Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [50]
The FBI was too big a target for Carlin to ignore. A year later the Bureau added several pages to his file when the comic reprised his bit about the “Ten Most Wanted” list on The Carol Burnett Show. A viewer from Cocoa Beach, Florida, wrote to Burnett, explaining that although she and her husband considered themselves fans of the show, “tonight our mouths fell open and almost to the floor in utter dismay and shock.” “Malcontents” such as Carlin, she wrote, owed it to their country to offer solutions to, not just snide comments about, its problems: “To destroy rather than build, in my opinion, is not the way our country achieved ‘a walk on the moon.’”
Forwarded a copy of the letter, Hoover scribbled a note at the bottom before passing it down the Bureau’s need-to-know chain: “What do we know of Carlin?” The answer, surprisingly, never came. At the time, the FBI was devoting countless man-hours to the systematic evaluation of certain celebrities the bureau considered a threat to American security, including Jane Fonda, the Smothers Brothers, the poet and activist Allen Ginsberg, and John Lennon, whose nude portrait with wife Yoko One on the cover of the 1969 album Two Virgins prompted an inquiry from Hoover to the attorney general wondering whether a pornography charge was in order. But Carlin’s own file apparently never grew beyond the twelve annotated pages about his prime-time FBI jokes, as the comedian eventually learned when he filed a Freedom of Information Act request years later. Hoover’s death in May 1972 left the FBI without its longstanding public spokesman. Carlin, however, continued to joke about the director after his death, imagining a Washington, D.C., operative who knew his phone was wiretapped and answered it with a cheery “Fuck Hoover!”
A milder cussword got the rebellious comedian in trouble next. In October 1969 Carlin checked into Las Vegas for another residency at the Frontier, which had become a key component of his livelihood. After debuting there the previous year, he’d already played two three-week stints in 1969. From $10,000 a week to start, he’d been bumped up to a whopping $12,500, at a time when sitcom actors were lucky to be making $1,500 a week. The money was almost embarrassing. Lenny Bruce had commented on the ridiculous discrepancy between the extravagant sums paid to entertainers and the paltry salaries of schoolteachers: While a teacher in Oklahoma might be making $3,000 a year, he said, Zsa Zsa Gabor was getting $50,000 a week in Vegas. “That’s the kind of sick material that I wish Time would’ve written about,” he said.
If the money was guilt-making, the marquee lineups Carlin was sharing in Vegas were downright discouraging for a guy who longed to be as hip as Lenny. “I was opening for—try not to smile—Robert Goulet, Barbara Eden, and Al Martino,” he recalled. “I was terribly out of place.” During his October engagement, opening for Goulet, Carlin did an early show for a private group of businessmen in town for the Howard Hughes Invitational golf tournament. The men stumbled in late, drinking heavily. The incident set off the comedian’s long-held antagonism toward golfers. (One joke, years later: “O.J. Simpson has already received the ultimate punishment. For the rest of his life he has to associate with golfers.”)
For some time Carlin had been referring in his act to his skinny body type, the fact that he had “no ass.” “I’m one of these white guys who, if you look at me sideways, I go from the shoulder blades right to the feet. Straight line. No ass. When I was in the Air Force, black guys used to look at me in the shower and say, ‘Hey, man, you ain’t got no