Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [58]
Among those who contacted Wald and De Blasio was Monte Kay, Flip Wilson’s manager. Kay and Wilson could see what Carlin was trying to do, and they thought they could help.
A hip Brooklynite who had his own apartment in the Village by the age of fifteen, Kay’s youthful enthusiasm for swing and bebop led to a close friendship with disc jockey Symphony Sid Torin, with whom he produced concerts, including a notable appearance at New York’s Town Hall by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. As a manager, he handled Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, and the Modern Jazz Quartet, among others. Like many of the artists he represented, he tended to favor dashikis, and he wore his hair in a Jewish ’fro. When Kay began dating his first wife, the black singer and actress Diahann Carroll, “it never occurred to me that he was white,” she wrote in her autobiography.
Kay “felt the music pushed the races together when nothing else did,” says his daughter with Carroll, Suzanne Kay Bamford. “I wouldn’t say he was an idealist—he just believed this was something that could bond people, could help dissolve these silly separations.” When Kay got into comedy with Wilson, the transition was natural. “Comedy did the same thing,” says his daughter. “It could poke fun at institutions. It dissolved some of those divisions when everybody was in the room together, laughing. He was drawn to it at a deep level because it did good in the world.”
By 1970 Wald already had what he considered a “long-term relationship” with Kay and Wilson, from the comedian’s performances at Mister Kelly’s. “Basically, we smoked a lot of grass together,” he says. Kay and Wilson had just established a boutique record label together, Little David, a subsidiary of Atlantic Records. Kay had briefly been an executive with the parent company, befriending the influential brothers Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun. But he was ill-suited for a corner office with a nameplate on the desk, so they agreed to let him run an imprint instead. Little David launched in 1970 with Wilson’s fourth album, The Devil Made Me Buy This Dress, which won the good-natured comedian a Grammy award.
Though their friendship was relatively brief, Wilson’s support of Carlin came at just the right time. Born into an enormous New Jersey family, Clerow Wilson Jr. got his nickname in the Air Force, when fellow airmen told the hyperactive cut-up he was “flipped out.” As a comedian he became a fixture at the Apollo Theater and other black stages, such as the Regal in Chicago, before breaking into television on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show. By the late 1960s Wilson was well-known to the American audience for his signature catch phrases, “What you see is what you get!” and “The devil made me do it!” He had a wacky repertoire of characters, including the Reverend Leroy, pastor of the Church of What’s Happening Now, and Geraldine Jones, a sassy, finger-wagging woman for whom Wilson dressed shamelessly, like Uncle Miltie, in drag. Following a highly rated special on NBC in 1969, Wilson’s own variety series kicked off in the fall of 1970 with the British interviewer David Frost and Big Bird, the huge feathered puppet from the new Sesame Street children’s series, as the guests.
The first thing Wilson and his manager could do for Carlin was give him a record deal. Three years after the release of Take-Offs and Put-Ons, RCA still held an option on Carlin’s next album, though nothing was imminent. De Blasio felt no allegiance. It was safe to assume, he felt, that RCA would have little interest in helping Carlin reach out to the college crowd. “They were busy chasing