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

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page i I’m Dying Up Here

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I’M

DYING

UP
HERE

H E A R T B R E A K A N D

H I G H T I M E S I N

S TA N D - U P C O M E D Y ’ S

G O L D E N E R A

W I L L I A M K N O E D E L S E D E R

New York

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page iv Copyright © 2009 by William Knoedelseder

Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™, a member of the Perseus Books Group.

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, Suite 1321, New York, NY 10107.

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Designed by Trish Wilkinson

Text set in 12-point Goudy

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Knoedelseder, William, 1947–

I’m dying up here : heartbreak and high times in stand-up comedy’s golden era / William Knoedelseder.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-58648-317-3 (alk. paper)

1. Stand-up comedy—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.

PN1969.C65.K56 2009

792.7'60973—dc22

2009013751

First Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Dedicated to the memory of

Irv Letofsky and Howard Brandy,

and to the girl of my dreams.

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1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page vii Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Prologue: A True Comic

1

Blood Brothers

9

The Hippest Room

19

Mitzi’s Store

31

Tom, Dave, and George

45

All About Budd

59

Six Minutes, Twenty-two Laughs

65

The Boys’ Club

71

Guns, Drugs, and Westwood

81

Comedy University

87

Richard’s Baroness, Steve’s Movie

93

The Funniest Year Ever

101

Roommates

111

vii

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Contents

The New Year’s Resolution

117

Drugs and Theft

125

Order, Please

135

Diary of a Young Comic

141

The Gauntlet

147

Comedians for Compensation

153

Choosing Up Sides

165

Fire!

175

The Vote

181

All on the Line

189

Dave’s Big Night

203

The Union Forever?

211

Jay’s Big Flop

223

“My Name Is Steve Lubetkin”

231

A Standing Ovation

245

Epilogue: The Prisoner of Memory

253

Index

269

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page ix Acknowledgments

I started doing the research for this book thirty-one years ago, when my editor at the
Los Angeles Times,
Irv Letofsky, called me into his office and said there was something happening on the local comedy club scene that had the feel of Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. He thought stand-up comedy was about to explode nationally in the hands of a new crop of young performers working at the Comedy Store and the Improvisation. He thought the
Times
should establish a comedy beat. Was I interested?

For the next two years, I had stage-side seats at the best show in show business. I was at the Comedy Store the week that Robin Williams first erupted on to the LA scene, and I spent a quiet afternoon at the beach with him in his final hours of obscurity before
Mork & Mindy
hit the air. I sat slack jawed one evening as Andy Kaufman performed his entire stage act, complete with three costume changes, for an audience of two on the patio of my house and then wanted to wrestle my eight-months-pregnant wife. I spent a surreal night on the town with Kaufman’s alter ego, Tony Clifton, and was present on the set the day Clifton was fired from his guest-starring role in
Taxi
and then wrestled off the Paramount Studios lot by security guards. I met and wrote about ix

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Acknowledgments

Jay Leno, David Letterman, and Richard Lewis before the world knew who they were. I watched the funniest people of my generation get up on stage alone and try and fail and triumph. And I laughed my ass off.

I am grateful for the help and inspiration provided by the following people: Jimmy Aleck, Dottie Archibald, Alison Arngrim, Jo Anne Astrow, Mike Binder, Steve Bluestein, Elayne Boosler, the late Bernie Brillstein, Ken Browning, Johnny Dark, Lue Deck, Tom DeLisle, the late Estelle Endler, Ellen Farley, Budd Friedman, Gallagher, Argus Hamilton, Charlie Hill, Jeff Jampol, Bill Kirchen bauer, Jay Leno, Mark Lonow, Barry and Ginny Lubetkin, Jamie Masada, Dennis McDougal, Barbara McGraw, John Mettler, the late George Miller, Judy Orbach, Susan (Evans) Richmond, Phil Alden Robinson, Brad Sanders, Ross Schafer, George Shapiro, Mitzi Shore, Wil Shriner, the late John Stewart, Susan Sweetzer, Bennett Tramer, Marsha Warfield, Ellis Weiner, Dr.

Robert Winter, Ann Woody, Bob Zmuda, Brian Ann Zoccola, and Alan Zwiebel.

I would like to offer special thanks to the following:

• Tom Dreesen for his generosity and many, many hours of time

• my friend and brother Richard Lewis for that and so much more beyond this book

• my dear friend and agent for life, Alice Martell, for always believing

• all the people at PublicAffairs, especially founder and editor at large, Peter Osnos, and my very cool editor, Lisa Kaufman, for their saintlike patience

• Dayan Ballweg, for his encouragement and great title

• and most of all my family—Bryn, Matt, Colin, and Halle—for their unquestioning love and support as I struggled to figure things out and find my way back to where I always should have been.

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Prologue:

A True Comic

They slipped into the nightclub quietly, one by one, stepping carefully at first as their eyes adjusted from the bright afternoon light outside: a soft parade of mostly middle-aged comics come to pay their respects to a fallen comrade.

George Miller had died the week before from complications due to a blood clot in his brain. He was sixty-one and had battled leukemia for seven years. An obit in the
Los Angeles Times
summed up his career with the headline “Stand-up Comedian Was Often on ‘Letterman.’”

In fact, Miller had appeared as David Letterman’s guest fifty-six times over two decades. That may not sound like a lot to a lay -

person, but professional comedians considered it a feat of Barry Bondsian proportion. No other comic could boast such a record.

Miller also had logged thirty-two appearances on
The Tonight
Show Starring Johnny Carson.
It hadn’t made him rich or particularly famous, but it had kept him working longer than many of his comedy peers—performing in small clubs around the country, occasionally opening in Las Vegas for middle-of-the-road music acts, making a living by making people laugh. Miller had stood alone in 1

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2

William Knoedelseder

front of a crowd and cracked wise most every night for more than thirty years. That’s not an easy thing to do.

So, on Sunday, March 16, 2003, his friends turned out to honor him at the Laugh Factory on Sunset Strip, where Miller had appeared regularly in recent years. Their names and faces ranged from vaguely familiar to instantly recognizable. Among them were Richard Lewis, the perpetually angst-ridden comic who appears regularly on
Curb Your Enthusiasm
; Tom Dreesen, a veteran of sixty-one
Tonight Show
appearances and Frank Sinatra’s longtime opening act; Mike Binder, the comic turned filmmaker who created, wrote, directed, and starred in the HBO series
The Mind of the
Married Man
; Elayne Boosler, the comedienne credited by her colleagues with breaking down the gender barriers for her generation of female stand-up comics; the ubiquitous Jay Leno, arguably the most successful stand-up of their generation; and Mort Sahl, an elder hero to every performer in the room and, as Master of Ceremonies Dreesen noted, “the only comic George ever paid to see.”

Letterman was a notable no-show. He was hospitalized in New York with a case of shingles, and all present took his absence as a sign of just how sick he really was. Dave and George had been best friends since 1977, when they both lived in the same apartment building across the street from the Comedy Store, just a few blocks down the street. Dave had paid for all of George’s medical expenses during the last few years of his life and had even picked up the cost of a two-bedroom apartment and a twenty-four-hour on-call nurse. When it appeared that George was dying in 2000, Dave got him admitted to an experimental leukemia treatment program at UCLA by donating nearly $1 million to the medical center. The treatment involved a new “miracle” drug called Gleevec that stabilized George’s white blood cell count and saved his life, at least for a time.

In a way, it was probably a good thing that Letterman didn’t make it to the memorial, given that Leno did. The tension of 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 3