I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era

by William Knoedelseder

  “George, you have to get straight,” Letterman told him. “You have to get well or else.”

  “What does that mean? ” Miller shot back nastily. “That you’re not going to put me on your show anymore? ”

  For Letterman it was like a sucker punch to the gut. He left hurt and angry, and he and Miller didn’t talk to each other for weeks afterwards—the only time in their long friendship that had ever happened.

  Naturally, none of this was mentioned at the memorial, where one of the biggest laughs of the night was prompted by Kelly Montieth’s drug-referenced quip, “George probably doesn’t know he’s dead yet.”

  When it seemed for a second that Dreesen was steering dangerously close to sentimentality, saying, “I’m going to miss George’s 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 7

  I’m Dying Up Here

  7

  criticism of me,” Elayne Boosler pulled him back from the brink by calling out, “I’ll fill in for him,” to which someone in the back of the room added, “And when she dies. . . . ”

  The exchange kicked off a volley of high-spirited heckling, with insults and put-downs caroming around the room—“Yeah? It won’t be the first time you’ve used my material”—all goosed along gleefully by a beaming Leno, dressed as of old in well-worn jeans and a rumpled denim shirt and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Mike Binder, with whom he’d had a painful parting of the ways more than two decades before.

  In that moment, they all seemed transformed. The years fell away. Suddenly, it was the mid-1970s. They were twenty-something, bubbling with ambition and bursting with dreams. No one was rich; no one was famous. No one had been to rehab; no one had died.

  Dave and Jay were still pals. They were all having the time of their lives. And no one had any inkling of what was about to happen.

  “This page left intentionally blank. ”

  1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 9

  Blood Brothers

  Richard Lewis was scared. On a cool April evening in 1971, he was on the way from his apartment in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, to midtown Manhattan, driving through the Lincoln Tunnel in his silver Chevy Vega, a car with more electrical problems than he had neuroses. No mechanic could figure out what was wrong with the car. Typically, the tape deck would begin to slow down, causing the high-pitched vocals of Procol Harum to drop to the deepest of bass, and then the headlights would dim, alert-ing him to the fact that he was a mile or so from hell, when the engine would die. Which could be a big problem in the tunnel.

  But that’s not what he was afraid of. Earlier in the day, Lewis, a twenty-four-year-old Ohio State graduate with a degree in marketing, had finally decided what he wanted to be in life, what he had to be: a stand-up comic. And that scared the shit out of him.

  Lewis had been funny as far back as he could remember, the class clown from kindergarten on. He fell in love with laughter at the age of five and gobbled up whatever comedy early television had to offer— The Colgate Comedy Hour with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Texaco Star Theater with Milton Berle, Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar, The Ed Wynn Show. By age nine, he had 9

  1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 10

  10

  William Knoedelseder

  memorized the TV Guide schedule and was a discerning enough consumer of comedy to prefer Steve Allen to Ed Sullivan on Sunday night. He tried not to miss Oscar Levant’s weekday afternoon show and stayed up late to catch Alexander King and Shelley Berman on Jack Paar.

  Humor provided solace from the sense of isolation he felt growing up as the baby of his family with a considerably older brother and sister who consequently paid little attention to him. His father, William Lewis, known in northern New Jersey as “the King of Caterers,” was devoted to his business and was seldom home. His mother was lonely and often depressed. The only time “Richie” felt connected to his parents was on the rare occasions when he would lie between them in their bed watching The Honey mooners. But the feeling lasted only as long as the show. So, he sought comfort in the company of comedians he found first on television and later on record albums: Jonathan Winters, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, and Carl Reiner. He came to think of himself as a rebel, laughing at authority, like Holden Caulfield.

  He experienced an epiphany one day at Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood, New Jersey. During an assembly in the school gymnasium, he was mocking the people on stage under his breath and cracking up everyone around him when the principal suddenly stepped to the microphone and halted the proceedings.

  He directed the students to file out of the gym homeroom by homeroom until only Lewis’s homeroom remained. Then he ordered the class to file out row by row until, out of the original nine hundred kids, only Lewis was left in the gym, whereupon the principal looked down at him and said, “Richard Lewis, you are the troublemaker of this school.”

  Most teenagers would have been mortified, terrified, undone by such a singling out. But Lewis appreciated the absurdity. His first thought was, “Hey, I might be able to make a living at this.”

  At first his plan was just to write comedy. In college he started jotting down funny premises and jokes in a notebook that he car-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 11

  I’m Dying Up Here

  11

  ried everywhere he went. He fantasized about transitioning directly from student life to that of a staff writer for a TV star like Sid Caesar, which was how Woody Allen had gotten his start.

  When that didn’t happen upon graduation, he hung around Columbus, Ohio, for nearly a year, doing odd jobs, afraid to return home to New Jersey and face his father’s inevitable questions about finding “a real job.”

  What finally moved him out of Ohio was the news that one of his comic heroes, Robert Klein, was going to host a summer

  “replacement” show on network TV. A friend tracked down the address of Klein’s manager, Buddy Morra, who was with the prestigious firm of (Jack) Rollins and (Charles) Joffe, which also managed Woody Allen and Dick Cavett. Lewis mailed off a pack age of material he wrote specifically for Klein and followed up a week later with a phone call to Morra, who’d been impressed enough with what he read to pass it on to Klein. Morra told Lewis to call him the next time he was in the New York area, and he’d arrange a meeting with the comedian. Lewis couldn’t get back to New York quickly enough.

  The meeting proved to be life changing, but not in the way Lewis had expected. “I read your stuff, and it’s really good,” Klein told him. “But I got into stand-up to express myself, so I only do my own stuff on stage. I don’t get off doing other people’s premises.”

  Lewis was disappointed but also buoyed by the praise and the fact that Morra had promised to hook him up with some older comics who were always looking to buy good stand-up material.

  The best known of them was Morty Gunty, a big star in the Cats -

  kills who’d appeared numerous times on TV. Over the next few months, Lewis earned a few hundred dollars writing jokes for Gunty and the others, but he was frustrated that they invariably turned down what he thought was his best stuff, the most personal material that expressed how he felt about the world around him.

  The obvious solution was to perform the material himself. But he couldn’t even think about that because of the conversation it 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 12

  12

  William Knoedelseder

  would require with his father, whose approval he craved. What was he going to say? “Hey, Dad, I’ve decided to chuck the college education that you worked so hard to pay for in favor of becoming a stand-up comic?” Writing comedy was one thing—that was being a “humorist.” Performing comedy was something else entirely—

  that was show business, and they were not a show business family.

  He couldn’t imagine his father saying, “My son, the comedian,”

  with any pride. As a result,
he was uncomfortable with the idea himself and felt guilty even considering it.

  But all that ended on April 12, 1971, when William Lewis died of a heart attack (his fourth) at age fifty-seven. After the first wave of shock and grief, Richard realized that he was finally off the hook. He didn’t have to face the conversation that he so feared. His father’s death had freed him to find his own comic voice. Two weeks later, as he emerged safely from the Lincoln Tunnel in his haunted Vega, he said to himself, I’m writing jokes for Richard Lewis now. . . . But how am I ever going to get up on that stage? He headed uptown toward the only place he knew that might hold the answer to that question.

  The Improvisation, at the corner of Forty-fourth Street and Ninth Avenue, was the comedy center of the universe. Established in 1963 by a former ad man named Budd Friedman, it was the only nightclub of its kind, a casual, chaotic cabaret where comedians and singers alternated sets and on any given night you might catch David Brenner and Jimmie Walker working out new material for The Tonight Show, Robert Klein blowing blues runs on his harmonica, Bette Midler doing some impromptu warbling in the bar accompanied by Dustin Hoffman on the piano, David Frye climbing out of a limousine in front with a drink in his hand, or Woody Allen arriving in a raincoat and fedora and dramatically instructing the doorman to “whisk me to my table.”

  It was 8:30 p.m. on a Monday when Richard Lewis first walked into the Improv. Monday was “open-mike night,” when anyone with the will or compulsion to do so could get up onstage and 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 13

  I’m Dying Up Here

  13

  perform five minutes of material in the wild hope of impressing Friedman and being asked back to perform as a regular in the Tuesday-through-Sunday rotation. Lewis had no intention of getting up on stage, however. He was there purely for research purposes. For all his love and knowledge of stand-up comedy, he had never seen it performed live.

  The first comic he saw was a handsome, shaggy-haired Jewish kid about his age whose name he didn’t catch but who was everything he wanted to be as a performer—cool, hip, confident, sexy.

  He particularly liked the way the guy handled a heckler: “So, you come here to work out your heckles in a small club, right? Thinking that pretty soon you’ll get really good at it and maybe some-day you’ll be in Vegas heckling the biggies? ”

  Between shows an hour later, Lewis saw the comic sitting alone in the back of the room, nursing a beer and looking morose. “Jeez, you were really great,” he said sincerely.

  The guy’s eyes lit up. “You’re kiddin’ me,” he said. “I thought it didn’t go so well.”

  “Naw, man, you were the best, hands down,” Lewis said. “I aspire to be that good.” They shook hands.

  “I’m Richard Lewis.”

  “Steve Lubetkin.”

  Both felt an immediate connection. Lewis confessed that he was thinking about becoming a comic but had no idea how to go about it. Lubetkin said he knew a lot. “I’d be happy to show you the ropes,”

  he said. They wrote their phone numbers on cocktail napkins.

  In the ensuing weeks, Lubetkin proved even better than his word, guiding Lewis on a tour of every bar, restaurant, disco, or strip club that allowed self-proclaimed comedians to entertain, or irritate, its customers. The itinerary included such oddball venues as Dan Lurie’s Gym & Health Spa on Long Island and Gil Hodges’s Grand Slam Lounge in Brooklyn, which abutted a bowl-ing alley so that punch lines often had to compete with the crash of falling pins.

  1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 14

  14

  William Knoedelseder

  Lewis especially loved the Greenwich Village clubs that Lubetkin introduced him to—Café Wha, the Village Gate, Gerdes’s Folk City—where Warholian hipness permeated the walls and the smell of grass and sound of Dylan still wafted in the air.

  The Village was Lubetkin’s turf; he was born and raised there.

  His father, Jack Lubetkin, owned Ye Olde Treasure Shoppe at 1

  West Eighth Street, right off Fifth Avenue. Opened in 1948, the year Steve was born, the Shoppe was one of the original Eighth Street establishments that catered to a beatnik clientele, selling antique furniture and jewelry and leather bags, belts, and sandals that Jack made by hand in the back. By the late 1960s, the Shoppe had become a Village institution, with customers often lined up outside waiting to get in.

  Growing up, Steve and his older brother, Barry, worked along-side their father, as did their mother, Evelyn. The brothers didn’t get paid, but they were allowed to take money from the till whenever they needed. Jack Lubetkin fostered a loose, irreverent atmosphere in the store, entertaining customers with his constant shtick. “Excuse me, madam,” he’d say to an indecisive browser,

  “but I have a rather weak heart, and I’ve been watching you looking around, and it’s upsetting me, and I don’t want to faint, so could you please leave? ” Then, he’d wait a few seconds before winking at the flummoxed woman to let her know he was just teasing. One of his favorite bits was playing off the family’s flatu-lent pet bulldog, Caesar. Every time Caesar farted with a customer nearby, Jack would rebuke one of the boys—“Steve, how many times have I told you about that?”—then they’d all break up.

  The family lived above the store, which was set back from the street in a quaint little arcade that looked as if it had been lifted straight out of colonial times. The boys’ bedroom overlooked the arcade. One block away, Washington Square Park served as their playground when they were little and their political classroom as they got older—a multiethnic, multiracial marketplace of free-thinking, loud talking, and public protesting.

  1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 15

  I’m Dying Up Here

  15

  Free expression was encouraged in the Lubetkin household.

  At their weekly “Sunday Breakfast Club,” the four would sit around the dining table and decide such family issues as whether to buy a pool table or a new car or what TV shows to watch. The two boys had an equal vote with their parents. The Lubetkins were culturally rather than religiously Jewish. Evelyn tried to keep a kosher kitchen, and both boys were bar mitzvahed, but if the family went to temple at all, it was only on Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. Jack Lubetkin was a conservative Republican who as a young man had battled the Nazi bunds in Yorkville (now New York’s Upper East Side) before World War II. He was forever thankful that his parents had emigrated from Russia in the late 1800s. A distant cousin, Ziviah Lubetkin, had been one of the leaders of the Warsaw rebellion and now lived in a Holo-caust survivors’ kibbutz in Israel. Leon Uris’s novel Mila 18 was dedicated to her. Steve often boasted about being related.

  All in all, it would have been a storybook childhood if it hadn’t been for Evelyn Lubetkin’s slow, agonizing death from ovarian cancer at the age of forty-four. Steve was twelve at the time and took it harder than anyone. Barry, who was seventeen and later went on to earn a PhD in psychology, always believed that the tragedy of their mother’s death had driven Steve to become a comedian, that his little brother figured if he could just learn to make other people laugh then he could laugh again himself.

  Steve Lubetkin and Richard Lewis made one another laugh a lot. They got each other’s sense of humor completely, no doubt because they had so much in common: a middle-class Jewish upbringing, a deceased parent, a degree in marketing, a part-time entry-level job in advertising, an intense interest in sports and girls, and, above all else, a love affair with stand-up comedy.

  In the first week of their friendship, Steve took Richard to a tiny West Village dive called the Champagne Gallery. “You’re gonna love this joint,” he said. “It’s as far off the beaten path as you can get.”

  1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 16

  16

  William Knoedelseder

  With its not-ready-for- The-Gong-Show lineup of wannabe comics and weirdos doing whacked out performance
art, the Cham pagne Gallery made the Improv seem like Vegas. “This is like a variety show at Christmas in a mental institution,” Lewis said.

  “That’s why it’s the perfect place for you to start doing standup,” Lubetkin responded. “It is safe here. There’s no pressure.”

  Lewis made his debut at the Champagne Gallery a week later, on a Sunday night, with Lubetkin and forty other people in the audience. In stand-up parlance, he killed. He felt it as it was happening, a high like he’d never experienced before. He’d finally done it; he’d gotten up on stage and made people laugh. He’d passed the test. He was a stand-up comic.

  From that night on, Lewis and Lubetkin were nearly inseparable. Using the Improv as their hub, they hopped from joint to joint, sometimes hitting four or five places in a single night, plying their trade, testing material, trying to develop their acts. They’d do sets at a club called the Metro in Forest Hills, hustle out to Pip’s in Sheepshead Bay, and eventually wind up back at the Improv with $20 apiece to show for their night’s work, enough for dinner and a couple of beers before they headed home for a few hours sleep followed by eight hours of day job.

  Steve continued to do open mike nights at the Improv and eventually graduated to occasional late-night spots during the week. But Richard held off trying for the Improv on the advice of David Brenner, who took a liking to him after meeting him in the bar and became something of a mentor. “Wait until you’ve put together twenty minutes of killer material,” Brenner told him. “Then call me, and I’ll tell you if you’re ready.”

  Lewis waited six months before he invited Brenner to see him at the Champagne Gallery. Lubetkin was in the audience as usual, and once again Lewis came off the stage feeling like he’d killed.

  Still, he needed to hear it from Brenner. The older comic greeted him with a serious face, placed his arm around his shoulders, and 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 17

  I’m Dying Up Here

  17

  walked him outside without saying a word. Then, he turned to him and broke into a smile. “You’re ready,” he said. It was the most joyous night of Lewis’s life.