Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [51]
Maheu, longtime spokesman for the world’s richest man (whom he claimed to have actually glimpsed only twice), was nearly as much of a puzzle as his exceedingly strange employer. During World War II Maheu went undercover for the FBI as a Nazi sympathizer. After setting up his own investigations outfit, he took clandestine assignments from the CIA, including, famously, a plot to assassinate the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, for which he recruited Mafia capo Sam Giancana. As the self-appointed chief executive officer of Hughes Nevada Operations, which oversaw the management of the reclusive investor’s holdings in the state, Maheu saw it as his duty to police the Frontier’s entertainment on the night of the golf tournament. Carlin was abruptly dismissed from the remainder of his engagement—paid and sent home. “I was more or less flabbergasted,” he said.
He’d just done a week without a hitch at the Holiday House outside Pittsburgh, a ritzy, art deco-style dinner theater with hotel rooms and a pool. Variety reviewed him favorably there, calling the show “a sock.” “We probably paid him $7,500—very good money,” says Bert Sokol, who, as the son-in-law of the club’s owner, was booking the entertainment in those days. The main showroom was big, seating a thousand. Rumored to have mob ties, the Holiday House expected clean material from its comedians, which included plenty of veteran names—Milton Berle, Jack E. Leonard, Totie Fields (“a little risqué for a woman,” Sokol recalls)—as well as up-and-comers like Carlin, David Brenner, and Joan Rivers. “The comedians were restricted with the language they could use on our stage,” says Sokol, who had no problem with Carlin, picking up the club’s two options on him for the following year.
Provocative content was becoming a hot topic in the entertainment industry. The introduction of the Motion Picture Association of America’s self-imposed film rating system in 1968 served as an acknowledgment that some subject matter, such as that of 1969 Best Picture winner Midnight Cowboy, was inappropriate for young audiences. For comedians, the fact that they were still held to the “clean” standard in clubs and on television, while movies and so-called legitimate theaters were increasingly exploring mature themes and language, seemed unfair. Variety reported on the complaints of stand-up acts in England: Some British comics were being fined for cursing, while their stage-acting counterparts were immune to censure. The article also cited the double standard of what the writer termed “boondock situations,” in which comedians working lower-class barrooms could get away with using profanity, whereas those in finer establishments could not. “Presumably the local constables wink at the hardcore prose,” the Variety correspondent concluded. “Some who’ve played the sticks say it’s tough following a four-letter act.”
Like so many in his business, Sokol considered Jules Podell’s Copacabana in New York the epitome of classy American supper-club entertainment. “All the stars wanted to work at the Copa,” Sokol says. The club advertised itself as “New York’s heart-quarters for great stars. . . . The Copa is the showcase of show business.” Carlin, however, was not feeling quite so peppy about the place. Booked over the December holidays into the red-leather-upholstered hotel basement on East Sixtieth Street by Irvin Arthur, GAC’s well-connected nightclub agent, from the start of his two-week engagement the comic sensed that he was in for a confrontation.
The Copa’s connection to the powerful underworld figure Frank Costello was a poorly kept secret. “The Copa was a tough room,” veteran comic Jack Carter once said. “The Murderers Row would come in every show.” And Podell had a longstanding reputation for tyrannical behavior. When singing