Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [52]
Podell was notorious for a particularly obnoxious habit. “If Jules wanted attention,” remembered Peggy Lee, “he would knock his big ring on the table and everyone would come running.” Podell’s table took a pounding during Carlin’s engagement. The comic was opening for William Oliver Swofford, a fresh young pop star who took his middle name as his stage name. Oliver had smash hits that year: “Good Morning Starshine” from the Broadway musical Hair, and “Jean,” a ballad written by the poet Rod McKuen, heard as the theme to the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. But the audience’s enthusiasm for the theatrical song stylist from North Carolina did not extend to his opening act. Whether or not they recognized Carlin from The Hollywood Palace or The Ed Sullivan Show, he got nothing but indifference from the paying customers, as the silverware clinked and the chatter continued unabated.
After a few nights trapped in his penguin suit—Podell insisted that his entertainers wear tuxes—Carlin was desperate to get out of the suffocating atmosphere. “I hated that fuckin’ place,” he said. “It was everything I didn’t want. I died every night.” He started castigating the audience, telling them that places like the Copa had gone out of style twenty years before. Then he began to express his displeasure by killing time in absurd ways—lying on the dance floor and describing the ceiling, for instance, or crawling under the piano and reading from its manufacturing label. Like the performers at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire a half-century earlier, where nonsensical performance was inspired by the horrors of World War II, Carlin was subverting the social contract by knocking it on its ear. He began announcing that he was a Dada comedian. “I’d say, ‘I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Dada school of philosophy; it concerned itself in part with the rejection of a performer by his audience. The point is that it’s as difficult to gain your complete rejection for thirty minutes as it is to gain your acceptance, and I can go either way.’”
Directly addressing a table of GAC executives one night, Carlin implored them to book him into more appropriate venues, with crowds that would understand him. Podell was enraged—who did this kid think he was, giving lip to his loyal customers? Still, he refused to give the comedian what he wanted. Instead, he let him suffer. “He would never fire me, that fuck,” Carlin remembered. Obligated to pay him whether or not he completed the run, the Copa’s kingpin let him dangle. On the last night of the stint, the sound and light guys effectively ran Carlin out of the building. Before he was finished with his set, they slowly began to dim the lights and fade out the sound. “It was very artistic, very cinematic,” he said. “Very dramatic. It was almost sweet in a way. And I knew I was free.”
Carlin certainly wasn’t the first to earn Podell’s ire. Shecky Greene was opening for Nat King Cole at the Copa when he tried a joke in a voice that sounded like Popeye. Unbeknownst to him, Podell’s guttural rasp was often compared with Popeye’s. Almost immediately the lights went down and the microphone went dead. The stubborn comic kept doing the joke; the stubborn club bully kept shutting him down. “Three weeks I had of that,” said Greene.
Craig Kellem was with the GAC gang on the night of their client’s meltdown at the Copa. He’d already sensed Carlin was getting restless, but the agent wasn’t sure how to handle it. Besides, his own star was rising at the agency. “I had made my bones,” he says, “and I wasn’t staying up at night worrying