The Improv

by Budd Friedman

  Even when ending a marriage is for the best, you’re never fully prepared for the finality of it—especially when young children are involved and you suddenly begin to realize all the things you’ll be missing that you once took for granted, like having breakfast together, testing the kids on spelling words, going to the zoo, etc. It isn’t so much the activities themselves as it is the fact you won’t physically be present to do them—plus you also become aware of the things in the future that you won’t be there for, like first dates and learning to drive.

  Not that I was always as much of a hands-on parent as I would have liked to have been because I was so busy running the club, which now only seemed to magnify the pain. On top of that, I had also lost a parent myself—albeit in a much different and permanent way—and I knew all too well the void it leaves, which was the last thing I wanted for my girls.

  Though I was still a neophyte at being a single father, I did everything I could to make the best of a difficult situation by trying to visit them as often as I could in New York and making their trips to Los Angeles memorable. In between, I tried to ease my emptiness by reliving my youth in what basically amounted to a midlife crisis.

  Perhaps “crisis” is too strong a word, and the truth is that it was far from that, although suffice it to say I had plenty of wild oats to sow, which I did at every opportunity. After selling my house in Nichols Canyon in the Hollywood Hills, which I had planned to build onto and add a swimming pool, I temporarily moved into a residential hotel off of Sunset Boulevard. Actually, it was more of a mid-level apartment building for people in transition, as I certainly was. While it was by no means luxurious, it wasn’t a dump either, and it turned out to be just what I needed at the time.

  As a result of living there, I also became friendly with Mickey Ross, a prominent television writer, who was one-third of the production team Nicholl Ross West, whose credits included producing and writing for All in the Family and The Jeffersons, as well as creating and producing Three’s Company.

  Mickey and his wife lived down the hall from me, and we became especially close years later after we became involved with the LA Free Clinic, which provides pro bono health care services to unwed mothers—and which roasted me in 1988 at their annual fund-raiser.

  It’s a charity with which I’m still actively involved, and that roast turned out to be one of the greatest nights of my life because I got television producer Garry Marshall to be the emcee, although in an amusing aside, right after Garry agreed, I ran into Brandon Tartikoff, then the head of NBC, who begged me to let him do it instead.

  However, I wasn’t about to bump Garry, so I happily agreed to let Brandon be on the dais where we also had comedians Paul Rodriguez and Pat McCormick alongside Bette Midler, who sang four songs, three of which were parodies about me. To top it off, we even raised $50,000 more than the year before when they honored Hollywood super-agent Bernie Brillstein.

  But getting back to the days of sowing my wild oats when I was single again, I also bought a Porsche 914, which I immediately affixed with a personalized license plate that had the moniker “Improv One.” I felt like the cat’s meow when I drove it, although when my car-aficionado pal Jay Leno found out about it, he was aghast. His response was, “You’re not a car person, Budd. You have to take care of a Porsche.” When I tried to explain that it had an automatic transmission, he just turned and walked away.

  And when it came to the women I was dating, the people closest to me thought my choices were no less ridiculous. Naturally, I tended to go much younger, and one of my girlfriends during this period was a twenty-three-year-old singer I met at the Improv who was twenty-four years my junior. Then there was the time that I got invited to an orgy, where members of the opposite sex were screwing everywhere you turned, although I declined to participate.

  There was never any shortage of beautiful women at my beck and call, especially at the Improv bar where I smoked cigars and routinely invited them to join me for champagne at my VIP table. Some even accused me of running a casting couch operation and giving stage time to the women I favored, although that was never the case. And at any rate, despite outward appearances, business overall was sluggish even after the show room had been fully rebuilt and we still occasionally had nights when comedians showed up unexpectedly, like the time filmmaker Albert Brooks called us out of the blue in 1980 and performed stand-up for the first time in nearly four years.

  BRUCE SMIRNOFF:

  It was on a Monday night around eleven-thirty, and I was sitting on my stool by the door. There were seven guys at the bar, a couple of women in the restaurant area, and maybe about ten people in the show room when the pay phone rang. I picked it up and said, “Improv.”

  The guy on the other end said, “Hi, this is Albert. Who’s this?”

  When I told him my name, he said, “Listen, I want to come down and do a little comedy,” although he still hadn’t told me his last name, so I asked him. He said, “It’s Albert Brooks. Is there anybody there?” When I told him we had about twelve people and asked him when he wanted to come in, he said around midnight.

  So I told him I would take care of it. This was in 1980, when the cost of a pay phone call was still a dime, so I hung up, went to the cash register, and took out a handful of dimes. I think we had two pay phones at the time and I scattered the dimes on the bar. Then I said to whoever was there, “Albert Brooks is coming in. He hasn’t done stand-up since 1976. Call everyone. He’ll be here in forty-five minutes.”

  So we started calling people and we must have assembled sixty people in forty-five minutes. And then he came in and went on for nearly two hours from about midnight until two o’clock in the morning. What made it so magical was that everyone who came knew they were coming to see this special, secret show from Albert Brooks.

  Of course, I was floored, and Albert Brooks coming in that night instantly took me back to countless others like it we’d had back in New York, like when Liza Minnelli sang for her father for the first time or later when her mother, Judy Garland, came in to sing with her.

  But by this point—and as special as they were—such spectacular evenings on Melrose Avenue were few and far between. I was also living well beyond my means, and even though I managed to put on a brave face, I was lonely and depressed to the point that there were some days I wanted to pack it all in, sell the club, and go into real estate. Looking back on it now, I realize that would have been the worst decision I could have made, but what gave me the idea, besides the fact that the club was floundering, was that I had done fairly well with the sale of my home, and so I thought I might be able to make a decent living flipping houses.

  But thank God I didn’t and the reason why is because of a woman who came into the club one night in March 1980.

  During this same bleak period when I was speed dating, I was also going out with women closer to my age, one of whom—Marsha—ran a legal transcription service. She was terrific and we shared a lot of fun times together, although it quickly became apparent that our relationship wasn’t going anywhere. However, Marsha and I shared a mutual friend named Barbara, who to my complete surprise, would be the one responsible for introducing me to Alix Mark, my wife of now thirty-five years.

  Alix was a former fashion model and she took my breath away from the second I laid eyes on her. Originally from Morristown, New Jersey, she had lived in LA since the 1960s and was also recently divorced and raising two young sons, Ross and Dax. When Barbara brought Alix to the Improv for the first time, I immediately sensed there was something different about her.

  ALIX FRIEDMAN, Budd’s wife:

  I’d never even heard of the Improv and I had no idea who Budd Friedman was. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’d ever even been to a comedy club before. The night we went, I was with my friend Barbara, who was also divorced and had two sons the same age as mine. They played Little League baseball together. Our kids were home with a babysitter, and we’d gone out to dinner when Barbara suggested we go to
the Improv. It wasn’t crowded at all, and I don’t know what comedians we saw, but I remember paying five dollars to get in while Barbara talked to Budd.

  I spotted them as they were walking in and I was heading out. I think I said something to the effect of, “I’ll see you inside,” when it suddenly dawned on me that Alix had already paid the cover charge and I ran back in to tell them it was on the house.

  ALIX FRIEDMAN:

  He also offered to buy us a bottle of champagne, which I found to be the most charming, delightful gesture. It wasn’t love at first sight for me by any means, but I liked Budd instantly, which you couldn’t help because he was so adorable.

  Maybe part of it was the buzz I was feeling from the champagne or the great conversation we’d had when I joined them at their table, but I wasted no time pursuing Alix. The next thing I knew I was asking for her phone number.

  ALIX FRIEDMAN:

  He was a complete gentleman about it—just a total sweetheart—but I was still reluctant to give him my number because I found out he’d dated one of my friends before, so I said, “Budd, there’s a problem. You went out with my friend and I don’t want that to cause any trouble, so let me see how she feels about it.”

  They weren’t dating anymore and they hadn’t seen each other in a while, and it was never a serious romance. I was also dating several other men at the time, one of whom was a film producer at MGM. However, I promised to ask my friend and I told Budd I would get back to him the next day.

  All I could think was, “I hope she means it and I better think of something clever to say now to seal the deal.” And, of course, I was as nervous as a schoolboy while I waited for Alix to call.

  ALIX FRIEDMAN:

  When I asked my friend, she had no qualms about it whatsoever, so Budd and I made a lunch date for the very next day, which was quickly followed by Budd sending me roses and taking me out for champagne on my birthday the night after. At first, he asked me if he could join me and my sons for dinner, which didn’t seem appropriate, and I said no, but I agreed to let him pick me up afterwards around ten o’clock. When we got back from the restaurant, Budd was there waiting for me and that was the beginning of our romance.

  As much as I may have been head over heels, I knew that I had to play it cool. Though our conversations early on were mainly of the innocuous getting-to-know-each-other kind, we quickly realized we had a lot in common.

  What’s more, I immediately began to feel my anxieties over the Improv’s uncertain future melting away. It was as if my world was suddenly becoming a better place because Alix was part of it. Not only that, but when I told her I was considering selling the Improv and going into real estate, she immediately said I was making a huge mistake.

  As for the depression I was feeling over being separated from my kids and my lingering animosity towards Mitzi, this, too, began melting away. Along with it was the end of an era that some comics used to call “BA”—before Alix—where I used to walk into the club and shove the tables and chairs around just to make my presence known. With Alix now having a tangible impact on my business, largely because she wasn’t officially in it, people soon began to take notice. She also proved to be an invaluable asset when it came to spotting and valuing talent that I had somehow managed to overlook. Over the years, some of the best examples were Adam Sandler, Rita Rudner, Arsenio Hall, and Sandra Bernhard, although there are many more.

  People even started saying, “If Budd Friedman can meet a woman like that at the Improv, it must be the place to go.”

  ROSS MARK, radio executive, former comedy producer, and Budd’s stepson:

  It was a fascinating transformation to watch. Before Budd met my mom, he used to wear these hideous-looking vests and he had a goatee. He was also driving around in a Porsche with personalized license plates, but he had no style, which drove my mother crazy. She quickly took care of that.

  BILL MAHER:

  I’m not sure if I knew Budd and Alix at all at this point, but I remember sitting behind them once in the audience at David Letterman’s old morning talk show in New York and they were like a couple of teenagers. They couldn’t take their hands off of each other.

  JAY LENO:

  Everybody liked Alix and they still do. Budd suddenly became much calmer and it was as if everything didn’t take on the weight of the world as it once had.

  EDDIE BERKE:

  I’ll just give you an idea of what Budd was like before he met Alix. For Christmas one year, a female comedian I won’t name gave him a framed picture of herself holding a bunch of kittens. On the inscription, she wrote: “Dear Budd, this is as close to my pussy as you will ever get.”

  Deservedly or not, that was his reputation, but when Alix came along, that was it. He was a changed man. It was like he had found his soul mate.

  I also loved that Alix had no real connection to the comedy business, although one night after seeing Robin Williams perform at the club not long after we met, she casually remarked that she might want to try doing stand-up because he made it seem so easy.

  Of course, it wasn’t, but Robin always had that effect on people. At first I couldn’t tell if Alix was pulling my leg or not. But after seeing Robin perform several more times with completely different material each time, she did an about-face. She also quickly got a crash course when it came to the eccentric ways of comedians.

  Most memorably was the time we had dinner at the Palm steakhouse in Beverly Hills with Professor Irwin Corey, the wild-haired, gibberish-talking monologist who recently died at the age of 102. Billed as the “World’s Foremost Authority,” Irwin had been a popular nightclub fixture since the 1940s and used to perform at the New York Improv, which is how I knew him.

  On this particular night Alix and I were with him, it was during the Jewish holidays and he was in Los Angeles alone, so we invited him to join us for dinner. As it was, Irwin was a slovenly dresser who could have easily been mistaken for a homeless person. To Alix’s dismay, when we got to the restaurant, he proceeded to chew with his mouth open throughout the entire meal and he used the tablecloth for a napkin. Not only that, but while we were eating, he informed the waiter he was cold. Then he asked the waiter to bring him another tablecloth, which he did, and Irwin wrapped it around himself like a blanket. It was vintage Irwin and I would have given anything to have had a camera with me that night to capture the look on Alix’s face.

  After a yearlong courtship, Alix and I tied the knot on May 14, 1981. Though it was the second marriage for both of us, I spared no expense. Among the guests were Milton Berle, Harvey Korman, and Richard Lewis. Following a traditional Jewish ceremony and a lavish reception on the rooftop of a luxury condominium in West Hollywood that a friend of mine owned, we took a five-week cruise around Europe on the Queen Mary. When we returned to Los Angeles in mid-June, we discovered an unexpected wedding gift that would change our lives forever.

  PART FOUR

  THIRTY-FOUR

  An Evening at the Improv

  My marriage to Alix was a fresh start for me, one made all the more blissful after returning from our honeymoon and receiving the news that there was interest in developing a syndicated weekly television series that would be called An Evening at the Improv, which soon began filming on Melrose Avenue and eventually at our club in Santa Monica, which opened in 1987.

  Of course, comedians had been a popular staple on television well before I entered the picture, all the way back to its earliest days with Arthur Godfrey, Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen, and Jack Paar. And the still-embryonic concept of pre-taped stand-up comedy specials, like Richard Pyror: Live & Smokin’, which was filmed at the New York club in 1971, and On Location: Freddie Prinze and Friends, which had been HBO’s first-ever stand-up show filmed on Melrose Avenue beginning in 1976, had also given us a major shot in the arm.

  However, a regular weekly show devoted entirely to stand-up hadn’t been done before, nor had anyone ever come up with the financing, despite the fact that I’d long been intrigued by t
he idea and had had a number of suitors. But the outcome had always been the same: no money, no show.

  This time the scenario was different, thanks to my longtime attorney Stan Handman introducing me to a former television commercial producer named Lawrence O’Daly, who already had a formidable track record hawking children’s toys like Duncan yo-yos and Silly Putty. An army veteran like me, he had also developed and promoted G.I. Joe action figures in the 1960s.

  BARBARA O’DALY, co-producer of An Evening at the Improv and Lawrence O’Daly’s widow:

  Larry was very ambitious and he was an idea guy who’d moved over to the TV syndication side from advertising where he’d had some success. I forget how they first met, but Budd’s attorney Stan Handman, who had a fairly large stable of celebrity clients, said, “I’d like you to meet Budd because we’ve been kicking around the idea of trying to tie the Improv in with some sort of television show.” That was how that happened. I loved the idea, and when Larry told me about it, I told him that I knew Budd in passing from when I used to go to the New York club in the late sixties and early seventies.

  I vaguely remember meeting Barbara back then, but when Stan told me about Larry’s pedigree, it certainly got my attention. I’ll say, though, that from my own jaded personal experience, I wasn’t particularly keen on people who came out of advertising, whom I often compared to snake-oil salesmen.