Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [40]
“The question was, who should open for who[m]?” recalls Cantrell, who later became an entertainment lawyer. “Our careers were perfectly parallel at the time. It snowballed very quickly for both of us, but it was very premature to put either one of us at the Cocoanut Grove,” which was accustomed to booking marquee names such as Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland.
Mere days before the engagement was to start, not a single reservation had been taken, so the nightclub’s jittery management held over Eddie Fisher, the veteran pop singer recently divorced from Elizabeth Taylor, as the headliner. “I opened, George did his thing, and Eddie did his thing,” says Cantrell. “It was the longest show in show business history. George wouldn’t cut, and I wouldn’t cut. It was such a strange week. Eddie didn’t want to have anything to do with us.” The next week, Kellem’s odd couple held down the booking together, without Fisher. “We dragged in a few people and got some decent reviews,” says Cantrell.
Though her interaction with Carlin was brief, Cantrell still recalls it fondly. She had experienced outrageous humor up close before. In Sydney, she once opened for Lenny Bruce, who brought a stool onstage and climbed on top of it without a word, prompting an audience member to ask what he was doing.
“It’s a good position to be able to pee all over you,” said Lenny.
Bruce died in August 1966, a victim of his addictions and persecution. His naked body was discovered in the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills home. The graphic police photo seemed one last slap at the comedian who had no reverence whatsoever for the traditional institutions of American life. Dick Schaap wrote a memorable appreciation: “One last four-letter word for Lenny. Dead. At forty. That’s obscene.” At a memorial service at a progressive Greenwich Village church, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky led a Buddhist chant for the dead; they were followed by a performance by the Fugs, the ragtag Village folk-rock group named for Norman Mailer’s euphemistic expletive used throughout his debut novel, The Naked and the Dead. Bruce’s friend Paul Krassner, founder of the black-humor magazine The Realist, hosted.
From Carlin’s days in Shreveport, when his roommate first introduced him to Bruce’s lethal observations on the Interviews of Our Time album, the younger comic had found much to admire in his predecessor’s value judgments and utter disregard for conventional morality. “Lenny’s perception was magnificent,” he told the New York Times in a 1967 feature story, the first in-depth profile of the younger comic. “He could focus on the real emotions behind what we say and what we do in our society. He was the immortal [sic] enemy of cant and hypocrisy and pseudo-liberalism, which is just another form of hypocrisy. What Lenny was saying should continue to be said until we begin to hear some of it.” On the eve of Carlin’s debut in his next prime-time showcase, a summer replacement series for The Jackie Gleason Show called Away We Go, the article revealed that he was considering a role on Broadway as Bruce, in a script written by the playwright Julian Barry. Nothing came of it for Carlin, though Barry’s script was eventually produced as the 1974 Dustin Hoffman biopic Lenny.
For Carlin, Bruce’s comedy “let me know there was a place to go, to reach for, in terms of honesty in self-expression.” Carlin and Brenda had a cordial relationship with Bruce, who had played the Racquet Club in Dayton and gotten to know Brenda when she was assigned to give him rides to the airport. After Bruce’s death Carlin and his wife remained friendly with his inimitable mother, Sally Marr, who had taught her son everything he knew about speaking his mind.