I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (18 page)

Kaufman had time to moonlight because, thanks in part to Binder, he didn’t have to work very hard at his day job on
Taxi.

Kaufman hated the rehearsal process, believing it detracted from real performance. So, to keep him happy, Paramount agreed that he didn’t have to rehearse all week with the rest of the cast just so long as he showed up fully prepared for the Saturday taping. The studio hired Binder to run Kaufman’s lines with costars Judd Hirsh, Danny DeVito, Marilu Henner, Tony Danza, and Jeff Conaway—a move that didn’t endear Andy to the others. Binder then would meet Kaufman on Friday night with a copy of the script and a dia-gram of the set—“Okay, they are doing this bit here, and Latka is over here by the car”—and Kaufman would go in the next morning and usually nail it in one take.

The gig was a great deal for Binder. He got $1,000 a week out of Kaufman’s salary and daily access to some of the best writers, producers, and directors in the TV business. But he didn’t take advantage of it. He really only wanted to be a nightclub comic and stay out until 5:00 a.m. with other nightclub comics. So, he constantly showed up half an hour late and dog tired for his 10:00 a.m. call on the
Taxi
set, irritating the cast and crew, who couldn’t believe they had to wait “for a fucking stand-in.” It pissed them off all the more at Kaufman.

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When Binder wasn’t hanging out with Leno, he gravitated to the hard-partying crowd. No teenager ever had easier access to controlled substances. Among comics, alcohol and pot were givens. You couldn’t stand in the Comedy Store parking lot for five minutes without someone passing you a joint. Jay Leno, David Letterman, Tom Dreesen, and Andy Kaufman were in the small minority that didn’t indulge. George Miller indulged more than anyone. His consumption of various and sundry downers began to worry his best buddies, Letterman and Dreesen, to the point that one afternoon they drove deep into the San Fernando Valley to check out a drug-rehabilitation facility. They explained to the woman in charge that they were interested in getting treatment for a friend. As they talked, she kept smiling at them oddly and glancing out the window. Finally, she admitted that she recognized them from
The Tonight Show
and asked if this was some sort of comedy bit they were doing. Was there a camera truck outside?

A few days later, Tom and Dave took George for a drive. “We need to talk to you,” Dreesen said. “We’re really concerned about your drug use. It seems to be getting out of hand.”

“Oh, come
on
,” George protested. “It’s just recreational. I’m fine; don’t worry about it.” He was adamant that he would not go to rehab and said if they took him there, he would not get out of the car.

Letterman looked at Dreesen and shrugged, “Well, we tried.”

In the late 1970s, Hollywood was having a honeymoon with cocaine. The drug seemed tailor-made for the show business lifestyle—perfect for production crews working fourteen-hour shifts and six-day weeks on movie sets, just the thing for actors suddenly called to action after hours of sitting around waiting, a godsend for musicians dragging their tired asses off the tour bus for yet another two-hour show in yet another two-horse town.

Coke made its way into the comedy community, not surprisingly, around the time more and more people started getting paying gigs. Someone would come in off the road and walk into the 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 129

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Westwood or Sunset club with a little extra swagger, and you could tell he was carrying. Having a little blow meant you could stay up drinking and partying a few hours longer. But coke was not like pot, a communal drug that could be passed around openly.

You couldn’t share your coke with a group because you couldn’t afford to. The best you could do was pick a friend or two to do

“bumps” with in the bathroom. Either that or hang with others who likewise were gainfully enough employed to have their own.

In that way, coke was a separator, a barrier between the haves and have-nots. In a line that always got a big laugh, particularly at the Sunset Store, Robin Williams observed, “Cocaine is God’s way of telling you that you’re making too much money.”

He would know. In the months since he had become a household name, Williams had turned into a party animal nonpareil.

Despite the rigors of a weekly TV show that was built around him, he was out on the town nearly every night, making the scene at Westwood and Sunset, at the Improv, at the Off the Wall studio in Hollywood. If there was a stage, he got on it. “Live performing, that’s my drug,” he told one interviewer. “I really do feel like a junky, not just for the laughs but the energy.”

Some of Williams’s fellow comics knew that his energy was fueled increasingly by cocaine. He was part of a group that regularly ended up back at Mitzi Shore’s house after the clubs closed on the weekend, drinking and snorting coke until near dawn. In addition to Williams, the gathering usually included Argus Hamilton, Biff Maynard, Ollie Joe Prater, Mike Binder, Richard Pryor, and Shore herself.

Pryor was the main attraction to the young comics. For them, to sit at the feet of the master while he told hilarious, wildly animated stories about his life in comedy was a near-religious experience.

The blow just made it last longer.

Word of the after-hours get-togethers quickly got around and created bad feelings toward Mitzi’s “pets.” The uninvited resented the special access to Shore, to Pryor, and to the coke.

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Straight-arrow Leno was upset for another reason. He thought the drugs and drinking were taking a toll on his two pals, Binder and Williams. He felt personally responsible for Mike because he’d told Burt Binder that his son was doing great out in Hollywood and promised to look out for him.

“You’re going over to Mitzi’s tonight, aren’t you,” Leno would say whenever Binder declined his invitation to come to his house after the show. “What are you doing that for? Why are you hanging out with those guys doing drugs? Don’t you see that you are wasting your talent. You should stay home and work on your act.”

But neither Binder nor any of the others heeded Leno’s warning, and the results eventually proved disastrous for all of them.

Williams was causing concern among his fellow comics for another reason in early 1979. Of the group that emigrated to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, he was the first to hit it big. And no one had ever hit it bigger, not Freddie Prinze, not even Steve Martin. With
Mork & Mindy
atop the TV ratings, Williams’s fame was such that he wasn’t merely recognized in public—he was mobbed. Even at the usually too-hip Comedy Store, newcomer fans began hollering out Mork’s Orkan greeting, “Na-noo, na-noo,” when he took the stage. Williams was embarrassed by such outbursts and uncomfortable being treated like a celebrity.

But he didn’t exactly hide from the spotlight. He seemed to turn up on every talk show and at every celebrity event; camera crews and reporters trailed him wherever he went. His face was un-avoidable.
Time
magazine was about to put him on its cover, accompanied by the headline, “Chaos in Television, and What It Takes to Be No. 1.”

In Williams’s case, it took a lot of material. Much of what came out of Mork’s mouth came straight from Williams’s brain.

The show’s writers left him plenty of room to improvise by salting the script with stage directions like “Robin goes
off
here” in place of written dialog. The combination of
Mork & Mindy
, his club performances, extracurricular TV appearances, and constant me-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 131

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dia interviews put extreme pressure on Williams to be “on” during every waking moment. And it was that pressure, some of his pals said, that led him to commit the cardinal sin of comedy: borrowing other comics’ material.

In a
People
magazine profile, Williams was depicted in full improvisational mode, suddenly interrupting the interview to answer a pretend telephone: “Suicide hotline. Hold please.” It was a funny bit, but, as Williams’s colleagues knew, it belonged to Gary Muledeer. He’d delivered the line many times at the Comedy Store with Williams in the crowd. In another instance, Williams uttered the vaguely druggie line “Reality, what a concept” so often that it became synonymous with him (and later the title of his first comedy album) instead of comedian Charles Fleisher, who had been saying it for years.

Williams attended a Gallagher show at the Ice House in Pasa -

dena one night when the watermelon-smashing comic joked from the stage, “You know, I think marijuana is great for old people because it slows down time. I gave my grandmother a kilo of Co -

lumbian and a ton of yarn, and I got back an Afghan big enough to cover a garage.”

A few nights later, Gallagher saw Williams on a talk show riff-ing about marijuana being good for old folks “because it makes time go so slow.”

“That little fuckhead sucked up the essence of my joke,” Gallagher was still complaining decades later.

Bill Kirchenbauer had a routine about playing Superman as a kid. He’d pull a towel out of his prop bag, tie it around his neck like a cape, run in a semicircle around the stage, then leap and land on a stool balanced on his stomach with his legs straight out in Superman flying position. It always got a great reaction from the crowd, in part because it was such an unexpectedly agile move for a man of Kirchenbauer’s ample size.

Kirchenbauer was watching Williams onstage at the Comedy Store one night when Robin suddenly hopped onto the stool on 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 132

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his back, imitating the Man of Steel flying upside down. “Superman on drugs,” he said.

Everybody laughed except Kirchenbauer, who confronted Wil -

liams afterwards and lit into him. “I’m sorry, man, it just popped into my head right then,” Williams said by way of explanation,

“my mind gets going so fast.”

Tom Dreesen had a talk with Williams after he heard a line of his come out of Mork’s mouth in the show’s closing voice-over, when the lovable alien always reported his earthly observations back to his home planet. Williams was so apologetic and seemed so genuinely distraught over the “mistake,” that Dreesen believed it truly had been inadvertent. He knew that Robin absorbed influences like a sponge, and given his wild performing style, it seemed entirely plausible that when he got on a roll and was literally spinning onstage, he really didn’t know what he was going to say next. Richard Lewis, who had a similarly frantic, off-the-top-of-his-head style, had stopped watching other comics perform for fear of unconsciously doing the same thing.

Bill Kirchenbauer and others didn’t buy it. These were no accidents, they argued. A comic knew when he was treading on another comic’s idea. They’d all seen one another’s act so many times that they knew every bit by heart. And everyone knew the rules: Whoever said it or did it first, owned it.

Before long, others were exaggerating the Dreesen-Williams conversation as an angry confrontation in which Dreesen had thrown Williams against the wall and threatened to punch him.

“Why do you think they call him
Rob
in,” was one joke going around. “Did you hear that Canter’s now has a Robin Williams sandwich? ” went another. “Yeah, they give you the bun, but you have to steal the meat.”

There was a measure of envy in the meanness. Williams had everything, all the talent, success, and money the others dreamed of. So, the idea that he would stoop to steal material on top of all that made people’s blood boil. It wasn’t like he was Ollie Joe 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 133

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Prater, who stole material all the time but wasn’t very good, so nobody gave a shit. Ollie Joe didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting on
The Tonight Show.
But what if Robin blurted out one of your bits while yukking it up on Johnny’s couch? Accident or not, that material would be gone forever: You could never use it again or audiences would think you stole it from him. That’s why Kirchenbauer, Gallagher, and a few others decided they would no longer perform in front of Williams. If he was in the room, they wouldn’t go on.

The unpleasantness marked the first tear in the tightly knit fabric of the LA comedy community. Soon there would be others.

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