Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [43]
The feeling in the Carlin camp was that it was only a matter of time before the comic began fielding offers for sitcoms and films. Old friend Jack Burns beat him to it. When Don Knotts left his Emmywinning role as Andy Griffith’s bungling deputy on the beloved The Andy Griffith Show, Burns was hired as his replacement for the show’s sixth season. His role as Deputy Warren Ferguson introduced the country to Burns’s comic trademark, a pompous, all-purpose demand for recognition: “Huh? Huh? Huh?” But Knotts’s endearing Barney Fife character proved impossible to replace, and Burns was dropped from the show after eleven episodes.
Meanwhile, Burns’s old partner made his first appearance as an actor on the new ABC sitcom That Girl, which starred Danny Thomas’s daughter, Marlo, as a mod-ish aspiring actress in New York City. In an episode that aired in late 1966, Carlin played the star’s agent, George Lester. Working the phone from his client’s apartment, he kibbitzed with a booking agent on the other end of the line: “That’s the trouble with this business. You can’t trust anybody. Trust me, Martin.”
In January of the new year he prepared to take his first bow on the big cheese of the variety hours, The Ed Sullivan Show. Nearing the end of its second decade on the air, the implacable gossip columnist’s program still represented the pinnacle of television success for singers, dancers, novelty acts, and comedians. Newsweek noted the rising star’s impending appearance with a short feature, commending his “highfidelity ear for the transistorized pop gabble of the mid-’60s.” Carlin’s reliance on the fertile source material of electronic entertainment—his slick anchormen and disc jockeys and clueless game show contestants—was noted as a potential dead end. “Eventually, he’s going to have to branch out,” Johnny Carson told the unnamed reporter. “If you base all your material on one subject, sooner or later you reach a point of diminishing returns.”
Though GAC handled the Sullivan show and booked a disproportionate number of its guest spots with in-house talent, Carlin had resisted making his debut there for some time. “I heard they chewed young comedians up,” he said. “Just before you go on they come and they say the roller-skating chimpanzees went long, so we need you to cut another minute. This is a live show, you’re about to go on in another five or ten minutes. . . . I was afraid of that.” Though he’d never had many qualms about performing, to Carlin, Sullivan represented the most unforgiving, least appealing aspect of show business, and he was frankly daunted. The audience inside CBS’s Studio 50 on Broadway, the Ed Sullivan Theater (now home of The Late Show with David Letterman), “were dead. Just dead people. Yes, they laughed at Myron Cohen, and Jack E. Leonard could mow them down with energy.” But the studio audience in Sullivan’s theater, he felt, was preoccupied with being seen, overdressed in minks and pearls and waiting for the house lights to go up when the host introduced a special guest in the crowd—“Joe Louis or Babe Ruth’s widow or somebody. . . . On those Ed Sullivan shows I began to realize I didn’t fit. I was missing who I was.”
By this time Kellem, Carlin’s responsible agent, had also become Sullivan’s agent. “I lived at the Sullivan show,” he says. “September to June, or whatever it was, I was there.” Television had no more nerve-racking stage. “It was blood and guts, man. You saw the veins in the neck, the eyes. There was something viscerally