Last Words Read online

  In 1935 he won first prize in the National Public Speaking Contest held by the Dale Carnegie Institute, beating out 632 other contestants. Throughout the thirties he was in great demand as a luncheon and after-dinner speaker. In those days public speaking was a big deal. At one time, according to my mother, between salary, commissions and public speaking fees my dad was bringing home a thousand dollars a week—a film-star-sized sum at the time.

  His set speech was “The Power of Mental Demand”—which also served as the defining theme of his life. The title was that of a book written in 1913 by Herbert Edward Law. I still have his copy of it; on the inside cover is an inscription: “This is my bible. Please return to Pat Carlin, 780 Riverside Drive NYC.” The speech itself depended on its dramatic ending. After a forceful inspirational talk, he’d slowly bring the tone and tempo down until by his penultimate line he was almost whispering. “The power … of mental … demand.” He’d point around the room at various members of the audience. “each of you … in this room … has it.” Then the big finish. He’d practically shout, “PUT IT TO WORK!”

  Electrifying, my mother said.

  He was a dynamo, well matched to his live-wire wife. At its best their marriage was a great romantic adventure filled with energy, excitement, sparkling repartee. My mother claimed that when she and my father were married, “Madison Avenue said, ‘That’s not a marriage—that’s a merger.’” He called her Pepper after her spunky personality; she called him Ever Ready after his Sexual drive and availability. Several times she told Pat and me how great the sex in their marriage was, and when she did a wistful look would come into her eye. Dad’s approach was uninhibited for such prim and proper times. According to Ma she’d sometimes hear him call from another room, “Mary, is this yours?” go in and find him standing in the nude, holding his penis with the ice tongs.

  She told me once about the last day he ever saw me. I was only a few months old. He came to whomever’s home we were staying with at the time, and began playing with me on the living-room floor. Then he picked me up, held me above his head and sang this song to my mother:

  The pale moon was rising above the green mountain

  The sun was declining beneath the blue sea

  ’Twas then that I strolled to the pure crystal fountain

  And there I met Mary, the rose of Tralee

  She was lovely and fair as the rose in the summer

  But ’twas not her beauty alone that won me

  Oh, no, ’twas the truth in her eyes ever dawning

  That made me love Mary, the rose of Tralee

  Early in their courtship they’d made “The Rose of Tralee” their own song. I’m sure it poured absolutely sincerely from his great sentimental Irish heart. But it didn’t work. The Rose of Tralee was determined and he was history. He never saw me again.

  Something—I don’t know what—happened in 1940 or early 1941 that changed his course. It must have been related to his alcoholism because the next trace I have of him he was working as a kitchen assistant at the monastery of the Graymoor Friars in Garrison, New York. In a letter to his daughter Mary—by his first marriage—he chirps:

  My new job is assistant to Brother Capistran who is in charge of the cafeteria. On Sunday I attend the steam table, dishing out food. During the week I have charge of the men who mop, clean up and get the place ready for the following Sunday. I have a private bedroom and I eat with five privileged characters in a small dining room, the same food as the priests and brothers … I have lost thirty pounds, mostly around the waist. I feel swell—not a drink in over six weeks and there is plenty available. Oh yes!

  I first saw this letter in 1990 when I was fifty-three, the exact age he was when he wrote it. Besides the eeriness of that, there were other things that struck me. His spirit seemed completely unaffected by the change in his financial circumstances—this was a man who only five or six years earlier had been at the top of his game, promoting and employing the Power of Mental Demand and commanding a small fortune doing it. But he seemed to be a person who defined himself and his self-worth in terms of his own relationship to the universe at large—not the material world and its narrow standards. It made me proud of him and gave me reason to believe that my own very similar sense of what’s important had come directly from him. It’s a connection, a profound one. I don’t have many.

  By the fall of 1943 he was writing to his other daughter Rita from Watertown, New York, where he’d landed a job at radio station WATN, selling commercial time and playing records on the air—the same thing I’d be doing just thirteen years later. “Well here I am a veteran ‘cowhand’ with twelve days’ experience lousing up the air. I think I’ve set radio back twenty years … This old horse is learning something new. I’m going to stick it out until I develop enough technique to up myself.” Best of all there was a station sign-off he said he’d like to deliver; and this was at the height of World War II and its patriotic fervor:

  “I pledge allegiance to the people of the United States of America and all the political crap for which they stand. Big dough shall be divisible with union dues for all.”

  As conclusive evidence it’s scanty, but suggests to me that my father saw through the bullshit that is the glue of America. That makes me proud. If he transmitted it to me genetically, it was the greatest gift he could have given.

  His enthusiasm for radio didn’t lead anywhere except home a year later, with daughter Mary in the Bronx. He might have had an inkling his health wasn’t good and kept it from his family. Anyway he died at her house, aged fifty-seven, in December 1945, of a heart attack.

  I remember walking up the hill to our house—by now we’d had a home on West 121st Street for several years. It was a few days before Christmas. I was singing “Jingle Bells” and thinking of the presents my uncle Bill had let me pick out the week before, wrapped and waiting under the tree—an electric baseball game, an electric football game, a real leather football.

  The kitchen was quiet and my mother more serious than usual. She sat me down on a little stepladder that doubled as a chair—I still have it—and handed me a death notice from that day’s New York Journal-American. I didn’t need to read beyond his name; I knew what death notices looked like. I don’t recall any emotion. I just knew my brother would be happy and my mother relieved.

  Years later I came across the only record I have of his feelings for me. It’s a telegram he sent to my mother on my first birthday in May 1938. We’d been separated from him for about ten months by then but my mother hadn’t found work yet, so he was probably still fanning the hope things might work out. He wrote to her: “Just to let you know that one year ago today, I shared every moment of your anguish and prayed that I might share each pain—while your present advisors said nothing and cared less. Thank God and you for the sunbeam you brought forth, whom I pray will outlive all the ill-founded gossip.”

  He did have a terrific line of bullshit: praying to share the pains of childbirth sounds like vintage Pat Carlin. But he called me … a sunbeam.

  And he got his wish, though there are very few people alive to whom it matters. Not only did I outlive the gossip—by which I’m sure he meant my mother’s quite public and vocal negative opinion of him—but I lived to write this book which will serve as testimony to my old man’s great heart and soul.

  A sunbeam. Imagine that!

  2

  HOLY MARY, MOTHER OF GEORGE

  Mary Carlin with a young George

  (Courtesy of Kelly Carlin-McCall)

  My mother’s visit to the funeral home was a frigid affair for both sides—her family and the Carlins. She had always kept her distance from Patrick’s folks, considering them shanty Irish, and I’m sure they saw her as a climber, an uppity gold digger. They weren’t far wrong.

  My mother’s capacity for good living had long been blunted by the realities of salaried employment, but she retained her class pretensions and tried to realize some of them by using us kids as advertisements for her
taste. Pat, when he was young, had always been dressed like a little sissy in Eton collars and short pants, explaining in part why his fighting skills developed so rapidly. I escaped the worst of that because she couldn’t afford it, but she still took me to have my hair cut at Best & Co. on Fifth Avenue, because she knew that was where “the better people” had their kids’ hair cut. The better people went to Best.

  Much of the struggle between Mary and her sons revolved around her “plans” for us and our strongly developed instinct for independence. She was a woman with decidedly aristocratic pretensions, indoctrinated with the idea that she was “lace-curtain Irish,” as opposed to the shanty kind with its stereotypes of drinking, lawlessness, laziness, rowdiness, all the things which—to the degree that ethnic generalities have any meaning—come from that side of their national character that makes the Irish fun.

  There was a fierceness to my mother’s striving typical of her generation (she was born in 1896). William Shannon in The American Irish writes: “Social rules and conventions in America are set by women, and the standards women enforced in late Victorian America as to what was ‘nice’ behavior … could be cruel and rigorous. And to these standards the Irish mothers and maiden aunts often added exacting requirements of their own because resentment and competitiveness impelled them not only to want to be accepted and well thought of but also superior and invulnerable.” Voilà! Mary Bearey in a nutshell.

  She felt she had detected a diamond beneath my father’s rough shanty-Irish exterior, and could clean him up, polish the gem. It’s a common courtship fantasy. That mission thwarted, she turned her sights to the more malleable Silly Putty of her sons. Pat the Younger quickly screwed up that strategy. One time in the elevator of our building on Riverside Drive they encountered a lady of particularly regal bearing. “What a lovely little boy,” she purred. “And what is your name?” “Son of a bitch!” answered the lovely little boy. Pat was dismissed early on by Ma as “being a Carlin” and having the “dirty, rotten Carlin temper” and I became in her eyes “a Bearey,” a scion of her superior, cultured, lace-curtain ancestry. My quiet nature as a little boy became “the Bearey sensitivity.” She had even named me for her favorite brother, George, a sweet, gentle soul who played classical piano.

  (George, by the way, spent most of his life in the nuthouse. He had taken all his clothes off on the crosstown bus and they said don’t do that, but he did it again two years later. So they put him in Rockland State Hospital, Building 17, diagnosed with dementia praecox. He would come home at Thanksgiving and Christmas and play the piano. One Thanksgiving he turned to me and said, “I’m an admiral. I sail out of Port Said.” He pronounced “Said” as the past tense of “say,” not with the vowels separated. I thought it was wonderful that he’d spent his life in Rockland and claimed to be an admiral. But he never told me any more about his seafaring days.)

  Part of my mother’s strategy for advancing her life-agenda and realizing her material dreams demanded careful control of the development of her children. I don’t mean moral guidance or practical life-advice but a code that would make her look good and feel comfortable. “Everything you do is a reflection on me.” She was obsessed with appearances, utterly dependent on the approval of the outside world, in particular that segment of society for whom she worked and that met her approval, the ruling class. Her vocabulary was full of tripe like “A man is judged by his wife,” “When you speak you judge yourself,” “You are judged by the company you keep.” Judgment, judgment, judgment. Judgment of others, judgment by others.

  The other control factor was guilt—how our behavior made her feel. She turned everything into a test of how considerate or inconsiderate we were being. She carried it to melodramatic lengths—infused it with a sense of martyrdom. It wasn’t just “I give you everything.” It was “I trudge home night after night, my arms loaded with bundles for you boys, my poor arms loaded with bundles and the doctor says I may drop on the spot because my blood pressure is 185 over 9,000 and the garbage isn’t even out.” I know lots of people heard that shit but there was some extra dimension for me—it was frightening. I had the normal need to differentiate from the parent, especially one of the opposite sex, but she was repelling me with these aspects of her behavior and of her dreams for me.

  When her marriage broke up, her living with a maid on Riverside Drive and having nice crystal and all that shit went away. It was unfinished business. I think she wanted me to finish the job. On one occasion I overheard her saying to Patrick that he would amount to nothing because he was a Carlin and so on, but … “I’m going to make something out of that little boy in there.” It gave me steel. It made me determined that she wouldn’t make something out of me. I would be the one that would make something out of me.

  And yet she was my mother, so she’s deep in my art, both for what she gave me—especially that love of words—and for what I rebelled against in her. And she made me laugh, she had a way with a punch line. Once she told Pat and me about coming home on the bus that day. A big fat German man plonked down beside her. “A big Hun sat next to me,” she said, “a big mess! He was taking up far too much room. So I took out my hatpin and showed it to him and said: ‘Condense yourself!’”

  I’ll never forget the moment when I made my mother laugh for the first time. That I actually took an idea and twisted it and she laughed. And it was real—not just cute-kid stuff. I provoked a laugh in her by means of something I thought of. How magic that was, the power it gave me.

  Even after I’d made the break—made it pretty clear that I wasn’t going to let her make something of me—she hung on. She’d find excuses to come visit me on the road when I was playing these little nightclubs in the early sixties. She’d show up in Boston or Fort Worth or Shreveport. “I just want to see if you have nice linens.” By then I’d begun to claim my independence and my manhood and was able to accommodate that—we hadn’t wound up killing each other after all.

  But then she showed up on my honeymoon! My partner, Jack Burns, and I were working at the Miami Playboy Club, and my brand-new wife, Brenda, and I were living at the motel next door—and I get a call: “I’m coming down with Agnes” (Agnes was her sister). My mother and my maiden aunt on my fucking honeymoon!

  Mary got on well with Brenda. Almost too well. A little later when we lived with her in New York—I was getting started on my own by now and things were pretty tight—she would often try to drive a wedge between Brenda and myself. I would go out drinking with the guys from the old neighborhood, and while I slept it off in the morning, she’d give Brenda twenty bucks and say, “Go on downtown, and go shopping—don’t let him know where you are.” Anti-man, anti-husband stuff. It was the diametric opposite of the old mother-in-law joke.

  As Shannon says, Victorian standards of niceness could be cruel. It wasn’t just that the linens had to be nice. And while Mary must have been dismayed that her son chose the career I did, she made the most of it. When I was a regular on Merv Griffin in the mid-sixties, she came on the show and upstaged everybody—including me. In a way I hadn’t yet made a break with Mary’s niceness. The sixties were my nice years, my nice suit, my nice collar, my nice tie, my nice haircut—and my nice material.

  When I really made the break in 1970, really put that niceness behind me, she had a remarkable—but typical—reaction. She came to the Bitter End on Bleecker Street right around the time of the FM & AM album. I was doing “Seven Words” by then, and so for the first time she saw me saying “cocksucker” and “motherfucker” on stage and having people laugh and applaud.

  Mary was never a prude. She liked to tell a dirty joke—but she’d make believe she felt ashamed and embarrassed. She’d give you a look like “Aren’t I awful? Am I the bad girl?” and then tell it. But I was taking things very far—plus I was attacking two of the things she held most dear: religion and commerce. She was mortified that I would be rewarded for these attitudes. But she was incredibly happy I was successful. It was the payoff. The f
ulfillment of “Everything you do is a reflection on me.” She was a star’s mother. “Hi—I’m Georgie’s mother.”

  But here’s the most telling thing. On the block of 121st Street where I grew up was our church, Corpus Christi, and Corpus Christi School. It was run by Dominican nuns and they all knew Mary. Throughout my nice years the sisters got to know me from television; they knew I was an alumnus of Corpus Christi, and my mother would visit with them and it would be “Yes, he’s doing so well,” “Yes, I’m so proud of him,” “Yes, you should be.”

  Now comes shit-piss-cocksucker-tits and God-has-no-power. So one day she’s walking past the church and runs into a couple of the nuns and they comment on the new surge in my popularity and say, “Corpus Christi was all over the Class Clown album.” So Mary says, “Yes, but isn’t it awful, sisters, the language he’s using.” And they say, “No, don’t you see? What he’s saying is these words are part of the language anyway and they’re kept off in their own little section and their own little closet. He’s trying to liberate us from the way we feel about these things.” My mother says, “Oh yes, yes, of course.” She’s okay now. She’s fine. Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits have just received the imprimatur of Holy Mother Church. Now they’re nice words.

  When I threw my mother out of my life figuratively as a teenager, I threw out the good with the bad. To make a clean break you eliminate everything, but I still find her ambitions hidden in mine—and they’re not necessarily bad. An important goal of mine is to do a one-man Broadway show. And it was Mary who used to take me to Broadway shows and in the lobby would point to people and say: “See that man’s hand? Look at that. He’s cultured. He’s refined. Look how he holds his cigarette. Look at the angle of his leg. That’s what I want for you.” In some way my desire to go to Broadway and the legitimate stage is to impress the people my mother admired. I still have this longing to be Mary’s model boy. She is hidden in every cranny of my workroom, requiring me to do things. What I have to do constantly is to take Mary out of things and leave only myself in them. Then decide if I want to do them.