Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [4]
Patrick Carlin, born in 1888 in Donegal, Ireland, was seventeen years older than Mary Bearey. They were married in 1930, and their son Patrick was born one year later. Though the man of the house was making good money during the Great Depression, averaging a thousand dollars a week in commissions (for three years in a row, he was the leading newspaper ad salesman in the country), he and his young bride fought bitterly over Mary’s “lace curtain” aspirations and Patrick’s prodigious drinking. Within a few years they were separated. By chance they met again in the summer of 1936. Patrick Carlin convinced his estranged wife to accompany him for the weekend to Rock-away Beach, in Queens, where they checked into their old getaway, Curley’s Atlas Hotel and Baths, along the oceanfront. There, as George Carlin often noted, the baby was conceived.
Mary contemplated having an abortion, going so far as to schedule an appointment for a D&C with a doctor in Gramercy Park. She’d been to see that doctor before; his code name, according to Carlin, was “Dr. Sunshine.” But fate, and superstition, intervened: Gazing at a painting on the wall in the waiting room, Mary became convinced she could see a likeness of her own mother, who had died six months earlier. “Let’s get out of here, Pat,” she said. “I’m going to have this kid.”
The impending birth of George Carlin brought on a short-lived reconciliation for the couple. But Patrick’s drinking was too much for Mary to take. “The Irish call it the curse,” Carlin said. “My mother called him a street angel and a house devil.” Two months after the delivery on May 12, 1937, Patrick Carlin arrived home at the family’s Riverside Drive apartment, having made his usual stop at an Upper Broadway watering hole en route. In the course of their latest argument, Mary wondered aloud why she should bother to set out crystal and fine china at dinnertime, if her husband was just going to stumble in three sheets to the wind every night. Enraged, Patrick Carlin took a tray of his wife’s place settings and chucked them out an open window.
Mary Carlin gathered up her boys and fled down the fire escape. Making their way through the back lots out to Broadway, they piled into a Packard owned by one of Mary’s brothers and headed out of town. When they returned, mother and sons moved from apartment to apartment in the neighborhood, trying to avoid confrontation with the boys’ father. “We ran for four years,” said Carlin. “I saw the fear in her when the doorbell would ring.” With four brothers living nearby and occasional escorts from sympathetic beat cops, Mary felt safe enough from physical harm, though she could not escape her husband’s intimidation.
He bid the boys a quiet farewell on one last visit; according to Carlin, he sang an emotional version of “The Rose of Tralee,” the traditional Irish ballad about the “lovely and fair” Mary, who won her beloved not with her beauty alone, but with “the truth in her eyes ever beaming.”
The young son understood from an early age that he took great pleasure in entertaining people. As a toddler he learned a few surefire attention-getters from his mother, who worked as secretary to the president of an advertising association, demonstrating the new dance craze called the Big Apple or mimicking Mae West (“Why don’t you come up and see me sometime?”) for her friends in the office secretarial pool. When he was old enough, Carlin began sneaking onto the subway to meet his mother after work, where his impromptu performances for her colleagues sometimes earned him a dinner at the Automat in Times Square. “I noticed that this process of