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

by William Knoedelseder

  Ashen-faced and hollow-eyed, Richard Lewis wept uncontrol-lably through most of the memorial but managed to pull himself together somewhat when it came time to deliver the keynote eulogy.

  He talked about the “blood brother” days and nights in Greenwich Village when he and Steve dreamed of stardom and promised to help one another no matter what. “And I know Steve would have achieved those things that he wanted and he would have been on all those panel shows that he always talked about, because he was good and because he deserved it,” he said. For ten minutes, he paced the stage, running his hands through his shoulder-length hair, sobbing with grief, talking about his dead friend, and getting laughs.

  The connection between pain and laughter was never more tangi-ble, causing more than one person present to wonder if providence hadn’t created humor and comedians for this very purpose.

  1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 248

  248

  William Knoedelseder

  The service closed with the recording that Steve requested in his suicide note: his final set at Westwood on March 24.

  You know what I was thinking the other day? Wouldn’t it be wild if they made men’s contraceptives in sizes? Imagine the ego trips guys would go on. Can you see a guy swaggering into the drug store? “Wanna give me a dozen Trojan Big Boys and a handful of Moby Dicks? ” Of course, the ego trip is shattered the minute he gets back to the car and the girl friend says, “Did you get your Tom Thumbs and Gherkin Pickles? ”

  I’ve been a little depressed lately because a comedian friend of mine had a nervous breakdown. . . . He had to go up against the Ayatollah Khomeini on Make Me Laugh.

  You really have to love LA because they have so many weird people out here. I read about a guy who died the other day and his family put out a statement saying that in lieu of flowers they would appreciate . . . stereo equipment.

  On tape, the Westwood crowd roared its approval; at Hum -

  perdinck’s the audience wept as well and gave him a standing ovation.

  The next day, Barry and Ginny, Susan, Richard, and Steve flew back to New York. Richard crashed at the apartment of his childhood friend and fellow stand-up, Larry David, while Susan stayed with Ginny and Barry, who took on the excruciating task of telling his father about Steve. As a precaution, Barry first called Jack’s next door neighbor, a cardiologist, and asked him to be present.

  “Dad, I have terrible news,” he said after Jack invited them into his apartment. “Steve has passed away.” The elder Lubetkin did not collapse as Barry had feared, but he was rocked to his core and reacted with stunned disbelief. Barry instinctively withheld the fact that Steve had taken his own life. Instead, he told his father there had been an “accident” and that Steve “fell off a build-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 249

  I’m Dying Up Here

  249

  ing,” which caused the old man to wonder aloud, “Why would he fall off a roof? Was it drugs? ”

  At a memorial service for family members the next day, Richard found himself sitting next to Susan. For three days, he’d been carrying around the crushing burden of a guilty secret; now he couldn’t hold it in any longer. “I know something important that no one else knows,” he told her, as the story of Steve seeing faces in the weeks before his death poured out of him. When Susan responded that both she and Barry knew about the faces, too, he almost wept with relief. It wasn’t all on him after all.

  Steve was buried next to his mother at Wellwood Cemetery in Pinelawn, Long Island. Later in the afternoon, Barry and Richard walked to the East River a few blocks from the Lubetkin’s apartment and sat on a bench for several hours talking about the brother they had shared.

  Back in Los Angeles, the hostilities between Mitzi Shore and the CFC (now calling itself Comedians for Comedians) continued unabated. On June 6, the CFC took out a half-page in memoriam ad in Daily Variety, choosing to quote not a sampling of Steve’s humor but rather an excerpt from the essay he wrote titled, “What the CFC Is All About.” Shore responded by having the city of Los Angeles proclaim June 6 “Comedy Store Day.” Written in flowery script with wording provided by the Comedy Store, the official proclamation was stamped with the seal of the city and suitable for framing:

  WHEREAS June 6, 1979 will mark the 6th anniversary of The Comedy Store and,

  WHEREAS the primary purpose of The Comedy Store is to develop new comedy talent through a graduated process, which starts on Monday nights when anyone who wants to is invited to experience five minutes in front of a mike; and WHEREAS The Comedy Store is frequented by managers, agents, casting directors, producers, talent coordinators, network 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 250

  250

  William Knoedelseder

  executives and studio executives and is a showcase and springboard for the comedians who play there; and

  WHEREAS, a creative consultant for ABC-TV, Mitzi Shore is the innovator of every new program that The Comedy Store offers; and in order to encourage the growth of women in comedy she opened The Comedy Store Belly Room last season for female comics, and her latest innovation is Video Workshop sessions where growing comedians will work out in front of a camera in a classroom environment;

  NOW, THEREFORE, I, TOM BRADLEY, Mayor of the City of Los Angeles, on behalf of its citizens do hereby proclaim June 6, 1979 as “The Comedy Store Day” in recognition of its sixth anniversary and commend the many talented comedians for sharing their unique ability to make people laugh; and FURTHER, I congratulate Mitzi Shore for her outstanding contributions and wish her continued success in her future endeavors.

  Not content to hang the proclamation on her office wall, Shore had the document reproduced as a full-page ad in Daily Variety at a cost of nearly $1,500, which would have covered a week’s worth of paid time slots.

  The week after Lubetkin’s death, Shore appeared exhausted and on edge during a set-the-record-straight interview with the Los Angeles Times. “I loved Steve Lubetkin, and I wouldn’t have done anything to hurt him ever,” she said. In her view, Lubetkin was the victim of the agreement “that was forced on me by the CFC.” The agreement had compelled her to cut back time slots at Westwood, and Steve was among the comics affected. It was as simple as that. There was no retaliation; it was merely “arith-metic.” She said she would gladly renegotiate the agreement “because this one is not working. I knew it wouldn’t.”

  The subject of the CFC quickly set her off. “I’m getting pissed off that I’m being blamed for someone else’s inadequacies,” she 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 251

  I’m Dying Up Here

  251

  said, banging her desktop for emphasis. “This system works. If you’ve got it, then you’ll make it and become a star. Not everyone is going to become a star, and those people who are angry and blaming me are probably aware that they are not going to become a star. So, they can’t lay that on me or the Store. It’s totally unjust and unfair. You’re dealing with a bunch of children.

  “Steve was a clever writer, but he had trouble as a performer,”

  she said, softening slightly. “He was a person who wanted to be a superstar and didn’t have the ingredients. He killed himself because he could not handle his life.” While there was undeniable truth to her words, in the end, of all the people who knew and loved Steve Lubetkin, only Mitzi Shore denied any responsibility for what happened to him.

  Ten days after his best friend’s death, Richard Lewis looked wan and disheveled as he sat with a reporter who had covered the strike from the beginning. The reporter had come armed with a list of questions, which became superfluous the second Lewis started talking.

  “I think it got him off the hook,” he said of Lubetkin’s suicide.

  “After trying so desperately and so hard and so long for some kind of recognition in this business, I think he was exhausted, tired of expecting rewards.

  “No one should ever chalk th
is man up as just another crazy performer. I’m not defending his final act—I am bitterly angry and will feel his loss forever. But he was Steve Lubetkin to the end and only the last second seems crazy. In his head, he was giving at the end, just like he had thousands of times before in front of thousands of people. Only this time he wanted nothing in return—no laughs, no applause, no promises of gigs, no auditions.

  He purely just wanted to leave a message that things should be fair. To point a finger seems to demean what that moment meant to him. To point to some situation or person and blame them is the very nature of the sickness that’s in this town. It makes them bigger than life. And it’s the thing that killed Steve.

  1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 252

  252

  William Knoedelseder

  “I feel sorry for all the Steve Lubetkins who are not thinking past that one night at the Comedy Store, that particular night when they are indeed making people laugh and being an entertainer in the grandest sense. But they shouldn’t make the Comedy Store bigger than it is. Don’t make it Vegas, because it isn’t.

  Don’t make it a series or a tour or a screenplay, because it isn’t.

  It’s just tables and chairs and a stage where you can go work and be seen and maybe make some pocket money. Mitzi Shore is not a psychiatrist. Neither is she their mother. I never wanted to give her that much responsibility for me.

  “People in this business give too much power to those who judge them, and it is so damned destructive. It keeps you from doing what you can do. Granted, it’s a bitch to work for free and be a piece of meat, which is generally what you are in this business.

  But it’s a choice that actors and comedians have made, and the best way to deal with it is to work on your craft, surround yourself with good friends, be able to love people and get love back, and keep your fingers crossed.

  “But if you depend on the business people—the agents, managers, producers, the Improvs, the Comedy Stores, the Budd Friedmans and the Mitzi Shores—to give you credence and suste-nance, then you are in big trouble. I think Steve Lubetkin was in this kind of trouble for a long time. Perhaps it was in his nature to have this happen to him. He thought these people cared more than they do.”

  He sighed. “The business, by and large, is made up of wallets, not hearts.”

  1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 253

  Epilogue:

  The Prisoner of Memory

  For the stand-up comedians who migrated to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s and participated in the strike, Steve Lubetkin’s suicide serves as a sad signpost, like a classmate’s fatal car crash on graduation night, marking an end to their innocence.

  “We were just young kids trying to be funny, and all of a sudden, it wasn’t about making people laugh anymore,” Tom Dreesen recalled nearly thirty years later. “It wasn’t even about making a living. There was something deep and dark and scary, and all the fun was out of it.”

  “It colored everything,” said Dottie Archibald. “It made it bigger than it was, bigger than just a bunch of people trying to get paid. It made people reflect more on what happened.”

  “After Steve’s suicide, it was never the same,” said Jay Leno.

  Lubetkin’s desperate last act did not accomplish what he had hoped. There was no coming together of the two sides in its wake, no fairness finally codified. The strike settlement agreement didn’t last the summer. The Comedians for Compensation renamed them selves the more union-sounding American Federation of Comedians (AFC) and filed charges of unfair labor practices against 253

  1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 254

  254

  William Knoedelseder

  the Comedy Store with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Mitzi Shore responded by rescinding the contract and reducing the per-set payment to $10 on weeknights. The AFC sued to force her into arbitration; she countersued, challenging the AFC’s right to act as a collective bargaining agent. The comics turned to SAG and AFTRA for help and were told there was nothing that could be done unless they affiliated with AGVA, which had jurisdiction in nightclubs. So, in January 1980, the AFC reversed its previous stance and voted unanimously and ap-prehensively to affiliate with AGVA, which, sure enough, did little more than collect dues for the next two years. After months of hearings, the NLRB finally ruled in January 1982 that the comedians who worked at the Comedy Store were independent contractors rather than employees and, as such, were “not qualified for NLRB protection.” By that time, the AFC was broke and owed its lawyers nearly $40,000. It struggled on for more than a year after that, with Chairman Susan Sweetzer and a handful of other unpaid officers spending the bulk of their time dealing with grievances and complaints from a dwindling and increasingly unappreciative membership. But the movement to unionize the stand-up comics of America ultimately proved to be an insurrection of the moment, and on some unremembered date in 1984, the organization that Steve Lubetkin died trying to save simply ceased to exist.

  The principal lasting effect of the 1979 strike is that it ended the era of comedians working for free. Even though Mitzi Shore repudiated the contract and reduced the amount per set, she continued to pay the comics who performed on her stages, to the extent that a regular could earn as much as $200 to $300 a week.

  Budd Friedman and the owners of Catch a Rising Star and the Comic Strip in New York grudgingly went along with the new reality, and purely “showcase” clubs disappeared from the entertainment landscape.

  The end of the strike coincided with an explosion in the popularity of live comedy around the country. By the dawn of the 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 255

  I’m Dying Up Here

  255

  new decade, new comedy clubs had opened in San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Boston, Toronto, Vancouver, and Edmonton. Southern California soon boasted a total of sixteen paying clubs, including the Laugh Factory, located less than half a mile down Sunset Strip from the Comedy Store. The Laugh Factory was launched shortly after the strike by a nineteen-year-old wannabe comic named Jamie Masada, who had walked the picket line. On the club’s opening night, Masada charged fifty cents at the door and divided up the proceeds among the performers. But the first performer to take the stage, Richard Pryor, refused his share and instead handed Masada a $100 bill and said,

  “Pay your rent.”

  Within a couple of years of the strike, there were an estimated three hundred comedy clubs in the United States. Seventeen of those were branches of the Improv, licensed by Budd Friedman and his new one-third partner Mark Lonow. That many clubs created an unprecedented demand for talent, which put comics with diplomas from the Comedy Store and the Los Angeles Improv in a previously unimaginable position of power, able to command what they started calling “stupid money.” As Lonow explained,

  “A new club would open with a neophyte owner that the comics knew didn’t know anything, and a comic making $2,500 a week would ask for $10,000, and they’d settle for $8,000, and six months later the club would be out of business.”

  “The strike was a great lesson for how to conduct your career, in terms of being a business person and learning how things work, and getting a little gumption to stand up for yourself and knowing what things are worth, and how to put a contract together and negotiate,” said Elayne Boosler. “It was sort of a jumping off point.”

  It wasn’t just the headliners who did well. Lesser-knowns such as Jo Anne Astrow, Dottie Archibald, Susan Sweetzer, Jimmy Aleck, Ollie Joe Prater, and Lue Deck joined the legion of standup “road warriors” who spent the 1980s making a damn good living telling jokes in water-tank towns across America.

  1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 256

  256

  William Knoedelseder

  It wasn’t all good times, of course. Some of the new club owners made Mitzi and Budd seem cuddly in comparison. “There was a club in Tempe, Arizona, where
the owners were all drug dealers, and no one ever got paid because their checks always bounced,”

  recalled Elayne Boosler. “I was determined to get paid, so when the guy said, ‘I’m going to announce you now,’ I said, ‘But I haven’t been paid yet.’ He said ‘later,’ and I said, ‘No, now, or I don’t go on. Or maybe I’ll just go out there and tell them why I’m not going on and what you do to comics, and I sure hope you have fire insurance.’ He said, ‘Just a minute,’ and he came running back in a few minutes with a vial of cocaine and said, ‘Can I pay you with this?’ I said, ‘Only if you buy it back from me after my set.’ He said, ‘I don’t have the cash.’ I said, ‘Well, go get it.’

  And he got it and gave it to me, and then he said, ‘Don’t you want me to put that in the safe while you go on?’ I said, ‘How stupid do I look?’

  “I realized then why Henny Youngman always stood with his hand on his side—to make sure the money was still there,” she laughed. “I became notorious for not going on stage without first getting paid in full in cash. It all went back to the strike.”

  The major downside of the strike was that it killed the camaraderie that had characterized the LA stand-up community for at least half a decade. “That was all gone,” said Argus Hamilton.

  Tom Dreesen never went back to performing at the Comedy Store. Neither did Elayne Boosler, Dottie Archibald, Jo Anne Astrow, Marsha Warfield, Bill Kirchenbauer, or Murray Langston, the Unknown Comic. In some cases, the choice was theirs; in others, it was Shore’s. For Richard Lewis, the idea of returning to the ground where Steve died was just too painful. George Miller went back only once: He stopped in for a drink on Halloween night 1979, and Shore immediately dispatched Ollie Joe Prater to throw him out. David Letterman, who had been performing at Sunset sporadically, never returned after that. Jay Leno continued 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 257