Last Words Read online

  We continue this way for about a month and come back one day to the YMCA to find the remainder of our money missing from the sock drawer. We’d been robbed—presumably by some Young Christian Man. Disaster. We had to get some dough, get work. But unfortunately we’d made a mutual pact not to ever really work. We would not park cars or wait tables. It was show business or starve.

  We had to get back into radio. Like I said, we weren’t going to work. The first place we went—a daytime station called KDAY—was looking for a morning comedy team. Only in Hollywood! We did an audition tape and got the gig. They called us the Wright Brothers, put aviator helmets on us and we did our first show from an airplane.

  We had trouble getting up at five in the morning. If we were late we had a trick in case the station owner had been monitoring us and had heard dead air. We’d upcut ourselves—chop the first letters off a word to make it sound as if there was something wrong with the transmission. “… ’ack Burns, here! ’d morning Los Angeles!”

  The studios—in a little building on Vine—didn’t occupy the entire floor. There were also small offices where song publishers, song pluggers or other small offshoots of showbiz could have an address and get phone messages.

  The station went off the air at sunset. Jack and I used to stay at the station and work on nightclub bits there. One night we’re rehearsing and a guy came out of one of these little offices. His name was Murray Becker.

  Murray watched us for a while, then said, “I used to manage Rowan and Martin and Ford and Hines, I know a lot of the teams, I know agents, I got connections, I worked with a lot of comics. You guys are nice, you’re hip, you’re young, you’re clean, you got that hip tip, it’s in, it’s hip, why don’t you let me manage ya?”

  Well, why not?

  A week or so before, we’d found work at a coffeehouse called Cosmo Alley. We were there without a contract. Murray said, “You gotta have a contract.” First things first, he drew up a management contract between Burns and Carlin and Murray Becker. Then he went to the coffeehouse and got everything down in writing. He got us into AGVA, where he knew people. Murray was a little Jewish guy, a lovable man who knew his way around. Incredibly loyal. If you were his act, man, you got talked about in glowing terms all day to everyone.

  Two things now happen. First: Murray knows a guy at Era Records, Herb Newman, and he gets Herb Newman to record us. Three hundred bucks advance, but … we’re only in L.A. for a month and we’ve recorded an album!

  Second: an important part of our act was an imitation of Mort sahl and one of Lenny Bruce. I did them both because I was a better mimic than Jack. And to imitate them in 1960 was something of an act of defiance. So we felt far out—that was the term of the time—these guys are really FAR OUT! They do Lenny and Mort Sahl!

  Murray says, “I know Milt Ebbins [Mort Sahl’s manager], I know Lenny Bruce. We were in the navy together. I think I can get them to come in and see you guys and we can get a blurb or something. We get a little talk going, you guys are young, you’re sharp, you’re hot, you’re hip …”

  So Mort came in to see us. Mort was encouraging. He called us “a cerebral duo” and later he recommended us to Hugh Hefner for the Playboy Clubs. They called us a “duo of hip wits …”

  A few nights later in comes Lenny with his wife, Honey, and while we didn’t quite realize at the time the legendary nature of this encounter, I do remember that for eveningwear Lenny had chosen a powder-blue sport jacket.

  Lenny was incredibly important to me. I’d come across his album Interviews of Our Times when I was in Shreveport and I was changed forever. The defiance inherent in that material, the brilliance of the mimicry, the intellect at work, the freedom he had. I had no sense I could approach it ever, but I wanted to emulate it in any way I could.

  One simple way: mimic him. I got aspects of him that were very good although I didn’t really have the voice. But he liked us! He was partly flattered I think and partly liked the brash edge we had. So he was friendly and wished us luck (“Emmis!”). The next thing we know, we get a telegram from Jack Sobel, the head of GAC, which was one of the biggest agencies of the day. (General Artists, we handle everybody!) The telegram read: “Based on Lenny Bruce’s rave reaction, New York office hereby authorizes West Coast office GAC to sign Burns and Carlin under exclusive representation contract, all fields, Jack Sobel.” Phew.

  It was June 1960. We’d been in the business five months. We had an album, a manager and a big agency. And Lenny Bruce liked us! L.A. seemed to have delivered big-time on that morning feeling.

  By now I had politically crossed the street. There’d already been several months of a campaign in which a new young liberal candidate was on the horizon and getting clearer all the time. Jack was a Kennedy man from way back. When Kennedy won the Wisconsin primary, Jack said: “He’s on the glory road.” That made my skin prickle.

  We got booked, properly booked for once, into a legitimate nightclub: The Cloister Inn in Chicago. A first-line place that was regularly reviewed by Variety. Right on rush Street in the heart of Chicago’s nighttime scene with the Happy Medium across the street, the Living Room, the Playboy Club, Mister Kelly’s farther down. We were opening for Bobby Short. “How come we’re opening for a pianist?” Jack asks. “He ought to be opening for us.”

  We do great. We get held over. Hefner sees us. Hefner likes us. We’re in the Playboy Club. And Playboy at that time was on its way up, the polite side of the revolution, if you like, fighting for sexual freedom and freedom of speech. The guys who bought keys were actually kind of lame—they only thought they were hip because Hef told them they were. But still, it felt good to be in that mix.

  And we got the Paar Show. Just ten months after we’d been sitting in our underwear in Fort Worth fantasizing about it. We did Huntley and Brinkley interviewing Kennedy and Nixon. I did Nixon in 1960 (before anyone, I think, and I did Kennedy better than Vaughn Meader. Ha!). We didn’t get Paar as host: we got Arlene Francis. So we didn’t get to tell our story about our having met when Jack caught me going down on his African-American mother. But we did get to be part of the Kennedy power structure that night: Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was also a guest.

  Burns and Carlin were on their way.

  Our goal, if we had one, was to be a crossover act, somewhere between the disrespectful, irreverent comedy of the coffeehouses and the smart, sophisticated Blue Angel school. Shelley Berman, Mort Sahl, Nichols and May had already accomplished this, Bob Newhart and Dick Gregory were beginning to. That was what we aspired to.

  But there was some other element to what we did—a certain amount of risk taking. We weren’t quite what was becoming a standard type. We weren’t clean cut, campus bred.

  We were urban, rough-edge Irish kids. In nice suits, with what seemed like a decent vocabulary and a bit of social conscience, but cut from a coarser cloth. And when we later auditioned live at the Blue Angel, which was a very big deal (besides being in my hometown), those sophisticated East Siders, who fell off their chairs at Shelley and Mort and Nichols and May, just stared at us.

  Another miscalculation was at the Playboy Club in Chicago. Hef told us that Joe Kennedy—JFK’s father—was in the club and would we do a special show in the library for him? We said we weren’t sure Joe Kennedy would go for our humor. But Hef dismissed that: “They’ve all got a great sense of humor. All the Kennedys.”

  So we did the bit, with Jack interviewing me as Jack Kennedy. Now, the trouble with doing humor in front of somebody who’s the subject of it is the whole audience waits for that person’s reaction before they laugh. Or don’t. So they didn’t. Because Joe was steamed. No Kennedy sense of humor in evidence. Not about his boy.

  “No Time For Comedy,” said the Variety headline next day: “Joseph Kennedy sat stonily through George Carlin’s impresh of the Chief Executive … Kennedy père was heard to remark as he was leaving, ‘I don’t see anything funny in making fun of my son.’ Translation: the whole room went down in flames.”<
br />
  In reality our political material was pretty harmless. We had a veneer of hipness, even of daring, but we were more interested in playing characters—especially these lower-class Irish guys—than we were in making a statement. We let our comedy serve our politics rather than have our politics drive what we did and said. And the Irish characters were in charge. They did the writing. There was always the chance at any moment that one of these characters might say something unplanned and might say it in an uncomfortable, disturbing manner. Shock, not titillate. That’s exciting, the high-wire stuff.

  These guys came from deep in our street experience: they were cops, dads, bartenders with baseball bats. The first-line authority figures we’d grown up with as opposed to Congress, big corporations and more impersonal authorities. Putting bigoted or violent language in their mouths was fun and funny and even to a degree satirical, exposing them for what they were. In a way they were the forerunners of later mainstream Irish bigots like Peter Boyle’s Joe and Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker. Later still, throughout the eighties, my Irish street guy was a powerful element in the evolution of what finally became in the early nineties my authentic voice. He and his White Harlem relatives are the core of the family of characters that still live inside me.

  For the next two years, Jack and I played first-line nightclubs like the Embers in Indianapolis, Freddie’s in Minneapolis, the Tidelands in Houston. Bill Brennan, the owner of the Racquet Club in Dayton, flew into Chicago to see us and booked us for the next month. The Racquet Club was a hugely important booking. Not professionally—after all, this was fucking Dayton, Ohio. But it was where I met my wife, Brenda.

  The nightclub circuit was unpredictable. Some places got what we were doing. In the Playboy Clubs, for the most part, we did okay. There were other places where we died. At one club outside Detroit, the owner said, “I haven’t booked a live act since Bobby Clark in 1941. You guys better be good. My softball team’s coming in tonight.”

  It was a cinder-block bar with a jukebox and tables and a little dance floor. The softball team comes in still in uniform and off we go. We do the Kennedy bit. Stuff about the European Common Market. They don’t get it or like it. No laughs, nothing. Sweat is pouring off us. About ten minutes in, somebody puts a quarter in the jukebox and they start dancing to the music—while we’re still halfway through the act.

  The owner came over as we were wrapping up: “I’m taking a bath with you guys. Don’t you work dirty?” We said, “Like Lenny Bruce?” He said, “Who the fuck’s Lenny Bruce? You better get some tits and ass in this act. You got two more shows and the room don’t turn over.” Holy shit. We ran out and bought a fright wig for me and for the second show did a bit with Jack as Ed Murrow and me as a waitress in the club. We did stuff we’d never done before—or ever again. We were there for a week. We didn’t get fired. A nightmare.

  Sometimes it worked the other way around. There was a club in Allentown, Pennsylvania, whose owner was a great Lenny Bruce fan. And because Lenny liked us, he booked us. In the ad in the paper it said: “Lenny Bruce’s favorite comics.” Nobody in Allentown, Pennsylvania, knew who the fuck Lenny Bruce was either and if they had they would have hated him. Every night there were maybe five, six people in this cavernous room. Still the guy booked us back. And it was the same story every time we played there.

  Deep down I didn’t want to work. I was lazy because I knew I was going to be a single at some point. Jack and I being together was just a stepping stone. I had no idea what the timing would be but I knew it was inevitable. We developed a show of solid stuff and a second show (for when those fucking people in the front tables wouldn’t leave). But once we had that under our belts, we essentially coasted.

  Jack used to say that the reason Burns and Carlin didn’t work was because we were very much the same person. We did the same characters. We were strong willed, Irish, Catholic, veterans. We had many things in common that made us great buddies, but didn’t explode onstage.

  The truth was more harsh: I didn’t want to expend my best ideas on the team. I was selfish about my creativity. I refused to put out my best effort for, and with, Jack.

  We broke up in March 1962—or I broke us up. It was at the Maryland Hotel in Chicago, where we’d had our first big booking. Jack seemed a bit stunned at first, but I think subconsciously he’d known for a while it was coming. We got pretty stoned and were clowning around and for some reason that seemed funny at the time Jack threw this paperback out the window into the freezing night. As he did he suddenly realized all his pay was in the book. He’d put it there for safekeeping. We ran to the window and watched the twenties and fifties floating down through the snow and we both knew that by the time we got to the street it’d all be long gone. So we split my half.

  Jack joined the Compass Players in St. Louis (he auditioned with another hopeful named Alan Alda: both of them made it in) and then moved to Second City, where he later formed a comedy team with Avery Schreiber that did far better than Burns and Carlin. He ended up as a hugely successful TV writer and producer. We’ve stayed the best of friends.

  A few years ago Jack said that without Burns and Carlin he would’ve been working at the A&P as a stock boy for the rest of his life. Maybe. And quite possibly without Jack I would’ve ended up as some dopey old radio cocksucker spewing bigotry into the night.

  7

  INTRODUCING

  THE VERY LOVELY, VERY

  TALENTED—BRENDA!

  George and Brenda, 1961

  (Courtesy of Marion Rife)

  Brenda was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1939 at St. Elizabeth’s, an open-door hospital run by the Franciscan Sisters. Forty-odd years later I wound up there one night, after totaling my car. And experienced a nose-related miracle.

  She was the elder of two sisters and Daddy’s little girl. Art, his name was. He took her everywhere, including his favorite saloons, where he’d sit her on the bar while he drank. Art had been a singer in Chicago speakeasies during Prohibition and went by the name “The Whispering Tenor.” His wife, Alice, made him quit. He hung out with these gangsters who, according to her, forced drinks on him so that he developed a drinking problem. From what I could tell when I got to know him Art didn’t need much forcing. But Alice didn’t like gangsters or alcohol so Art had to give up being the Whispering Tenor.

  Alice was the dominant figure in the family and Brenda was scared of her. She did stuff like marking Brenda’s periods on the calendar with an X. She was nice enough but very controlled and severe. I think she was Lutheran or Congregational. I don’t know about Art. At one point Brenda had to play the organ in church.

  Art worked as the production manager for Newsweek in the McCall printing plant. They were the largest printer in the United States and they printed sixty or seventy titles in Dayton. As a kid Brenda loved going with her dad to see the huge presses in action and smelling the printer’s ink in the air. When she was older she even did pasteup for the foreign edition of Newsweek. All of which nurtured her high school ambition to be a journalist.

  On graduation, she planned to go to college because she’d gotten a scholarship to Ohio Wesleyan, but her mother said no: women didn’t go to college unless they wanted to be teachers. She should’ve said, “Okay, I’ll be a teacher,” and then switched to journalism when she got to Wesleyan. But she’d always been a sweet, obedient, overachieving child and it didn’t occur to her. And her mother was adamant. So Brenda never went to college. And she was very, very angry about that.

  She’d been going with the guy next door for about three years. Like her, he was “a good kid”—they didn’t fool around—but after the college episode Brenda was in a fuck-you mood and more or less forced the guy to sleep with her. That very first time, she got pregnant.

  Again her mother was adamant: they had to get married. Again Brenda went along. Within a month she was walking down the aisle in a white dress her mother made (she was an expert dressmaker). Two weeks later, after the honeymoon, she had a
miscarriage. She hadn’t needed to get married at all. When she started to miscarry, she fainted in a downtown department store, but her mother wouldn’t take her to the hospital. She had to miscarry in secret at home.

  The poor slob on the other end of all this didn’t like it any better than Brenda did, so as soon as she could she filed for divorce. That was the breaking point with her parents because she was the first person in their family who’d ever gotten a divorce. So from being a wonderful, overachieving, goody-two-shoes child, Brenda became overnight an alienated divorcée of twenty.

  She went to work for a tool company as an executive secretary, which seemed like a good gig, until she found out the job involved the executives’ tools as well as the ones they sold. She quit after having to organize call girls for visiting salesmen—and being made to watch them at work, so she could give head herself.

  Today Dayton is just another struggling city in the Rust Belt. Back then, it had a tremendous industrial base: Frigidaire was there, National Cash Register, General Tire. When it still had jobs and factories, it was a major stop on the entertainment circuit. Comedy and music acts used it as a kind of test market. Showbiz wisdom was that if it went over in Dayton, it would go over anywhere.

  One of the bigger venues in Dayton, out in a suburb called Kettering, was this place the Racquet Club. By day it was a swim and tennis club; at night it became a supper club with topflight entertainment.

  Brenda heard on the grapevine that the maître d’ had had a heart attack. She immediately drove out there and said, “I heard your maître d’ had a heart attack. I want his job.” (She always had balls, Brenda.) They said, “Where have you worked?” She said, “I haven’t, but I’m really good with people.” They were desperate for somebody to front the place so they gave her a temporary tryout.