her life, as she got on in years—she was seventy-eight by now—she'd
have a sip of this and a sip of that. It took away the aches and pains.
But now she was pouring drinks for them both while feeding Brenda's unhappiness and paranoia and pushing her further into that
toxic liquor-cocaine-Valium-liquor cycle.
Brenda was discreet about the cocaine—she'd do it in the bathroom. But I'm sure Mary knew she was doing it, even if in a way she
didn't know. She was the kind of woman who wouldn't see something if she didn't want to, even looking right at it. And she was
pumping all her own poison into poor Brenda: "He doesn't love you.
You know he's no good. He's never been any good. If you ever leave
him, come with me and I'll take care of you." In the shape she was
in, Brenda had no defenses against malice like this.
She sank lower and lower. By 1975 she was reduced to sitting
around the house drinking wine: Mateus Rose, which she'd order—
or Kelly would order—by phone from the liquor store down the hill,
six or seven bottles at a time. Whenever she did actually sleep—she
was terrified of dying in her sleep—she would sleep on the couch,
then get up in the morning and immediately crawl to the kitchen
to get booze. She couldn't walk because she shook so badly. She
weighed less than ninety pounds.
I was taking cocaine fitfully, though when I did, I still did a good
long run. But I would have relatively coherent periods and realize
what a fucking mess my family was.
Inevitably, Brenda hit bottom. One night in August of 1975 we
had a fight and she got in my little white B M W 3.0 CS and took my
mother down the hill to the Santa Ynez Inn. They had drinks in the
bar and left to head back. Brenda remembered waiting for the car at
the main entrance, but after that nothing.
The next thing she knows, she's sitting in my car, having backed
it into and through the lobby of the San Ynez Inn. The fire truck's
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there. My car is an accordion. They bring my mother home. The
Santa Monica police lock Brenda up.
I went down to get her and I was able to get her out. I said: "I'm not
doing this anymore. I ' m not having Kelly see this anymore." I didn't
yet know about "bottoming out" and all those other AA phrases. She
said: "Fine. Help me." Which was what this was all about—begging
me to help her as I should have long before.
I got a lawyer. She was up for DWI and she'd had a DWI before.
Chances were she was going to have to go to Sybil Brand Institute,
which was this real shitty women's jail in L.A. County, with a horrible reputation. Peter Pitchess, the L.A. County sheriff, was a cartoon Nazi who'd make sure Mrs. George Carlin did some time. We
had to operate on the assumption that she wasn't going to walk this
time.
I asked a friend at Atlantic Records to find me a lawyer. He went
one better. What I wanted was simply to get Brenda off. Instead all
records of her arrest and case just disappeared from the court system. They could never call her case up for adjudication, because it
no longer existed. I paid for having that done. Believe me, it's by far
the best way to stay out of jail.
She went to Saint John's Hospital in Santa Monica, which was
just beginning its CDC—Chemical Dependency Center. She met
a great sponsor—Tristram Colket III, a Main Line Philadelphia neurosurgeon, who had fucked up his own life by having a horrendous
accident when he drove fucked-up drunk. He devoted his life to
helping people get sober and staying sober himself in the process,
which is the basic sobriety technique. By helping others you keep
your own sobriety alive.
When she went to the hospital she packed every pill she had.
There were thirty-two bottles of medication in her suitcase—and
a nightgown. And in 1975, they did not yet have detox. The next
morning, they woke her at six o'clock, made her make her bed, get
dressed and go sit in lectures. She didn't know where she was. She
couldn't walk. It took two people to hold her up and they didn't
know if she was going to make it. They were giving her anticonvulsant drugs. She had chronic malnutrition and was anemic. All she'd
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HIGH ON THE HILL
done for months was drink. Everything in her body was screwed up:
she was diagnosed with chronic active hepatitis and given only two
years to live.
was, "I cannot have your mother in the house." Obviously I was in
one of my coherent moods because I went right home, packed Mary
up and put her on a plane back to New York. Later I found an entry
in her diary for that day—a typical self-pitying Mary line: "George
kicks me out today. He drove me to the airport."
Brenda started going to three meetings a day for the first year.
When she got out of the hospital she started doing a 12-step workday, where she would go down to skid row and rescue people and
put them into facilities. She really practiced the AA thing for a long
time until she realized the AA people were all sick in a different way.
That they were just living out their sickness and not doing anything
about their lives.
But she did, and never looked back. And the C D C couldn't have
been more wrong about that "only two years to live."
All this happened in August '75.1 was never happier in my life. I
never had a greater feeling of relief than to know—although I didn't
have solid proof yet—that I'd never again have to race out and take
the car keys out of her hand, that I would never have to carry her out
of any place, that I would never have to endure this terrible tension
that went with her drinking.
The three things—my cocaine and pot, her drinking—were hard
to separate. Talking about any one of them in isolation implied the
others weren't there. I knew I was to blame too. It had been a mutual
dance of death. But more than anything I was simply glad it was
over.
A few years later, the Santa Ynez Inn became the Center for Enlightenment. Brenda always said that perhaps in some small way we
helped that come about.
Two months after this, in October '75, I hosted the first Saturday
Night Live. One of the original ideas had been that the show would
have rotating hosts, Richie Pryor, Lily Tom!in and me, but some1 8 7
LAST WORDS
where along the line that got dropped and Lily and Richie didn't
host till shows 6 and 7. Perhaps I poisoned the well a little: I certainly
was full of cocaine. (Though I was far from the only one.) To me
this counted as one of those times when "I'm away from home, I
can party."
Bob Woodward, who wrote Wired, said that they had to break my
hotel room door down, I was so coked up. Which I don't remember.
It may be true. Maybe I went missing the day before or after the
show, crashed after being up all week. One thing I do remember is
that I refused to be in any sketches. I was still hesitant about acting
and I told Lome Michaels, the producer, "I'll just fuck it up. Instead
of
hanging around throughout the show in sketches, give me a series
of monologues of a few minutes each." Which Lome agreed to. I
think I'm the only host who's ever done that. I also wore a suit, which
Woodward definitely got wrong. He claimed the network insisted
that I wear a suit. Actually I wanted to wear a nice three-piece suit,
but with a Wallace Beery dirty tee underneath. They wouldn't let
me do that. Too nervous. T-shirt had to be clean.
Everybody was very tentative. And the tension was intense. My
role became to balance between the young radicals of the cast
and writing staff and the old-guard stagehands and techies, a lot of
whom were New York neighborhood guys I could relate to. I brought
a little harmony between them by being able to communicate
with both sides. At least that's my interpretation of how the week
went.
Nervous or not, they did allow me to do the God material:
Maybe God is only a semi-supreme being. Everything He's ever
made has died . . . When we put a statue of Jesus on the dash-
board, instead of having him watch the t r a f f i c , which he should
be doing, we got him watching us DRIVE! Watch this, Jesus—
LEFT TURN! Are we so middle-class we have to perform for
Jesus when we're driving?
It was fairly mild stuff, but before we were off the air the NBC
switchboard had lit up and someone from Cardinal Cooke's office
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n i u n un i nc niLL
was on the phone with the official complaint. My second Cardinal
Incident.
Somehow, despite the coke, over the course of the week I came
to be acquainted with a woman prosecutor, an assistant DA in the
New York DA's Office. I can't remember if I picked her up or if I
got her phone number, but at the end of the taping I brought her
to the big cast party. An assistant DA! That freaked out the fearless
radicals!
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13
SAY GOODBYE
TO GEORGE CARLIN
My own drug use, post-Brenda-sober, fell off. Somewhat. I
had longer periods of lucidity and a decreasing pattern of
use. The length of a given period of drug use was getting
shorter. The frequency of the periods was going down. Everything
was in decline. Slow decline. I think. The cocaine anyway. Pot I still
saw as benign. Beer I kept for work so I could function. One out of
three ain't bad.
Brenda didn't say, "you can't do drugs anymore." She wasn't like
that. She didn't try to cure me. Still I felt: "Gee, if she's going to stay
sober, I can't be coming in wrecked and acting goofy." And of course
when she cleaned up, I lost my drug partner. My drug playmate.
But there'd be times when I'd be gone for the weekend and get
some—some of everything—and have my own little private party.
Then be straightened out by the time I got home. So I was cleaner
and soberer and possibly getting even cleaner and soberer. There are
still large gaps in the record keeping. Anal George was still on an extended vacation. In this part of the story I have to keep telling myself
that I'm quite sure my amounts of usage were really diminishing.
But I'm not sure. Frankly the whole period is murky as shit.
What I am certain of is that the second half of the seventies was
a period of uncertainty. A time of tentativeness, of groping around
for what came next—and coming up mostly empty-handed. I wasn't
quite running on fumes—my fifth album, Toledo Window Box,
came out in '74 and eventually went gold, but it took a lot longer to
get there than the previous three. Predictably there was quite a bit of
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drug material (the title referred to a bizarrely named brand of grass
I'd once been offered):
Nursery rhymes are the first introduction children have—from
zero through five—to bizarre behavior. . . I've thought about
nursery rhymes. Quite a gang we had in there. All on various
drug experiences. I got to thinking about this one night when the
words "Snow White" passed through my mind.
I thought, Snow White, right? I didn't know whether it was
smack or coke. Can't be smack—too much housework with those
seven little devils around. More likely something to pep you up;
something to make you wanna wash the garage.
The Seven Dwarfs were each on different trips. Happy was into
grass and grass alone. Occasionally some hash—make a holi-
day for him. Sleepy was into reds. Grumpy . . . TOO MUCH
SPEED. Sneezy was a full-blown coke freak. Doc was a con-
nection. Dopey was into everything. Any old orifice will do for
Dopey. Always got his arm out and his leg up. And then the
one we always forget—Bashful. Bashful didn't use drugs: he was
paranoid on his own . . .
Old King Cole was a merry old soul
And a merry old soul was he
He called for his pipe and he called for his bowl
. . . I guess we all know about Old King Cole!
Hansel and Gretel discovered the gingerbread house—about
forty-five minutes after they discovered the mushrooms:
"Yeah.. . I SEE IT TOO . . ."
Little jack Horner sat in a corner
Eating his Christmas pie
Stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum
And said: "HOLY SHIT, AM I HIGH!"
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SAY GOODBYE TO GEORGE CARLIN
Mary had a little gram . . . no . . . Mary had a little lamb
Its stash was white as snow
And everywhere that Mary went
THEY BOTH ENJOYED A BLOW.. .
Monte Kay of Little David Records—who'd produced all of my
gold albums—had become my manager. When I suggested he become my manager as well as my record producer, I asked him, "Is
there a conflict of interest in there, Monte?" He looked me straight
in the eye for a very long moment and said: "Nah." I believed him.
Monte saw—correctly—that the peak was past for the Hot-NewGuy-in-Town-with-the-Albums. We had to take a step somewhere
else, somewhere new. The somewhere new turned out to be The
Tonight Show, which I returned to in 1975. Sound odd considering
my immediate past? That, in the absence of new vistas, I went right
back to Johnny Carson? Well, I did. With a silk shirt, yet. One of
those seventies deals with big, baggy sleeves. I thought, "I have to
look decent." It was a joke. I looked horrible. (I don't know anything
about clothes.) To complete the refurbished image I cut my hair.
I began appearing frequently on Carson; more frequently than I
ever had in the sixties. Soon I was asked to host. (Technically "guesthost," a term I've never understood. How the fuck can you be a guest
and a host?)
The hosting became frequent, then very frequent. There was one
run of twelve shows where I did eight as a host and four as a guest.
In the sixties I'd maybe reached double figures in Tonight Show
appearances; later, in the eighties I did it regularly but sparingly.
Somehow in this period I must have racked up the majority of my
cumulative BO Tonight Shows. I began thinking of it as a lifeline,
something that would replace the albums as th
ey faded.
In 1975, my fifth Little David album came out. Prior to this
there'd been: FM & AM— clear concept; Class Clown— strong concept, ditto Occupation: Foole. Toledo Window Box—no concept, but
still a catchy, snappy name that related to the counterculture. Now
along comes . . .
An Evening with Wally Londo, Featuring Bill Slaszo.
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No concept at all. And I'm putting two other people's names
on my own album. Outnumbering me TWO TO ONE! And yet
my head was the biggest it had ever been on an album cover. I was
mortified when it came out that you could see all those little dirty
pores—the ones you can never get the dirt out of, no matter what
you do. Uncertainty. No focus. And with Wally and Bill, forget
about the gold.
Soon I'm also back in Vegas—a financial decision, seemed an
intelligent one at the time, of a piece with buying a new house in
Brentwood, following the path that was most familiar and offered
the least resistance, continuing the flow that supported the money
machine.
Money now being handled—at Monte's suggestion—by a hotshot
business management firm called Brown and Kraft, who also handled the affairs of my fellow celebrities Marlon Brando and Mary
Tyler Moore. Going along with this was a nondecision that would
haunt me for years to come, not because Brown and Kraft did anything illegal, but because, even though the whole idea was to take
financial worries out of my hands, I had an irrational fear of looking
at my accountants' monthly statement. I would get their statements
out of my hands as fast as possible. I wouldn't even open them: just
throw 'em on the pile with the others.
In 1976 it was back to Hawaii to appear on . . . Perry Cornos Ha-
waiian Holiday. Produced by . . . Bob Banner. Perhaps the déjà vu
was lost on me because I was still doing cocaine. I don't remember. I
do remember that Monte controlled it out there so I couldn't get any
from him until the end of the day's work. Which was groundbreaking stuff like paddling an outrigger canoe with Perry and Petula
Clark while singing "One Paddle, Two Paddle." Or doing a piece