Last Words
yours.
Hamza's presence is so much larger than just a sentence that says:
"And then I met Jerry."
The financial pressure was huge. I'd claimed two things in the
seventies as major business losses. One was The Illustrated George
Carlin— millions there, a money pit. The other was a piece of land
up past Malibu, at Zuma Beach. Its official name was Meadow
Creek Farms, but we called it the Funny Farm. We paid for the
upkeep and the salary of the couple who ran it, Jill McAtee and her
partner, Odie. Kelly kept horses at the Funny Farm and Brenda had
a notion about eventually breeding horses up there.
Kelly had started riding in high school and it became kind of an
obsession. She was really good—a hunter-jumper, English-style. In
her senior year, when she was eighteen, she was third on the entire
West Coast in junior jumpers. Competing is a form of performance
and she had incredible performance anxiety: she threw up before
and after events. But it was the one thing in our chaotic family environment that she could control. It gave her a sense of self and kept
her anchored during her own problem years.
The Taxman hadn't allowed either of these as business losses—
they would have to go to an arbitrator or tax court. (Eventually they
allowed the movie.) For now we couldn't deduct them from our tax
bill. Which was gigantic and always growing. Often they'd look
at a year and say: "You owe another two hundred grand." When
I couldn't pay it, the big run-up was interest and penalties, endless interest and penalties. Plus the years in question were at least
2 2 6
I GET PISSED, GODDAMIT!
50 percent taxable. Some in the seventies were at the old 70 percent
rate.
Say I owed a million. Not counting the running interest and penalties on the million dollars for every day they went unpaid, I had
to earn two million at 50 percent tax rates to pay the back tax. Then
I had to pay a million current taxes on the two million. I've earned
two million dollars and I haven't even bought a hat!
Jerry shielded me from the worst implications of all of this. I'm
sure he felt: "As long as we have to do this anyway, I'll relieve George
of the worst news. Not tell him, boy, it looks fucking bleak and it's
getting worse." But sometimes he would have to tell me: "They
found another $525,000, they're looking at 1977 now as well as '78
and '79." Then we'd have to bite the bullet and get a loan or increase
the mortgage or get a second mortgage. Sometimes the Taxman
wanted money faster than I could make it. Jerry was a rock. Twice
in the '80s, he reached into his own pocket and loaned me over a
million dollars . . .
Brenda always said that I was being singled out because of what I
did and said onstage. That's why it went on so long—almost twenty
years in the end—without any attempt to settle it on the part of the
IRS. And it's true that many people in showbiz have tax problems—
worse than ours—but eventually there'd always be a settlement.
Seventy cents on the dollar, fifty cents on the dollar, whatever. But
that never happened for me. She was convinced the Taxman was
really saying: "Shut the fuck up. Or suffer." I don't know if it was
true but I loved her for thinking of it. She had a great line about
the whole affair: Despite everything I said about the government,
like not trusting anything they told me, I went out every night—and
worked for them.
Abraham Maslow said that the fully realized person transcends his
local group and identifies with the species. But the election of Ronald Reagan might ve been the beginning of my giving up on my
species. Because it was absurd. To this day it remains absurd. More
than absurd, it was frightening: it represented the rise to supremacy
of darkness, the ascendancy of ignorance.
2 2 7
LAST WORDS
All through the eighties I had a visceral reaction to those who
supported him. Especially on planes. I lost count of how many times
I sat up in first class with all these business suits, feeling a great welling anger in my gut. Livid at the conversations of these cocksuckers,
with their smug body language, their little leather briefcases, their
neatly folded Wall Street Journals, their aura of being in charge, running the show. I knew they were totally happy about what had happened and that they were in a position to gloat. It hastened new
directions for me.
The osmosis from the prevailing political climate is very real in a
person like myself. And so, all through those Reagan years, another
process accelerated. Along with finding my authentic voice, I was
finding an authentic position to speak from.
A decade earlier, when I'd done my gold albums, I didn't have any
synthesized sets of feelings or information about politics. Beyond a
few one-liners about racism or Vietnam I had no coherent point
of view. It was more a question of: "Let's just get HIIIGGGHHH!
Yeah, man, I'm against this and I'm against that, but who the fuck
knows why?"
I was very unsophisticated. I certainly couldn't back up what
political positions I had or argue them any with weight. I didn't
have a political self. Yes, I'd thrown off the phony media me, rediscovered the authentic rebel child and clown, rejoined my own
history, dug out my personal truth from misguided ambitions. All
good. But after a certain point, I'd discovered not much remained
to be rediscovered. I'd exhausted my personal history—right down
to snot-as-rubber-cement and my old toenails. I'd never considered
or explored the creative process in terms of the tension between the
internal me and the external political environment. But now I could
and would . . .
Death continued to keep an eye on the Carlin household. After the heart attack we decided I needed an angioplasty, which is
a technique where a tiny balloon is inserted in a narrowed artery
and inflated to increase blood flow. There were only a few places
2 2 8
I GET PISSED, GODDAMIT!
in the early eighties that had done the procedure enough times to
have a good track record. The cardiologist at Saint John's sent my
angiograms around to the short list of hospitals, including Emory
University in Atlanta, where a surgeon named Andreas Gruentzig
practiced. He was the Austrian doctor who'd invented angioplasty
and was considered the best. He agreed to do my arteries, or as they
say, my "vessel."
He did my right coronary vessel. The angiogram showed that two
other vessels—my left anterior descending coronary artery and the
diagonal off the LAD where they come together—were also narrowing. So the angioplasty is over and I'm in the recovery room with
this sandbag on the wound to help close it. And I'm feeling chipper
because the thing was a success. Gruentzig comes in and he's covered with blood. All over, even on those scrub things they wear on
their feet.
Which I think is great. And he says, "Ja. You looking pink. Ja—
much pinker." I said, "Yeah, I feel good. Let me ask you something.
How come you didn't do those other two
on the left?" He says,
"We're not here to show off. We have sufficient blood flow from the
right coronary artery now. If one of them would have closed down
you would still have had enough collateral flow that you would be
healthy and you would not lose much tissue." I thought that was
pretty snotty—especially in his Austrian accent, but Jerry was laughing. Later I asked him why: "You're sitting there and this guy is
covered in your blood and you're basically begging him to give you
open-heart surgery!"
Then it was Brenda's turn. When we did Carlin at Carnegie in
1982 she'd found a little lump on her breast, but it was just a cyst so
she let it go. After she finished editing—it took four months because
we didn't have that safety show—she went in for a checkup, and the
doctor looked at it and said yeah, it was a cyst, but he didn't want to
aspirate it because of the implants she'd gotten in the seventies.
So she went in for minor surgery and when she woke up there
were three doctors standing over her bed. Under the cyst they'd
found a tumor that no mammogram had shown. Luckily it hadn't
2 2 9
LAST WORDS
spread to the lymph nodes, but her options were either radiation and
chemo or a modified mastectomy—taking a wedge of the breast out
with the tumor. They gave her forty-eight hours to decide.
This was a rock and a hard place. After she got sober she was diagnosed with chronic active hepatitis (now called hepatitis C). Her
liver was shot. They put her on prednisone and gave her a few weeks
to live. She went through hell on these drugs, became psychotic and
suicidal and diabetic. She pulled through, but when it was all over
she still had hepatitis. But they did give her TWO YEARS to live.
Nine years later she still had the hepatitis C so chemo and radiation
weren't much of an option. They'd probably kill her.
B u t . . . a mastectomy? She was only forty-four. We called three
different surgeons and asked them, "What would you tell your wife
to do?" They all said get it out. So she had a modified mastectomy.
And it worked.
Given that her mother died of breast cancer, Brenda obsessed
about reliving that history: that she wouldn't make it past fifty (which
was the age her mother died). But she didn't die and there was no recurrence, although given her compromised system her doctors had
concerns about that. In 1985 she had reconstructive surgery, and
that was a good move too. (The surgeon was Steven Hoffman, the
one who did Michael Jackson.) But once you've had cancer you're
always in the waiting room, and every time she went in for a mammogram she too felt Death was looking over her shoulder.
We kept Brenda for many more years but we did lose Mary. In
the early eighties I'd relented about her banishment to New York.
She came back to California and I set her up in Santa Monica at an
assisted-living place on Ocean Avenue called the Georgian Hotel. It
was a quiet place and a quiet neighborhood, overlooking the ocean,
but she still had some tart comments left in her—she was in her
mideighties by now—and a steady stream of complaints about how
I ignored her and never had time for her. Same old Mary. But she
seemed to have forgotten about the $52.50 I owed her.
In late '83 she had a massive stroke that left her nonambulatory,
and we moved her to a more full-service assisted-living place across
2 3 0
I GET PISSED, GODDAMIT!
from Saint John's. She declined pretty quickly and died in June of
1984 at the age of eighty-seven.
In '86 I had to get a second angioplasty. An angiogram showed
that one of the arteries Gruentzig hadn't done was now closing. The
cardiologist from Saint John's who had taken me to Emory University decided to do the angioplasty himself right there in Santa
Monica. Now, if you have an angioplasty and anything happens, if
they split a vein or something, they do immediate bypass surgery, or
that's it, you die. They always have a team standing by. I wasn't too
worried—it's not invasive and I'd been through it before.
But Brenda was tense and she turned out to be right. During
the procedure the wire went into the wrong artery and there was
damage to it. So she and Kelly are sitting outside the OR and suddenly there are doctors and carts everywhere in the hall and they're
figuring I'm going to die and it's déjà vu—Hi and Goodbye time
again.
Anyway they work on me and I'm fine, though Brenda was certain
I'd had another heart attack because of all the activity. They medicate me to keep the arteries open and I get through it. A few months
later I got angina, which indicated a closing artery, and something
had to be done. Brenda had got it into her head that I needed to go to
San Francisco, where there was a doctor named Meyler, who'd been
Gruentzig's original partner and developed the angioplasty technique with him. We had a big fight about this, because I couldn't
see what was wrong with going back to Saint John's, and she was
saying, "Why wouldn't you go to the man who was Gruentzig's partner?" Finally I had her make an appointment for me. We went up to
San Francisco and Meyler did this wonderful variant of angioplasty
called the kissing balloon technique, where they did the other two
vessels at the same time. And that was angioplasty Number Three.
And by no means the last.
I began to do something about my political ignorance. I subscribed
to publications like Anarchy magazine, Mother ]ones, In These Times,
the Nation. I read a lot of sociology and social history. I sought out
2 3 1
LAST WORDS
the most radical parts of the Village Voice, which I'd always kept a
subscription to because I liked the New York edge. I knew I'd always
find someone really far left. Not just Village Voice-left, but someone
really wailing, like Alexander Cockburn. I discovered Noam Chomsky, Hunter Thompson, Gore Vidal, writers who said things in a
daring manner, truly dissenting voices.
I had a left-wing, humanitarian, secular humanist, liberal inclination on the one hand, which implied positions on myriad issues.
On the other I had prejudices and angers and hatreds toward various classes of people. None of which included skin color or ethnicity
or religion. Well—religion, yes. I used to get angry at blue-collar
right-wingers, but that passed, because I saw that in the end they
were just a different sort of victim.
I felt discomfort at having received positions on issues, simply because of my preference for the left of center, for people's rights over
property rights. I was beginning to find that a lot of my positions
clashed. The habits of liberals, their automatic language, their kneejerk responses to certain issues, deserved the epithets the right wing
stuck them with. I'd see how true they often were. Here they were,
banding together in packs, so that I could predict what they were going to say about some event or conflict and it wasn't even out of their
mouths yet. I was very uncomfortable with that. Liberal orthodoxy
was as repugnant to me as conservative orthodoxy.
That wasn't an entirely new feeling. I'd worked for Jesse Unruh
in
1970 when he ran against Reagan, during Reagan's second run
for governor. (My brief little brush with electoral politics.) One of
the rally talks I gave for Unruh was at an Elks Lodge in Stockton.
I pointed out to these democratic liberals that, "You're having your
meeting in a place that has excluded black members for years. Just
thought you might like to know."
I hosted Saturday Night Live for the second time in 1984. (I like to
do it every nine years. For some reason Lome didn't call in '93 or
2002. I'll give him one more chance in 2011.) This time, unlike the
first, I was determined to do sketches, because my acting ambitions
had been relit. I felt confident and different enough about who I
2 3 2
I GET PISSED, GODDAMIT!
was by then. I did three sketches, and I have to say I was really good.
They were with Martin Short, Billy Crystal and Chris Guest. I did a
policeman sketch with Billy Crystal as the father. And Martin Short
played this crazy rock guy.
At the cast party, Martin came over and he said, "You know
you were terrific in that policeman thing, because you played the
middle man." (Which is an old vaudeville term for the man in the
middle. And apparently it was a position of responsibility.) I had this
wonderful running line where Billy would ask me a question and I
would say, "Not to my knowledge. Not that I'm aware of."
I was really pleased Martin had taken that trouble. So now I'm
over with Billy. I had done some things in the sketch, small though
they were, that came so naturally to me I knew I now had the chops
to be an actor. And would get it done when the time for the film acting came. So I said to Billy: "So long, man. The sketch went nice,
didn't it?" And since I knew he was going to leave Saturday Night
Live and go to movies the next year and I was beginning to seriously
explore them again myself, I added: "Maybe we'll get to do a movie
together someday."
And he gave me this look as if I was some kind of a bug. Like, "Oh
yeah? That certainly doesn't work into my plans."
So it was satisfying that I got a pretty fat role in a movie before
he did— Outrageous Fortune with Bette Midler and Shelley Long—
which turned out to be a hit. And I think I got my star on Hollywood