BECAUSE FM & AM, and Class Clown, made us a ton of money, we now lived in a huge modern house on Tellem Drive, atop a hill in the Pacific Palisades. Dad said it was the perfect street for him because “That’s what I do. I tell ’em.” But mostly it was not so perfect because the neighborhood was a bastion of the Republican Party. We were surrounded by lots of Governor Ronald Reagan’s best friends: next door a National Security Council bigwig, and across the street a Rand Corporation executive. The only way we could have picked a whiter, squarer part of Los Angeles to move to is if we’d lived in a piece of Wonder Bread. This was the autumn of 1972—the Nixon vs. McGovern campaign was in full swing, and I’m pretty sure we were the only house on the block voting for McGovern.
One early evening I stood with my dad on the driveway, looking across the street at a cocktail party the Rand Corporation executive was having. Like most cocktail parties, it consisted of couples dressed up in suits and cute dresses talking animatedly and tinkling fancy cocktails. However, unlike most cocktail parties, this one came with its own sideline commentator. As Dad and I stood there taking in the scene, he turned to me and said in a very loud voice, “Hey, Kel, look at all the assholes over there.” Conversation stopped, glasses no longer tinkled, and heads spun our way; fun times for a ten-year-old.
Dad was now saying stuff out loud often to people’s faces, which made me want to disappear. Part of the reason for this was that his very presence provoked reactions. Dad’s hair was now halfway down his back, and this would raise the hackles of the “straights.” Sometimes they gave him a look that said, “Cut your hair, hippie!” Sometimes they’d actually say it out loud to his face. Either reaction triggered my dad to spout a few of his famous “Seven Dirty Words,” usually with a few additional choice words tacked on for good measure.
Once when we were on a cross-country flight on a 747 coming home from a trip back east, Dad disappeared into the bathroom for a long time. After about ten minutes a big guy with a big Texan accent banged on the door and told my dad to hurry it up. Dad was taking his time in there, rolling and then smoking a joint, and I’m sure doing a few lines, too. After about twenty minutes the big Texan was starting to get really loud, threatening my dad. When my dad finally came out, the Texan sneered at him and called him a freak. My dad told him to stick a dildo up his ass. The Texan lunged at my dad, and a few stewardesses had to get between them. About ten minutes before we landed, one of the stewardesses came over to tell us that the Texan had complained to the pilot and also mentioned that he smelled marijuana. The cops would be at the gate to meet us. My stomach clenched with terror. I didn’t want to see a repeat of Milwaukee, or worse. Then the stewardess said that she and the other girls on board were huge fans, and that if we wanted to, they would sneak us off to safety. After we landed we lingered on board and then sneaked out the back stairwell with the stewardesses, and into their van. It was as if we were secret agents making a getaway! We went straight to the Airport Marina hotel on Lincoln Boulevard with them and hid out. We ordered room service, and I watched cartoons. Finally, after about four hours, one of them called to say that the coast was clear and we could go home.
Although I was young, I knew that Dad’s volatile behavior probably wasn’t the best strategy for succeeding in life. But my dad couldn’t help himself. His general attitude toward authority (which had gotten him kicked out of every institution he had ever been a member of—middle school, high school, the air force), combined with the quality and quantity of cocaine he was now regularly ingesting, resulted in mounds of unfiltered rage.
Doing ridiculous amounts of cocaine must be some kind of prerequisite to becoming a counterculture god. My current theory goes like this: Fame brings lots of people into your life, and with these people comes genuine admiration, and with genuine admiration come gifts, and during the early seventies, most gifts came in the form of drugs. Therefore, if not all, then most of the people who came into our lives at some point handed my dad a little packet of white powder. Although I was meant not to, I usually saw the exchange, but never acknowledged it. I mean, what could I possibly say as I waved at folks leaving our house? Thanks for coming by. Oh no, it’s fine. I like it when you bring all those drugs into the house. My life is way more fun when Mom and Dad stay up for days and nights, and end up arguing right outside my door at 3:00 A.M. I mean, what else could I possibly be doing? Sleeping? No, no, really.
The upside of Dad’s cocaine use (strangely, there was an upside, even for me) was that he’d be up at all hours doing all kinds of stuff, and I could hang out with him. One night I found him in the living room on the floor surrounded by piles of nails, screws, washers, bolts, paper clips, and rubber bands. He was sorting them. He had a little cabinet with about fifteen little drawers in it, and he’d created a system that involved the size, color, and use of each object. He was in his joy. Sorting his stuff was such a joy for him that it ended up becoming the source for one of his most famous routines: “A Place for My Stuff”: “That’s all I want, that’s all you need in life, is a little place for your stuff … That’s all your house is—a place for your stuff.” My dad believed all was right in the world when, and only when, there was a list, a pile, a folder, or a Ziploc bag to contain the chaos of his life.
Even his ideas needed to be contained. Everywhere in our house, for as long as I can remember, there were pads and pens in every room so that when an idea popped into his head, it had a place to go. He would then collect all those notes, organize them into themes, place them in folders, and then build his bits from there. This is how he did fourteen HBO specials of groundbreaking comedy over a forty-year span—he wrote his shit down. Anyway, that late night when I saw him hovering over the piles of nails, screws, washers, bolts, paper clips, and rubber bands, I happily plopped down, learned his system, and got to the task at hand.
Other times in the middle of the night, I’d find him immersed in music. Like my parents, I was a bit of a night owl. I’m not sure why. It might have just been my nature, or it might have been nurture—having spent my first few years on the road. But during this time I suspect that it was because some part of me was always subconsciously on alert for any problems that might arise between my parents. When I couldn’t sleep, I’d stand by my door to listen to see if my mom was awake. If I didn’t hear her I’d sneak into the living room, and if I was lucky, there’d be my dad bopping his head to an unknown beat that only he could hear through his headphones. I’d stand and watch him until finally he’d notice me and say, “Kel, Kel, you gotta hear this.” He’d then place the headphones on my ears. I never knew what to expect. Would it be the groundbreaking sound of the albums Tubular Bells or Switched-on Bach or the bluegrass soul of Doug Kershaw? Or maybe even Harry Nilsson singing, “You’re breakin’ my heart/you’re tearing it apart/So fuck you”? I’m guessing that not many other ten-year-olds in my neighborhood were being turned on to Harry Nilsson by their parents.
I always listened intently, trying to understand what exactly it was Dad loved about each piece of music he shared with me. I so wanted to be in his head, to understand his world. When Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” came out, my dad played it over and over again on the big stereo in the living room at full volume. He’d say, “Kel, listen to the harmonies,” and then he’d sing with the record, “They give us the greeeeeeeens of summers./Makes you think all the world’s/A sunny day, oh yeah.” The joy in his face coupled with the purity of those notes created an explosion of love in my heart. To this day I cannot hear that song without thinking of him and those moments. To this day I love the harmonies because of him. Those moments in the middle of the night were like little life rafts in our life of increasing chaos. A safe haven of daddyness.
Although Dad had always shared his music with me, it was during this time that I discovered my own musical tastes. It started when I picked a few albums from his collection and played them for myself. When Dad noticed this, he gave me my own turntable for my room. Dad was an early adopter of technology, and I benefited his entire life from this by being first in line to get all of his technological hand-me-downs. The first album I took into my room was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I played it over and over until I had memorized every word of every song. The song “She’s Leaving Home” had a particularly powerful impact on me. Somewhere on the edge of my thinking, I wondered what my parents would do if I’d suddenly disappeared from their life. I didn’t want to leave them, just the chaos. It was the first time I ever entertained the thought that I could choose to do something different and separate from them in my life. If I were like the girl in the song who chose to leave, would they understand that my anxiety and loneliness from their drug use and fighting had pushed me out the door? But those thoughts and feelings were way too scary to actually have, so I pushed them somewhere into the basement of my mind. I knew I’d never leave. We were the Three Musketeers.
As music became my sanctuary, I looked outside of my dad’s collection for even more music. Every week Dad got Billboard magazine, diligently marking where his albums were on the Top 100 Charts, and keeping the pages in a folder. But before he tore the pages out I looked to see what the top songs were, and then got him to take me down to the little record store in the Palisades Village to buy some 45s. Some of my first purchases were “Love Train” by The O’Jays, “Spiders & Snakes” by Jim Stafford, and “Rock On” by David Essex. I know. I know: “Spiders & Snakes,” really? What can I say? No doubt my eclectic taste came straight from my dad.
* * *
For the first year in the house on the hill, Mom seemed to be happy, which really meant she had more good days than bad. I think it was because she had a project to sink her teeth into—decorating the house. The house was one of those just-built modern homes, and it was all glass. The view was stunning. We were able to see all the way from Santa Monica Bay to downtown Los Angeles. It was an open-concept design that Mom filled with gorgeous modern touches like glass coffee tables and lights that swooped over the couch like drooping orchids. But there was also a fair share of quirky items, too. In the hall powder room, when you sat on the toilet you looked at the dashboard of an old Edsel, steering wheel and all. And in the area that had the dining room table and baby grand piano (a new addition), there was a full-size British phone booth sitting against the wall. Next to that was an old barber’s chair with a life-sized carved wooden mannequin that looked like a Native American, and in the corner was a naked male store mannequin. Mom’s humor, playfulness, and adventurous spirit were on display everywhere. She was such a joyful being in her essence, which made her dark moods and drinking that much harder to live through. When she was happy, she was a delight. When she was not, she was a nightmare.
As time progressed, so did Mom’s drinking. Her behavior got more and more erratic, and Dad and I did our best to manage it. We had secret conversations in which we’d talk about what we might do about it. We usually concluded that there wasn’t a whole lot we could do except try to slow her down. We became like the East German secret police, watching her every move, questioning her every motive. This, of course, pissed her off and made her feel we were ganging up on her. We were, but we weren’t. We were just trying to get our heads and arms around this force that had taken over her life, our lives—addiction.
Dad, of course, worried about her and my safety when he was on the road, and so he hired a guy, Fred, to help around the house. Fred drove me to where I needed to go and kept an eye on Mom. Although it was Fred’s job to watch her, it did little to relieve my hypervigilance. My mind was already so ingrained with ways to manage, change, or work around Mom’s increasing dysfunction that I couldn’t just turn it off. I didn’t know how to fire myself from the position of chief Brenda wrangler. And it wasn’t just in the house; I had to try and monitor her while we were out, too. Mom had begun to practice a new form of driving. It wasn’t exactly off-road driving; it was more like off-street driving. More than a few times, as we’d make our way up the winding road to our house late at night after dinner at Bill and Elaine’s house in Malibu, she’d drive the car up and onto our neighbor’s lawn. After she’d done this about half a dozen times, I began to fake being asleep at Bill and Elaine’s so that I wouldn’t have to get in the car with her. I hoped that she would stay, too, and sleep it off. That rarely happened. She’d usually just leave me there and find her way home on her own.
Fearing she’d really hurt herself or someone else, I began to hide her car keys to prevent her from leaving the house in the first place. That worked the first few times, but then she caught on, and would threaten me if I didn’t give them to her. Then I came up with the next strategy: I hid her alcohol from her. One day when she was out, I emptied the shelves of the wet bar, hid the bottles in my closet, and then left the house to go out and play. When she came home and found the shelves empty, she went ape-shit and searched the house. When I came home, she marched me straight to my closet, pointed at the twenty or so bottles of alcohol on the floor, and asked, “Kelly, what the hell is going on here?”
“Um, I don’t know,” I answered.
“Answer me! What the hell is going on here? Are you some kind of alcoholic?”
Oh, denial, how you make me laugh!
* * *
There was laughter. Especially when the TV was on. It seemed that nothing could go wrong with the TV on. I’d crawl into Mom and Dad’s bed, get right between them, and we’d watch all the great comedies of the day: The Mary Tyler Moore Show (Dad loved Ted Knight’s Ted Baxter character), Laugh-In (I loved Lily Tomlin’s Edith Ann, and did one hell of an imitation of her), and The Bob Newhart Show (we all waited for the Mr. Carlin character to show up). But our hands-down favorite was The Carol Burnett Show. Carol Burnett was my Danny Kaye. I was around ten or eleven years old when I started to think, Hey, maybe I could do that someday, like my dad had done when he formed his “Big Danny Kaye plan.” My thoughts were much more nebulous than his had been, though. I never formed a plan. When I watched Carol (or Lily or Lucy) there was always a rush of energy that made me feel connected to others, and more importantly, connected to something bigger than myself. I wanted to make people feel connected, too. That is what made me want to be just like Carol. That, and making my dad laugh.
Although Carol Burnett was my hero, ironically, it was doing an imitation of another cast member that is my earliest memory of really making my dad laugh. Vicki Lawrence’s Mama character from “The Family” sketch had a line that went something like, “I don’t want to play no god damn Parcheesi!” I mastered this line and could make my dad melt into a pool of laughter whenever I recited it. Making my dad laugh was a conduit straight to nirvana. Hell, just seeing my dad laugh was pure bliss. Maybe that’s why The Carol Burnett Show was so special to me—every time Tim Conway tried to get Harvey Korman to break in a sketch, my dad laughed so hard he cried. No moment is more perfect than watching the man who makes the world laugh laugh himself.
* * *
When we moved to the Palisades, I quickly made friends with my next-door neighbor, Amanda, and her friend Tom. Amanda was the daughter of the guy who worked for the National Security Council. She was a few years older than me, had short blond hair, a perky, flirty personality, and was wicked smart. Although her father worked for the Nixon administration, and her family looked like a “normal” family on the outside, it was just as strange as mine. When I met her, one of her brothers had just returned home from some dustup in Washington, DC. Her father had pulled some strings to get him out of a scrape with the law, or maybe it was the mafia; either way, he was now hiding out on the West Coast. The first thing he did to repay his father was to spell out “Fuck Nixon” on his chest with masking tape and fall asleep in the sun. Once his sunburn set in, he took Amanda and me down the hill for ice cream at Baskin-Robbins in the village. Before he got out of the car, he took his shirt off. He and my dad got along very well.
Yet another brother was also a nice guy, but he had no heels. I was told that a few years before, he’d had a brain operation in which they’d put him in ice, and during the procedure he’d ground down his heels to nothing. I was fine with the big scar on his head; it was his lack of heels that always gave me the willies. To round off the family, Amanda’s mom had some kind of degenerative neck problem, which limited her mobility, and so she got to stay in bed all day wearing a neck brace and watching TV. I thought she was the luckiest person in the world.
Amanda’s dad, thankfully, was rarely home. He scared me. Not only did he work for the government, but one day we sneaked into his office and found some books that contained horrific photos of dead soldiers who had been torn apart by shrapnel. I may have been able to say the “Seven Dirty Words” in my house, but my dad had always sheltered me from violent films and images. The pictures in those books shattered my innocence. But her dad wasn’t all bad—when he came home from his “business trips” abroad, he would bring us beautiful gifts. Most of them came from a faraway place called Iran. Looking back on it now, I realize that he must have been hanging out with the shah and propping up the regime. When the tension in my house got to be too much for me, I’d go over to Amanda’s. They may have been a strange family, but at least there wasn’t a whole lot of yelling and screaming in their house. One person’s weirdness is another person’s refuge, I guess.
Tom, my other best friend, lived down the hill, and was really cute. He had sun-bleached hair down to his shoulders, freckles, glasses, and a great smile. I had a crush on him, but didn’t know how to have a crush on him because I was a tomboy. Or maybe I was a tomboy because I didn’t know how to have a crush on him? Either way, any glimmer I felt of wanting him to kiss me I shoved far away, deep inside my psyche. Focusing on tricking out our skateboards, collecting Wacky Packages (funny stickers that made fun of consumer brands, they came with bubble gum), or playing with our Corgi Toys (high-end British die-cast toy cars) was way easier. The best time I ever had with Tom was the weekend my dad taped New Year’s Rockin’ Eve on the Queen Mary in the fall of 1973 (it had been retired to Long Beach in 1967). Tom came with us on the ship for the whole weekend. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Not because I got Tom all to myself or because we had the run of the entire Queen Mary, or even because we were hanging out with Dick Clark, Billy Preston, and the Pointer Sisters, nope. It was because there was an onboard toy store devoted to selling Corgi cars from the UK. Talk about your sexual sublimation. As Freud used to say, “When is a cigar not a cigar?” When it’s a Corgi car.
As I approached my twelfth birthday, my body made the inevitable changes—hair in places I’d never seen it, painful little mounds on my chest, and emotions that felt more like demonic possession than something human. Although Amanda was only two years older than me, her body was way ahead of mine. She was fourteen going on thirty. She already had boobs and hips. While I actively hid my budding sexuality under layers of oversize T-shirts, Levi cords, and Wallabee shoes, Amanda’s was front and center. When we were around boys, she just knew how to work it, which made me feel even more invisible than I already felt in my “boyish” body.
Amanda fully embraced her budding womanhood, and did what she could to show me the way. She showed me how to shave my legs, put on eye shadow, and how to use the waterspout in the bathtub for more than just filling it up with water. But still, it wasn’t an easy transition for me. And my mom didn’t make it any easier. When she saw that I had shaved my legs, she flew into a rage.
“You’re too young to shave your legs! Now you’re stuck having to do it for the rest of your life! Why didn’t you come to me?!”
I broke down in tears, even more ashamed of my body now. I stormed into my room to cry and sulk. But really I was just so mad at her for being mad at me. I wanted to say to her, Sorry, Mom—next time I start puberty, I’ll make sure to check your calendar to see if there’s an opening somewhere between you and Dad raging and you passing out on the couch.
After that encounter I kept any and all questions, curiosities, and anxieties I had about sex, boys, or my body to myself. The closest our family ever came to “the talk” was when I accidentally walked into my parents’ bedroom and saw my dad walk out of the bathroom with an erection. Horror! That sight alone scared me off sex for another four years.
One of my biggest joys during those days was when Amanda and I choreographed skateboard ballets. Living on a steep hill made normal skateboarding rather treacherous. Luckily Amanda had a long and flat driveway—the perfect skateboard-ballet venue. One of our best was a lyrical modern piece we did to the Rolling Stones’ “Angie.” While we crisscrossed the driveway, we streamed colorful scarves behind us. But the crowd favorite (the “crowd” being our parents) was the one we did to the Beatles’ “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” a rather silly romp. Although I loved doing them, I knew there was no future in skateboard ballet, so we turned to variety shows instead. Our tour de force, in the summer of 1974, was a three-ring circus/variety show starring Amanda, Tom, me, and my abundant stuffed-animal collection. We were clowns, acrobats, and had animal acts, too. Gunderilla, my blue-velvet-jumpsuit-wearing stuffed gorilla, stole the show. But of course he did! Who wouldn’t, in a blue velvet jumpsuit?
* * *
In the summer of 1973 the Carlins hit the road again. Something magical always happened when we went on the road together—all the friction, fighting, and frustration would just melt away. After my dad did a few gigs in New England, we rented a camper van and toured the area. Mom made us stop at every antique store in search of turn-of-the-century medicine bottles, and Dad loved to stop at historical monuments. After a week or so, we ended up in Vershire, Vermont, to visit Uncle Pat and Aunt Marlene. They now lived and worked at a private school/summer camp that catered to rich kids who just wanted to “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” but whose parents wouldn’t let them. Everyone had long hair, wore tie-dyed shirts, and didn’t care for authority. This was a perfect place for my uncle and aunt, since they themselves had definitely turned on, tuned in, and dropped out, and never much cared for authority to begin with. Aunt Marlene ran the kitchen, and Uncle Pat provided “security.” The Derek and the Dominos’ song “Layla” reverberated throughout the main building. It must have been the only album that the campers had, because I don’t remember any other song playing that entire summer. My cousin Dennis and I roamed the forest, learned to play mumblety-peg from the older campers, and bought Mountain Dews and Oh Henry! candy bars at the gas station down the road—the only place to buy anything for miles and miles.
My mom and dad headed out for more gigs, leaving me there for the rest of the summer. By the time they came back, I’d learned to ride a horse, play soccer, and helped write the end-of-summer play. But, my most vivid memory of that summer was seeing all the adults huddled around a little black-and-white TV eagerly watching a bunch of politicians yammer on and on about who-knows-what. Little did I know it was the Watergate hearings, and our parents’ dreams were coming true—President Nixon would soon be disgraced and forced out of the White House. The summer of 1973 was rather perfect for all of us.
Another trip we made around that time was a bit less than perfect. Or maybe it was completely perfect. Dad had a bunch of dates in the lower Midwest, so we were flying from gig to gig in small single-engine planes. One day we were flying from Charleston, West Virginia, to somewhere in Pennsylvania. Mom sat in the copilot’s seat, as she always did, because she told the pilot that she’d had some flying experience (she loved talking to the pilots, and they always let her fly the plane). Forty-five minutes into the flight, the plane started to get thrown around like it was made of balsa wood. We were skirting the edge of a huge thunderstorm. The pilot was doing his best to get around it, but the storm was faster than we were. The plane pitched and rolled violently, and I clutched my dad. He held me tight.
“We’re okay,” my mom said as the pilot physically strained to keep the plane level. In a cheerful voice, Dad added, “It’s just like a roller coaster. Up. Down. Right. Left. It can be fun if you let it.” I was not sold. I began to cry.
The pilot shouted, “Dammit, the radio’s gone out!” He turned to my mom. “Take the controls.” Mom grabbed onto the controls as they moved about as if they had a mind of their own. The pilot worked on the radio. Mom battled to keep the plane steady. I hid my head in my dad’s chest. I was sure we were going to die.
As the ferocious storm tossed us about, Dad held me tightly. “Everything’s going to be okay. We’re going to be perfectly fine,” he kept whispering in my ear. I think he was talking to himself as much as he was to me. After what felt like two and a half eternities, but was more like ten minutes, the pilot finally yelled, “Got it!” He’d fixed the radio. He grabbed his controls, and Mom and he flew through the rest of the storm. Finally a patch of blue sky emerged in the distance, and we flew toward it.
For the next week my mom could barely move her arms. She’d pulled every muscle in her upper body keeping that plane aloft. She saved our lives that day.
Now it was our turn to return the favor.