Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [69]
As the comedian, wearing faded jeans and open-toed sandals, was being escorted away, Brenda collared Schwall and whispered a few terse words in his ear, something about George’s denim shirt in a desk drawer in the dressing room. “I knew what she meant,” Schwall says. “She didn’t have to spell it out.” The guitarist slipped into the dressing room, pulled out the shirt, and quickly pocketed the contents—a small envelope of cocaine. Moments later, the police searched the room. Though Carlin later joked that he’d made lifelong fans of the Siegel-Schwall Band when he left them with his blow, Schwall says he gave it to a Summerfest staffer later that night, after checking to be sure that Carlin would be bailed out. “When he gets out, he may want this,” he said to the assistant, pressing the package into his hand.
Clearly Carlin had reverted to using cocaine, after temporarily quitting on his German doctor’s recommendation. “Brenda and I laid off of everything for two months and then all of a sudden, we decided to celebrate the Carson thing and the Carnegie thing by getting high,” he said that summer. “So now we know we can stop and be off everything and then all of a sudden we might say, ‘Hey, let’s have another one of those weeks of getting high.’” It was an attitude that would catch up with him soon enough.
When the assistant district attorney refused to file a state criminal charge against Carlin, Lenz and his colleagues turned to the city offices, which charged him with disorderly conduct, then released him on $150 bail. The promoters, meanwhile, tried to cover their own asses. Summerfest executive director Henry Jordan, a former Green Bay Packer, told one local newspaper that he “had no idea he was like that. I have seen him many times on the Johnny Carson show and I had no idea he would use that kind of vulgarity. Summerfest is supposed to be a family show.”
Yet Carlin was not in the mood for apologizing. “I wouldn’t have changed anything I did if I had known there were children in the audience,” he told a local television station. “I think children need to hear those words the most, because as yet they don’t have the hang-ups. It’s adults who are locked into certain thought patterns.” (Schwall maintains that Carlin, having arrived at night by limo and performing in the bright glare of floodlights, in fact may not have realized that there were carnival attractions nearby.) The whole episode was rife with irony: “I find it kind of funny to be hassled for using [the seven words] when my intention is to free us from hassling people for using them,” he said.
Variety gave the story little attention, running just three paragraphs in a lower corner on an inside page the following week. Someone on the staff, however, couldn’t resist a bit of editorializing. The last paragraph ran as a parenthetical editor’s note:
(Hinterland managers have expressed themselves to Variety that they just can’t understand why comedians, who feel that “the kids loved it at the Bitter End and at Carnegie Hall,” do not understand that provincial family tastes differ from what the hypersophisticated audiences will accept in the metropolitan centers.—Ed.)
Following his arrest Carlin contacted the law offices of Coffey, Murray, and Coffey, who were known in