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

by William Knoedelseder

  • Lois Bromfield was the only woman to join the strikebreakers.

  Naturally, a number of male comics took it as solid evidence that she was Mitzi’s secret lesbian lover.

  Inside the club, Mitzi urged her supporters to keep constant watch on the pickets outside “because I don’t know whether they might try something violent. I wouldn’t put it past them.” Some pickets delighted in playing to her paranoia by lighting pieces of paper on fire and waving them in the air, shouting things like,

  “Remember the Improv.” Such antics were more inflammatory than the pickets realized because Shore and some of her closest cohorts suspected that Budd Friedman was behind the torching of his club, calling it a “fire of convenience” and “a case of Italian lightning.” At one point, there appeared to be a genuine threat to the Sunset club when two Los Angeles Police Department detectives showed up with a tape of a phone call they said had come into the precinct warning that a bomb had been planted in the building. Upon hearing the tape, Shore blurted out, “Gee, that sounds like Ollie.” After the cops left, reassured by Shore that it was all just a misunderstanding, a terrified Ollie Joe Prater admitted to several people that he had phoned in the bomb scare—he just never imagined those calls were taped.

  The atmosphere on the picket line was also growing increasingly tense. Whereas the first week was highlighted by such play-ful stunts as Leno, dressed as Che Guevara, wheeling up in a Volks wagen “Thing” painted in camouflage to resemble an armored personnel carrier, the second week was marked by angry confrontations. In one instance, a shouting match between an apparently unchastened Prater and Jimmy Aleck led to Prater’s 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 207

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  chasing Aleck through the parking lot with a baseball bat, an astonishing sight given Prater’s bulk and the fact that Aleck moved with a pronounced limp left behind by a childhood bout of polio.

  Prater had Aleck cornered against a couple of cars, and a crowd was starting to gather around them, when Dreesen pulled his car into the parking lot, jumped out, and got between them.

  “What’s going on, Ollie? ” he barked.

  “It’s none of your business. Stay out of it,” Prater said.

  “This is my business.”

  “I’m going to break his fucking jaw.”

  “Then I’ll have to break yours.”

  Dreesen was fairly confident that he could take Prater, who was heaving from the short sprint, but he was relieved when the much larger man backed off and trudged down the ramp toward the club. He shook his head in disbelief at what had just taken place. What did all this have to do with being funny for a living?

  With the strikebreakers forming a semblance of a professional lineup, Shore reinstituted the cover charge over the weekend, but the mood inside the club remained as dark as the décor. Shore cycled between self-righteous rage and self-pity, with no stop in between for self-reflection. Her staff was concerned that in her pain and anger, she might do something rash. Rumor around the building had it that Glendale Federal Bank had made her an offer to buy the business. Hamilton feared they were getting dangerously close to the point at which she just might say, “Fuck ’em,” and sell the place.

  If Shore saw any bright spots as she stood night after night looking out the window at the picketers, it was the fact that, with the exception of Leno, none of her favorites had shown up to parade around with the others, shouting slogans and calling her names—not Robin Williams or Jimmie Walker or Richard Pryor, not Sandra Bernhard, and not David Letterman. That was about to change.

  Monday, April 9, was Oscar night. Most of Hollywood was buzzing with speculation about which of the two Vietnam war 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 208

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  dramas, Michael Cimino’s epic The Deerhunter or the Jane Fonda vehicle Coming Home, would win for best picture. The comedy community, however, was focused on a sidebar story: Johnny Carson was hosting the Academy Awards ceremony, and as a result, one of their own, David Letterman, was filling in as host of The Tonight Show. There wasn’t a comic on either side of the strike who didn’t know what this meant for Dave. It made him in the business, not just as a stand-up but as a major league entertainer. It was bigger than what had happened with Freddy. Dave was being anointed as Carson’s heir apparent. It was all the comics were talking about on the picket line, not just because Dave was universally well-liked but also because it gave them hope for themselves.

  Once again, Dreesen accompanied Letterman to the early evening taping, but this time it wasn’t solely for moral support; he was booked as a guest. A veteran of umpteen Tonight Show appearances, Tom was cool and calm backstage before the show, while Dave was a nervous wreck, running through his routine of self-deprecation: “This time tomorrow I’ll be back in Indianapolis.”

  As Ed McMahon introduced Letterman, Dreesen was standing in the wings watching when he felt a presence behind him. He turned to see talk show host Tom Snyder, whose Late Night followed the Carson show. “I gotta see how the audience responds to this no-name,” Snyder said snarkily.

  Once again, Dave’s jitters didn’t make it past the curtain; when the cameras started rolling, he was smooth as silk. Dreesen had seen his friend perform countless times at the Comedy Store and other clubs, and he never really understood why Dave didn’t feel entirely comfortable in that setting. Seeing him now in the TV host chair, he finally got it. Oh, my God, he thought. This is where he belongs. He’s home.

  It was a heady moment when Letterman introduced Dreesen for the stand-up segment of the show, something that neither of them could have imagined just two years earlier. “Thank you, 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 209

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  ladies and gentlemen,” Dreesen said at the top of his routine. “I always like being here on The Tonight Show. . . . Of course, I like it a lot better when Johnny is here.” Off to his right, he heard Dave break up.

  They planned to drive together to the Comedy Store after the taping. Letterman hadn’t been there since the picketing started because he’d been working every night getting ready for the show.

  But as they were headed down the hall toward the door, Carson’s longtime producer, Fred DeCordova, stopped them and told Letterman that, like all guest hosts, he was expected to attend the postshow staff meeting. To Dreesen’s astonishment, Letterman begged off, saying, “I’m really sorry, Freddy, but I can’t stay because I made a commitment to walk the picket line at the Comedy Store tonight.”

  When Letterman’s red truck pulled into the Comedy Store parking lot twenty minutes later, the crowd on the sidewalk cheered. As he walked down the ramp and took his place on the line, his fellow Comedians for Compensation broke into a scat version of The Tonight Show theme, singing “dah-dah, dah-dah-dah-dahdah-dah.”

  Inside the club, Argus Hamilton watched as Mitzi looked out the window and took it all in. Her shoulders sagged, and her chin dropped to her chest. Emotionally devastated by what she could only interpret as an act of personal betrayal, she looked so small he thought she might disappear.

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  The Union Forever?

  The next morning, Mitzi Shore blinked.

  In a hastily arranged interview with the Los Angeles Times, she announced, “Against my better judgment, I have conceded to pay the comics in the Original Room. It is my third and final offer to them.”

  Her offer was $25 per set, except for the first three acts Tuesday through Thursday nights, which would feature “beginners,” who would therefore work for free. Performers in the Main Room would be paid $35 per set on Friday and Saturday nights. At Westwood, all comics would work for free except one featured performer per week, who would be paid $200.

  The offer far exceeded wha
t any of the comics had imagined back in January. For regulars, it would mean not only gas money but also a car payment, with maybe a little left over for part of the rent, a veritable windfall. But things had changed since that first New Year’s morning bitch session. After hours spent together on the picket line and in CFC meetings and strategy sessions, the comics of the Comedy Store had bonded in a way that they hadn’t from smoking dope in the parking lot and shooting the shit all night at Canter’s deli. A group conscience had taken root, 211

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  a sense of common purpose beyond being funny and making it in Hollywood.

  Some of them saw Mitzi’s offer as potentially divisive because paying certain performers in the Original Room and not others would ratchet up the tension and jealousy already inherent in the competition for good time slots. By the same token, the whole vibe at Westwood would likely change if one act was designated as the star and all the others were just bit players. You could kiss camaraderie good-bye. As for Shore’s proposal for the Main Room, $35 a set seemed like a pittance. A full house brought in more than $2,000 in cover charges, so she was offering less than 10 percent of the door on a good night.

  The CFC leaders saw something else in Shore’s offer, a chink in her armor, a sign that she was weakening, maybe even scared. So, they decided to push that perceived advantage at a CFC meeting at the Improv that evening. With the media in attendance, Tom Dreesen chose not to put discussion of Shore’s proposal at the top of the agenda. Instead, members first heard from a business representative from the American Guild of Variety Artists. AGVA claimed jurisdiction in the employment of nightclub performers, but since the days that Buddy Hackett referred to on The Tonight Show, the union’s paying membership had comprised mostly performers at theme parks, ice shows, and circuses. Floyd Ackerman made a pitch for CFC affiliation with his union, noting that such an alliance would lend the support of the Associated Actors and Artists of America, or 4A, unions, which included the Screen Actors Guild, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the American Federation of Musicians Local 47, the International Alliance of Theater and Stage Employees Local 33, the Screen Extras Guild, and the Actors Equity Association. He boasted that an alliance with AGVA would also lend Teamster support to their picket line. “A club can’t sell liquor that isn’t delivered,” he said.

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  The room did not warm to Ackerman, however, partly because of AGVA’s reputation for putting small clubs out of business in the past and partly because Ackerman came off as an old-line union hack from Central Casting. As he spoke, you could see noses turning up all around the room as if they smelled feet. After Ackerman got into a particularly heated exchange with comedian Kip Addotta, who all but called him and his union a bunch of goons, the comics voted almost unanimously against affiliation with AGVA. (Ackerman lived up to AGVA’s reputation the next day when he sent a note to Dreesen that said,

  “You might advise Mr. Addotta that he has awakened a sleeping dragon and therein I will watch with great interest any engagement of his that is not covered by an AGVA contract.”) After Ackerman, Dreesen introduced a labor-relations attorney named Frederic Richman, who got a much better reception when he told the group, “Believe it or not, you have greater strength than Mitzi Shore does.” Dreesen then read another telegram of support from Bob Hope:

  Dear Fellow Comedians,

  Really, you want to be paid for your services? Hey, I don’t mind working for nothing. . . . I also don’t mind root canal work.

  The tired old line elicited a loud groan from the crowd. Comedian Jerry Van Dyke drew a much more enthusiastic response when he stood up and pledged 100 percent of the cover charges at his recently opened club in Encino.

  The meeting was two hours old before Shore’s proposal came up for discussion and voting, and by that time, more than a dozen comics had left. Much of the discussion centered on Mitzi and her presumed millions, with one comic describing the Comedy Store as “a huge conglomerate bringing in tons and tons of money.”

  Emily Levine defended Shore. “I’m in favor of a comedians’ union, 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 214

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  of comics owning their own product and getting paid for what they do, but I will not join the picket line because the Comedy Store is not a target I would pick as my main enemy,” she said. “It seems to me that there is an element here that looks at it as a win-lose situation, and the only victory is to bring her to her knees. Well, I can’t ally with that. She’s done marvelous things for comedians, and I think her true commitment is there.”

  “I don’t think she cares about the comics at all,” countered Murray Langston, a club owner himself.

  Steve Bluestein replied, “I don’t know. When I was in the hospital, she sent me flowers, and no one else did.”

  In the end, despite some dissent, the comedians rejected Shore’s final offer by a strong majority. Elayne Boosler summed it all up with the dramatic pronouncement, “The power has been broken” (a line George Miller would tease her about for the next twenty years).

  In speaking to a reporter after the meeting, Dreesen made it sound as if the CFC had already moved beyond the strike. “The Comedy Store settlement is the least important thing,” he said.

  “The organization of the CFC is the most important. What we plan to do will last forever and ever.”

  Among the plans he ticked off were a single booking agency for comics at all clubs in the Los Angeles area, a Hall of Fame for stand-up comedy, a comedy advisory board for the television networks, acting classes for comics, and “a central office to record and protect our material and to run charitable projects.”

  Of course, the whole evening—the media presence, the stack-ing of the agenda, the CFC plans for “forever and ever”—was part of a performance that he had choreographed to play to an audience of one: Mitzi Shore. He wanted her to read about it in the Los Angeles Times the next morning and conclude that the tables finally had turned and she now needed them more than they needed her. “This group of comedians has the power to make any club owner a millionaire,” he said. “We did it for her, and if necessary, we can do it for someone else.”

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  In fact, aside from the picketing, lining up new venues where members could perform was the CFC’s primary endeavor. It was the comedy equivalent of keeping the kids off the street and out of trouble. The Improv was a great alternative to the Sunset Store, but it could not satisfy the demand for stage time created by the ever-growing number of comics and would-be comics. As David Letterman joked, “We now have an overload in this field. We should put some sort of patrol at the Arizona border to keep more from coming.” But seriously, it was a big problem for the CFC

  membership committee, which was grappling with the question, How do we decide who can be a member and who can’t? What if, for example, some kid fresh from Akron was the next Robin Williams just waiting to happen? Did they want him auditioning for Mitzi on Monday night?

  Fortunately, the CFC’s “new club committee” was having some success hooking up its idled labor force with entrepreneurs who realized that comedy was about the cheapest form of live entertainment to produce. As Jay Leno often said, “All you really need is a comic, a microphone, and a few tables and chairs. And people like to laugh as much as they do anything else. It’s not like you’re making them watch jai alai.”

  The CFC signed up the Plaza Four restaurant in Century City, which agreed to let the comics keep 100 percent of the cover charges in its newly anointed Comedians’ Room. Humperdinck’s in Santa Monica also pledged 100 percent of the door. Comedian Jackie Mason co
mmitted to splitting the cover charges and bar revenue on a fifty-fifty basis at a new club he was planning to open. The Continental Hyatt House, the Comedy Store’s next door neighbor on Sunset, announced that it would begin featuring paid comics in the hotel’s lounge on weeknights.

  Jerry Van Dyke was hoping that Mitzi’s problems would save him from having to shut down his San Fernando Valley club, which was featuring “name” entertainment at a cost of $8,000 a week and losing money as a result. He agreed to let the CFC set 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 216

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  the price of admission. He asked in return only that the comics sign an exclusivity agreement not to perform at any other club within a one-mile radius. The exclusivity agreement was not aimed at Shore but rather at Michael Callie, owner of the Laff Stop in Newport Beach, who had invested $300,000 in a new club scheduled to open right next door to his in October. “So he won’t have any comics, which is fine with me,” said Van Dyke.

  The strike was already having an unintended negative effect at one paying club in the area, the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach, whose owner, Mike Lacey, was particularly well-liked by the comics. But Lacey had been experiencing a falloff in business since the strike began, and the only explanation he could come up with was that the public, seeing comics on the news complaining about not getting paid, assumed that he was not paying them either. “I wouldn’t have been losing money for months if I hadn’t been paying my comics,” Lacey said in a newspaper interview. “But I don’t feel you can charge a cover and not pay the performers.”

  Laff Stop owner Michael Callie worried about the future of clubs like his if the comics succeeded in breaking Mitzi because he used the Comedy Store and the Improv as his farm club. “I don’t let anyone perform here unless I’ve seen them at one of those clubs first,” he would tell new comics looking for a spot. “I don’t like disasters on stage.”