I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (23 page)

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his bad-ass black-dude persona, Mooney was intimidating enough all by himself. So, they planned to keep it light and keep the dialog going until she saw the rightness of their position, as she eventually would, they thought, because at her core Mitzi loved the comics and wanted what was best for them.

At the house, one of Shore’s female assistants answered the door and ushered them to the large family room on the first floor where Mitzi always entertained. It was a room they all knew, Mooney better than the others because he was often present for the all-night coke sessions with his pal Richard Pryor. They gravitated naturally to the bar and pulled up stools. Mitzi didn’t keep them waiting long, and within a few minutes, they were all chatting about happenings in and around the Store. It fell to Dreesen to bring the conversation to ground.

“Mitzi, you know what we’re here to talk about,” he began. She nodded and waited for him to make his pitch. He started by assur-ing her that they hadn’t come for themselves; they were all fine, making a good living and grateful as all get-out for all she’d done for them. They were there on behalf of scores of other comics, he said, the ones who hadn’t gotten their big breaks yet but were nonetheless entertaining people from her stage and contributing to the success of the Store. He told her there was a growing feeling among the comics that maybe it was time for the Store to start paying them for performing.

“We’re not talking about a salary,” he hurried to add. “We’re talking about a small stipend really, a token amount acknowledging that they are professionals. Believe it or not, for some of these kids, $20 or $30 a week would make all the difference. It would mean they didn’t have to take that second shitty job working in a restaurant or parking cars, and they could spend that time writing and coming up with new material. The Store would be the bene-ficiary of that. They’d develop faster and contribute even more to the success of the club.”

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Shore listened calmly, patiently, letting him finish before saying anything. When he paused long enough to let her know he was done, she said, “You know, Tommy, when I was married to Sammy, I saw how comics were treated. As Rodney would say, they didn’t get any respect.”

Dreesen and the others knew this story by heart because they’d heard her tell it so many times.

“They always had to open for a singer,” she went on, “as if what they did wasn’t as important. They were treated like second-class citizens, like comedians weren’t good enough or entertaining enough to merit their own audience. I didn’t think that was right.”

When she got to the part about how she had the interior of the Store painted black so that all attention would focus on the comic on stage, Dreesen wanted to interrupt with “Yes, Mitzi, we know, because we did the painting, remember? ” But he held his tongue, and she continued painting her picture of the Store as a comedy utopia, part college and part artist colony, where funny young people from all over the world could come to drink the water and then, when their time came, burst into bloom like rain forest flowers.

As visions go, it was a bit overblown, but the four young comics listening couldn’t fault her for that. Without the club she’d created, they couldn’t imagine where they would be or what their lives would be like. There was no doubt they owed her. But by the same token, didn’t she owe them? Where would the Store be without the likes of Jimmie Walker, Robin Williams, and so many others? Mitzi seemed impervious to that viewpoint. She could say in all seriousness, “You know, Richard Pryor got
Lady Sings the
Blues
[his first feature film role] after an appearance in the Main Room,” as if Pryor’s talent would have gone unrecognized by Hollywood if not for her and the Store.

After Dreesen and Shore completed their opening statements, the three other comics took turns trying to bring Mitzi around, 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 150

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each arguing from a different angle. They brought up a number of formulas for paying that the headliners’ group had kicked around, ranging from the $5-per-set “gas money” program practiced in New York to 50 percent of the cover charges divided up among the comedians performing each night. Shore would not budge.

The Store was not a nightclub, she said again and again. It was a training ground, a workshop, a college. The comics were learning their craft. They were not professionals yet. They did not deserve to be paid.

The tenor of the conversation remained friendly throughout—

no one got mad; no voices were raised. George Miller did his best to keep things light with one-liners, the best of which he delivered when Mitzi excused herself to go to the bathroom. “Mitzi and Steve Landesberg are making love and Mitzi moans, ‘Oh, Steve, hurt me, hurt me.’ So, Steve whispers in her ear, ‘Pay the comics, pay the comics.’”

After several hours, Dreesen noticed that only he and Mitzi were left standing. The other three were asleep—Thomerson on the couch, Miller in a chair, and Mooney with his head resting on his arm on the bar. Dreesen was astonished by Mitzi’s stamina.

She’d exhausted three men twenty years her junior.

He tried again, reminding her of the time he was doing a series of radio interviews in Chicago and brought her along with him to promote the Store on a 50,000-watt station, something she never would have had the courage to do on her own. She remembered but didn’t see his point.

He told her about Michael Rapport not having $5 for breakfast on New Year’s morning after appearing on her stage before a sold-out crowd. “Then he should get a goddamn job,” she said.

“He has a job, Mitzi,” he said. “He works for you.”

She disagreed. Rapport did not work for her. He worked for himself, and she just gave him a place to do it, a stage where he might be seen and become a star. She was his patron, not his employer.

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“I just don’t get it, Mitzi,” Dreesen said, finally exasperated.

“You pay your waitresses. You pay your bartenders. You pay the guy who cleans the toilets. Why would you
not
pay the comics who are bringing people into the club?”

“People don’t come to see the comics,” she said. “They come to see the Store. It’s famous.”

“Well, who made it famous if not the comics? ”

“People come for the ambience.”

“Then don’t put on any comics one night and see how long they stay.”

She just looked at him—composed, impenetrable, a brick wall.

Drained by the endless chicken-or-the-egg go-around, he woke the others, and Mitzi walked them the door. “This isn’t personal, Mitzi,” he said in parting. “We think the world of you. The comics aren’t asking for a piece of the Store. They just want to get paid something, that’s all.”

When he dropped the other three off at Sunset, it was after closing time, and no one was around. He was too tired to go to Canter’s, and he didn’t know what to tell people if he did. All he knew was that he’d failed in his mission. Piloting his Eldorado through Laurel Canyon to the valley and home, he felt numb and sad. This is no joke, he said to himself. We are in for a real fight here.

“
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Comedians for

Compensation

Tom Dreesen was rousted out of bed the next morning by calls from comics telling him that Mitzi Shore was convening her own meeting at the Sunset club that afternoon. Her minions were phoning people already, telling them to be in the Original Room at 4:00 p.m. And get this, he was told: Everyone was invited
except
the headliners.

Dreesen stood in the shower for a full fifteen minutes that morning trying to glean Mitzi’s strategy and plot the comics’ next play.

Obviously, she was going to try to divide and conquer, pit the rank and file against the headliners. She was moving quickly to determine if they really had broad support and attempt to turn it around if they did. She wanted to talk to all the comics before he and the other three had a chance to report on their meeting with her. She didn’t want them speaking for her because that would give them power. It was a smart move on her part, he thought. It wouldn’t surprise him if she made an offer at the meeting, proposing one of the solutions they put forward last night as if it were her own idea.

All day long his phone kept ringing, and fellow comics kept asking, “What are we going to do? ” All he could think of was, 153

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“Wait. Let’s see what she says first.” He was fairly certain that a majority of comics would come down on the side of getting paid.

Then again, he’d been certain that Mitzi would capitulate last night. So, he was worried. If she made enough people feel guilty about going against her, then she could make this very difficult.

It would only work if the comics stuck together; he was sure of that.

With Mitzi apparently going on the offensive, Dreesen figured it was time to line up a lawyer for the comics. He knew just the guy to call. Ken Browning was David Letterman’s attorney, recommended to him by none other than Johnny Carson. Ken was a junior partner at Bushkin, Koppelson, Gaims, and Gaines, whose founder, Henry Bushkin, was Carson’s longtime attorney. The Bushkin firm was built around Carson, who’d made his feisty lawyer something of a household name with frequent on-air quips about “the Bombastic Bushkin,” which never failed to break up Ed McMahon. Letterman had introduced Dreesen to Browning at the Comedy Store one night a few months back, and Dreesen had run into Ken at the Store and the Improv several times since then. He liked Ken. More important, he thought Browning’s connection to Carson would stand the comics in good stead in any negotiations with Mitzi. She might not respect the comics, but she sure as hell respected Johnny, so if it appeared that Johnny was on their side, well. . . .

Browning was happy to get the call from Dreesen. Of all the young comics he’d met in his forays into the club scene, Dreesen was the most established in his career, and he seemed particularly well-grounded, focused, and sober, a real grown-up in the land of the maturity challenged. Browning had noticed that the other comics—David Letterman, Jay Leno, George Miller—seemed to look to Dreesen for advice and counsel, as if he were a trusted big brother—all of which would make him an ideal client. Browning was trying to build his own practice, after all, and even though he was working with Carson in the comedian’s purchase of a Las Ve-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 155

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gas TV station, he knew that Johnny would always be Bushkin’s client, not his. He wanted to represent the
next
Johnny, and if that wasn’t Dreesen, then it was likely someone Dreesen could introduce him to.

“Ken, we’re finally trying to do something to get the kids paid,”

Dreesen said, adding, “and we may need your help at some point.”

Browning didn’t need to hear much more. He remembered Dreesen telling him the first time they met at the Comedy Store that the comics didn’t get paid for working there, and his reaction had been,

“You’re kidding!” Dreesen went on to say that, in fact, some of the younger comics who performed that night were so poor they were living out of their cars. Browning had been appalled. He was twenty-nine and had come to Los Angeles straight out of Cornell Law School in 1974, right around the time the great migration began. He identified with the comics and loved being in their company. It wasn’t just the laughs that attracted him; it was the feeling of being at the center of a generational, even epochal, change in American culture. And now, on the phone, Dreesen was offering him a chance to play an important role that not only challenged his lawyering skills but also fired his idealism.

Their conversation was short, but before they hung up, Browning uttered the two words Dreesen was hoping to hear: pro bono.

It was a different Mitzi Shore who showed up in the Main Room that evening. The impenetrable brick wall that Dreesen, Miller, Paul Mooney, and Tim Thomerson had run into the night before was replaced by a trembling, wounded bird of a woman who seemed in desperate need of protection. She sat on a chair on the stage with comedian Dave Tyree beside her, sometimes patting her hand, sometimes handing her a tissue to dab away tears. She told the audience of about one hundred comics that representatives of the headliners—whom she referred to derisively as “the fourteen 10

percenters” for reasons that were unclear (they all had agents?)—

had come to her “demanding that you all be paid.” She delivered this news in a tone that assumed the crowd would be just as 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 156

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shocked and offended as she was by the idea. Then she launched into her I-have-a-vision speech. “This is a college,” she said. “I started this for you.”

For anyone who hadn’t heard it more than once or twice before—and there were many of those in the room—it could be an inspiring oration, offering understanding and support, promising a safer passage through the jungle that was show business. “I have such great plans for you,” she said poignantly.

Not even the most cynical among them doubted her sincerity.

This was no act. It was pure Mitzi, behaving exactly like a doting parent who’d been wounded by the ingratitude of her rebellious children. The hurt was real. And so was the anger. When Severin Darden, an improvisational actor from Second City, lightened the mood by sweeping into the room wrapped in a cape and calling out dramatically for “sanctuary,” Shore shot him a withering look and said sharply, “Sit down and shut up!”