I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era
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The break came not a moment too soon. Pat Hollis had come back off the road and told him he had to leave. Her boyfriend was very jealous and didn’t like the idea of her sharing her house with another man. So, Dreesen moved into an old Nash Rambler that was sitting up on blocks in the alley behind Hollis’s house. Fortunately, it had a fold-down front seat, so he could sleep. Thanks to his childhood training, he knew how to bathe in the restroom sink of a nearby gas station. And he survived on one meal a day at Ken-tucky Fried Chicken, where the “Corn and Cluck for Under a 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 47
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Buck” promotion offered two pieces of chicken, a small ear of corn, mashed potatoes, gravy, and coleslaw for ninety-nine cents.
His only break from the Colonel’s cuisine came the day he hitched over to Jay Leno’s house. Leno wasn’t home, but the pretty girl who opened the door invited him in anyway.
“You hungry? ” she asked. “Want something to eat? ”
“Yeah, sure,” he said.
She looked in the refrigerator. “How ’bout a steak? ”
Dreesen almost laughed out loud. Good old Jay, the Charlie Hustle of stand-up. In town only a matter of weeks and already he had a nice place to live, a good-looking girlfriend, and enough work to afford steak. The one the girl served Dreesen turned out to be the last one in Leno’s fridge, which made it taste even more delicious.
Mitzi Shore put Dreesen in the regular lineup—early and late spots, not prime time—and agreed to let him emcee occasionally.
After a few weeks, he decided it was time to return to Chicago and round up his family, so he hatched a plan to pay his way back home. Pretending to be the manager of a hot new stand-up comic named Tom Dreesen, he called the booking office of a new talk show in Edmonton, Canada, which was paying comics $300 per appearance and flying them round-trip first class. He told them that Dreesen had been on The Merv Griffin Show and The David Frost Show (he didn’t mention that he’d appeared as part of a team) and was now a rising star at the Comedy Store. They not only booked him but agreed to fly him home to Chicago rather than back to Los Angeles after his appearance. Once in Chicago, Dreesen talked the owner of Mr. Kelly’s nightclub into letting him open for Fats Domino for two weeks at a whopping $750 a week. He needed every cent of that money to convince his wife to pack up the kids and return with him to Los Angeles.
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San Fernando Valley for $225. Tom immediately applied for unemployment and food stamps and went to work at the Comedy Store, a state-funded stand-up comic.
A few months later, in May 1975, twenty-eight-year-old David Letterman and his wife, Michelle, left Indiana and drove to Los Angeles in tandem, he in his 1973 half-ton Chevy pickup, “Old Red,” and she in their 1972 Oldsmobile Cutlass. The pair had met and married when they were students at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, where he majored in radio and television. After college, David became a minor celebrity in his hometown of Indianapolis as the host of a 2:00 a.m. movie show and a substitute weekend weatherman on WLWI-TV. It was there that he pioneered the concept of irony in weathercasting, making up fictitious weather phenomena and spicing up the daily temperature readings with wry comments like, “Muncie, 42 . . .
Anderson, 44 . . . always a close game,”* which didn’t always go over well in rural central Indiana, where most folks liked their weather straight. He also used the station to incubate what would later become some of his trademark late-night bits—making fun of management and using staff members and passers-by (sometimes cruelly) as unwitting foils.
Unlike Dreesen and the others, Letterman wasn’t moving to Los Angeles hoping to make it big as a stand-up comic. Performing live was not his thing. He’d been required to make all manner of public appearances as part of his TV gig in Indianapolis, and he’d hated every minute of it. The prospect of an upcoming event would cause him to lose sleep for a week, so that he constantly questioned himself, If it were in me to do this, then wouldn’t it be easier?
*Caroline Lathan, The David Letterman Story: An Unauthorized Biography (London: Franklin Watts, 1987).
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Letterman’s ambition in going to Los Angeles was to land a job writing for television, preferably for Johnny Carson, his hero. He’d gleaned from watching The Tonight Show that performing at the Comedy Store was a good way to get Carson’s attention, so he saw the Comedy Store as a necessary evil. Two months earlier, he’d flown to LA on a reconnaissance mission. Even though it was a Tuesday night, the Sunset club was jam-packed. The first comic he saw perform was George Miller, who was doing a routine about working in a Hollywood mailroom where the workers rated the executives as stamps; one guy was known as a “five center,” another as “air mail.” The punch line was about the stupidest executive of all: “Imagine what it’s like to be known as ‘postage due.’” It was a really dumb joke, but the crowd laughed, and Letterman did, too, thinking to himself, Oh, hell, I can do this.
On his first Monday night in Los Angeles, he jumped right back into the fire, lining up with the other hopefuls waiting to audition for Mitzi Shore. His turn came just before midnight. As he stepped onto the stage, he was immediately unnerved by the white-hot intensity of the spotlight. It felt as if he were standing on a train track with a high-speed bullet train bearing down on him. The next five minutes seemed to take forever, and afterward, he was sure he’d bombed. But Shore apparently saw something she liked in his Midwestern manner. “That was nice,” she said. “You should come back.”
He didn’t realize that meant he had passed the test; he thought she was just being polite. He went home feeling relieved that he hadn’t blown it completely and clinging to the hope that someone from the club would call him soon about trying out again. In the meantime, he spent his time writing new material and hanging with the comics who gathered in clumps every night in the parking lot of the Sunset club. The first comic he introduced himself to was Dreesen because he seemed the most approachable.
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More than a week passed with no call from the Comedy Store.
When he felt comfortable enough around the other comics, he confided that he was concerned that he hadn’t heard anything.
He wasn’t going to, they told him, because that wasn’t how it worked. Based on what Mitzi had said to him, he was supposed to call in to the club during the day on Monday and inform them of his availability to work the following week. Then, if Mitzi really thought he was ready for the Original Room, someone would call him Tuesday afternoon with assigned time slots. If he didn’t get a call on Tuesday, then he should show up again for Monday night tryouts. That was Mitzi’s system.
Letterman likened it to trying out for the high school basketball team: If you didn’t make the cut, nobody told you directly.
Your name just didn’t appear on the list the coach posted on the bulletin board. He felt like such a freshman.
He phoned in his availability the next Monday and held his breath. Sure enough, he got a call back on Tuesday assigning him time slots for the week. They weren’t in prime time, but they were a start. The other comics quickly took notice of him because he wasn’t like anyone else. For starters, he didn’t tell jokes.
He used everyday experiences as the setup and then supplied his own punch line, like the dreaded call from the mechanic telling you there’s a lot more wrong with your car than you’d thought:
“Yeah, Dave, this is Earl down at the garage. . . . We were adjust-ing the dials on your radio . . . and the engine blew up. . . . Yeah, it killed one
of our guys.”
The other comics also noticed that Letterman didn’t sound like the rest of them. He didn’t have the staccato cadence and hard sell delivery that usually came with being a club comic. He sounded more like a broadcaster—smooth, controlled, conversational—in the style of Carson, Steve Allen, and Jack Paar. That, combined with his caustic wit and ability to turn the tables on hecklers, created a presence on stage that belied his limited experience and 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 51
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cued his fellow comics that a major talent had arrived. It also helped to offset his appearance: the Hoosier clothes and scraggily red beard that Jay Leno said made him look like “either Dinty Moore or Paul Bunyan’s son.”*
Johnny Dark thought Letterman was a “hayseed” when he first met him. They were standing in the hallway by the Comedy Store restroom waiting for Letterman to go on. Letterman introduced himself, called him “Mr. Dark,” and said how much he admired his act. Dark then watched as the scruffy newcomer took the stage and faced a crowd that had been tough all night. “They are going to eat this kid,” he thought.
Instead, Letterman took it right to them. “So what do you puds want to talk about tonight?” were the first words out of his mouth.
From opposite sides of the room, two men heckled him simultaneously. He fired back, “Are you two guys sharing a brain? ” The crowd roared. After that, he owned them. Johnny Dark was awed.
Given Letterman’s cocksure stage manner, other comics were surprised to discover that offstage he was shy and socially ill at ease. Fellow Midwesterner Tom Dreesen took an instant liking to him. They were both married, lived in the San Fernando Valley, and had their days free, so they quickly bonded over sports activity. Dreesen invited Letterman to play racquetball and join in pickup basketball games at the Van Nuys YMCA. When Dreesen put together a Comedy Store basketball team, the Bombers, he drafted Letterman as the power forward. Tim Reid, Jimmie Walker, and Johnny Witherspoon also played on the team, as did Paul Mooney’s twin sons, Daryl and Dwayne, who would only pass to one another, which meant that their teammates constantly had to steal the ball from them.
Dreesen worked hard to draw Letterman into his ever-widening social circle of comics. It wasn’t easy because Letterman was a
*Jay Leno with Bill Zehme, Leading with My Chin (New York: Harper-Collins, 1996).
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loner, almost to the point of being a recluse. He was comfortable hanging out with Dreesen one-on-one, shooting hoops, and having a sandwich, but he was uneasy in the kind of larger group situation that Dreesen was constantly engineering. But Dreesen pulled him along, counseling, “Always remember that your fellow comics will get you more work than any agent or manager ever will.” Their routine was to meet up at the Comedy Store before the show started, catch everyone’s set, and then, because the Store didn’t have a bar to hang out in, move to either Theo dore’s, an upscale coffeehouse on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, or Canter’s Deli in the Fairfax District, where they’d laugh and swap stories until 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. The group usually included Johnny Dark, George Miller, Jay Leno, Steve Bluestein, Johnny Witherspoon, Jimmie Walker, and whomever else Dreesen could round up. On weekends, they’d sometimes cross over the Hollywood Hills to a San Fernando Valley club called the Show Biz that was owned by Murray Langston, who later gained some fame by putting a paper bag over his head and performing as the Unknown Comic.
One of the waitresses at the club was a then unknown Debra Winger, a serious comedy groupie who had a crush on George Miller at the time. At the Show Biz, comics would perform impromptu, and when business was good, Langston would throw some money their way. Leo Gallagher was a Show Biz regular in the days before he ditched his first name and began using his
“sledge-o-matic” to splatter audiences with smashed fruits and vegetables.
It was a late-shift life guaranteed to wreak havoc with marriages, as Letterman soon learned. With Michelle working during the day as an assistant buyer for the May Company, the couple rarely saw one another. When the inevitable split came and Mi -
chelle returned to Indiana brokenhearted, Letterman was guilt-ridden and anguished. He soon moved into an apartment just down the hallway from George Miller, and the two quickly became fast friends.
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Miller was a true eccentric. Born George Dornberger (a “Nazi name,” in his opinion), he was the only child of a single mother, Helen (his father abandoned them when George was a baby), with whom he maintained a lifelong love-hate relationship.
Miller and his mom adored one another but fought constantly. He thought she was the funniest person he ever knew, and he frequently made merciless fun of her in his act, especially her penchant for worrying about his and everyone else’s well-being.
“George, it’s been raining, and you know what happens,” she once cautioned. “It gets cold, and then you have ice.” Another time, she supposedly lectured a teenager who was sitting on the bus with his arm hanging out the window, “Young man, that’s a very good way to lose an arm.” In George’s act, the teenager replied sarcasti-cally, “Why, thank you very much, ma’am. Could you suggest a few other ways?”
If there had been a contest for worst-dressed comic, Miller would have won walking away. As far as anyone could tell, he’d worn the same rumpled brown sport coat and baggy corduroy pants every day for years, and he apparently owned a closet full of hideous shirts. The only wardrobe upgrade he ever invested in was an occasional new pair of deck shoes. Miller spent money on two things: his phone bill, which was often huge because he spent hours each day talking to comedian friends all over the country, invariably asking, “Are you bombing, too?” and food, which was something of an obsession with him. He talked about food all the time, questioning people constantly about where they’d eaten last and what they’d had. He seemed to know the daily special at every chain restaurant in the country: “It’s pea soup Tuesday at Coco’s.” And he only ate one kind of cuisine—American home-style comfort food. His favorite bread was white, and he preferred to have a side of mashed potatoes and gravy with every meal. Basically, Miller ate what a teenager would eat in the 1950s.
Miller was an accomplished pool hustler and, despite his couch potato ways, not a bad shot on the basketball court, as 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 54
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Letterman learned one day when George suckered him into shooting free throws for money. Letterman was stunned to find himself suddenly down $100 that he could not afford.
“I don’t understand,” George said. “If you were so concerned about losing the money, then why did you bet? ”
Letterman looked at his doughy friend and replied, “Because it never occurred to me that I would lose to you. ”
Letterman found Miller’s myriad idiosyncrasies endlessly amus-ing. But what he liked most about George was his wry wit and superb joke-writing skills. Miller was a master of the one-line setup and quick punch line, a kind of joke haiku that always cut to the core but was never mean-spirited. He was an irascible character but still sweet natured. “George goes for the jugular,” Elayne Boosler liked to say, “but never with his teeth, only with his gums. He’ll gum you to death.”
For his part in the friendship, Miller seemed to like nothing more than to tweak Dave’s natural state of unease. One evening he was having sex with a girlfriend on his couch when Letterman walked into the apartment without knocking. Letterman was hor-ribly embarrassed, which Miller thought was a hoot. From then on, he made a point of always making love to the girl on the couch with the door unlocked in the hope that Letterman would walk in on them again. He got Dave one more time, but after that Dave always knocked
.
Letterman would downplay his relationship with Leno in later years, but he was drawn strongly to Jay in the early days. The initial attraction was professional rather than personal. He admired, even envied, Leno’s onstage craft. Letterman was never comfortable in the nightclub arena, always thought his performances were subpar, and constantly felt like an imposter in the company of real comics like Leno, Miller, and Dreesen. Leno, on the other hand, had confidence to burn and never seemed to sweat a blown line or a bad audience. Everything rolled off his back.
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Letterman loved Leno’s attitude and marveled at his ability to sell even a mediocre joke to a crowd. “Jay is absolutely the best at observational stuff,” he told the Los Angeles Times in one of his earliest press interviews. “He has an amazing ability to take everyday stuff to the stage and make it work nine times out of ten.”
Letterman observed about Leno’s act that he won over the audience by treating them as if they were a group of his hip friends.
They were all in it together, laughing at the absurdities of the world.
Leno was equally impressed with Letterman. He noted that Letterman was not one to work the room or prowl the stage, but he was a superb wordsmith who radiated smarts and constantly came up with some of the most original material he’d ever heard.
They quickly formed a mutual admiration society, watching and learning from one another. Night after night at the Comedy Store, when they weren’t onstage, they were standing together in the back, taking it all in, studying everything. Their fellow comics came to think of them almost as a team, connected by an amper-sand like Abbott & Costello or Martin & Lewis. The consensus in the comedy community was that Leno & Letterman (or vice versa) were destined for big things.
Proving Tom Dreesen’s dictum about comics getting each other work, Letterman landed his first paying job in Los Angeles working with Leno as a joke writer for Jimmie Walker. They were each paid $100 a week and expected to come up with fifteen acceptable jokes. Their employer was actually Walker’s company, shamelessly named Ebony Genius Management, which was run by Walker’s managers, Helen Gorman and Jerry Kushnick, who eventually married. They quickly signed Leno and Letterman to talent contracts but saw Letterman primarily as a writer, not a performer.