I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (13 page)

His name on the marquee guaranteed sold-out shows every night.

So, whenever Pryor wanted to work out some new material, all he had to do was let her know, and she’d clear the decks for as many nights or weeks as he wanted. He usually did a show of at least ninety minutes that included two other comics he handpicked to precede him. He favored frequent collaborator Paul Mooney, Marsha Warfield, and David Letterman.

87

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 88

88

William Knoedelseder

When Pryor worked at the Store, it cost other comics their time slots, but this was the only time none of them cared. They each had their personal heroes and major influences—for Jay Leno it was Robert Klein, for Robin Williams it was Jonathan Winters, for many it was Johnny Carson—but collectively they recognized that Pryor was the closest thing their peculiar profession had to a genius on the scale of a Beethoven or Van Gogh.

Pryor was the cutting edge of their art form—a black man taking stand-up comedy to a place that even the persecuted and prose-cuted Lenny Bruce had not. Pryor’s use of ghetto slang and profanity on stage made George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” routine seem almost like a graduate lesson in linguistics. What were a few lost time slots compared to the chance of studying the master at work? When Pryor took the stage at the Comedy Store, nearly every local comic who wasn’t on stage somewhere else was on hand to watch and learn.

A Pryor appearance on Sunset Strip had the frenzied feel of a heavyweight title fight in Vegas, with lines stretching around the block as tourists and celebrities jostled for the fewer than two hundred seats per show, which, amazingly, Shore kept priced under $5. The gap between supply and demand proved a boon to the club’s senior doorman, Harris Peet, whose primary job was to escort patrons to their seats. Shore paid Peet $16 a night and apparently didn’t mind if he augmented his income at the expense of the paying customers. Peet unabashedly gave seating preference to patrons who were willing to grease his palm, to the point where he even handed out his home phone number to favored customers so they could call him well in advance to let him know how many seats they needed held. Thus, Pryor made it possible for Peet to buy his first color TV and stereo system.

Pryor’s drawing power also helped make it possible for Mitzi Shore to expand her comedy empire rapidly. She spent $50,000

turning Art Laboe’s former space into a 450-seat showroom, which she christened “the Main Room.” Much of the work was done by 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 89

I’m Dying Up Here

89

her in-house labor force of comics. While some scraped and hammered and painted, Argus Hamilton and several other runners were dispatched to fetch supplies from merchants all over town, armed with Shore’s credit card and her driver’s license for verifica-tion. As a safeguard, she blacked out her birth date on the license, saying, “It’s none of their business how old I am.” Hamilton risked immolation by carting lumber and painting materials from the hardware store in Shore’s Ford Pinto.

Shore opened a Comedy Store branch in the Pacific Beach neighborhood of San Diego and purchased three beachfront condos nearby, one for herself and two for the comedians who would be performing at the club. And she pushed her brand beyond Cali fornia by launching a college concert tour called “A Night at the Comedy Store,” featuring three comics. (Shore later moved the club from Pacific Beach to the far more upscale community of La Jolla).

When Shore surveyed her thriving operation, she saw not a nightclub business but a kind of college of comedy with a curriculum that allowed young comedians to develop their art in graduated stages—from potluck nights, to the regular lineup at Westwood and the Original Room, to headliner status in the Main Room. She saw the San Diego club as a paid vacation for comics who had done particularly well. They earned $300 for the Tuesday-through-Sunday gig and were sometimes driven down to La Jolla by limousine on Monday night. She thought of the college concert tour, which paid $100 per show, as on-the-job training for their eventual careers as opening acts on the road. In this view, she was the founder of Comedy U, its head of faculty and dean of students. And Professor Pryor was the school’s comedian emeritus, her genius in residence.

Everywhere she looked in the spring of 1977, Shore saw signs that her grand vision was producing results for her comics.

Jay Leno made his first appearance on
The Tonight Show
on March 2, nearly three years after he moved to Los Angeles. Robin Williams and Mike Binder accompanied him to the taping.

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 90

90

William Knoedelseder

He stumbled out of the box when his first two bits fell flat.

Then, in a rare
Tonight Show
moment, a man in the studio audience heckled him. Leno paused for just the right fraction of a second, then turned slightly toward Carson and said, “This is the same guy who talks to the TV at home: ‘Look out, Kojak! Behind you!’ ‘Oh, thank you, Mr. Viewer.’” He’d used that comeback on hecklers dozens of times during his years playing small clubs, but he never got a bigger laugh than the one he got from Carson.

Having righted himself, he sailed through the rest of his autobiographically inspired six minutes, which included a supposedly typical dinner-table discussion with his father:

“Dad, could you pass the salt? ”

“Salt? We didn’t have salt when we were kids. We had to live without it. We didn’t have underwear or potatoes. We ate dirt every day of the week. Your mother and I hunted wild dogs for food. We had nothing when we were your age.”

All in all, it was a solid debut. But Johnny didn’t invite him over to chat on the couch, and Leno went to bed that night deeply bummed. But he bounced back with five more appearances that year.

Elayne Boosler finally got on
The Tonight Show
on August 9, no thanks to Carson. Boosler owed her big break to guest host Helen (“I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar”) Reddy. She did well enough to be booked again on September 15, with Tim Conway and Johnny Mathis as guests and Carson hosting. But Johnny proved true to his bias. He never booked Boosler again.

George Miller made six
Tonight Show
appearances in 1977. He finally broke through when Craig Tennis, who didn’t think he was very funny, left the show and was replaced by Jim McCawley, who did.

After knee surgery that kept him from performing for nearly a year, Richard Lewis made a triumphant return to
The Tonight
1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 91

I’m Dying Up Here

91

Show
in June 1977 and logged three more appearances before year’s end.

David Letterman made his national TV debut in the summer of 1977 as a regular on the musical variety series
The Starland
Vocal Band.

Robin Williams and Argus Hamilton were cast as regulars in a new version of
Laugh In
that aired over the summer.

After scoring big ratings in the spring with a one-hour NBC

TV special, Richard Pryor was signed by the network to do a comedy variety series,
The Richard Pryor Show
, beginning in the fall.

Pryor showed his loyalty to the Comedy Store by hiring a cast comprised almost entirely of the club’s young performers: Robin Williams, Argus Hamilton, Marsha Warfield, Sandra Bern hard, Paul Mooney, Tim Reid, John Witherspoon, and Charles Fleisher.

Robin Williams’s rise had been meteoric. The product of a privileged upbringing in affluent Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, he’d attended the Julliard School of Drama on scholarship and performed at San Francisco’s Holy City Zoo before migrating to Los Angeles in September 1976. In the comedy capital of America, he had caused an instant sensation.

Mitzi Shore was so knocked out by his first Monday night audition at the Sunset Strip Comedy Store that she immediately called the Westwood club and told Argus Hamilton, “I’m coming over right now with this new comic so he can do there what he just did here.”

Williams walked onto the Westwood stage barefoot and dressed in a T-shirt and overalls, placed his hands on his hips just so, and said with a spot-on prissy gayness, “Now a reading from
Two Gentlemen
of Santa Monica
, also known as
As You Lick It
.” Then he broke into full Shakespearean profundity: “Hark, the moon, like a testicle, hangs low in the sky.” The audience exploded with laughter.

Shore wasted no time in giving Williams the best time slots at both clubs and putting out the word in the business that there was a new kid in town whose act had to be seen to be believed. Soon the lines to see Williams were long, and the buzz was palpable.

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 92

92

William Knoedelseder

But it was Tom Dreesen who outdid all his Comedy Store pals in 1977. Following his first
Tonight Show
appearance the previous December, Dreesen appeared in quick succession on every TV

show that booked comics:
The Merv Griffin Show
,
The Dinah Shore
Show
,
The Mike Douglas Show
,
American Bandstand
,
Midnight Special
,
Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert
,
Soul Train
,
Match Game
, and
Hollywood Squares.
A guest appearance on the talk show
Sammy
and Company
moved host Sammy Davis Jr. to announce, “Man, I’m taking you on the road with me.” Dreesen spent the rest of the year opening alternately for Davis and Tony Orlando in the biggest showrooms in Vegas, Tahoe, Reno, and Atlantic City. He also logged eight more appearances on
The Tonight Show
(for a total of fifteen since his debut)
.
Two years before, he’d been broke and worried about paying rent. Now, his annual income was approach-ing $300,000, and he was able to buy a house in Sherman Oaks with a bedroom for each of his three kids. Thank you, Johnny.

But the biggest thrill of the year for Dreesen was when he went back home to Harvey, Illinois, where the city fathers proclaimed “Tom Dreesen Day” in honor of his three sold-out nights in the 1,000-seat ballroom of the Harvey Holiday Inn. People paid $25 each to see the local boy who’d made good, netting Dreesen a nifty payday of $58,000. At the close of each hour-plus performance, he turned serious.

“Normally, wherever I go I end the show with my biggest laugh and then walk off,” he said. “But this isn’t just any audience in any town. This is my home. And it’s a very emotional night for me because when I look out at you, I see the faces of people whose golf bags I carried in the hot sun, for nickels and dimes. I see people who I sold newspapers to on the street corner, for nickels and dimes, and people whose shoes I shined on my hands and knees, for nickels and dimes. And as I stand here now, I can’t help thinking. . . . Boy, I really got you bastards back tonight.”

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 93

Richard’s Baroness,

Steve’s Movie

No one took more advantage of the era’s prevailing sexual promiscuity than Richard Lewis. One of the reasons he preferred performing at the Improv to working at the Comedy Store was that the bar at Budd Friedman’s place was a much better scene for meeting beautiful women.

One night, he managed to get picked up by a pair of them, but when they got him to their apartment, he passed out on the bed from drinking while they were taking their clothes off. Later, he dimly remembered them, naked and irritated, trying to get him to perform, to no avail. The next thing he remembered was being dumped out of their car a few blocks from the Improv. Such mis-adventures became grist for his act, entries in the sex manual he told audiences he was writing, titled
Ow! You’re on My Hair
.

There were serious relationships as well. Lewis had a whirl-wind romance with actress Debra Winger, a former cocktail waitress at the Improv who’d become an overnight sensation for her performance in
Urban Cowboy
. Unfortunately for him, Winger was just taking flight and not interested in limiting herself to the 93

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 94

94

William Knoedelseder

exclusive sort of relationship he envisioned. After a few months, she left him nursing a badly broken heart.

He bounced back quickly, however. One night that spring, he’d just finished a terrific set and was huddled with a handful of comics in the Improv bar when he spotted the most beautiful woman he’d ever laid eyes on. She was looking right at him and smiling, so he assumed she’d just watched the show. Suddenly he realized he knew who she was: Nina van Pallandt, the Danish actress and baroness who’d starred with Elliott Gould in Robert Altman’s
The
Long Goodbye.
She’d been on the cover of
Life
magazine.

“I’m going to go over and talk to her,” he said to his friends.

“Get the fuck outta here,” was their response. “She’s a princess or something.”

“I don’t care,” he shot back. “I’m a regular at the Improv.”

He walked across the room, figuring he had nothing to lose and maybe twenty seconds to make an impression. He introduced himself and dropped one of the greatest pickup lines in the history of male-female relations: “I’ll take you out for a tuna fish sandwich anywhere in the city.” She laughed. The next night they went for a long walk on the beach in Santa Monica. He was twenty-nine and she was forty-three with three teenage children, but none of that mattered. They fell madly in love.

Lewis spent the summer of 1977 on the road opening for Sonny and Cher. The duo’s reunion TV series had fizzled, but they remained a big draw on the concert circuit. Lewis was paid about $500 a week (they got as much as $175,000 a night), and his job was basically to keep the crowds occupied for half an hour or so while the stars put on their makeup. In the stand-up comedy trade, it’s known as “custodial work.”