SHELLEY ACKERMAN, singer, actor, astrologer, and former New York Improv waitress:
During the week, the pace was a little slower, but it could still be very packed and you worked your ass off. If a table comfortably sat eight people, Budd would double that to sixteen. He’d squeeze as many people in as he possibly could, so there was very little room and you had to move through it and move fast to keep your eye on everything because Budd did.
For our bread, we used these round boards where we’d put half a loaf of pumpernickel and two pats of butter. If a customer wanted extra butter, Budd insisted we charge them five cents extra. I wouldn’t call him cheap necessarily, but he was very frugal and watched every penny. This also meant that if a customer walked out without paying, it was our problem.
FIVE
The Improv Gets Hot
SILVER SAUNDORS FRIEDMAN:
The crowds came based on the early press we got, which Budd was very good at because he’d been in advertising. Besides the singers we had from many of the Broadway shows and other celebrities performing and coming in nightly, another big crowd-pleaser in the beginning was this defective pay phone we had.
It was a leftover from the Vietnamese restaurant, and you could call anywhere in the world, often without putting money in. People were so fascinated by this that they’d line up just to use the phone. Somehow or another, Earl Wilson, who wrote a column for the New York Post, found out and he wrote an entire story about it.
The talent we had coming in almost nightly was in abundant supply from the get-go. This was already becoming increasingly evident by the spring of 1963, even though it was still anybody’s guess where it would all lead. It was also during this early period when I suddenly began to realize that, if nothing else, we were prophetically living up to our name both onstage and off.
CYNTHIA FROST:
One night, there was a holiday of some sort and the place was packed when Budd came in with four or five strippers who must have been standing outside. The next thing I knew, they were all up on the table taking their clothes off. I don’t know if they were professionals or not, but they were up on the tables dancing. We all just good-naturedly kind of took things in stride and the men went crazy. But God almighty, Silver was pissed off—and rightfully, I think—because she was afraid that if the cops came in they’d be out of business.
That same evening, my friend Jim Downey stopped in after his restaurant closed and when I told him what happened, he asked me to introduce him to the women, which I did. He said, “Ah, good evening, ladies. I’m Jim Downey. How are you tonight?” And then one of them reached into her blouse, took out her breast, and said, “Oh, hello, Jim. Have some.”
CYNTHIA FROST:
Budd kept a mental list of who came in and who was more famous. He would always ask them to get up and there were some of them who didn’t want to because they weren’t getting paid, although there were others who were well known that wanted to and Budd wouldn’t let them. He’d keep them waiting for hours.
Attracting an after-hours show-business crowd like we did, there were obviously a lot of drunks, although when I was there we didn’t have a bar and we didn’t serve liquor yet. Instead, Budd would sneak some booze to his favorite customers, like Rudy Vallee, and he wouldn’t charge them. Rudy was very cheap. I would wait on him hand and foot, and when it came time to pay, Budd would say it was on the house. Rudy wouldn’t even leave a tip.
To this day, I’m still obsessed with meeting and being around celebrities, which, aside from my desire to be a producer, could have well been another reason I started the Improv. This didn’t occur to me until many years later, although when we first opened, I felt like a big kid in a candy store.
JAMIE DEROY, producer, singer, actor, and television host:
Budd was always very nice to me and I’ve got nothing but wonderful memories, although I’ll also tell you an interesting story about him when it comes to having customers who were famous—even though mine probably echoes a lot of others.
I moved to New York from Pittsburgh in 1964 to study acting at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, and become a singer and an actress. Like a lot of young performers, I had a lot of day jobs to support myself, although fortunately most of them were in show business. One of them was working for the Improv’s publicist Michael Goldstein. He brought me there a lot and I worked for him off and on, which was great, but there was a time in between when I was collecting unemployment benefits.
As it still is, one of their requirements is that you have to be actively looking for work in your respective field in order to receive benefits. One day, I was down at the unemployment office and the clerk set me up for a job working for a British actor named Norman Wisdom who was very well known at the time. He needed help learning his lines for this upcoming television appearance he had, which proved to be impossible because he was impossible.
Anyway, one night after work we ended up having dinner at this hamburger place near the theater district. It was such a dump that there were literally flies in the food. It was just disgusting and I’m not sure if I even ate, but somehow afterwards I suggested we go over to the Improv. Needless to say, Budd, in his typical fashion, was absolutely ecstatic that I’d brought Norman into his club and we stayed for a couple of hours.
The next thing I knew, when the check came at the end of the evening, Budd picked up the tab for both of us, which he never did when I was alone.
ROSS BENNETT, comedian:
Budd loves talent, but he loves being around celebrities and power even more. I’m not sure if it’s him or just the nature of show business, but that’s what he gets his charge from.
BUDDY MANTIA, comedian, actor, and singer:
I think Budd’s bark was always much worse than his bite, although you could always feel his wrath when he’d yell at you to get out of the aisle—especially if you weren’t famous yet, because it made you fearful that you wouldn’t get spots. But the thing was that it could be just about anybody and he’d say the same thing: “Get the hell out of the aisle.” Back then, it was his mantra.
SILVER SAUNDORS FRIEDMAN:
In the beginning, Christopher Plummer would come in a lot, and sometimes Jason Robards would meet him because they were friends. I loved Jason as an actor and I certainly respected his talent, but he was a drunk and he was almost always plowed. As a matter of fact, he came in one night not long after we opened and then proceeded to relieve himself on our brick wall.
I remember saying to Budd, “If you don’t reprimand him, I will.” However, he refused to do anything. He said, “We can’t do that. He’s drunk. Number one, he’ll never remember that we reprimanded him, and number two, we have to be careful who we reprimand.”
Well, that was that. This was where Budd and I had our biggest differences, even though I didn’t fight with him over this particular instance. I also understood the importance of “marketing” as much as I hate that word, although Jason never came back with a decent party and he was almost always drunk.
Not long after that, I’m guessing sometime around late 1963 or early 1964, I remember hearing this commotion coming from outside the men’s room. Naturally, because we only had one toilet and there were three guys in there, I immediately became suspicious, and I started pounding on the door with my fists. It was one of those things where impulse just sort of takes over.
When nobody responded, I kicked the door in and busted the latch. The next thing I knew, I saw Jason, Christopher, and this other guy named Al Lewis, who was an aspiring actor that ran his father’s parking garage. All three were just standing there, passing around a bottle of vodka like a bunch of teenagers and getting completely shitfaced. They didn’t even have cups, but I didn’t want to seem like the bad guy either, so I finally just said, “Don’t stay too long,” and turned around and left.
I guess you could say I was something of an enabler, although nobody knew about those things then. There was a police precinct about two blocks a
way, and there were these six detectives who used to come in after they got off duty to have a drink and blow off steam.
What they’d do is get a bottle of whatever from another bar, then come in and have a drink, and leave the rest for me to give to some of our more famous customers like Christopher and Jason. So many stories involving them and alcohol come to mind, but probably my all-time favorite was the night that Christopher was there singing some sort of a duet with Jason at the little sixty-six-key upright piano we had.
And then—God knows why—Albert Finney and Tuesday Weld decided to join in. Both were already famous actors, and Tuesday, who had won a Golden Globe Award for the Most Promising Female Newcomer in 1960 and was dating her future husband Dudley Moore, was one of the biggest sex symbols in Hollywood at the time. Teenagers and grown men alike were absolutely besotted by her, myself included. You can only imagine what a thrill for me it was to have her in my club. Only this night, she became the main attraction, because just as Christopher and Jason were singing, a very sexily clad Tuesday stretched out diagonally on the piano top while Albert Finney began beating on the back of a chair like a pair of bongo drums.
The audience just went ape shit and I remember bolting from the back of the room where I was tallying up checks to the front so I could get a closer view. My mouth was literally hanging wide open like some teenager. I can still see Tuesday stretched out, sultry and sensual, and every other male in the room ogling her. I’m sure that any man who was there that night and is still around shares this memory.
On this very same evening, and whenever Jason and Chris were performing together at the piano after that, they’d often have a third person with them named Mort Shuman, a songwriter who’d written for Elvis Presley, Bobby Darin, and the Drifters. Mort worked in the nearby Brill Building and he always brought his guitar with him. This happened frequently and he was a very pleasant, easygoing guy, although I was hesitant about putting him on despite his pedigree because rock ‘n’ roll wasn’t in keeping with the Improv’s musical-theater theme. Usually he was just fine with that, so it was never a problem.
However, on this particular night, Mort insisted on joining in. I can’t remember if it was before or after Tuesday and Albert, but I do remember saying yes and letting him go on anytime he wanted—all because he sent his friend out to get champagne from his home and we wound up staying until the sun came up. It was the perfect example of countless other evenings that followed.
Over time, I also became very friendly with Mort’s writing partner Doc Pomus, who spent most of his life in a wheelchair following a childhood bout with polio. He was married to the female lead in Fiorello!, which Silver had been in. Doc was a great guy, and he’s the one who taught Bette Midler how to sing rock ‘n’ roll. He saw her at the club one night and said, “I’ll tutor her.” And he did.
BETTE MIDLER:
Oh my God, Doc was a blues singer—a white blues singer—and he’d been in a wheelchair for a long, long time, but that didn’t stop him from having wonderful relationships with a wonderful family who adored and looked after him. He lived on 72nd Street on the West Side somewhere, and the Improv is where I first met him. He was also a terrific songwriter who wrote mostly blues and blues-inflected songs. I think he thought he could help me, but I wasn’t sure he liked my voice. I never really got that feeling, and I don’t think I spent enough time trying to get a firm grasp on what he was offering. He gave me some songs he thought were appropriate for me that I either butchered or didn’t come up to snuff with. But Doc was truly one of the giants and he knew a lot of the same people I wound up knowing.
DANNY AIELLO, actor, singer, and former New York Improv bouncer:
Doc Pomus was my boy. He was working somewhat with Bette and he used to come to the club a lot even when she wasn’t on. His car would pull up to the entrance and then I’d carry him inside and put him near the stage. There was a waiter named Jerry Green who worked at this restaurant called the Colony on the Upper East Side where Doc also went a lot, and he knew we were friendly. One time, I was having dinner there and Jerry came up to me out of the blue and asked me if I knew why Doc wrote the song “Save the Last Dance for Me,” which I later recorded on one of my albums.
It was a very touching story because Doc’s wife had been a professional dancer and he used to enjoy watching her dance with other people even though he couldn’t accompany her because he was confined to a wheelchair. That was the inspiration for this song where the last line was, “As long as you’re going home with me.” Doc was dynamite.
SIX
A Future Film Legend Wanders into West 44th Street and I Nearly Produce My First Show
In April 1963, I decided to hire a piano player. Given our precarious finances, it was another expense I could barely afford. But from what very little I still knew about show business at this point, I also knew enough to realize that singers sang that much better if they had a regular accompanist who was familiar with their material and could play in their key.
The first person we had was Bob Murdoch, whom I paid fifty dollars a week and who was in the chorus of How to Succeed with Silver. Bob came in almost every night after the show and was an immediate hit. When he got another gig and left several months later, I was devastated. Luckily, however, I wasn’t left completely high and dry because not long after that another classically trained pianist from California who had recently moved to New York to become an actor wandered into the club and sat down at the piano.
When I say “wandered into,” which was how a lot of people found their way to the Improv in those days, I’m not exaggerating. I also didn’t try to stop him after I discovered he could play, although I couldn’t tell you the song he did or what our first conversation was if my life depended on it. The whole thing sounds strange, yes, but he was always welcome during the six months he came in after that.
Whenever he did, it was mostly without fanfare, mainly because it was usually during our early evening lull. But I liked him a lot, even though the melodies he played typically fell somewhere in between slow and serene to sullen and moody. Nevertheless, it worked because of his tendency to scrumptiously blend into the background. And yet despite his enigmatic playing style, there was also something about his personality that made you want to like him.
The young man’s name was Dustin Hoffman. Many years later he would say that the only reason he was never a flop is because I never formally introduced him. I don’t say any of this for vindication, but his claim is also only true because he never asked me to.
In any event, when he first began coming into the Improv in either the late spring or early summer of 1963, Dustin was living in an Upper West Side hotel with a young male opera singer who also came in fairly often. One night around this same period, the roommate told him that he was bringing a girl with him to the club and Dustin said, “I’ll meet you there.” As fate would have it, the girl was Anne Byrne, a young ballet dancer and actress who eventually became his first wife.
PHOEBE DORIN, actor and the New York Improv’s first waitress:
I went home with Dustin one night. Dusty is a tiny little guy and I’m a tiny girl, and he liked me because I waited on him. At the time, he was several years away from The Graduate and light-years away from instant recognition. He was living on the West Side not far from me, and he asked if he could take me home on his motorcycle. I’d never ridden one so I was like, “What do I do? Do I sit on the back?” And he said, “Yeah.” He was very charming and adorable, but I didn’t invite him up because I didn’t know where it was going to go. Instead, we ended up going out for pancakes and just talking until four in the morning. Even though he told me he was struggling, I could already tell he was going to be a humongous star.
I can’t say that Dustin and I were ever close friends, and I haven’t spoken to him in many years, but we were always friendly. I remember one night in particular when he came into the club in late 1975. It was right before I moved to Los Angeles and Dustin was in town
filming Marathon Man.
He was already a major star by this point and I hadn’t seen him in several years, but as we were about to close, Dustin informed me that he was due on the set in a few hours, which meant he didn’t have enough time to go back to his hotel and sleep. Then he asked me if I still went to Brasserie, a popular all-night French restaurant in the Seagram Building that has since closed. I told him I did, although I was also tired and I wasn’t too thrilled about going at first. Then again, I also didn’t want to seem like a bad sport, nor did I want to pass up an opportunity to be seen in public with Dustin Hoffman in one of New York’s hottest restaurants.
So we went and, needless to say, had a great time, although when I went to see the film after it came out I remember noticing that Dustin appeared to be exhausted in one of the scenes. That was when it suddenly occurred to me that our night out on the town months earlier might have been the reason why.
Along with Dustin and Louis Gossett Jr., who occasionally sang and played the guitar, we had many other talented piano players at the Improv over the years. Early on, most notably, they included Charlie Small, who went on to write the original Broadway score for the The Wiz, and John Meyer, who wrote a musical about the Vietnam War called The Draft Dodger that I wanted to produce in 1965.
The Improv Page 5