Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [53]
GAC had already seen another of its young comedy stars suffer a very public identity crisis. Soon after his debut on network television and in the high-rollers’ nightclubs, Richard Pryor began to crack. Opening for Trini Lopez at Basin Street East, he performed while lying on the floor. The manager of the Sands called Pryor’s agent, Sandy Gallin, to complain that the wiry kid was “swinging from the chandeliers” during his week there on a bill with Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. But the real freak-out occurred in September 1967, when Pryor froze onstage at the Aladdin Hotel in Vegas. He’d been trying to fit in as a junior version of Cosby, spinning amusing yarns with little acknowledgment of the problem of race in America, which was then coming to a head.
“My days of pretending to be as slick and colorless as Cosby were numbered,” Pryor later wrote. “There was a world of junkies and winos, pool hustlers and prostitutes, women and family screaming inside my head, trying to be heard. The longer I kept them bottled up, the harder they tried to escape. The pressure built til I went nuts.” Seeing Dean Martin looking at him expectantly from the audience at the Aladdin, the comedian stood mute for a painfully long time. Who are they looking at? he asked himself. “I couldn’t say, ‘They’re looking at you, Richard,’ because I didn’t know who Richard Pryor was,” he claimed. Finally, he mustered the courage to open his mouth. “What the fuck am I doing here?” he asked, and walked off.
It was a question Carlin was trying to answer for himself. After appearing as a “Mystery Guest” on What’s My Line, he glumly told the studio audience that he was appearing at the Royal Box in midtown Manhattan, where Frank Sinatra had sat a few years earlier with Gleason and Toots Shor, watching Frank Jr. make his singing debut. Host Wally Bruner tried to get his guest to open up; more than most of his fellow comedians, he noted, Carlin considered himself a writer as well as an entertainer. “It’s the only way,” Carlin replied. “I like to make things from my own head.”
By his own admission, it was around this time that Carlin began experimenting with LSD and peyote. Hallucinogenic highs were no longer the well-kept secret of the intellectually intrepid underground. Psychedelic music, art, and fashion had been an undeniable part of American life to all but the most naïve Americans since the massive media coverage of the Summer of Love. Users reported “dazzling states of heightened awareness or mystical experiences worthy of St. Teresa of Avila,” noted Time magazine as early as 1966; “others claim insights that have changed their lives.”
Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, the two former Harvard psychologists whose experiments with mind-altering drugs helped usher in the new age of expanding consciousness, had already been celebrity figures for several years—Leary with his ubiquitous motto, “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” and Alpert, by this time known as Ram Dass, leading the counterculture’s spiritual quest to India and beyond. Paul Krassner accompanied Groucho Marx on the aging vaudevillian’s maiden voyage on the drug; Cary Grant was another film star who admitted he’d taken dozens of trips, as therapeutic treatment, before LSD was banned. “It opened my eyes,” Paul McCartney of the Beatles told Life magazine. “It made me a better, more honest, more tolerant member of society.” World leaders, he suggested, would be ready to “banish war, poverty, and famine” if they would only try it.
Carlin’s own experimentation with acid didn’t last long, but it helped him to see that he was out of his element with the “straight” crowd. “Those drugs served their purpose,” he recalled. “They helped open