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

by William Knoedelseder

The news that a group of comedians was picketing a nightclub on Sunset Strip didn’t exactly rock the country, but the story got good play locally, especially on television. The coverage was pre-dictably shallow, however, with most reports playing up the comedic aspects of the first night of picketing rather than the underlying issues. On day two of picketing, Elayne Boosler accosted a Los Angeles Times reporter on the sidewalk, poking him in the chest with her index finger as she complained about the newspaper’s article that morning. “This is not a joke, and you should be ashamed of yourself for treating it like it is,” she scolded. “These people are literally risking everything by being here. That’s what you should be writing about.”

  Boosler may have been risking more than any of them. She was already on the outs with Budd Friedman, and Johnny Carson wasn’t a fan of her act. So, her standing out in front of the Comedy Store talking trash about Mitzi Shore could be viewed as 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 197

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  either extreme courage or borderline insanity. And now she was busting the chops of the reporter who was covering the strike for the entertainment industry’s newspaper of record. For a moment it seemed as if the sound of the picketers was all but drowned out by the clanging of Boosler’s legendary brass balls.

  Steve Lubetkin was back on the picket line the second night, chanting with the zeal of the newly converted. Having spent the morning in a fruitless attempt to get Shore to listen to what had happened to his car, he decided he had nothing more to lose by throwing in wholeheartedly with the CFC. The CFC leaders were glad to hear it. In the aftermath of opening night, they were nervously eyeing the number of people on the all-comics list who had not yet signed up for picketing duties, as well as the number who had crossed the picket line. The CFC counted at least ten of the latter. They weren’t technically scabs, at least not yet, because they hadn’t crossed the picket line to perform, only to show support for Mitzi. In fact, Shore had placed calls to a group known around the club as “Mitzi’s boys” and insisted that they make an appearance at the club. In addition to Argus Hamilton, the “boys” included Harris Peet, Ollie Joe Prater, Biff Maynard, Mitch Walters, Dave Tyree, Mike Binder, Allan Stephans, and Lue Deck. They served Shore in various paid and unpaid capacities, ranging from doorman to handyman to, in the case of Prater, enforcer. Ollie was usually the one who let a comic know when he had worn out his welcome with Mitzi either for personal or professional reasons, telling him either that he should stop trying to talk to her, or maybe take a vacation from the Store for a few months, or, worst of all, go away and never return. Prater’s three hundred plus pounds proved helpful whenever they objected.

  In the view of their peers, only two of Mitzi’s boys—Hamilton and Binder—had acts good enough to qualify for prime-time spots.

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  pressing them to prevail upon others to cross the line. The more comics who crossed, the longer the strike would last, and the longer it lasted, the more likely the comics were to lose their collective nerve and vote to accept whatever crumbs Mitzi put on the table.

  For anyone who doubted Shore’s power, The Tonight Show on the second night of picketing offered a lesson in how it worked.

  Johnny’s first guest was Mitzi’s longtime friend Buddy Hackett, whose appearance had been engineered by Comedy Store publicist Estelle Endler. After some initial chitchat with Hackett, Carson turned to the audience and digressed: “You know, the young comedians out here work in a place called the Comedy Store and other places which are kind of a training ground. These places have trained most of the young comedians who start here; we get them from the Improv and the Comedy Store. And what’s kind of interesting is that they are on strike because they think they should get paid.” Turning back to Hackett, he then lobbed the prearranged question, “How do you feel about that? ”

  “Well, I think they’re bananas,” said Hackett. “It’s very simple: Years ago AGVA [the American Guild of Variety Artists, the traditional union for nightclub performers] came down on clubs that let neophyte comics go onstage and perform after the featured acts finished; they could get up and try stuff. But the union came down on it and said they had to get paid $75, and [the clubs] all went by the wayside. Richard Pryor came out of that system, and he’s now fighting for the young kids to get paid. But if he’d had to get paid in those days, then they might not have let him get up to find out if he should be paid. So, I think these nonpaying clubs are a necessary evil.

  “They say this woman is making an awful lot of money,” he continued with a straight face. “Now, I don’t know the woman, and I know all the kids are going to hate me for saying this, but I am like an old father giving some advice. There is a lot of money to be 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 199

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  made as a comedian, and once you learn your trade, you will never be without work; you will always work. There is always a place to work for a price. It might be a high price, or it might be a low price, but you will always earn a living once you learn your craft.”

  Turning from the audience back to Carson, he asked. “Were they going to chip in and pay for the woman’s investment if she went broke? ”

  Carson seemed uncomfortable during Hackett’s recitation of the Comedy Store talking points, making a clumsy attempt at a joke—“I could do a sketch about [the strike]. Can you see co -

  medians on the picket line with seltzer bottles? ”—and saying “I think you are making a good point; that’s some good advice,”

  while at the same time cautioning, “We don’t know the depth of the situation.”

  All in all, it was an awkward conversation that must have seemed like a confusing non sequitur to a national audience that knew little, if anything, about the strike. But it registered with its intended audience. By the next day, the Carson-Hackett exchange was topic one among the young comics of Los Angeles, and the consensus among them was that Johnny had come down against the strike. Dreesen was concerned that Carson’s stature among comics could help persuade some of the fence-sitters to jump to Mitzi’s side. He was also disheartened that Hackett didn’t seem to understand the plight of the young comics of the day. Hackett was right about the history of AGVA and the small clubs and Pryor, and his advice to young comics about learning their craft was solid.

  But the Comedy Store was a world away from the little clubs in the Catskills where Hackett had learned his craft, and it bore no resemblance to the loosey-goosey joke joint that his old pal Sammy Shore had opened on Sunset Boulevard seven years earlier.

  “The little club that Buddy’s talking about doesn’t exist anymore,” Dreesen said in an interview with the Detroit News that Steve Bluestein set up to rebut Hackett’s Tonight Show comments.

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  “We’re talking about a place that packs in 1,800 people a night on weekends at five bucks a pop and that with the bar is grossing way over $20,000 a week. All we want to do is split the door and divide our half equally among the 150 comedians who work there in a week. We wouldn’t even make the lowest union scale, but getting paid would say something. It would say we’re professionals.”

  As the dispute broke more widely in the press, Shore changed her narrative. Instead of playing up the philosophy behind her no-pay policy, she cried poor, claiming that paying the comics what they were demanding was “a financial impossibility because we have forty sets per night.” “She simply can’t afford to pay them,”

  said her spokeswoman, Estelle Endler. “They’re holding out for philosophical reasons; she’s holding out for financial reasons.”


  Ken Browning immediately fired back with both barrels, claiming that Shore’s most recent offer—75 percent of the door in the Main Room—was little more than a smokescreen. “The fact of the matter is, the Comedy Store derives the bulk of its income from the Westwood location, the Belly Room and the Original Room. The Main Room functions only for headliners, and it is dark most of the year. So if she offered us 110 percent of the Main Room, it would be almost valueless.

  “She has also told us workmen’s compensation is inhibiting her ability to afford the comedians,” Browning went on. “She says it would require a $3,000-a-week expense. That is not so. We have talked with various workmen’s comp carriers, and we’re talking about something more like $200 to $600 a week.

  “I asked for the opportunity to meet with her accountant and look at her books on a confidential basis regarding her ability to do this, but that request was rejected out of hand.” Browning said the CFC’s estimate that the club was grossing $20,000 a week

  “bears out the proposition that this is a money-making operation.”

  The figure was based on an estimated 3,000 paying customers a week at Sunset and Westwood and was considered “quite conservative” by the CFC. “It could be twice that,” Browning said.

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  The CFC’s $20,000 estimate actually came from information provided by Shore’s accountant, Helen Dornberger, who had passed it along to her son George. Mrs. Dornberger and a handful of other staffers were aware that each night’s receipts were placed in a safe in Mitzi’s house; then, once a week, approximately $21,000 was taken from the safe and deposited in the bank. They assumed that some portion of the receipts always remained behind in Shore’s safe, undeclared. Why else would the bank deposit always be the same? Why else did the club sell unnumbered tickets?

  The arrangement had all the earmarks of a classic skim.

  In the wake of Ken Browning’s uncomfortably accurate statements about her finances, Shore did some accounting of her own: She added two and two and summarily fired Helen Dornberger.

  However justified, the dismissal was problematic for Shore. For one thing, Helen was an extremely popular figure among comics on both sides of the pay divide, as well as with Shore’s office staff.

  For another, David Letterman was George’s best friend, and he was upset about the firing because George was. If Dave had not been emotionally involved in the strike up to that point, he certainly was now.

  Ken Browning had one strike-related discussion that he kept secret from his CFC clients. As part of his other duties at the Bushkin firm, he had to accompany Johnny Carson to Las Vegas, where the comedian was in the process of buying a TV station.

  Alone with Carson on the private flight, the young attorney screwed up his courage and mentioned that he was representing the striking comics. Carson took the bait, and before they landed, Browning had delivered a passionate precis on the depth of the issue. The strike would never be mentioned on The Tonight Show again.

  On Friday, March 30, the fourth night of picketing, a dozen comics took a break from the strike to participate in the First Annual Battle of the Stars basketball game at the Forum, home of the Los Angeles Lakers. The charity benefit pitted the Comedy Store 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 202

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  Bombers against the Deep Pizza Celebrity All-Stars, whose only bona fide celebrity was Larry Wilcox, the costar of the hit TV series C.H.I.P.S. Although only one of the Bombers, Lue Deck, sided with Shore, all of them donned the uniforms she’d paid for to play in what would turn out to be their final game, which they won by a score none of them could remember the next day.

  At the end of the first week of picketing, Budd Friedman met with CFC leaders at the Improv, where comics were performing nightly for free on a makeshift stage. Friedman opened his books to the group and signed an agreement to begin paying for performances when full operations resumed in six to eight weeks. The exact amount and manner of the payment was subject to future good faith bargaining.

  “I agreed, in effect, to pay them something, ” he said in announcing the agreement. “Basically, I am against the strike. But if that’s what they want, then maybe it’s the tenor of the times. Or, as my ex-wife said, ‘Maybe it’s the end of an era.’”

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  Dave’s Big Night

  After a week’s shutdown, Mitzi Shore reopened the Sunset club, but it was hardly a return to business as usual. At 10:00 p.m., prime time, on Tuesday, April 3, the Original Room was only one-quarter filled, the line-up consisted entirely of amateurs culled from the previous night’s potluck auditions, and admission was free (though the two-drink minimum remained in effect).

  Outside, former regulars and headliners were working hard to make the media understand the issues underlying the picket signs and the slogans. “There are comedians in this town who have done all the talk shows and don’t have $100 net worth,” said Jay Leno. “It’s humiliating after you’ve been on TV to have to get a job at Nate ’n Al’s deli. All we want is a little gas money, just a couple of dollars, that’s all it comes down to. It amazes me that it’s come to this.”

  Elayne Boosler told a reporter that because of the Comedy Store’s success, “showcase rooms are replacing paying rooms; it’s sweeping the country. As it is now, you have to be a TV star like Robin Williams or you have to work for free. [Mitzi Shore] calls this a showcase when no one has been allowed to showcase [perform for agents, managers, or producers] on the weekends. And it’s 203

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  not really a workshop anymore. If you bomb in there, you don’t continue to work in there. She recently told a comedian he was

  ‘too experimental.’”

  Tom Dreesen said that even though he was earning as much as $15,000 a week in Vegas, “I had a [club owner] offer me $250 a week recently. He said, ‘Well you work for free at the Comedy Store.’ We’ve got the best show in town for $4.50. We did this to ourselves; we agreed to work for free six years ago. Now we’re trying to undo it.”

  All around them on the sidewalk, their colleagues were trying to dissuade potential patrons from entering the club, handing out mimeographed fliers that read, “Please honor the comedians’

  boycott. At the Comedy Store only the comedians are not paid.

  The people you have come to see receive nothing for their work.”

  The picketers also provided printed directions to the Improv and the lineup of comics set to perform there that night.

  At one point, a huge tour bus carrying the Canadian rock band April Wine pulled up, and the band members and their road crew disembarked. Comedian Susan Sweetzer and several others pleaded with them, “Please don’t cross our picket line. We’re performers, too, and we’re just trying to get paid for what we do.” The musicians climbed back onto the bus and left, to much cheering and praising of the Canadian people. But the bus returned an hour later, and this time those fucking Canucks, the April Winos, crossed the line and went in to watch the show.

  Periodically, Shore loyalists would emerge from the club to engage the other side in debate or name calling. Harris Peet and the other doormen liked to rile the picketers up by making a show of writing down their names as if compiling a future blacklist. Argus Hamilton did his best to keep things collegial, allowing Dreesen or Dottie Archibald to complete his or her pitch to a would-be patron about not entering the club before presenting his case for crossing the line, which usually began with something like, “With all due 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 205

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  respect to my friend and colleague, who is a very talented performer. . . . ” Though he was Mitzi Shore’s most a
rdent defender, Hamilton could not bring himself to view the picketers as the enemy. He had partied with almost every one of them, stayed up all night laughing and talking and sharing dreams. He saw them as honorable opponents who had a different view of what the Comedy Store should be. The great-grandson of a Confederate officer, he believed he was fighting the good fight for a cause greater than himself. It was a civil war, to be sure, but he was a Southern gentleman who knew that one day Arkansas and Illinois would get along again.

  The war heated up as the week wore on and Shore supporters began taking the stage to perform. Argus Hamilton led the charge, urging the others to follow him into the breach. Most of Mitzi’s boys did, prompting Elayne Boosler to start the sidewalk chant, “The doormen are the headliners. The doormen are the headliners.”

  Behind every crossing of the picket line was a story:

  • When Lue Deck went over, it marked the end of the comedy team of Heck and Deck because his partner, Jimmy Heck, supported the CFC. Best friends from Houston, the pair had performed together for five years, touting themselves as “Heck and Deck, funny as a train wreck.”

  • Yakov Smirnoff, an émigré from the Soviet Union, was employed by Shore as the club’s carpenter. Along with a handful of other strikebreakers, he was paying only a few hundred dollars a month to live in a comfortable seven-bedroom house that Shore owned on Crest Hill Drive a few blocks above the Sunset club.

  • Charlie Hill had been an ardent supporter of the American Indian Movement during the bloody siege of Wounded Knee in 1973, which colored his view of the comedians’ uprising: “I didn’t see any of them there with me at the federal building when the FBI was killing my brothers on the Pine Ridge reservation.”

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  struggling comic experience. He was a successful sitcom writer trying to break into stand-up, and prior to the strike, Shore had refused to put him in the regular lineup because she didn’t think he was good enough. Of course, that changed the minute he crossed the picket line.