I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era
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1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page iii I’M
DYING
UP HERE
H E A R T B R E A K A N D
H I G H T I M E S I N
S TA N D - U P C O M E D Y ’ S
G O L D E N E R A
W I L L I A M K N O E D E L S E D E R
New York
1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page iv Copyright © 2009 by William Knoedelseder
Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™, a member of the Perseus Books Group.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, Suite 1321, New York, NY 10107.
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Designed by Trish Wilkinson
Text set in 12-point Goudy
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Knoedelseder, William, 1947–
I’m dying up here : heartbreak and high times in stand-up comedy’s golden era / William Knoedelseder.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-58648-317-3 (alk. paper)
1. Stand-up comedy—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.
PN1969.C65.K56 2009
792.7'60973—dc22
2009013751
First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page v Dedicated to the memory of
Irv Letofsky and Howard Brandy,
and to the girl of my dreams.
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1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page vii Contents
Acknowledgments
ix
Prologue: A True Comic
1
Blood Brothers
9
The Hippest Room
19
Mitzi’s Store
31
Tom, Dave, and George
45
All About Budd
59
Six Minutes, Twenty-two Laughs
65
The Boys’ Club
71
Guns, Drugs, and Westwood
81
Comedy University
87
Richard’s Baroness, Steve’s Movie
93
The Funniest Year Ever
101
Roommates
111
vii
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Contents
The New Year’s Resolution
117
Drugs and Theft
125
Order, Please
135
Diary of a Young Comic
141
The Gauntlet
147
Comedians for Compensation
153
Choosing Up Sides
165
Fire!
175
The Vote
181
All on the Line
189
Dave’s Big Night
203
The Union Forever?
211
Jay’s Big Flop
223
“My Name Is Steve Lubetkin”
231
A Standing Ovation
245
Epilogue: The Prisoner of Memory
253
Index
269
1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page ix Acknowledgments
I started doing the research for this book thirty-one years ago, when my editor at the Los Angeles Times, Irv Letofsky, called me into his office and said there was something happening on the local comedy club scene that had the feel of Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. He thought stand-up comedy was about to explode nationally in the hands of a new crop of young performers working at the Comedy Store and the Improvisation. He thought the Times should establish a comedy beat. Was I interested?
For the next two years, I had stage-side seats at the best show in show business. I was at the Comedy Store the week that Robin Williams first erupted on to the LA scene, and I spent a quiet afternoon at the beach with him in his final hours of obscurity before Mork & Mindy hit the air. I sat slack jawed one evening as Andy Kaufman performed his entire stage act, complete with three costume changes, for an audience of two on the patio of my house and then wanted to wrestle my eight-months-pregnant wife. I spent a surreal night on the town with Kaufman’s alter ego, Tony Clifton, and was present on the set the day Clifton was fired from his guest-starring role in Taxi and then wrestled off the Paramount Studios lot by security guards. I met and wrote about ix
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Acknowledgments
Jay Leno, David Letterman, and Richard Lewis before the world knew who they were. I watched the funniest people of my generation get up on stage alone and try and fail and triumph. And I laughed my ass off.
I am grateful for the help and inspiration provided by the following people: Jimmy Aleck, Dottie Archibald, Alison Arngrim, Jo Anne Astrow, Mike Binder, Steve Bluestein, Elayne Boosler, the late Bernie Brillstein, Ken Browning, Johnny Dark, Lue Deck, Tom DeLisle, the late Estelle Endler, Ellen Farley, Budd Friedman, Gallagher, Argus Hamilton, Charlie Hill, Jeff Jampol, Bill Kirchen bauer, Jay Leno, Mark Lonow, Barry and Ginny Lubetkin, Jamie Masada, Dennis McDougal, Barbara McGraw, John Mettler, the late George Miller, Judy Orbach, Susan (Evans) Richmond, Phil Alden Robinson, Brad Sanders, Ross Schafer, George Shapiro, Mitzi Shore, Wil Shriner, the late John Stewart, Susan Sweetzer, Bennett Tramer, Marsha Warfield, Ellis Weiner, Dr.
Robert Winter, Ann Woody, Bob Zmuda, Brian Ann Zoccola, and Alan Zwiebel.
I would like to offer special thanks to the following:
• Tom Dreesen for his generosity and many, many hours of time
• my friend and brother Richard Lewis for that and so much more beyond this book
• my dear friend and agent for life, Alice Martell, for always believing
• all the people at PublicAffairs, especially founder and editor at large, Peter Osnos, and my very cool editor, Lisa Kaufman, for their saintlike patience
• Dayan Ballweg, for his encouragement and great title
• and most of all my family—Bryn, Matt, Colin, and Halle—for their unquestioning love and support as I struggled to figure things out and find my way back to where I always should have been.
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Prologue:
A True Comic
They slipped into the nightclub quietly, one by one, stepping carefully at first as their eyes adjusted from the bright afternoon light outside: a soft parade of mostly middle-aged comics come to pay their respects to a fallen comrade.
> George Miller had died the week before from complications due to a blood clot in his brain. He was sixty-one and had battled leukemia for seven years. An obit in the Los Angeles Times summed up his career with the headline “Stand-up Comedian Was Often on ‘Letterman.’”
In fact, Miller had appeared as David Letterman’s guest fifty-six times over two decades. That may not sound like a lot to a lay -
person, but professional comedians considered it a feat of Barry Bondsian proportion. No other comic could boast such a record.
Miller also had logged thirty-two appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. It hadn’t made him rich or particularly famous, but it had kept him working longer than many of his comedy peers—performing in small clubs around the country, occasionally opening in Las Vegas for middle-of-the-road music acts, making a living by making people laugh. Miller had stood alone in 1
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front of a crowd and cracked wise most every night for more than thirty years. That’s not an easy thing to do.
So, on Sunday, March 16, 2003, his friends turned out to honor him at the Laugh Factory on Sunset Strip, where Miller had appeared regularly in recent years. Their names and faces ranged from vaguely familiar to instantly recognizable. Among them were Richard Lewis, the perpetually angst-ridden comic who appears regularly on Curb Your Enthusiasm; Tom Dreesen, a veteran of sixty-one Tonight Show appearances and Frank Sinatra’s longtime opening act; Mike Binder, the comic turned filmmaker who created, wrote, directed, and starred in the HBO series The Mind of the Married Man; Elayne Boosler, the comedienne credited by her colleagues with breaking down the gender barriers for her generation of female stand-up comics; the ubiquitous Jay Leno, arguably the most successful stand-up of their generation; and Mort Sahl, an elder hero to every performer in the room and, as Master of Ceremonies Dreesen noted, “the only comic George ever paid to see.”
Letterman was a notable no-show. He was hospitalized in New York with a case of shingles, and all present took his absence as a sign of just how sick he really was. Dave and George had been best friends since 1977, when they both lived in the same apartment building across the street from the Comedy Store, just a few blocks down the street. Dave had paid for all of George’s medical expenses during the last few years of his life and had even picked up the cost of a two-bedroom apartment and a twenty-four-hour on-call nurse. When it appeared that George was dying in 2000, Dave got him admitted to an experimental leukemia treatment program at UCLA by donating nearly $1 million to the medical center. The treatment involved a new “miracle” drug called Gleevec that stabilized George’s white blood cell count and saved his life, at least for a time.
In a way, it was probably a good thing that Letterman didn’t make it to the memorial, given that Leno did. The tension of 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 3
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having them both in the same room might have proved a major distraction. Once good friends, they’d had a famous falling out in 1991, when NBC chose Leno over Letterman to succeed Johnny Carson as host of The Tonight Show, and time had not healed the wound. Neither man ever talked publicly about the rift, but their mutual friends in the room knew both sides by heart: Leno expressed bewilderment that Letterman blamed him for the fact that NBC offered him the gig after deciding—for whatever reasons—that Dave wasn’t right for it. That’s the way the showbiz cookie crumbled, he figured; it was all in the game.
What was he supposed to do, turn down the opportunity of a lifetime?
The way Letterman saw it: yes. Dave thought their sixteen-year friendship should have precluded Jay from lobbying for, and making a secret deal to take over, the show that he himself had always dreamed of inheriting. As much as Dave coveted the job, he couldn’t imagine going behind Leno’s back to get it. He didn’t know if he would ever be able to trust Jay again.
These were treacherous waters for their fellow comics to navi-gate. The Tonight Show Starring Jay Leno and The Late Show with David Letterman were the twin peaks of the stand-up comedy business—the best TV exposure a comic could get. So, no one wanted to appear to take sides in the Dave-Jay thing for fear of losing both a friend and a potential buyer. Truth be told, given the opportunity, most—if not all—of them would have done what Leno did, but they probably would have felt worse about doing it. Nobody blamed Jay, but everybody understood why Dave felt betrayed. Letterman was nothing if not loyal to his old friends (the joke among them was that he hadn’t made a new one since 1979). In addition to Miller, he regularly brought on longtime pals Tom Dreesen, Richard Lewis, Johnny Dark, and Johnny Witherspoon. And it was, ironically, Letterman’s frequent booking of Leno on NBC’s Late Night all during the 1980s that had 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 4
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helped propel Leno to the top rank of stand-up comedy and ultimately put him first in line for Carson’s crown.
In contrast, Leno rarely featured stand-up comics on The Tonight Show, explaining to his old friends that the network didn’t think they drew viewers, that the research showed people even tuned out when comics came on. The comics didn’t buy it.
They thought that, as host, Leno should buck the network brass and book anyone he thought was funny, just like Carson had before him. Fair or not, the knock on Jay was that he wouldn’t go out of his way to help a fellow comic.
And yet, here he was, one of the busiest men in show business, spending a Sunday afternoon at the Laugh Factory, mixing easily with the old gang and reminiscing with obvious affection about a guy he hadn’t hung out with in twenty-five years.
“George and I had nothing in common,” Leno said. “Not one thing. Cars? [Leno collects them; George drove his mother’s bat-tered Chrysler LeBaron with cracked Corinthian leather seats and a peeling vinyl top.] Drugs? [Leno never did them; Miller never stopped.] But George always made me laugh,” he said. “He was a true comic—not a sitcom actor or an improv performer. He was a classic stand-up; it was what he was meant to do.”
He noted that their relationship had been conducted mostly by phone in recent years, with George calling frequently to cri-tique his Tonight Show monologues or to apologize cheekily “for not being able to get me on the Letterman show. He suggested I send a tape.”
One by one, Miller’s old pals followed Leno to the microphone to share their favorite George joke or anecdote. The famously garrulous Dreesen explained why he was chosen to emcee by telling Miller’s favorite joke about him: “The cops stopped Tom Dreesen the other night and asked him, ‘You wanna talk here or down at the station?’ Dreesen said, ‘Both, and in the car, too.’”
Native American comic Charlie Hill launched into a call-and-response with some of Miller’s best-remembered bits.
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“Why are so many people drinking diet cola? ” he shouted.
“Because they are fat and thirsty,” the crowd hollered back .
“A cow on speed . . . (rapid fire) Moo-moo-moo-moo-moo.”
“How much does [comic] Paul Mooney weigh? . . . 200 pounds; 180 without cologne.”
“Last night I was watching an Elvis Presley movie on diet pills and Xanax . . . because that’s the way Elvis would have wanted it.”
“I went to see the movie Accidental Tourist and something horrible happened in the middle. . . . It continued.”
The dialogue quickly devolved into a kind of shorthand that only they understood, as people in the audience began calling out their own favorite lines to uproarious reaction:
“Then the head waiter came over . . . ” (guffaws, whooping).
“I’m chewin’ and he’s lookin’, and I’m chewin’ and he’s lookin’
. . . ” (hands slapping on tables, tear
s of laughter).
“Yesterday I was sitting at Denny’s having a waffle . . . ” (falling out of their chairs).
And finally, some one shouted out, “one hundred eighteen,”
which they all apparently considered the funniest number in the universe.
The “George stories” were more accessible to an outsider. Ross Schafer told of the time one of Miller’s girlfriends broke up with him. “So, George took this picture of Jesus she had on her wall and wrote on it, ‘Rot in hell,’ and put it on the windshield of her car. The woman called the cops, who showed up at George’s apartment and told him that the woman feared he was making a threat because it was a picture of Jesus. ‘Oh, gee,’ said George. ‘I thought it was Dan Fogelberg.’”
Johnny Dark recalled the time that Miller got into an argument with the manager of his neighborhood Starbucks and was told to get out and never come back. “Oh, my God,” George had wailed. “Where am I ever going to find another Starbucks? ”
Elayne Boosler remembered a middle-of-the night phone call the week she moved to Los Angeles in 1976:
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“A voice says, ‘Hi, it’s George Miller. You met me last night at the Comedy Store. You’ve gotta come out to the corner of Sunset and Sweetzer and give me some money so I can buy some drugs.’
“I didn’t even have a checking account in those days,” Boosler went on, “and I had $75 in cash to my name. But for some reason I got in my car and drove there, and he was standing by the curb.
I rolled down my window, he reached in and took the money, and I drove away. Years later his punch line to me was, ‘You handed me $75 when you didn’t even know who I was . . . so I consider you an enabler and the reason that I have a drug problem today.’”
Miller’s drug consumption was conspicuous even among this drug-experienced crowd. Quaaludes were his favorite in the early days; he preferred prescription Soma in later years. It was the dope as much as the leukemia that killed him because he’d get so high that he’d forget to take his life-preserving medicine. Dreesen, Letterman, Gary Muledeer, and Laugh Factory owner Jamie Masada had tried to stage an intervention with him in the months before he died—to no avail. Letterman flew to Los Angeles to be there, but when Miller saw them all together, he said, “Oh, this is that intervention shit, isn’t it? We’ll I’m not going for it.”