In his posthumous memoir, “Last Words,” George Carlin tells the story of his life, and explains the development of his brilliant and original comedic voice. Larry Getlen talks with co-author Tony Hendra about his longtime friendship with the comedy icon.
George Carlin, who died last June, was perhaps the greatest comedy mind of our time. His just-released posthumous autobiography, “Last Words,” by George Carlin with Tony Hendra, shows how his comedic voice was developed by a rich (in experience, not money) New York City upbringing, and nurtured in its earliest incarnation in the clubs of 1960s Greenwich Village.
Photo by Robert Sebree. Caricatures by Chris Kalb.
“The voice that eventually matured in George is absolutely an Upper West Side voice. He mentions often in the book that his kind of default character, which is ‘this kind of guy,’” says Hendra, slipping into Carlin’s New York street-tough voice, “was absolutely from the streets, the bars, the firehouses, and the basketball courts of New York. This is the voice he grew up with.”
While it’s normal practice for celebrities to have other writers assist with their memoirs, the situation on “Last Words” is unusual in several ways, starting with the prestige of the ghostwriter. Hendra, a best-selling author in his own right for his highly acclaimed 2005 memoir, “Father Joe,” among others, is also a comedy pioneer. He performed with future Monty Python members John Cleese and Graham Chapman at Cambridge, and in 1973 he co-created the “Lemmings” stage show for National Lampoon, where he gave John Belushi, Chevy Chase, and Christopher Guest their first major exposure. He became that magazine’s editor soon after, and also later edited the groundbreakingly snarky magazine Spy. What he is best known for, though, was on the screen, not the page, as he played band manager Ian Faith in the 1984 comedy classic “This is Spinal Tap.”
His participation in “Last Words” emerged from his long friendship with Carlin, which began in the early ’60s when both performed in the generation-defining music clubs along Bleecker Street.
Tony Hendra photographed by Jeffrey Schifman
“We first met in 1964 or ’65 in the Village, at a place rather unfortunately named the Cafe Au Go Go, which was actually a nexus of young talent,” says Hendra, of the club at 152 Bleecker Street that would later host the likes of Jimi Hendrix and The Grateful Dead. “George had established himself there earlier that year. He called it his laboratory. My partner and I were also comedians, and our very first job was at the Cafe Au Go Go, opening for Lenny Bruce.”
There, Hendra witnessed the end of Bruce’s career with two arrests over a two-week period. “Not only was this an extraordinary introduction to what happens to comedians if they’re too funny in America,” he says, “it was also a great bond with George, because Lenny had given George his break.”
The two embarked on parallel courses — also alongside other prominent comedians of the era including Richard Pryor and Lily Tomlin — by gaining their first television exposure on “The Merv Griffin Show,” which filmed in New York at a theater next door to Sardi’s, and appearing on many of the “dreadful” variety shows of the day including “The Perry Como Show” and the granddaddy of them all, “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
George Carlin in 2008’s “It’s Bad For Ya,” his final HBO special. Courtesy of Main Sequence, Ltd.
“That was the worst of all. Just a nightmare for comedians,” says Hendra, who refers to the show as a “mausoleum” for comics. “It was unbelievable how bad it was. A lot of the audience was Ford and Mercury dealers from Long Island, because the main sponsors of the show would populate the audience. Then, when they didn’t have enough people, they would bus people in from various ‘hospitals,’ let’s say. And as Vietnam caught fire, he would often have wounded veterans in the audience. It was dead. And the other thing was, this little rodent [Sullivan] would stand throughout your routine on the right-hand side of the stage, and he’d watch the routine and never laugh. And if he doesn’t laugh, the audience isn’t gonna laugh.”
While Carlin and Hendra both went on to break comedic ground in the ’70s — Carlin as the most popular stand-up comedian of the era, and Hendra with the Lampoon — they reunited in the early eighties, when Hendra interviewed Carlin for a book about their generation’s comedy called “Going Too Far.”
“Not only did he give good interview, but he was so articulate about his view of comedy as far as what it meant to him to develop material and how he had evolved,” says Hendra. “We became so engrossed that we did about 12, 14, 15 hours of conversation over two or three weeks. It went from the earliest stirrings of these instincts in him during his childhood up there on 121st Street, all the way to his ambitions and dreams of being a movie star. It was like forty years of recollection in incredible and very funny detail.”
They kept in touch throughout the eighties, and then around 1992, near the high point of Carlin’s career due to his groundbreaking “Jammin’ in New York” special for HBO, Carlin revealed to Hendra that he’d secretly been working on an autobiography. Hendra read the hundred or so pages that he’d written, which turned out to be both fascinating and problematic.
Young George Carlin on the streets of New York
“It was the first six years of his life,” says Hendra. “There was a lot of very funny and moving detail, because he really, really loved New York. He had the fondest memories of growing up in wartime Manhattan, with some really juicy detail to it, which all appears in this book. But I pointed out that to do his first sixty years, as he was already approaching sixty, the book would be a thousand pages long. So I said I thought there were some bits that didn’t work, and he said, ‘I know. That’s why you’re reading the fucking thing! Cause I need help!’”
Over the next six years, the two gathered sporadically for lengthy conversations covering many aspects of Carlin’s life including the evolution of his comedy. “We would frequently go off on tangents,” says Hendra, “where George would say things like, ‘I never thought of that before,’ or, ‘It’s really great to know what I was doing in the ’70s.’ He hadn’t figured it out. So it was a process of discovery for him too.”
At one point, Carlin decided that he wanted to bring a one-man show to Broadway about his early years growing up in Morningside Heights, which was then referred to as “White Harlem.” Given the work they’d done, Hendra was going to help Carlin write the script, and then they would release the biography just as the show was premiering.
But the following years saw the book and the stage production stall due to several factors, including Carlin writing three books of his own, busy schedules on both sides, and, eventually, Carlin’s declining health. The book remained undone when Carlin died, and when it was revisited earlier this year, it sold to Simon & Schuster’s Free Press in a matter of days, leaving Hendra to complete it in less than four months.
While the highly pressurized timeframe might have killed a lesser writer, for Hendra it served as a valve for his grief.
“He was one of these people you just expected to be around,” he says, “to hear that voice on the other end of the phone, or get this disgusting e-mail from him. His death took me totally by surprise. It was awful. But as I got over my initial pain, I realized that I owed it to George to do this. It was something he really wanted, and it literally was the last words we have with him. So it was very sad, very hard on the emotions, but I probably benefitted from [the abbreviated timeline]. I think if it had been a drawn-out process, I would have been cast down by it.”
Hendra believes that “Last Words” will show the average George Carlin fan a very different side of the legend than they’ve ever seen before.
Carlin, with daughter Kelly
“He’s so articulate in how he documents his intellectual growth, as well as his growth as a performer and artist,” he says. “It’s got lots of funny stuff in it, but it’s not funny in the way you’d expect a humorist to write a version of his life. He was essentially a very serious-minded guy. That doesn’t mean it’s not entertaining, or, as I found, totally absorbing, because his goal was not necessarily to give an account of his life, but to give an account of his art, and how he got to where he felt he’d gotten to.”
For Hendra, Carlin’s utter New Yorkness is a large part of what made him a legend, as well as a key to his personal appeal.
“As a first-generation immigrant, that was the part of George that I most responded to,” says Hendra, “because I love that apartness of New York. New York doesn’t mind being the other. There’s New York, and then there’s the rest of America, and that’s just fine. And George very much had that sense of being apart. It wasn’t just that he was a loner, but also that he was a New Yorker. It gave him a certain edge — a pride — to take that attitude around the country.”
Hendra cites a perfect example of this in a Carlin routine called “Coast-to-Coast Emergency,” which concluded Carlin’s 2005 HBO special, “Life Is Worth Losing.” Carlin sets the stage for the piece by describing a minor fire in Los Angeles, and then builds on that as it spread across North America. “The fire gets to New York,” says Hendra, “and New York tells the fire to go fuck itself. The place just goes apart when he says that line. I just love it. That’s George right there.”
“Last Words” (Free Press), by George Carlin with Tony Hendra, is on sale now.
City Scoops editor Larry Getlen had the pleasure of interviewing George Carlin on several occasions, including a lengthy conversation for a piece in Esquire magazine in 2001. Read that interview here.
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