Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [66]
Over the years, guest hosting The Tonight Show became a semi-regular occurrence for Carlin. Carson routinely used substitutes, taking most Mondays off and going on frequent vacations. Rat Pack sidekick Joey Bishop was the primary fill-in for much of the 1960s; Jerry Lewis was another regular replacement. Later, John Davidson and Joan Rivers, among others, served stints as Carson’s regular guest hosts. Carlin, with his hair pulled back in a ponytail, wearing an airbrushed long-sleeve T-shirt, was an unorthodox-looking guest host, to say the least.
When he was offered the gig, he put in three requests for the guests he wanted to interview: Jane Fonda, Ralph Nader, and Lenny Bruce’s mother, Sally Marr. All three were turned down. Fonda was preparing for the release of the documentary F.T.A. (alternately identified as “Free the Army” and “Fuck the Army”), an account of her “antiwar road show” with fellow actor Donald Sutherland, a sort of pacifists’ version of Bob Hope’s USO tours. Fonda would make her infamous trip to Hanoi a little later, in July. Nader, who was briefly considered as a third-party presidential candidate for 1972, was denied because of his relentless criticism of the automotive industry’s safety standards; The Tonight Show was heavily supported by advertising from U.S. car manufacturers.
The disagreement over Sally Marr, Carlin recalled, was especially disappointing. “That was really the capper,” he told Rolling Stone. “I had to call Sally and say, ‘Sally, you won’t believe this. [Lenny’s] been dead for six years and they’re still scared of him.’” Carson’s producers did make a few concessions, booking the Committee, the hippie sketch-comedy troupe that had been on the Smothers Brothers show with Carlin; former pro football linebacker Dave Meggyesy, known for his 1970 exposé Out of Their League, which blew the lid off the inhumane culture of the NFL; and Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, led by a psychedelic gypsy-jazzbo born in Little Rock but shaped by San Francisco’s Summer of Love. (At the time Hicks and his band were in talks with Monte Kay to become the next Little David act, though it never panned out.)
“I remember thinking, Wow, they got some pretty hip people on the show,” says Meggyesy. He had interviewed a year earlier with a Tonight Show producer who, he says, was a “flaming right-winger”; only when Carlin agreed to host did the show find time for the radical linebacker. The singer and actress Debbie Reynolds was the sole representative from traditional show business, but even she brought along a bit of political baggage: She had recently been in the news for her quarrel with NBC over its use of Big Tobacco sponsors for her short-lived sitcom, The Debbie Reynolds Show.
In his opening monologue, Carlin spoke frankly about his transformation, attributing his newfound self-awareness to his experiences using acid. Not surprisingly, the admission was omitted from the tape of the show.
With FM & AM selling like a hit rock album, the comedian was no longer scrambling for gigs. On the eighth of July he headlined a sold-out Carnegie Hall. Stand-up comedy had some select history in the old Italianate auditorium, onetime home of the New York Philharmonic: Lenny Bruce had played there in February 1961, recording a charged set at midnight during one of the fiercest snowstorms ever to paralyze Manhattan. Brother Theodore, a legend of underground comedy who called his warped stream-of-consciousness “stand-up tragedy,” had a standing engagement of midnight performances in the building’s Recital Hall during the mid-1950s, billed as a “One Man Show of Sinister Humor.” In 1961 the foul-mouthed comedienne Belle Barth, whose recordings included one called I Don’t Mean to Be Vulgar, But It’s Profitable , headlined; legend has it that her show was a failure, because she’d been warned to clean up her act for the billing. Mort Sahl, Bob Newhart, Jackie Mason, and Dick Gregory