I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (14 page)

The tour was stressful for Lewis because he missed Nina, and the only thing he could count on was the fact that no one in the crowd had paid to see him or even knew who he was. At the state fair in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he had to perform outdoors at 4:00 p.m. with a roller coaster running full bore behind him and 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 95

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circus animals being paraded around a race track between him and the audience. He was supposed to do thirty minutes, but the distractions were so extreme that he raced through his routine and bolted from the stage after ten minutes, sure that it meant the end of his career. He was consoled by a grizzled patron who told him, “Trust me, kid. Bill Cosby was here last week, and he only did fifteen minutes.”

In Hartford, Connecticut, they played the 15,000-seat Hartford Civic Center. Before the show, Lewis had dinner in the center’s glassed-in VIP restaurant. From where he sat, he could barely see the stage; it had to be a quarter of a mile away. He looked around at all the people drinking and eating steaks and lobster and realized that in a little while he was going to be playing to them, competing with the booze and the butter sauce for their attention. That’s when the fear set it, and he started drinking. By showtime he was slurring his words. It was not a good performance, even if the folks in the restaurant were too far away to tell.

The next day, Sonny Bono chided him. “Were you a little loaded last night? You seemed kind of off.” Lewis told him what had happened at the restaurant. “Well, you really should try to cool it,” Bono said gently.

Lewis didn’t know Cher—she always showed up just before the couple went on stage—but he considered Sonny a friend. They’d hung out together after shows. And Sonny had given him his big break in show business after all. Lewis was determined to make up for letting Sonny down in Hartford. Later in the tour, they were playing the Montreal Forum, home of the Canadiens hockey team. As Lewis walked onto the stage, he decided that for Sonny he was willing to sell out his own beloved hockey team. “The New York Rangers suck,” were the first words out of his mouth.

The crowd was instantly on its feet cheering. He never lost them after that.

When the tour moved to Wisconsin, they played another outdoor venue, with 15,000 people spread out on picnic blankets.

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Lewis’s show was at 7:30 p.m. when it was still light out. Bono knew that was a bad situation for a stand-up comic, so he surprised Lewis by showing up just before he went on stage. “I just came to see the fear in your eyes,” he said with a smile. That triggered something in Lewis that moved him to deliver his best set of the entire tour. He didn’t just kill—he destroyed. Walking back to his hotel at dusk, he looked back over his shoulder at the huge banks of ballpark lights illuminating moths the size of Rodan, and he heard the announcer say over the loudspeaker, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sonny and Cher.” He felt a surge of pride.

All by himself, he’d made 15,000 people laugh in broad daylight.

He had nothing more to prove to anyone. When this tour was over, he was never going to be an opening act again.

Between touring with Sonny and Cher and falling in love with Nina, Lewis had little time to hang out with Steve Lubetkin. But from their frequent phone conversations, he gathered that Steve’s career was not rising with the comedy tide.
Dante Shocko
apparently was a bust. After spending eighteen months getting the film shot and edited, Steve couldn’t get anyone to distribute it. Richard had attended one of the two industry screenings that Steve set up at the Encore Theater on Melrose Avenue, along with one hundred plus agents, managers, distribution executives, fellow comics, friends, and friends of friends. Steve’s brother, Barry, even flew in from New York to see the movie. Mitzi Shore came, too.

Lewis knew he wasn’t the most objective judge of Steve’s work, but he thought the movie was funny, rough in places, sure, with some jokes that fell flat, but with lots of energy and Steve-ness.

Mostly, he was impressed that Steve had pulled it off, down to getting all those people to show up for the screening. He didn’t know any other young comic who’d written, produced, and starred in his own movie.

As usual, Lubetkin put on a brave face for his best friend. He was disappointed about the movie but not discouraged, he said.

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He still thought
Dante
would be released eventually, and it would be a success. The problem, he said, was that all “the biggies” running the movie companies just didn’t know what funny was.

Steve told Richard that he and Susan Evans were now working together as a stand-up team, billed as Lubetkin & Evans. He was writing the material for them, and they were gigging at small clubs around LA in preparation for taking the act to the Comedy Store stage.

Richard didn’t say it, but he was concerned that Steve was letting another career setback send him spinning off in an entirely different direction, just as he’d done when
The Tonight Show
rejection caused him to quit stand-up and turn filmmaker. He worried that Steve was far more upset about the fate of his movie than he was letting on.

In fact, Steve was devastated, in no small part because most of the money spent to make
Dante Shocko
had come from his father.

Jack Lubetkin lent him more than $15,000, which was a lot of money for a man of his means to lose. Barry kicked in a few thousand, too. Both men had been reluctant to invest in the movie, but Steve lobbied hard, peppering them with phone calls and letters that played up the project’s “can’t-miss” qualities. “The director thinks
Dante
will be a giant hit.”

They weren’t persuaded by his rosy predictions of huge profits; they put up the money because they feared he’d take their failure to do so as lack of faith in his talent. The movie was so important to him—he had so much of his ego invested in it—that they felt they needed to back him to whatever extent they could.

The long production and editing process had put a strain on family relations, as Jack Lubetkin fretted that the first-time director Steve had hooked up with, William Larrabure, was more interested in taking the money than making the movie. Steve defended Larrabure’s slow pace by saying he was “a perfectionist and a metic-ulous editor whose wife had a miscarriage, which took him out of 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 98

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action for a period.” Later, he revealed that “Bill is leaving his wife and has been living under intense stress” and that the director “simultaneously had to work on another project.”

The tension between father and son got to the point where Steve began communicating only with Barry. “If you call me on my birthday please give me a birthday present by sparing me the doubts, accusations and second guesses that help nothing and just give me physical pain,” he wrote in a letter.

“I’ll tell you, living as I do (poor) and with the expectations I have (justified and big) it’s a wonder I haven’t had a nervous breakdown already. Barry, in a short while you and daddy will be very, very proud of me, not only because of the movie I’ve created but because of the hell I’ve lived through in waiting for it.

“The film is going to stun you,” he wrote. “
Believe me
.”

Jack and Barry Lubetkin wanted to believe in Steve’s dream, but the demise of
Dante Shocko
made it exponentially more difficult. They’d watched him ride the comedy roller coaster for six years—rising and falling, veering one way and then the next, from Budd Friedman to Mitzi Shore to Johnny Carson to
Dante
Shocko—
and now they feared he was careening toward a crash.

It was Steve’s idea to form Lubetkin & Evans; Susan had reservations. For one thing, in an effort to work her into the act, he was writing skits that involved putting on wigs and hats and changing characters, and she didn’t think the material went over as well as when he was just going one-on-one with the audience.

That’s where he excelled—in working off the cuff, responding to heckles. But Steve was certain that the new act would work. As he wrote in a two-page manifesto aimed at girding them for the task ahead, “If we stick it out, we’ll make it. If we follow these rules, we’ll stick it out. Therefore, if we follow these rules and read them, we will make it.” The “rules” included

• We’re the only male-female comedy team. That’s the kind of selling point that speaks to people. Stick it out.

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• The more we do it, the more we can make a living from it.

• Everyone endures failure, hecklers, noise. . . . Just brush it off, hang in, and make it.

• Totally disregard embarrassment, criticism, etc.

• The rewards for sticking it out are the biggest of any business.

• The heckles and put-downs are just like the occasional rejection you get in any business.

• Worst thing just a temporary pain.

• We could experience one of the greatest joys imaginable—shared joy as it happens.

• We could help people we like, if we make it. . . . Stick it out.

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The Funniest Year Ever

In the annals of American entertainment, 1978 will be remembered as the Year of Comedy. The Fiftieth Annual Academy Awards ceremony kicked it off on April 3 when Woody Allen’s
Annie Hall
won an unprecedented (for a comedy) four Oscars—

Best Picture, Best Actress (Diane Keaton), Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay (both to Allen).

Faster than you could say, “I’d like to thank my agent,” the major Hollywood studios had multiple picture deals in place with Steve Martin, Mel Brooks, Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin, David Steinberg, Martin Mull, Marty Feldman, Chevy Chase, Cheech and Chong, and the writing staff of the
National Lampoon
.

A number of them got what was becoming known in the business as “the Woody Allen deal.” Steve Martin’s contract, for example, called for him to receive $500,000 to write and star in his first movie,
The Jerk
, which he could also direct if he wanted to (he didn’t). In addition, Universal Pictures agreed to give Martin and his company, Aspen Film Society, the final cut, the last word on the movie’s marketing campaign, and 50 percent of the profits.

Martin quickly set a new standard for stand-up success. On April 22, he promoted his upcoming national concert tour with 101

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his fifth appearance as the host of
Saturday Night Live
. His musical guests that night were John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in their debut as the Blues Brothers.
SNL
was just hitting its creative peak in 1978, becoming the highest-rated late-night show in TV history and forging what was being hailed as “the best demographic in television,” an audience dominated by eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds, the big spending, record-buying, and movie- and concertgoing public.

Martin went on to play sixty sold-out one-nighters (at a minimum fee of $75,000), packing concert halls and stadiums with as many as 20,000 near-hysterical fans who came not so much to laugh as to cheer their favorite Martin routines—his greatest hits—not waiting for punch lines, breaking into applause at the first hint of “happy feet.”

“It’s kind of like being Jesus or Hitler,” Martin told the
Los Angeles Times
, referring to the phenomenon that his fellow comics dubbed “rock ’n’ roll comedy.”

Indeed, Martin’s first album,
Let’s Get Small
, went multiplat-inum during the tour, and he scored a No. 1 single with
King Tut
, which was born as a musical comedy sketch on
SNL.
(
King Tut
was featured on his follow-up album,
A Wild and Crazy Guy
, which was named after another
SNL
sketch. Together Martin’s two albums sold more than 5 million copies.) Meanwhile, based on their
SNL
appearance with Martin, Blues Brothers Aykroyd and Belushi landed a million-dollar contract of their own with Atlantic Records. On September 18, they opened for Martin at the Universal Amphitheater in what was regarded as the concert of the year in Los Angeles. Atlantic recorded the Brothers’ performance and released it as an album titled
Briefcase
Full of Blues
during the first week of December. Naturally, it shot to No. 1 on the pop charts on its way to selling 2 million copies.

At the same time, Belushi’s first movie,
Animal House
, was setting a box office record for a comedy, racking more than $100 million in U.S. ticket sales. Executives at Universal Pictures, which pro-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 103

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duced and distributed
Animal House
, fell all over themselves to sign Belushi and Aykroyd to write and star in
The Blues Brothers
Movie.
By the time
SNL
’s fourth season got underway in the fall, most of its cast had movie and/or record deals in the offing.

“They’ve become the Beatles of comedy,” said talent manager Bernie Brillstein, who numbered Aykroyd, Belushi, Gilda Radner, and
SNL
producer Lorne Michaels among his clients.

Any showbiz suit could see that America was in a mood to laugh. And that put Mitzi Shore and Budd Friedman and their stables of stand-up comics at the vortex. The atmosphere inside the Comedy Store and the Improv was positively charged as an army of agents, managers, talent scouts, network executives, and show producers prowled the showrooms, hallways, bars, and parking lots, looking for new talent to feed the public’s appetite for humor. In the days before twenty-four-hour cable TV and video-tapes that could be sent around to serve as auditions, if you wanted to see comedians, you had to go see them perform live.