The Improv

by Budd Friedman

  JAY LENO:

  What’s interesting about Freddie’s Carson debut was that he had done Merv Griffin the day before and he was just okay. But then when he did The Tonight Show, Sammy Davis Jr. was doing that applause thing where you slap your knee and that’s when everything took off.

  CRAIG TENNIS:

  Between Freddie, Sammy Davis Jr., and Carson laughing, the audience basically followed their lead and fell in love with Freddie. Though it seemed inconceivable at the time, Freddie got Chico and the Man almost immediately after, and Sammy eventually took him on the road. It was a virtual disaster turned into instant success by sheer luck.

  In the end, however, few entertainers fell more swiftly or tragically than Freddie, who died at the age of twenty-two on January 29, 1977, two days after he shot himself with a .32 caliber pistol. Freddie’s sudden death came as a traumatic shock on so many different levels.

  For the comedy community in particular, memories of where people were that day remain as forever seared as September 11th, the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. It was the first time we had lost one of our own. Life as we knew it, even for those who didn’t know Freddie personally, would never be the same again.

  PAUL RODRIGUEZ:

  Although I realize now that Freddie had been unhappy and was deeply troubled, I had no idea at the time. Back then, he was just a comic role model for me. When I first heard he’d shot himself I was in the Air Force stationed in Iceland, and when the news came over the teletype, I just lost it. I cried like a baby. I remember my senior sergeant coming up to me and saying, “Why the fuck are you crying?” He didn’t understand why I was so upset when I’d never even met Freddie. I just couldn’t believe it, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. Had Freddie lived, he would have been the elder statesman of Latino comics and we would have hung out together at the Improv, giving Budd shit about his monocle.

  One of the first professional jobs I got was because I had a moustache, and the producers told me I looked like Freddie Prinze. This was also one of the reasons I wanted to perform at the Improv, because Freddie had gotten his start there. When I did, I used to sit there for hours grilling Budd about Freddie. He knew it all and he told me everything.

  He also told me I had to find my own voice and that I couldn’t compete with a dead guy. I give Budd total credit for that. He was the one who told me that if he saw me come in the next week with a moustache, he wasn’t going to put me on. It was very hard for me to do, because it was very easy for me to get girls with one—kind of like catching fish in a barrel—but I did what Budd told me to and I shaved it off.

  January 28, 1977, was a Friday. As usual, I was at the Hollywood Improv, where we were either preparing to begin or already in the middle of our first show of the night. I don’t recall who we had performing, or how we first received the news that Freddie had shot himself early that morning, but we were all stunned.

  Though the details were still very sketchy, it would quickly emerge that he had been despondent after being slapped with a restraining order from his estranged wife two days earlier, and that he’d apparently phoned her and his parents before pulling the trigger. That morning, around 4 AM, he’d been in his room at the Beverly Hills Plaza Hotel with his business manager, Marvin “Dusty” Snyder, who told police that Freddie had suddenly pulled out a .32 Magnum revolver from under a pillow on his sofa and shot himself before he could stop him.

  At the time, however, the only news we had was that Freddie remained in a coma in UCLA Medical Center’s intensive care unit following emergency surgery. Hospital authorities issued this bulletin: “He tolerated operative treatment well. However, because the brain tissue was badly injured, it is premature at this time to offer a prediction as to whether he will survive or what disability (brain damage) will be sustained.”

  When a shock hits your system this hard, you feel like you can’t breathe, and that was how I felt then. Luckily, I wasn’t alone. I was surrounded by comedians, many of whom knew Freddie and looked at me as a surrogate father figure, so I tried to remain stoic even as a whirlwind of feelings and thoughts came flooding in a rush.

  The first one was why Freddie would do this, although it still hadn’t been confirmed if it had been an accident. My second thought was whether or not I could have done something to prevent it. After hearing rumors about his ever-increasing appetite for quaaludes and cocaine, I’d seen it up close just a few months before, when I’d gone with Jay Leno to see him open for Shirley MacLaine at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Freddie was so strung out that when we went backstage to his dressing room afterwards, he just sat there with his dinner tray, barely aware of who we were, and struggling to lift his fork. However, I didn’t think anything of it at the time.

  Jokingly, I’d even turned to Jay and said, “This guy’s boring. Let’s go say hello to Shirley.” Not only did we leave with me mainly chalking Freddie’s strange behavior up to fatigue, I also didn’t know what a quaalude was. I had honestly never heard of the stuff.

  I was also aware of his mounting legal troubles, with an impending divorce from his wife, Kathy; a custody battle over their infant son, Freddie Jr.; and a breach-of-contract lawsuit with his first manager, David Jonas, which I’d felt had been a bad match from the beginning.

  There were also the growing tensions between Freddie and Chico and the Man creator Jimmy Komack, which had become tabloid fodder. Still, he had just performed at Jimmy Carter’s presidential inaugural in Washington, DC, two weeks earlier, and the last time I talked to Freddie a couple of days before, he seemed upbeat about the future.

  Now he was probably near death, but as the gravity of the moment set in, there was no time to process any of it, as reporters from every major news outlet in the country were already trying to get a hold of me. But I was in no mood to talk to them, and knowing that they would probably soon start descending upon the Improv, I immediately got into my car and drove over to Canter’s Deli, a popular after-hours hangout for comedians then as now, to see if I could get any more information.

  JAY LENO:

  I’m sure I was either at the Improv or The Comedy Store, which was the other big showcase club in LA, when everyone first got word Freddie had shot himself, although by this point he had already begun to drift away from his old friends. Some of this might have been conjecture on our part, but he was a huge star and none of us were, so when he came into the Improv, he’d be with whoever was famous and he didn’t sit with us.

  I think there are some people who might tell you this happens to everyone, in the sense that there are people you thought you were closer to than you actually were, so that when they make it big, you feel betrayed. But Freddie and I didn’t have a lot in common. He liked drugs and alcohol and I never had an interest in those things, so we didn’t have a connection there.

  Really, our only connection was the fact that we were both comics, like Seinfeld and me. Whenever Jerry and I get on the phone, we always end up talking to each other for an hour because each conversation invariably begins with something funny and we make each other laugh.

  When Freddie and I were just starting out, we had that same kind of a thing where one of us would come up with a bit and the other one would come up with the punch line. And because most comics write by talking and getting a reaction, you’d be like, “This guy’s good for me and I can write with him,” although with Freddie and me it didn’t really go beyond that.

  But his death was still very rough, especially when you were twenty-four or twenty-five like most of us were and you’d never had much experience with this kind of thing before. It just seemed so odd, although I’d been to his apartment enough times to know he liked to show off with guns, particularly when there were women present.

  He’d do things like go in the bedroom and fire his gun into the air. Then the woman would come running in, and Freddie would be lying on the bed pretending he shot himself. As soon as Freddie heard her scr
eam, he’d go, “Ha, ha.”

  RICHARD LEWIS:

  I was at the Improv when his friend Alan Bursky came in and said these exact words: “Freddie shot himself.” I became so enraged when he said it that I grabbed him by the collar and threw him up against the wall. I said, “This better not be a fucking joke.” I mean, I wanted it to be a joke, and yet because I thought he was making a joke, I went ballistic because I was so angry if he was.

  It turned out to be true, of course. The drugs and his fascination with guns were what did him in. But it was mainly the drugs and the stardom. What else is new?

  BYRON ALLEN:

  My mother worked in the publicity department for NBC and she was the publicist for Sanford and Son and Chico and the Man. And when you’re the publicist on a show, who gets the first call? I remember the phone ringing at three o’clock in the morning and the person on the other end was Paul Hall, who was a news producer at KNBC.

  There weren’t any answering machines back then, so I picked up the phone, and Paul said, “Byron, it’s Paul. I need to speak to your mother.” I asked him why and that was when he told me Freddie had shot himself. When I handed the phone to my mom, she was hysterical, but she still gave him the phone numbers of everyone connected with the show so he could tell them before the news broke.

  KITTY BRUCE:

  There are four dates that I remember like they were yesterday—my father’s death, Freddie’s, and the assassinations of John Lennon and John F. Kennedy. It took me a long time to get over Freddie’s death and I used to have such resentment against California because nearly everybody I ever loved died there. As soon as I heard the news, I remember thinking to myself, “Fucking Hollywood. It took another one.”

  PAUL REISER:

  I never met Freddie because I was still in college when he was starting out, but he was very impactful. His trajectory was one you watched, and he just got bigger and bigger and bigger. I was glued to the television after he shot himself because he didn’t die right away.

  It was just so sad and it left this taste in my mouth that this was the bad side of comedy—and that you didn’t want to make it too big too quickly. Not that I ever thought I would. And I would amend that because what made it especially sad was Freddie was so funny.

  KEVIN NEALON:

  Before I began performing stand-up, I would watch every comic appearing on TV to the point where I knew all their acts by heart. I knew people loved to laugh and they loved stand-ups, but it didn’t really hit me how important stand-up was until Freddie Prinze died.

  The day he shot himself, I was raking leaves in my parents’ yard in Connecticut when I heard the news on the radio. The country was devastated by it and there were massive amounts of media coverage. I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, a comic really makes a big impact on the world.” I think that was my impetus for moving to California to become a comedian. In a sick way, I thought, “A spot has become available.”

  DANNY AIELLO:

  I don’t know if I should say this, but after Freddie died people used to say things like, “Hollywood killed Freddie Prinze.” The pressures he was under may have contributed to it, but I can tell you that oftentimes when he was performing at the club in New York he appeared stoned. I never actually witnessed him taking anything, but I did see some of the behavior onstage. He was always brilliant comedically, but I always felt he was on something.

  SHELLEY ACKERMAN:

  The last time I saw him was in New York about five or six months before he died and I remember being frightened. I just had this sense that he was going down the tubes as if a piece of his soul had shifted. On the day he died, I remember standing in the kitchen of my friend’s Manhattan apartment where I was staying when the news came over the radio. As soon as I heard it, I was doubled over choking and crying.

  No one was with me that day, but not long before—maybe even the last time I saw him—Freddie borrowed a record album from me that he never returned. It was the soundtrack from the movie Car Wash and it had a song called “I’m Going Down.” Before he borrowed it, Freddie played it over and over that day. When he died, I truly think he hypnotized himself into a drug-induced state, took a gun, and didn’t know what he was doing.

  JIMMIE WALKER:

  I was on my way to Philadelphia when I heard the news he shot himself. I was literally frozen because in the beginning, they said he was wounded and he might make it. And this is exactly what I said to myself. I said, “It’s just like fucking Freddie to wound himself so everybody has to go to the hospital and say, ‘Freddie, what’s the problem?’”

  MARTY NADLER:

  I knew Freddie both when he was just starting out and after he made it big. The best analogy I can use was that this was a guy who went from the A train in New York to a red Corvette at NBC.

  I witnessed a lot of that firsthand because I was a writer on Chico and the Man during its second season. By that time, the people who ran the show and managed him were controlling him to a point that I think he kind of knew this was the beginning of the end for him.

  About a year before he died, we were working on a script one afternoon at my house for an episode called “Chico Runs Away.” I remember that we were right in the middle of writing it when Freddie suddenly reached into his man purse and pulled out a gun. I had no idea he was going to do this and I was terrified that it might go off, so I said, “Look, Freddie, you put any joke you want into the script and it’s fine with me.”

  So he put the gun away and we continued writing. But if I’d had any idea what was going to happen, I’m sure I would have given him more shit about the gun.

  ALAN BURSKY:

  Freddie was one of my best friends and I loved him, but he was sort of a psychic vampire. We lived together for a while after he first moved to Hollywood to do Chico and the Man. We were both about the same age and we went on The Tonight Show around the same time. I’d done it several months before him and he was still in New York, but Freddie used to call me in the middle of the night and we would bullshit. Then we met at Catch A Rising Star and we became fast friends. When he came out a few weeks later to do Chico and the Man, I told him he could stay with me.

  Anyway, the first time we met, I was expecting to see some kid, but then this guy who was about six two comes in. He had the mustache and broads on his arm. I was flabbergasted. The night he flew out to do Chico, I picked him up at the airport and he was wearing a blue wool peacoat. It was pouring rain out; we were both drenched and the coat reeked.

  By the time we got to my apartment, it smelled so bad that I was like, “Give me your coat and I’ll hang it in the shower.” I’ve told this story a million times, but when I said this, he asked me for a mirror and a blade, which I took to mean that he wanted to shave. So I handed him my electric razor and he said, “No, it’s for this.”

  That was when he pulled out this thing of cellophane from his wet coat and there was wax paper inside. In the wax paper was tinfoil, and in the tinfoil was more wax paper, which he finally opened up and there were pieces of what looked like crushed sugar cubes in the middle.

  I was like, “What’s that?”

  “Cocaine,” Freddie said.

  When I told him I’d never seen coke before, he told me he needed a mirror and a razor so he could chop it up. Instead of a mirror and a razor, I took my autographed picture of Woody Allen down from the wall and gave him an X-ACTO knife.

  Looking back, people don’t realize what happened to him—and to me years later. Cocaine psychosis set in. You’d hallucinate and then there’d be paranoia, but nobody knew what that was back then.

  Now this is where it got strange—and again, I didn’t know what cocaine psychosis was—but Freddie put the bullet in his head early on the morning of January 28th, then lasted thirty-three hours on life support, and died the following afternoon. Several months before, say around October of 1976, any time that I was hanging out with him, he was so paranoid he made me flush anything I touched down the toilet. Anythi
ng I couldn’t flush, I had to wipe my fingerprints off of, including doorknobs, which he made me wipe with a napkin. Then I had to take the napkin with me.

  Even after Freddie’s death had been ruled an accidental shooting, everybody still speculated because he always talked about suicide. He would say, “Can you see the headlines—FREDDIE PRINZE DEAD.”

  Once I remember him saying this to me and I said, “You better hope there’s not an earthquake that day.” Eerily enough, the day Freddie died there was a huge snowstorm in New York and the headline in all the papers was “SNOW STUNS CITY.” And then underneath in a little box, there was: “Freddie Prinze Succumbs to Self-Inflicted Gunshot Wound.”

  LIZ TORRES:

  I was at home in Los Angeles watching television when I found out. It was the day after and he was on life support. I don’t remember what it was about, but we’d recently had a knockdown, drag-out fight, and we were on the outs.

  As soon as I heard the news, I got right in my car and drove over to UCLA Medical Center. They weren’t letting anyone in, although Tony Orlando was also there and he went straight up to his room. He and Freddie had also recently had a fight and Freddie flung the Rolex watch Tony had given him up against the wall.