Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [57]
His sense of mischief did not go over so well in Lake Geneva. Carlin was beginning to lampoon the Vietnam conflict in his act. “Of course, we’re leaving Vietnam,” he said, referring to the Nixon administration’s claims. After a pregnant pause, he let out a suppressed snort. “We’re leaving through Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. It’s the overland route!” Gotta remember why we’re over there in the first place, he said. Then he stopped short, adopting the blank expression of someone who has suddenly forgotten how to spell his own name.
The audience in the Penthouse Room included several military veterans, and they began to heckle him and question his patriotism. What he said in reply has been lost to posterity, though the club’s entertainment director, Sam Distefano, reported, “George made a gesture with his finger and a remark. In so many words, he told the audience they were jerking themselves off.” According to Jerry Pawlak, then the Playboy Club’s maitre d’, he’d been preoccupied with business until someone notified him that customers were arguing with the entertainer. He looked up just in time to see Carlin stalk offstage. “I’ve only had three people walk offstage on me,” Pawlak recalled. “Joan Rivers, Buddy Rich, and Carlin.” Some in the audience, he said, were incensed. He had to convince one Marine not to follow the comedian backstage. “It was terrible. We had to comp everyone for the show.”
The whole episode brought to mind another Lenny Bruce joke: that he didn’t mind when people walked out on him, except in Milwaukee, “where they walk toward you.” In his hotel room Carlin grew nervous when he heard voices calling outside his door. He called De Blasio, who had yet to start earning commission on Carlin’s dates. “He said, ‘Listen, I think I got myself in trouble,’” says De Blasio. Carlin had already been notified that he was fired from the engagement, and that he should check out in the morning. “He said, ‘Right now, I got people outside my door.’ I said, ‘Oh, my God. Stay there and don’t confront them. Call the manager and ask for security.’”
De Blasio hung up and called the Playboy Mansion in Chicago. He knew Hefner well; Cosby was a good friend of the magazine mogul. He got Bobbie Arnstein, Hefner’s assistant and chief of staff, on the phone and demanded to speak with Hefner, blustering about how Hefner professed to be an advocate of free speech. “This is something Hef can’t get into right now,” Arnstein told him.
Meanwhile, Carlin drove down to Chicago, where he got in to see Hefner. “Hefner is saying to me that he has to wear two hats in this situation,” he recalled. On the one hand, he was a great fan and champion of subversive comedy. On the other, “Well, you see, I have to do business with these assholes.”
De Blasio figured that someone in the press would pick up the story and run with it, so he tipped off Variety, hoping to head off bad publicity by shaping the news from his client’s side. “I got a guy named Murphy,” he says. “I thought, boy, this is great. I’ve got all the Irishmen on my side.” The story appeared on the front page of Variety the following Wednesday. According to the report, the early show had gone smoothly, but Carlin’s “routine about materialism in American society, press censorship, poverty, Nixon-Agnew, and the Vietnam War apparently incensed the late-night crowd.” A club manager named L. W. Pullen was quoted as saying the performer had “insulted the audience directly and used ‘offensive language and material.’” The story noted that Carlin had been canceled in Vegas a few months prior for using “vulgar” language.
The front-page exposure made Carlin’s new approach common knowledge around the industry. “We got phone calls from