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

by William Knoedelseder

  (Leno remained with Helen Kushnick until 1991, when her er-ratic behavior threatened to cost him his job as host of The Tonight Show. He reluctantly fired her at NBC’s insistence.) 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 56

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  Letterman’s next break came courtesy of Tom Dreesen. A TV

  producer named Ron Greenberg recruited Dreesen to round up some young comics to help in auditioning potential hosts for the pilot of a new TV game show called Throw Me a Line. The comics would act as stand-ins for a Hollywood Squares– type panel of celebrity guests that was to include Zsa Zsa Gabor, Jack Cassidy, and Jan Murray. Their job was to throw funny lines back at the auditioning hosts, who included such daytime TV veterans as Jim Lange of Dating Game fame and Lloyd Thaxton. For the first half-hour run-through, the comics included Dreesen, Letterman, Leno, Johnny Dark, and Elayne Boosler, who had just moved to town.

  They were paid $6 each, and all of them performed well except Letterman, who was so flat that Greenberg told Dreesen he didn’t want him back for the second session the next day. “This guy doesn’t get it. Find somebody else,” he said.

  But Dreesen dug in for his friend. “No, no, I promise you he does get it, and he is very quick. He was just off today. He’ll be great tomorrow, I guarantee it.”

  Outside the studio Dreesen found Letterman leaning against a parking meter, looking dejected. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was awful.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Dreesen said. “Just knock ’em out tomorrow.”

  The next day Letterman tore the place up. The auditioning host was Lloyd Thaxton, who Dave addressed variously as Boyd and Floyd and even Hemorrhoid. When Thaxton read out one of the scripted questions, “Why would someone wear garlic around their neck,” Dave ad-libbed in a Hoosier accent, “Because it goes real good with a brown sport coat.” Letterman was so sharp that he raised everybody else’s game, and the session proved a riotous success (for everyone but Thaxton, who didn’t get the gig). Jan Murray and Jack Cassidy had stopped in to watch, and Murray said to Greenberg, “These kids are wonderful. What do you need us old farts for? You should shoot the show with them.”

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  In the end, the “kids” were paid $150 each and sent on their way. But Letterman had made an important impression. An NBC

  development executive named Madeline David sat in on the Thaxton session and came away convinced that the network should try to develop a TV show with him.

  In the meantime, Mitzi set him up with a gig at an IBM corporate retreat in Marina Del Rey. In an elaborate put-on dreamed up by some creative-services director, Letterman was hired to pretend he was a corporate goon brought in by the top brass to announce management layoffs. It was a task ideally suited to Letterman’s borderline-cruel sense of humor. Armed with some names and a little bit of biographical information, he was to stand on the stage and call out the employees who’d been selected by their bosses for a roasting. He spent a couple of days writing the material and twenty minutes delivering it. The pay was $100.

  Much more lucrative—but far more painful—was an engagement his managers, the Kushnicks, arranged at a club in Denver called the Turn of the Century. He opened for singer-actress Leslie Uggams, who was touring a musical variety show that featured three male dancers. The gig was two shows a night for ten nights, and his pay was $1,000. That was the good part. The bad started with the fact that he was expected to do a forty-five-minute set, and he only had twenty-five minutes of good material. On opening night, he got through the first set okay, but then the club owners announced to the crowd that they could all stick around for the second show. With no material in reserve, Letterman was forced to repeat his act verbatim to virtually the same audience that had sat through it an hour before. And so it went for ten excruciating nights. One night, he was trying desperately to fill minutes with some “So-where-you-from? ” banter when a patron in the back called out wearily, “He’s from Denver. I’m from Denver.

  We’re all from Denver. We’re in Denver.”

  He didn’t think it could get worse, but it did. On the Fourth of July, some clown celebrated by setting off fireworks at his table.

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  Things reached the level of Grand Guignol the day the club owner’s wife, a former dancer, had the dance floor refinished.

  When Uggams’s dancers hit the slick new surface that night, they all went flying, and the singer refused to go on, which meant that Letterman had to perform back-to-back identical sets to the same increasingly surly crowd. It was a humiliation on the scale of a public proctological exam, and he took the whole episode as further proof that he did not have the right stuff to be a stand-up.

  Guys like Tom and George and Jay could bull their way through stuff like that without breaking a sweat and laugh about it an hour later. Not him; he brooded.

  As part of his Denver deal, the club was supposed to provide him with limousine service. But after opening night, the owners cancelled the car, and from then on he walked to and from work, a mile and a half along the interstate highway between the hotel and the club, alone.

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  All About Budd

  On October 11, 1975, at 11:30 p.m. Easter Standard Time, Sat urday Night Live ( SNL) premiered on NBC. The soon-to-be-famous cast did not comprise stand-up comedians. The Not Ready for Prime Time Players—John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, Larraine Newman, Jane Curtin, and Garrett Morris—were all improvisational actors, a different breed of cat. But stand-up comics would be the first beneficiaries of the SNL phenomenon.

  The debut show featured guest host George Carlin, then at the height of his Class Clown fame, and introduced special guest Andy Kaufman to an astonished national TV audience. Kaufman’s appearances on three of the first four SNL shows established him as the hottest (and oddest) of the new crop of stand-up comics.

  SNL quickly became a cultural icon, ushering in a new era of sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, and laughter, a time when stand-up comics were treated like rock stars. But the fact that SNL was broadcast live from New York didn’t stem the tide of comic migration west.

  Funny kids from all across the country were pouring into Los Angeles and lining up to audition at the Comedy Store like immigrants being processed through Ellis Island. Their number would eventually swell to an estimated three hundred and include Robin 59

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  Williams from San Francisco; Howie Mandell from Toronto; Bob Saget from Philadelphia; Michael Keaton from Pittsburgh; Billy Crystal from Long Island; Skip Stephenson from Omaha; Arsenio Hall from Cleveland; Tim Thomerson from San Diego; Marsha Warfield, Jimmy Aleck, and Brad Sanders from Chicago; Johnny Witherspoon and Mike Binder from Detroit; Jeff Altman from Syracuse; Sandra Bernhard from Scottsdale; Argus Hamilton from Norman, Oklahoma; Gary Muledeer from Deadwood, South Dakota; and Kip Addotta from Rockford, Illinois.

  After watching his best comics pack up and leave one by one, Budd Friedman finally made his move. He leased a building on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood, just a mile from the Comedy Store. He wasn’t worried that the market might not support two comedy clubs. A new showcase club called Catch a Rising Star had opened in New York the previous year, and business at the Improv had not suffered. In fact, both clubs were booming, with the best comics playing both places nightly.

  News that there would be a West Coast Improv caused a ripple of excitement in the Los Angeles stand-up community. It meant more time slots, more opportunities for exposure to agents, managers, and TV executives. Jay Leno, Richard Lewis, and Michael Richards (who went on to fame as Cosmo Kramer on Seinfeld)
lent Friedman a hand in painting the inside of his new place, for which they were paid $3 an hour (their comedy services they would continue to provide for free). The first bartender Friedman hired was Les Moonves, who is now chairman and CEO of CBS.

  In many ways, Friedman was the antithesis of Mitzi Shore. A Korean War vet who’d been wounded in the famous Battle of Pork Chop Hill, he was barrel-chested and bombastic, resembling a TV

  version of a marine drill sergeant. He wore his considerable ego on his sleeve, or, more aptly, around his neck in the form of a monocle that appeared more affective than effective. In addition to giving himself top billing at his club—the logo above the door read “Budd Friedman’s The Improvisation”—he took the stage to introduce 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 61

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  every act, delivering his own mini performances that were sometimes funny and just as often rambling and overlong. Jay Leno once interrupted him by shouting from the back of the room,

  “That’s enough. This is boring.” A comic could say things like that to Budd and not worry about hurting his feelings. At least, a good comic could.

  Unlike Shore, who avoided the spotlight at her club, Friedman strode the Improv like the frustrated actor he was, mixing with patrons in the bar and dining room between trips to the stage to introduce the performers. On a typical night, the garrulous proprietor logged (some would say hogged) more stage time than any comic. He reveled in the spotlight. You’d never hear him say he was doing it all for the comics. The Improv was all about Budd; it said so right above the front door.

  Shore was not happy about Friedman’s expanding his franchise into her territory. She was in the middle of her own expansion, having just opened a second Comedy Store on Westwood Boulevard in West Los Angeles, not far from the UCLA campus. In terms of location, she held the high ground in West Hollywood, literally and figuratively. Sunset Strip was a brightly lit tourist destination with loads of foot traffic and carloads of young people cruising on the weekend, plenty of restaurants, and half a dozen hotels within a stone’s throw of her club, including the Continental Hyatt House right next door. The Improv was a mile down the hill from the Comedy Store, on a stretch of Melrose Avenue that was a comparative dark alley: You had to want to go there. Friedman apparently had a penchant for choosing less-than-hospitable locations. The Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood surrounding the New York Improv was, to paraphrase a Mike Preminger joke, “a great place to hang out, if you’re a bullet.”

  Despite her advantage, Shore still felt threatened by Friedman. She was accustomed to having a monopoly. So, in an attempt to kill Budd’s baby in its crib, she put out the word to her comics that they couldn’t work both clubs; they had to pick one 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 62

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  or the other. Always sure of himself, Jay Leno was the first to call her bluff, saying that if that was the case, then he’d just work at the Improv. Shore instantly caved. Leno was too big a draw, too good a performer, to bar from her stage. For those with similar star clout, it became a matter of preference. David Letterman and George Miller stayed exclusively with the Comedy Store, as did Jimmie Walker, even though he’d gotten his big break at the New York Improv and invested in the new one. (Friedman would never forgive him for not playing the LA club, calling him “the most ungrateful comic I’ve ever known.”) Freddie Prinze, Tom Dreesen, and Andy Kaufman worked both places at will.

  For less established comics, however, it was a dicey proposition to displease Mitzi Shore. So in an abundance of caution, most of them, including Steve Lubetkin, stayed with the Store, which offered many more time slots than the Improv in any case. Friedman didn’t respond in kind to Shore’s attempt to cut off his talent supply; he never punished a comic for working at the Comedy Store.

  But the seeds of enmity had been sown, initiating a bitter rivalry for the hearts and minds of a generation of stand-up comedians.

  Richard Lewis’s relocation to Los Angeles came courtesy of Sonny Bono. The singer and his ex-wife were hoping to recapture some lightning in a bottle by launching a new Sonny and Cher TV

  show on ABC, and Bono hired Lewis as a regular on the LA-based production.

  Lewis found an apartment on La Brea Avenue north of Sunset, a block from Hollywood High School. The second-floor one-bedroom cost $140 a month and came equipped with a nightly sound track of hookers and johns arguing about money on the street below.

  The TV gig turned out to be less than Lewis expected. He was cast not as a stand-up but rather as a member of a comedy/variety troupe. The show’s humor was broad and involved lots of singing and dancing. During the first week of rehearsals, he injured his knee doing kicks in a dance number. He was given a single line 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 63

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  on the first show and had to appear in a scene made up as a Greek statue—half-naked in a toga and spray-painted gray from head to toe. After the taping, he sat in the makeup room staring at himself in the mirror. “This is so humiliating,” he said aloud. “I just can’t do it. I quit.”

  Sonny Bono’s manager heard his comment and walked over and stood next to him. “You can’t be serious,” he said. “This is a network show. If you leave now, you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”

  Lewis contemplated their absurd reflection in the mirror for a few more seconds before bolting from the room. He went to his apartment and washed off the greasepaint, then hit the Improv, where he did an inspired set. An agent from the William Morris Agency was in the audience and called him the next morning.

  Within twenty-four hours of walking out on Sonny and Cher, he was signed to one of the biggest talent agencies in Hollywood.

  Steve Lubetkin’s personal life took a turn for the better on a spring day in 1976 when he walked into his neighborhood grocery store. As usual, he hadn’t had anything to eat that morning, so he headed straight for a card table set up at the end of an aisle where a young woman was handing out food samples. Her name was Susan Evans. A vibrant redhead with a master’s degree in speech interpretation, she was working with actor-director Victor French as a member of Company of Angels, an equity-waiver theater on Melrose Avenue, all of which apparently qualified her to dish out small cups of ice cream in a Hollywood supermarket.

  Lubetkin reacted to the hair, the ice cream, and the girl the way any young comic would—he started doing his routine, and within a few minutes, he had Susan Evans laughing so loudly that other shoppers started forming a circle around the two of them, and she feared she would be fired. Fortunately, it was time for her lunch break, and they were able to take their cute meeting outside to a little patch of grass under a browning palm tree. She was instantly attracted to him, with his long, dark hair, rakish moustache, and warm smile that seemed to draw her in. His personality 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 64

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  was positively vivid; she’d never met anyone like him or laughed so hard.

  He showed up at the same time the next day and over lunch invited her to dinner that night at his place. When she arrived at the address he gave her, she discovered that he really didn’t have a “place” but a room in someone else’s apartment. The only furniture in his room was a mattress on the floor. He had access to the kitchen, but he had no food in the fridge, no money to buy any, and no clue how to cook it if he did. So, she shopped for dinner and cooked it, too, an inauspicious first date, but she didn’t mind because he was so charming and appreciative, telling her that he’d had only a handful of home-cooked meals since his mother died when he was twelve. He talked to her about Mitzi Shore and Dante Shocko and his show business dreams.

  Over the next few weeks, they became inseparable. He took her to the Comedy Store, where she met Letterman and Leno, who were clearly the big men on that campus. He
introduced her to Mitzi, who didn’t seem at all like the warm, nurturing mother figure he’d described. After a couple of months, he moved in with her, arriving at her single-room apartment with a small, cheap suitcase stuffed with his clothes, a cardboard file box full of notes and jokes, and a cassette recorder. It was everything he owned.

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  Six Minutes,

  Twenty-two Laughs

  It took Tom Dreesen six months, but in October 1975, he finally convinced The Tonight Show’s Craig Tennis to come see him at the Comedy Store. Tennis arranged a so-called showcase audition for Dreesen and two other acts, a comedy team called Bauman & Estin and a new kid in town by the name of Billy Crystal. It was set for Tuesday night, the early show, when normally only about twenty people would be in the audience. Dreesen was a little worried because he knew that the bigger the crowd, the bigger the laughs, but when he pulled up to the club in his old VW, he saw at least 150 people milling around outside the club. “Fucking great,” he said as he drove up the ramp to the parking lot behind the Hyatt House. It got fucking greater when he reached the entrance and saw that the crowd included Norman Lear and Carl Reiner, two of the biggest names in television comedy. “Holy shit,” Dreesen said as he bounded inside, where a few audience members were already seated. He counted eighteen, including Tennis, as he paced nervously and waited for the rest to be let in.

  But before they had, Tennis told him it was time to go on.

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