I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (16 page)

• It’s the thing I do best.

• It’s the only thing I can do well that I can make big money with.

• I need to show success to Dad and Bar.

• I could advocate for good if I was famous—for decency, national health insurance, candidates I like.

• It’s the only way I can achieve fame.

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 111

Roommates

Mitzi Shore had reason to feel proud. Not quite five years after her ex-husband asked her to tend to his troubled business while he was out of town, she sat at the center of the biggest boom in show business. Yes, she’d been lucky to be in the right place at the right moment, but she had made that moment her own. The networks’

prime-time schedule read like a roster of young comics whose careers she’d fostered: Jimmie Walker, Andy Kaufman, Robin Williams, David Letterman, Jay Leno, Michael Keaton, Mike Binder, Billy Crystal (now a regular on the sitcom
Mary Hartman,
Mary Hartman
), and Steve Landesberg (a regular on the sitcom
Barney Miller
). Of course, Budd Friedman could—and did—claim the same influence over many of their careers (“According to Budd, Magellan got his start there,” Letterman once quipped).

But Shore got more ink, partly because she was a female in the traditionally male role of club owner and partly because she was so odd that she made for a better story than Budd, what with her un-forgettable voice, stringy beatnik hair, and dark, rococo office lit only by Tiffany lamps that made the room look, in the words of one comic, “like a brothel designed by Disney.” This, after all, was a woman who named her daughter Sandi Cee Shore.

111

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 112

112

William Knoedelseder

Shore no longer held a monopoly. There was now a third major showcase club in New York, the Comic Strip, and two more paying clubs in the Los Angeles area, the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach and the Laff Stop in Newport Beach.

Clubs that used to feature comics as entertainment one night a week were adding nights, and more clubs were being planned.

But the Comedy Store was more than a nightclub. Under her tutelage, it had become an institution. And Shore was more than a club owner. ABC made that official by signing her to a contract as a consultant, charged with seeking out young comic talent for the network’s shows. As 1978 drew to a close, Mitzi Shore was the undisputed queen bee of comedy, and her hive was humming.

Shore chose that moment to reveal her latest plan for expansion. She called a meeting of all her female comics and told them that she was going to convert an empty space next to her office on the second floor of the Sunset building into a showroom for women only. It would be called the Belly Room, in honor of the belly dancers who had performed there back in the days of Ciro’s.

She liked the name because it also called to mind the womb and the best kind of laughter. So it had a triple meaning.

“This will be your own space where you can develop your own style of comedy,” she said. It would be a supportive atmosphere, where they could be their feminine selves, free from the testosterone-fueled competition and male dominance of the other rooms.

“Women are not like men,” she explained. “You can’t do the same kind of comedy they do. Now Totie Fields, God rest her soul, she could because she had a very masculine delivery, but most women can’t.”

The twenty or so women gathered in the Original Room to hear Shore ranged from thirty-six-year-old Lotus Weinstock to fifteen-year-old Alison Arngrim. So Shore’s words fell upon ears separated by a generation. Weinstock loved the idea so much that 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 113

I’m Dying Up Here

113

some of the others suspected she had planted it with Mitzi. Robin Tyler, too, was all for it. Of course, as a militant feminist lesbian, she was pretty much for anything that excluded men. Some of the younger women were ambivalent. They were happy to hear that Mitzi understood their plight as women comics and wanted to do something about it. And they could sure use the additional time slots. But they wondered if this was the best way to gain parity with the men in the marketplace. To be assigned to a special room? Sent to special school? They worried about being marginal-ized, ghettoized.

Elayne Boosler dismissed the whole idea as ridiculous. There was no need to separate the sexes, she thought. People laughed at what was funny. No one ever sat there and said, “Gee, that was funny. Too bad you’re a girl.” Marsha Warfield was offended, “just like I would be if someone was proposing a ‘Negro Night.’” Neither woman had any intention of ever performing in the Belly Room. No way.

The youngest in the room, Alison Arngrim, was appalled by what she heard but not completely surprised. She’d experienced a side of Mitzi that few, if any, of the others had seen.

Arngrim was not a typical teenager. For one thing, she was already famous. America knew her as Nellie Olson, the mean little girl on
Little House on the Prairie.
Arngrim had grown up in Los Angeles, the product of a show business family. She’d been around performers, agents, managers, producers, and impresarios all her life. But she thought she’d never met anyone more cunningly manipulative than Mitzi Shore.

After passing a Monday night audition, Arngrim had started performing at Sunset, mostly in the wee hours on weeknights. By law, she couldn’t even be inside the club unless she was performing. So, she waited out in the parking lot until someone signaled through the front window that it was time for her to go on. Then, she’d run into the building and up onto the stage and launch into 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 114

114

William Knoedelseder

an act that played off her precocity: “Hi, I just came from the Roman Polanksi Day Care Center.”

The fact that a young actress on a hit TV show still aspired to be a stand-up comic indicated the respect the profession was accorded at that moment. And for all her Hollywood worldliness, Arngrim still retained some vestige of teenage girlhood. She had a secret crush on Jay Leno and thought he had a really cute butt.

Arngrim had been performing for a few months when Shore called her and said she wanted to meet with her in her office. “No one else, just you alone,” she said. As a fifteen-year-old, Arngrim wasn’t allowed to go anywhere unescorted. Someone always accompanied her to auditions and engagements. Her agent thought Shore’s request was weird but decided it was okay for Arngrim to go because Shore was a woman—“and what could she possibly do to you.”

In the course of the meeting, Arngrim concluded that Shore wanted to control her, dictate what kind of material she did, become her mother. Shore launched into a spiel about “what was appropriate for a young lady,” as if she found the very idea of a fifteen-year-old female comic distasteful. After a few minutes, Arngrim cut her off with her own spiel.

“Look, if you don’t like my act and don’t think I’m funny, then don’t give me any times,” she said. “If I come in and perform and people don’t laugh, then don’t book me. And if you don’t think that any of the tourists in the audience watch
Little House
and sometimes come here because they heard the girl from
Little House
is performing here, then okay.”

Shore wasn’t used to being talked to that way. She was seething when Arngrim left, and Arngrim felt like she’d just done battle with Cruella De Vil. Shore kept booking her, but not at Sunset, only at Westwood, which suited Arngrim just fine because she thought the Sunset building had a kind of dark, spooky energy.

As she listened to Shore sharing her vision of the Belly Room several months later, Arngrim realized that the previous en-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 115

I’m Dying Up Here

115

counter really hadn’t been about her at all. Shore was just the product of another time. She was channeling her Jewish mother and grandmother from whom she’d inherited the mind-set that women had certain roles to play. It was like in the 1950s when young women were told what courses to take in college to attract a good husband. “My home ec teacher wouldn’t give this speech,”

Arngrim thought to herself. “Any minute she’s going to start telling us what kind of material we should do to be better wives and mothers.”

Shore didn’t hear any of the women’s concerns about the Belly Room, however. No one said anything to her that day for fear of upsetting her. She may have been wrongheaded, but she still owned the club. Most of the women adopted a wait-and-see attitude.

As far as Shore was concerned, the main problem she faced at the Comedy Store had to do with the Main Room—it wasn’t working out as planned. Hoping to rekindle the glamorous spirit of Ciro’s by offering a taste of the Las Vegas strip on Sunset Strip, she had opened the venue with considerable fanfare in the fall of 1977, with Jackie Mason headlining a four-night stand. After Mason came similar multiple-night runs by Mort Sahl, Shelley Ber -

man, Dick Gregory, and Andy Kaufman. But booking acts with names big enough to sell tickets became more difficult as 1978

wore on because the Vegas headliners Shore had been counting on—the Don Rickles and Shecky Greens of the world, her old buddies—couldn’t be convinced to appear there. Even with her offer of half the door—amounting to an easy five grand for 90

minutes of in-town work—they worried about the financial impact on their careers. They earned their biggest paychecks in Vegas and feared that if people could see them in Los Angeles—just a six-hour drive or one-hour plane flight away—then it would siphon off their customers in the casinos, causing their prices to drop. They sympathized, but it just wasn’t worth the risk, they told her. As a result, Shore was reduced to booking such marginal acts as Tiny Tim, who drew barely a handful of people one Saturday 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 116

116

William Knoedelseder

night. After she’d spent a small fortune redecorating it, the Main Room sat empty most of the time.

She was discussing the problem one day with two of her most loyal employees, Argus Hamilton and Biff Maynard, when Hamilton hit on a possible solution. Why not put her most popular performers in there, say, a package of five, doing twenty-minute sets?

Imagine the marquee: “Tonight: Robin Williams, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Elayne Boosler, and Tom Dreesen.” Who wouldn’t pay $5 or $10 a pop to see that? Call it “The Best of the Comedy Store.” It had a young, rock ’n’ roll ring to it, like “The Comedy Store’s Greatest Hits.” It could be a record album.

Shore thought it was brilliant, a no-brainer: more time slots for the comics, more customers for the Store. Win-win. It never occurred to her that it would spark a rebellion, with the women at the forefront.

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 117

The New Year’s Resolution

At 3:00 a.m. on New Year’s Day 1979, the tables at Canter’s Deli were groaning with comics just coming down from the high of their New Year’s Eve performances at the Comedy Store. Both the Sunset and Westwood clubs had been filled to capacity, and the crowds ringing out the Year of Comedy had been promiscu-ous with their laughter. To hear the comics tell it, there’d been so much killing, destroying, and massacring from the stage that it was a miracle anyone in the audience got out alive.

At Tom Dreesen’s table, Michael Rapport was rhapsodizing about his set at Westwood, telling the others, “It was the best I ever did. I mean, every bit worked. I’ve never experienced anything like it.” A few minutes later, he turned to Dreesen and said, sotto voce, “Hey, Tommy, can you lend me five bucks for breakfast? ”

“Sure, man,” Dreesen whispered, digging a bill out of his wallet and passing it under the table. Dottie Archibald caught the exchange and quickly turned away so as not to embarrass Rapport. Like Dreesen, she was known as a soft touch and had been hit up for a fiver numerous times. It always made her feel sad; there were so many broke comics.

117

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 118

118

William Knoedelseder

Dreesen usually didn’t stop to ponder the underlying inequity of working comics having to borrow money to eat. He figured it was part of the deal that they’d all signed onto. But on this night, the deal seemed more unfair than usual because Mitzi Shore had charged $20 a head at the door. He did the math in his head: $20

times approximately four hundred seats times three shows equaled $24,000, not a penny of which went to the comics. It seemed all the more unfair a little later when one of the Comedy Store waitresses stopped in at Canter’s and mentioned that she had made $214 that night.

Two Saturday nights later, Dreesen arrived at the Comedy Store for his 9 p.m. set and was informed by one of Mitzi’s assistants that instead of performing in the Original Room, he would be appearing in the Main Room, along with four other comics.

“No shit? ” he said, pleased at his apparent promotion. He’d been on the road and hadn’t heard about Mitzi’s new plan for making the Main Room profitable. This was debut night for “The Best of the Comedy Store,” and the others on the bill were Robin Williams, Jay Leno, David Letterman, and Elayne Boosler.

None of them had played the Main Room before. It was considerably larger than the Original Room, with nearly four times the seats, a higher ceiling, a wider stage, and more sophisticated lighting. It was much more a professional showroom than a showcase club, and it definitely didn’t feel like a workshop. The experience reminded Dreesen of performing in Tahoe or Vegas.

At Canter’s after the show, Jay Leno got right down to it. “Does anyone think this system is fair anymore?” he asked rhetorically.

“I mean, that place was fuckin’ packed tonight. It took five of us to do it, but it was still packed, at $15 a head with a two-drink minimum. Shouldn’t we get something for that? When Rodney [Dangerfield] and Richard [Pryor] play that room, Mitzi gives them the door. Shouldn’t we get, like, I don’t know, half the door?”