Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [46]
As Herbie Fleck, Ye Olde Drive Inn’s carside attendant in a white waiter’s jacket, a bowtie, and a boat-shaped soda jerk’s hat, Carlin clowned shamelessly for the camera, warily monitoring the budding romance between his regular customer, Day’s character, and the interloper, played by Keith. “Dame must be a masoquist,” he clucks, mangling the word, when Day’s character apparently gets stood up.
“He sort of mugged his performance,” says Jamie Farr, who had a supporting role in the movie as an exotic hippie. Farr was living with his wife a few blocks from the Radford Studios—CBS Studio Center, on Radford Avenue in Studio City—where the film was shot. “George would stop by with a six-pack of beer,” he says. Despite the camaraderie, the experience on the set, Farr says, was “not a milestone moment, probably, for either of us.” In fact, Carlin’s part was a joke, and he quickly came to regret it. “He felt like furniture,” says Golden. “Anybody could’ve done it. I know that had a bit of an effect on him. Plus, Doris Day was going through a horrible time in her life and marriage at the time. It permeated the entire experience for everyone.”
Overnight, Carlin dashed his own dreams to build a Danny Kaye-type acting career for himself. He wouldn’t appear again in a feature film until 1976. “I found out . . . that I couldn’t act in movies,” Carlin said. “I found out I can’t do this shit. Man, they want you to change a little bit here, get out of Doris Day’s light, don’t lean in too far, lean back, you’re off-mike, you’re out of the light, you can’t do this, stand there, keep your legs crossed, remember this, say it with a little bit of sadness. . . . Fuck all that!” He might have remembered Evan Esar’s definition of actor in his Comic Dictionary: “A man who tries to be everything but himself.”
In May Carlin opened a three-week engagement at the Frontier Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, the first lengthy residency of a high-paying, three-year commitment. The first venue to book Elvis Presley in Vegas, the Frontier was then owned by the billionaire Howard Hughes, who’d bought the complex for $14 million in late 1967. Carlin’s live gigs were growing tonier, which meant his audiences were increasingly removed from the cultural transformation then taking place on the streets, not just in San Francisco but in every major city and college town across the country. For years Carlin’s running partners had been the folk and rock musicians he befriended on the nightclub circuit, many of whom were fellow pot smokers, and most of whom were jumping into the hippie pool with both feet. They certainly weren’t the targeted ticket buyers for Jack Jones or Joey Heatherton. Harris, who was traveling regularly with Carlin at the time, remembers that his client was growing conflicted. “He’d often come offstage angry—‘Those assholes.’ He was playing for these audiences he didn’t have much respect for, and he was trapped by his own success. He was struggling inside.”
The folkies had laid the groundwork; now pop and rock were socially motivated, too. Meanwhile, Carlin was catering to the middle class—the same people his musician friends were rebelling against. “The music was protest, and I was hearing people who were using their artistic talent to further their ideas and their philosophies,” he recalled. “It was starting to dawn on me that I’m not using my abilities to further these thoughts and ideas that I agree with. . . . I’m entertaining these businessmen and shit in these nightclubs, doing people-pleaser shit.”
Something had to change, and it soon did. At the beginning of the Frontier gig, Carlin called Golden, then