A Carlin Home Companion (23 page)

Even more stressful was the atmosphere on the set. He had issues with Sam both creatively and personally. Their meetings were often contentious—my dad felt that Sam saw him as only an actor and not a writer, which led to many disagreements about scripts. In general Dad didn't like Sam's leadership style. Dad liked it when everyone felt welcome in the creative process, and thought Sam liked to play favorites. He was especially irked by Sam's attitude toward my uncle Pat and me.

At the beginning of the second season, Bob and I pitched an idea for an episode to my dad and Jerry. It was called “George Pulls the Plug,” and in it, George faced an awkward quandary: When is the right time to take someone off life support, especially when it's someone you barely know? Dad loved the premise. It fitted in perfectly with how the show liked to make his character face moral dilemmas. He pitched it to Sam without telling him that Bob and I had come up with it, knowing how Sam would react. Sam liked the idea and said they should do it. Then Dad revealed to him that we'd come up with it. I'm sure the air in that room was so thick you would've been lucky to cut it with a machete. But, to his credit, Sam agreed to let us write it, and assigned one of the writers, Bruce Helford, to guide us through the whole process. He would go on to be the show runner of
The Drew Carey Show
shortly after this time. Bruce was a doll.

The cast, writing staff, and a few executives flew to Las Vegas for our episode's table read. Dad was away doing a week of shows at Bally's Casino and Hotel. As the reading began I thought I might throw up. I was so nervous I wanted to crawl under the carpet. But then we got a laugh from a few of the writers, and then another, and before I knew it we were through the whole thing, and there was applause. The actors told us what a great job we had done. Bob and I felt validated and excited, and by the big smiles on their faces, I could see that Jerry and my dad were very happy for us. Sam and Bruce thanked us for the great script, and we all flew home.

When we all landed back in Los Angeles, Sam, Bruce, and the writers disappeared into the writers' room, and Bob and I went home. We were not invited in. This was standard practice in the sitcom world—nonstaff writers are never invited into the inner sanctum. At the end of the week we went to watch the dress rehearsal. As scene after scene unfolded, it became clear that very little of what Bob and I had written was still intact. All that was left was the premise and a few jokes—also standard practice in the sitcom world. Though frustrated that we hadn't been allowed to defend our old jokes or pitch new ones, we knew we couldn't do anything about it. At the end of the day we were truly just happy to be there.

The night of the taping, in the fall of 1994, we were told that we would be introduced to the audience as the writers of the episode. I told Sam that I felt weird about that because barely anything we had written was in the script. He leaned over to me and very sweetly said, “Take your bow. This is the way it is. Some nights you do all the work and get none of the credit; other nights you feel like you've done nothing, and yet you get the applause. That's showbiz.” I took that to heart and knew he was right. At least I hoped he was.

*   *   *

Since Bob and I now had a produced sitcom episode under our belt, we looked for an agent. In the spring of 1995 we had a few meetings, but no one jumped on our bandwagon. That era was a frenzy of competition. Even with connections and a produced script, it was hard to get even a toe, let alone a foot, in the door.

But then we got a huge break.

We were invited to interview for the Warner Bros. Sitcom Writers Program. This was very exciting. Every year Warner Bros. picked a handful of writers to be mentored by show runners from existing shows. The up-and-coming writers would then be shepherded along until they were ready to be dropped into a writers' room and on a staff. Getting this opportunity was like opening a candy bar and seeing the corner of the golden ticket.

In the interview I did most of the talking, hoping I was charming and affable. I talked about how Bob and I loved to write together and what a great team we made. I shared our long-term dreams of someday making thoughtful films that entertained but also shifted people's minds and hearts—the kind of films that can change a life. Then I began to expound on
my
thoughts about sitcom writing—how it was not real writing, but more like paint-by-numbers formulaic fare that was basically dumbed-down trite for the masses, and used to sell beer and cleaning products. I told the Warner Bros. executive, who had the keys to my future in his hands, that during my career I hoped to someday elevate the genre and be able to write stuff that challenged rather than perpetuated the status quo. I was, after all, a Carlin, and would not be a patsy for corporate interests. The executive politely nodded, as if he agreed with what I was saying, but you could feel the chill in the air.

As we walked out of the meeting, Bob had a look on his face like, What did you just do? This was our big break, and I had just broken it.

We never heard back from the program.

I guess both my dad and I were done with sitcoms. His got canceled due to low ratings around the same time. Dad was happy about that, but I was unsure that I had done the right thing in that meeting with the Warner Bros. executive. To this day I deeply regret not giving Bob and myself a chance to learn the craft, make some dough, and get our foot in the door. But I also know that we both would've been miserable there. Some of the sitcom writers' rooms back then (and maybe now) were run by Ivy-League white guys who loved to lord their intellect and large egos over the room. That atmosphere would have pissed Bob off daily and sent me into an anxiety tailspin. Having just come out of my own personal dark ages, I didn't have the confidence to stand up to the head games and ego brinkmanship in those rooms. I'd barely formed a sense of myself. But still—poor Bob. Here was a man who'd walked away from his day job to pursue writing, and his partner had just killed quite an opportunity.

Thankfully that didn't stop him from marrying me.

*   *   *

By early 1995 we'd been living in the house we'd bought together for more than a year, and we were months away from our wedding. On Christmas Eve of 1994, after formally asking my dad for permission the day before (no urinals involved), Bob poured two glasses of Cristal champagne, got down on one knee, and proposed. I cried tears of joy and said yes. On June 10, 1995, Bob and I got married under the Mexican Wedding Bell tree on my parents' front lawn, surrounded by friends and loved ones. As I looked into Bob's blue eyes, every cell of my body said yes. When I looked into my mother and father's eyes after the ceremony, I could tell that they both felt that I'd finally landed in the safest of arms. And I had. I was now loved and supported, and ready to take the world on even more.

*   *   *

“Well, you can't just sleep all day!” echoed in my head. Those were the words my mom had said to me after I dropped out of UCLA in 1981. I knew they applied even more now. I had to keep moving forward with my career. I'd fallen even more behind my peers by fucking up the Warner Bros. program. And I was no longer working part-time for my dad, but he was paying me like I was. I felt guilty and weak for taking his money, but clearly not guilty enough to look for a real job. (Besides, I don't think the chip on my shoulder would've fitted into a cubicle anyway.)

The foundation of that enormous chip on my shoulder was my trifecta of anxiety around my career: fear of making the wrong choice, fear of failure, and fear of success. What made up most of the fear of making the wrong choice was decades of listening to my dad tell stories about how miserable he'd been in the late sixties because of not honoring his “true self.” I was scared of making that same mistake. At thirty-three I didn't feel like I had the time to waste working for ten years only to end up hating my life and having to reinvent myself like he did. He was thirty-three when he did the reinventing. Did I want to be forty-three when I had to do it? No—better to follow the right path from the beginning.

What I'd failed to realize with that inner logic was that to understand what it is you really want, you must first choose a path. It rarely works the other way around. You need to live a little so you can know what's working or not. Then, if need be, you can change course. My dad had chosen his path early—the “big Danny Kaye plan”—and had given it his all. But it was only through being on that path that he discovered who he truly was—a rebel who needed to speak the truth. I'd only heard the part of my dad's story where he was unhappy. He never mentioned the part about the importance of the thousands of hours of stage time he got that allowed him to discover his true self.

Which brings me to my second fear: fear of failure. In order for me to find
my
true self, I needed to be willing to fail—take a wrong turn, fall on my face—and learn from it. But I believed that everything I would do in the world would be a failure no matter what. If it wasn't immediately excellent or approved of, or if thousands of people weren't chanting my name like they did for my dad, it was pointless. I was paralyzed, unable to try things that were creative and risky. Dad's shadow loomed large.

Add to all that the ever-twisted logic of my version of fear of success: If I do well, then my mom will feel left behind, and then she'll get depressed and drink—and, well, you have one helluva drug to induce paralysis and ennui.

And so I dabbled.

Bob and I began to shoot a short documentary about a homeless man named Mr. Wendal, who sold poems on a corner to the rich people of Brentwood. But because I really didn't know what I was doing, I felt overwhelmed by doubt, lack of experience, and inertia, and after a few months I gave up.

Then we produced a short film with a bunch of friends called
Gary's Beer,
but it didn't make it into any film festivals, and in 1996 there were no YouTube or Funny or Die Web sites you could distribute something like that on, so whatever ambition I had around that just melted away.

I knew I had to do something, so I went to lunch with one of my mentors from the Communications Department at UCLA, Marde Gregory. She was a straight-shooting, tough-love champion of mine. She listened to my anxieties, reminded me of my potential, and then gave me the name and number of a friend who was hiring at his documentary TV company that produced
Mysteries of the Bible
and
Ancient Mysteries
for the History Channel, and many
Biography
shows for A&E. Bram Roos, the president of FilmRoos, hired me to be a research assistant. My duties incuded logging interview tapes, doing background research, and then he said, “We shall see where it goes. Maybe we could shoot a biography about your dad and have you help to produce it.”

When I told my mom that I'd gotten the job, and that I'd potentially be writing and producing a
Biography
in the near future, she said with skepticism, “Can
you
do that?” I really wasn't sure if I could, and her doubt was like a stake through my heart. But I knew ultimately that she loved me and believed in me. After all, she had once written me a birthday card that said, “Kelly—you are capable of anything you put your mind to, and you don't have to prove anything. If you want to spend the rest of your days staring up at the sky and studying the shapes of clouds, you can. You are perfect just the way you are. Love, Mom.” I often wondered if any of the Ivy League universities might offer me a Ph.D. in Pondering Shapes of Clouds.

After I spent a few weeks doing research, Bram moved me to the Development Department with an old acquaintance from Westlake, Felicia Lansbury, and a nice guy named Doug West. They too were from showbiz royalty—Felicia was Angela Lansbury's niece, and Doug was Eve Arden's son. I wondered,
Did Bram put us together so that we might spin some Hollywood success for him?

Although I knew little about developing TV shows, I knew what I liked, and I loved that FilmRoos cared about making shows that taught history through beautiful images and interviews with experts.

In the fall of 1996, about a week after I'd become part of the Development Department, Felicia and I were eating lunch and talking about our families. She told me she'd just lost her mom to cancer. “It was so fast,” she said. “She was diagnosed, and within a few months she was gone.”

Every cell in my body tightened with terror. As I listened sympathetically, I thought,
Thank God that hasn't happened to me
.

 

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

What It Looks Like When the Other Shoe Drops

I
T WAS OFFICIAL:
I was an adult. At age thirty-four I went on my very first business trip. In the last week of March 1997, I flew business class to New York City to pitch documentary show ideas with Felicia and Bram to A&E, Lifetime, and the Discovery Channel. I felt so darn grown-up—at least on the outside. On the inside, though, it was still up for debate. Before I left for New York, I was in a panic. First, I hated flying—too many memories of cocaine-induced panic attacks on planes in the 1980s. And then, to make matters worse, I had to fly into JFK in a snowstorm. To reduce my anxiety, my look-at-me-aren't-I-a-grown-up? solution was to pack a stuffed animal. My flying companion was Celery—a lime-green rabbit my mom had given me for Easter the year before. Because he was like all transitional objects that have been clutched, drooled on, and given godlike powers by toddlers since the beginning of time, I knew he'd make everything okay. And he did. We landed safely. When I got to my hotel room there were flowers waiting for me with a note that said, “I knew you'd make it. Love, Bob.” Either he was in on it with Celery, or I really did marry the right guy. He always knew how to ground me.