian, and Flip Wilson. All of these people were crazier and more fun than George Carlin. He was very contained back then. He seemed to be always festering. You could tell there was much, much more behind what he was saying.”

Early in the run, Carlin and Ken Harris were called into Bob Banner’s office, where the producer laid a sizable offer on the table to handle Carlin’s career. Harris remembers a proposed annual guarantee of $125,000, similar to the deal Banner had arranged with Davidson. Carlin and his West Coast manager politely declined. “It made no sense for George,” says Harris, “but it was nice to be asked.”

On the show Carlin did whatever he thought was expected. In one recurring bit, he worked up a variation on his Al Sleet character—Al Pouch, the Hippie-Dippy Postman, in which he brought phony fan mail for Davidson. “There were a couple of monologues they cut. They just didn’t work,” Carlin later admitted. “I was an undeveloped writer. I was writing superficially from the front of my head.” Yet he felt he deserved some respect. During one taping, Davidson introduced the comic with a bit of levity, calling him “Little Georgie Carlin.” “I was always trying to make him lovable,” Davidson says. “I never thought he was lovable or huggable enough. Later, he asked the producer to ask me not to call him Georgie again. He didn’t want to be like Ricky Nelson. He wanted to be taken seriously.”

Offstage, Carlin was settling easily into the California lifestyle. He’d always been able to down more than his share of beers (“I was amazed he was so thin,” says Davidson), but he was also smoking plenty of pot, a fact that was apparent even to the self-described “goody-goody” Davidson. “I assumed he was smoking grass back then pretty liberally, but he was never stoned at work at all. He was so business-like.” On a visit to the Carlins’ apartment to drop off a script, the host was slightly embarrassed to find the couple’s young daughter running around the house with no clothes on. “They were a free-spirit, liberal kind of family,” says Davidson, who credits Carlin with inspiring him to “loosen up.” “I wished I could be free like that,” he says. “He was very ‘street,’ and I was very WASP-y. I was jealous of what he was. I wished I could be closer to him.”

The two men worked together for some time, including a one-off TV showcase the following year called John Davidson at Notre Dame, which featured Judy Collins, the pop group Spanky and Our Gang, and the Notre Dame Glee Club, as well as an extended tour with the starlet Joey Heatherton in 1968. Yet Davidson was well aware that he represented a kind of show business convention that the comic was growing allergic to. “I have a feeling he thought I was too white-bread, that the whole show was just too saccharine,” he says. “I know he wanted to be more cutting-edge than that show was. He took the writing job to make money, for the TV exposure, and he was glad to get it. But I would definitely say he was holding back. He had much more to give inside of him, and he didn’t know how.”

For the moment, however, Carlin wasn’t letting on. “He was loving being on major television and being invited back,” claims Golden. “The jobs were coming in. He was enjoying having the career he always dreamed about.” In July the comic had another breakthrough, of sorts. After a handful of years ironing out his material in basement grottoes and cramped, chintzy backrooms fit for a tarot card reader, Hollywood’s newest comic was set to take the stage amid the potted palms at the Cocoanut