Last Words Read online

’EYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY, baby, was’ happenin’? Que paso? Al Sleet your Hippy-Dippy Weatherman here with all the hippy-dippy weather, man! First of all the pollen count from Long Island Jewish Hospital, onetwothreefourfive hahahaha. Present temperature is sixty-eight degrees at the airport, which is stupid ’cos I don’t know anyone who lives at the airport. Downtown it’s much hotter. Downtown’s ON FIRE, man.

  Now, I imagine some of you were a little surprised at the weather over the weekend. Especially if you watched my show on Friday. I’d like to personally apologize to the former residents of Rogers, Illinois. Caught them cats nappin’, man! …

  Now we take a look at the radar. Hey, the radar’s pickin’ up Mitch Miller! Sing along with Mitch, man! (sings) Baby … Gimme your answer do, I’m half crazy, all … Where was I, man …? Oh yeah, the radar’s picking up a line of thundershowers extending from a point nine miles north-northeast of Secaucus, New Jersey, to a line six miles on either side of a line somewhere south-southwest of Fond du Lac. However the radar is also picking up a squadron of incoming Russian ICBMs so I wouldn’t sweat the thundershowers!

  Tonight’s forecast: DARK! Continued mostly dark tonight turning to widely scattered LIGHT in the morning, man!

  That’s it from Al Sleet. Don’t forget, folks: inside every silver lining there’s a DARK CLOUD!

  As I did more and more television—The Hollywood Palace, The Tonight Show, Perry Como, Jimmie Rodgers, Roger Miller, more Douglases, other variety crap I’ve mercifully forgotten—I began to realize that there was a price you paid for the chance to do your stuff. You had to make believe you really cared about and belonged to the larger community of show business. That you were really interested in their small talk and shared whatever their values were.

  The two-track life was there all the time. I clung to the respectability and mainstreamness, yet I had no respect for the things stars did and talked about and seemed to glorify and find glory in. I’d watch other people do the show after I had: the same junk talk, the same empty chatter, all this stupid fawning and caring that wasn’t really there.

  But then along came the main chance. What all this dumb shit was leading to, my ultimate goal, the Holy Grail. Stage Three: my first shot at real acting!

  I decided to start modestly with a small role in That Girl. No need to overreach. Take it nice and easy. I was cast as Marlo’s agent. I knew I could do well at this. I was a natural onstage. Acting was just the next step in other kinds of performance I had mastered. Doing a character voice was an extension of what I did in my act. You memorize your lines and speak them, moving when needed. In the end it was all television. Piece of cake.

  There were a few other considerations, like real direction. (Variety TV directors direct cameras and not much else.) On the set, Marlo’s producers, Bill Persky and Sam Denoff, successful TV writers who were moving fast up the food chain and knew what they wanted, gave me some direction:

  “Okay, remember now, you’d like to handle this account. You’ve had trouble with this type of person in the past, so you’re a little leery, but at the same time you have to pay the bills and your wife has just left you. The phone upstairs is ringing but you’re not going to answer that because you know the maid is going to get it. And there’s a fire in the basement. By the way, you’re originally Romanian, so you have an Eastern European attitude to everything …”

  You absorb that and walk through it and now there’s blocking:

  “Okay. Try to come down and cut a little to the left, then come all the way down, cheat a bit toward the light, but stay out of her light and this time get closer to the window. Okay? Let’s do it again.”

  And … action!

  I try to remember the words, while putting something behind the words that smacks of authenticity—motivation, character, something, and also while following the direction and blocking, wondering if I should use one of my own characters, although then I’ll be putting alien words into my guy’s mouth and bang goes all his naturalness, because they’re someone else’s words which I have to somehow interpret …

  In short: Acting.

  And I was NOT ABLE to do that! I was absolutely at sea, completely lost. Whatever competence I might have had going in had vanished. I floundered. I fluffed lines. I tried to do everything I’d been told at the same time. I was failing! And failing feeds on itself. There’s a constant diminution of confidence. On top of failing, your brain is whirring: “They hired me! They are thinking about that RIGHT NOW! About the three more days they have to go through! They must be very dissatisfied! I SUCK! I will CONTINUE TO SUCK! And it WILL BE ON NETWORK TELEVISION!”

  I’d lobbied my manager hard for auditions and they came in thick and fast.

  There was a screen test for a series called Manly and the Mob. Anthony Caruso, who’d played a million mobsters, whose face you would know in a minute, was the Mob. Great casting. I was Manly, the inept private detective—an American Clouseau. Easy enough comic character to play. Not that complex a task. This was my series to have or not have. This was my pilot. My ticket to stardom.

  I couldn’t do that either! Or any of the others. They were all absolute, total failures, every one a humiliation. That Girl hadn’t just been first-time-out nerves. I was devastatingly inept! There were no Oscars in sight. No Hollywood helpless with laughter at my feet. Danny Kaye the Second? Jack Lemmon the Second? Forget it. It was all beyond my reach.

  I felt like I’d lost both legs in a car crash. My dream, this thing I’d wanted since I was a little kid sitting transfixed in a funky, dark movie house on the edge of Harlem, this future I believed was my birthright, had dissolved into thin air like the morning mist.

  Meanwhile Stage Two, which was to have been phased out, having served its purpose, the booster rocket designed to fall back to earth as I shot to movie stardom, continued to barrel upward, getting bigger and stronger all the time. To the outside world I was a comic on the fast track, hitting all the professional heights. But inside I was full of fear and confusion. I was beginning to feel the discontent that became intolerable later on.

  Objectively 1967 was full of success. In February my first album, Take-Offs and Put-Ons, came out and went gold. It was nominated for a Grammy and lost by a squeaker to Bill Cosby, a very worthy opponent. I was playing the biggest nightclubs in the country. I was starting to play Vegas. That summer, I did another replacement series called Away We Go, fourteen episodes, this time in the Jackie Gleason Show slot. (Hence the title, “Away we go!” being one of Gleason’s catchphrases. “To the moon, Alice!” didn’t seem to work so well.) But this summer I was a star of the show. Along with Buddy Rich and Buddy Greco.

  My schizophrenia was beginning to show. I would come to the studio every day with a single strand of Indian beads and a different button. One day the button said, “The Marine Corps Builds Oswalds,” and Buddy Greco took great exception to that. (He later became a very different person, completely relaxed with the human race, but he used to be a very difficult, very conservative guy.)

  The kind of stuff I did on Away We Go was singing a trio with my two Buddies of “It Was a Very Good Year.” It was creaky sketches with creaky premises, it was trivial numbers in bunny suits. It began boring in on me how untrue I was being to myself. These dreary variety shows with uninteresting people who were just walking through their lives. Doing bland, middle-American showbiz-as-usual material. The more that feeling piled up, the more my acting failures weighed on my mind, the more I was becoming aware that something was seriously wrong. That I was in the wrong place with the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

  Then there was The Ed Sullivan Show. The horrible, horrible Sullivan Show, torture chamber of comedians. I’d resisted doing it for a long time, but the offers kept improving and they agreed not to hack up my material, like they did with every other comic, however big. So in ’67 I finally went on Sullivan. On what I thought were my terms.

  The Ed Sullivan Show’s worst weapon of torture was that it was live. There
were no second takes on Sullivan. If you fucked up, all America saw it. If Mr. Pastry dropped his plates or Jackie Mason gave Ed the finger there were no do-overs, no cutaways, no edits. No apologies were accepted.

  There was additional pressure: the studio audience knew the show was live too. They knew there was a chance they might be on television, sitting in front of the picture of Joe Louis or Jimmy Cagney or some other celebrity Ed wrote about in his stupid column. Half the audience had special invitations. It was a perk. If you were a Lincoln Mercury dealer on Long Island you got ten tickets and you brought people you wanted to impress. Everybody had their best things on. The audience was on display as much as you were.

  When an audience is potentially on display, they’re very inhibited. They’re reluctant to let go. So laughter, which is a natural, spontaneous thing, must be avoided. They think: “I’ll wait and make sure that if I laugh, it’s something everyone’s laughing at. That I’m right in with the crowd. Because if I start roaring, ‘Hahaha- ohhhahaaahaaaa-God-oh-fuck-that’s-funny,’ and no one else does, I’ll embarrass the shit out of myself.” Not good for comedy.

  The final turn of the screw: Sullivan himself. During your set, Ed would stand onstage over to stage right. Out of camera range but onstage. So the entire audience never watched the comic. They were watching Sullivan to see if he would laugh. And he never did.

  Add all this up and you have the graveyard of laughter. Playing comedy to the Sullivan audience was agony. You’d get more laughs in a mausoleum.

  I’ve always been an ordered and left-brained person about performance, worried to the point of obsession that every detail has been taken care of, is precisely in place. But I don’t get nervous. On Sullivan I was always incredibly nervous. At first I thought it was the unpredictability, the lack of control, but I soon figured out it was because the show cultivated, it seemed almost deliberately, that driving force of network television—fear.

  I’d stay at the Americana Hotel (now the Sheraton) on Seventh at 52nd. I’d take that walk—the Last Mile—across to Broadway and up to the stage door on 53rd Street. There was a deli right at the stage door; I’d get my two cans of Rheingold, because I knew I could handle two cans. It wouldn’t show and it might help a little. But the nervousness never went away.

  These days Letterman is taped in the same place, the Ed Sullivan Theater. Once in a while when I’m in New York I purposely walk the Last Mile across those same streets and up to that stage door on 53rd. Forty years later I still reexperience all the fear and vomiting nervousness.

  It got even worse. Sullivan was on Sunday nights at eight. Because the dress rehearsal began around one to two p.m., you had to be there fairly early in the morning, right around the time normal people were in church. That was the choice: church or Sullivan. So you had ten to twelve hours to sit around getting absolutely fucking terrified before you went on live in front of 50 million belching, farting, comatose Americans who’d just eaten a big Sunday dinner. The boredom part of fear and boredom.

  There was one tiny ray of sunlight. Ed found out that I was an Irish Catholic from New York. It didn’t help with any of the physical horrors of the show, but it did mean I got preferential treatment when it came to having my material butchered, or simply being cut from the show after dress, both of which could happen even to the biggest names in comedy. The Sullivan people told my manager—whether it was true or not who knows—that I was Ed’s favorite comic.

  On one show he called me over after my set to where he stood, stage right. This was supposed to be a big honor. We had some inane exchange and then he said out of the blue, “You’re a Catholic!” and then gestured to the audience with that weird insect thing he did with his arms: “Give him a big hand! He’s a Catholic!”

  Ed was partial to this form of intro. He once introduced my friend the Hispanic singer José Feliciano (another of the Au Go Go gang) as follows: “Want you to give the next act, José Feliciano, a big hand! He’s blind—and he’s Puerto Rican!”

  But the real milestone of my Sullivan career was the show where I followed the skating chimpanzees. There’s something I can say for the rest of my days: “I once followed the skating chimpanzees.”

  Terrified I always was, but I did do some ballsy and reckless things on Sullivan. It was traditional for comedians to try out a bit in clubs to see if it worked and then do it on Sullivan. I tried out things on Sullivan and if they worked, I’d do them in clubs.

  Some of them didn’t. Once I brought my brother on. Pat had never been in front of an audience in his life. Very verbal man, lots of laughs in private, but no experience whatsoever being funny in public for money. I wrote a piece using an old character from the Burns and Carlin days, a corrupt senator called Frebish. Pat was a newsman, interviewing me. We sat at a desk so that if he dried up, he could read the questions.

  The plan was, Ed would do an intro, Ray Block, leader of the orchestra, would play a short sting, Pat would say, “Good evening, this is (whatever the funny show name was) and I’m here with Senator Frebish …”

  Ed does his intro and … Ray Block forgets to play the music sting. So Pat and I sit there live in front of 50 million people for what seems like two months. I hiss: “Go ahead! Start!” Pat looks blank—where’s the music? Eventually, after another month, he starts and of course the piece just went totally in the sewer. And it wasn’t that funny to start with.

  Vegas, on the other hand, was a cinch. I had this act—which was essentially my 1967 album—that I wasn’t really in, so it was easy. All I had to do was turn it on and let it run. I was a cute, clever, presentable guy and I had a nice double-breasted jacket. I was good-looking without being overpoweringly handsome, neat hair, slim figure. And articulate. I said what I said well. I knew how to do those characters and those voices and those radio announcers and those ladies on TV. I was a nicely packaged commodity, slick, entertaining. I could give them what they wanted for how long they wanted.

  Well, perhaps not quite. When I first played Vegas at the Flamingo in 1966, opening for Jack Jones, my contract laid out very specifically the time I was to do: nineteen minutes. I thought: “Fuck nineteen minutes! This is my first night ever in Vegas. This is an important moment. If I’m going good I’m going till I’m done!”

  The audience is fantastic and I end up doing twenty-two minutes—three minutes over the contract. I come back to the dressing room and there waiting for me is a male mountain with a conspicuous bulge in his jacket. He very calmly and slowly tells me that my three extra minutes have cost the owner of the Flamingo, Mr. X (I’ve blanked on the name), some fucking staggering amount of money in the high six figures (which now would be ten to fifteen times that). They calibrated exactly how much the casino was earning every single minute of the day. The man-mountain lets me know that in the future I do not want Mr. X to be “disappointed.” And I have no illusion as to what this means. Part of this woolly mammoth’s job description is rubbing out opening acts who do more than nineteen minutes and dumping them in the desert. Despite growing up on some pretty mean streets, it was the scariest fucking moment of my life. From then on I never did a nanosecond over nineteen minutes.

  The real point being: I could do exactly nineteen minutes or exactly twenty-nine or thirty-nine. I was by now a consummate pro. I could do whatever you wanted. Piece of cake.

  A random scan of my bookings for ’66/’67 shows names like: the Flamingo, the Cocoanut Grove, The Hollywood Palace, The Perry Como Show, The Jackie Gleason Show, Lake Tahoe, The Dean Martin Show and on and on. Next stop on this track I change my name to Jackie Carlin, buy some white shoes, gold chains and pinkie rings and I’m set for life.

  What was happening to me internally was that I’d got not just seeds of doubt, but saplings of doubt sprouting inside me. About my acting of course, but about all my goals, about being on this rigid track, about being rewarded more and more for being cute and clever and funny.

  But not for being George Carlin.

  And there was
something else too that I could see happening, but didn’t know how to change, that was just as related to the track I was speeding along on and to the doubt and discontent it caused me.

  After Burns and Carlin broke up, Brenda and I were together all the time. She devoted herself to me and my comedy. She helped me with the details and logistics, booked travel, kept the books, made suggestions, she was my sounding board, she sat in every club I played every night, whether there was one person or it was packed. She celebrated when I did well, she was there to hold my hand when things sucked. We did a lot of holding hands.

  On the road our days didn’t vary much. We wouldn’t get up till eleven or twelve; eat breakfast, hang around and watch TV. If we were in a city we wanted to see, we’d get out a bit and walk around. We were confined somewhat because we didn’t have much money to spend. But we were carefree, we did crazy stuff, we kept on clicking as we had at first.

  I couldn’t be there when Brenda was in Dayton getting ready to have Kelly. I did fly in when she was actually born and I was up on a ladder taking pictures when she was just a few minutes old. I felt bad that I had to leave and go back on the road. I could tell Brenda wasn’t happy.

  But she didn’t let that get in her way. When Kelly was just two and half months old—they were back in New York by then—she packed her up and they came down to meet me in Florida. That was Kelly’s first road trip. From then on for the next three years, it was just like before, except there were three of us now. We were together all the time, on the road or back in New York. And just like before, Brenda was my manager and bookkeeper, collaborator and comforter.

  Then the day after we got to L.A. in March 1966, I had to go to work on preproduction for Kraft Summer Music Hall. Brenda was left alone with Kelly, who was not yet three. Suddenly she had nothing to do. She knew no one. She had nowhere to go. So she got drunk.

  She started getting terrible migraine headaches—a pretty good indicator of stress and tension. But I missed the marker. And she wasn’t inactive. She volunteered at a hospital and she did one big thing in L.A. that she’d always wanted to try but we couldn’t afford till then: take flying lessons. She passed her tests, she became proficient. But she was used to sharing her accomplishments with me, and I wasn’t there for her to share it. I was too busy. Instead of boosting her confidence it became a source of resentment. So she got drunk.