Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [44]
Despite his reservations, Carlin made three more appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1967 and eleven in all, taping his last commitment in the waning days of the show in early 1971. If the Sullivan show was a powerful symbol of television’s boxy limitations, Carlin’s next gig was especially confining. In May, just as the Summer of Love was blooming—the hit song of the moment was Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”—Carlin spent an uncomfortable week as the center square on the smug game show The Hollywood Squares.
He did a series of dates—Cleveland, Toronto, Phoenix, Warwick, Rhode Island, and Wallingford, Connecticut—as part of the package tour with John Davidson and Joey Heatherton. And for the second summer in a row, he was cast as a writer and featured performer in a summer replacement series. This one was a placeholder for The Jackie Gleason Show, whose portly superstar was a critical client for GAC. The variety program was called Away We Go, after Gleason’s signature catch-phrase. “It was manifest destiny for George Carlin at the time to get his own TV show,” says Kellem. “We sold the show with Carlin as the star via Jackie Gleason’s company.” Carlin was paired with Buddy Greco, a Sinatra-style singer from south Philadelphia, with the infamously profane drummer Buddy Rich (who’d once appeared on a Lenny Bruce special on local New York City television) leading the house band.
“Things were going very well for me,” says Buddy Greco, who still performs at his own nightclub in Cathedral City, California. “I was doing movies, had hit records. I got a call from CBS. They wanted to do a series, and they said, ‘Who would you like?’ I said, you gotta give me my best friend, Buddy Rich. And they said, ‘We need a comic.’”
Greco, who has worked with virtually all of the Buddy Hackett-Shecky Greene Vegas tummlers (Borscht Belt comedians) in his long career, says he could tell that Carlin was a little different, though he was still perfectly presentable. “When he worked with us, you could see his ears,” he says. “He had a short haircut, a shirt and tie.” The sketches sometimes required the show’s frontmen to make fools of themselves, including one number called “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.” “I have videos of George and I and Buddy in tutus,” Greco says. “Can you believe Buddy Rich in a tutu? I was a tough kid from Philly. We’re tough guys. It was such a funny thing to see. We went along with it. It was hilarious.” But the best material, he says, was the improvised humor the three stars came up with away from the camera. “We did more stuff on the steps of CBS in the back,” Greco recalls. “So off-the-wall. I wish we could have recorded those.”
Little more than a year removed from those $5 nights at Café Au Go Go, Carlin suddenly had a steady, very respectable income, earning $1,250 a week for the summer series. “It quickly got to a point where we didn’t have to worry about George making a living,” says Bob Golden. Their experience on Away We Go, he says, was “kind of strange. There were a lot of egos involved. In a sense, CBS and the Gleason production company, they didn’t care. They were just happy to have something to fill the time with. But between Buddy Rich and Buddy Greco’s wife, there was always insistence that everyone do the same amount of time. It got to be pretty funny at times.”
During this period Carlin’s friend Bob Altman spent many nights on the couch in the front room of the house on Beverwil Drive, where, he says, the famously meticulous Carlin had already amassed “a whole fuckin’ wall full of file cards” containing lists of ideas and premises for new material. He says that Carlin was beginning to express his affinity with the counterculture by wearing the sloganeering buttons that were popular