see you getting smashed too. Tell you what you do. You watch
where Daddy hides his booze, then you put yours in the same
place! If Mommy finds it, he gets busted, not you!
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JB: Hey, kids, listen up! Today is absolutely the last day to send
o f f for your Captain Jack and Jolly George junior junkie kit!
GC: Boy, you've gotta have this kit, kids!
JB: Why is this the last day? Well, we were down in Tijuana and
our dealer's been busted by the fuzz. So we're running a little
short of the s t u f f . Now—this is pure heroin you get. No cuts. No
milk, sugar, flour. Dy-no-mite s t u f f kids!
GC: Captain Jack and I shot up a bag right before the show.
Lemme tell you, kids, I'm TWISTED! Look at my EYES! One
taste and I'm STONED!
JB: In the kit you get a U.S. Army surplus 12 cc hypodermic
needle . . .
GC: And a genuine Roger's silverware bent spoon. That's to mix
the fix .. . The bent spoon is available in Modern, Traditional,
Provincial or Rosemead. Make sure you s p e c i f y which pattern
you want when you send in the cash.
JB: AND—you get 3,669 feet of rubber tubing to wrap around
your arm to get that vein popping out there.
GC: AND you get a thirty-day supply of cotton to keep the spike
clean. Don't want to get no abscessed vein. You know, Captain
Jack—we've gotten a lot of letters from kids shooting up with
a dirty spike—and getting abscessed veins. You keep that spike
clean, kids. And when you see that big bluish, purple splotch
creeping up your arm it's time to switch to the main vein.
JB: Now, this is just for the girls! You boys, out of the room! Okay,
girls, today is your last day to send for your Lolita kit. You get
an autographed picture of Vladimir Nabokov and the original
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Lolita. You also get an instruction booklet. If you girls read those
instructions and do the exercises prescribed . . .
GC: That's kind of fun in itself, girls . . .
JB: . . . in just two weeks you'll be walking and talking and act-
ing like girls twice your age. Then you can pick up a little cash
after school. Call those boys back in!
GC: Okay, kids, time to go. We want to leave you with our
thought for the day:
JB/GC: Whatever you do-don't forget to PRAYYYY!
Something else happened during that period that had a nice wistful, romantic flavor. We would watch The Jack Parr Show ("where
dreams are made"), and be full of fantasies about appearing on it.
We'd sit around in our underwear—it was very hot in Texas so
we'd always be sitting around in our underwear—and improv getting on Parr. One would play Parr, the other Burns or Carlin. "So
tell us, guys"—that soft, serpentine hiss Parr had—"how did you two
get together?" "Well, I was dating Jack's mother. She's black, by the
way. So I'm going down on her one night and Jack walks in . . ."
We decided we had to leave Fort Worth. I went to the station
manager, Earl. (Earl was one of these periodic alkies who wake up
in Seattle and call the office: "I'll be in, in about a week.") I tell him
we're going to Hollywood to become nightclub comedians. He says,
"Well, George, a lot of people have left here to go to Hollywood and
a lot of them had to come back. We put a lot of money into promoting you and taking your picture just right. And now you're just going
to leave." I said, "I gotta do what I gotta do." He said, "George, if you
do come back we're going to have to use the same picture." I said,
"Okay."
We bought a Dodge Dart, real good-looking two-door, light blue
car. Tinted windows and everything. We just got in the car and
drove west on old Highway 80 toward El Paso. Mike Ambrose, the
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TWO GUYS IN THEIR UNDERWEAR
goodbye to us as we drove out of the signal's reach. Talking to us on
the air, "They're on their way. On their way to Hollywood. They're
going to be big stars." Then he played "El Paso" by Marty Robbins.
Just a wonderful feeling.
We went to El Paso, Las Cruces and points west. It was On the
Road with Jack Kerouac. One night we found ourselves driving
through some desert landscape working on a six-pack and there was
a full moon. So we turned off the lights and drove for miles and
miles. Hurtling through the Great American Night in the late fifties. Wonderful. Crazy. Taking chances.
We decided to go into Mexico and drive the rest of the way to
California through Mexico. There was a Highway 2, but we weren't
sure if we were going the right way. There weren't enough signs,
and if there were they were in a fucking foreign language. Night fell
and I looked up and there was the Big Dipper. And I said, "The Big
Dipper was over there last night when we were going west. It's over
there tonight. So we're still going west." And I felt I really knew how
to take care of shit.
Eventually we turned north and came to the outskirts of L.A.
on the Hollywood Freeway. There's one section of the Hollywood
Freeway, coming from the Harbor Freeway, where you suddenly see
all these tall, tall palm trees, the ones that have nothing on top but
the little fronds.
Right afterward there's the sign that reads: "Next Six Exits: Hollywood." The ultimate moment! The ultimate destination of all those
movie dreams I'd had in the dark of the Nemo Theatre on 110th
Street.
What I remember most about the ambience of Hollywood was
this amazing morning feeling. This promise of wide-open possibility. Something about the way the air smelled. And tasted good—and
no, this is not a smog joke. There was a goldenness to the atmosphere. Even with all the traffic, a kind of quiet, a peace free of
hustle and agitation. You felt safe but at the same time able to have
different dreams every day. Or picture a hundred futures.
The reality was that we checked in to the YMCA and immedi7 7
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ately hit places like Villa Capri hoping Frank Sinatra would come
in. Or that someone would say, "Look at those two interesting young
men at the bar. Shouldn't they be in show business?"
We had some money saved so we bought suits at Sears, cool RatPacky three-button deals. The kind of suits that in one light look
green and in a different light look brown. So it's like having two
suits.
We hit the Brown Derby on Vine Street. Going in we met Rock
Hudson coming out. My first realization that everything is not what
you're led to believe in the fan magazines: Rock was so light in his
loafers he barely touched the sidewalk.
Another night in the Brown Derby we spotted this guy in a banquette with two or three women, an older guy, sharply dressed. And
he had a telephone at his elbow! Actually in the banquette! We figured he must be a really fucking cool agent guy. A few weeks later
our new manager arranged to have somebody come into the nightclub we were working and take photos of us while we were on stage.
It was the really fucking cool agent guy.
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
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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
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"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
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TWO GUYS IN THEIR UNDERWEAR
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
&n
bsp; 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
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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 pere 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."
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.