I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (24 page)

Argus Hamilton arrived in the middle of the meeting as well.

He came straight from the airport, carrying his luggage after three weeks on the Comedy Store college concert tour. He’d heard nothing about the payment controversy and was stunned to find Mitzi defending her policy in front of a not entirely friendly audience. In Hamilton’s mind, Mitzi could do no wrong. He thought she was an artistic genius, a visionary, a gutsy businesswoman, and a gifted nurturer of comedic talent. The way he saw it, no one had a better understanding of the often tortured psyches of stand-up comics, and no one was better at getting them to perform their best for the audience and for themselves. Yes, of course, she was eccentric and sometimes difficult to deal with. But was she any weirder than the average comic? Hardly. And if she was blunt in assessing someone’s prospects for success, it was only because she thought it was cruel to foster false hope. She had a placard on her desk, placed so that only she could see it, that read, “It’s a sin to encourage mediocre talent.” Mitzi didn’t bullshit, which was a rare and admirable attribute in show business.

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Truth be told, Argus Hamilton was more than a little in love with Mitzi Shore, and the sight of his fellow comics in open conflict with her turned his world upside down. He was heartsick as he watched a question-and-answer session turn contentious.

“Why couldn’t you pay the comics $5 per night like some of the New York clubs are doing? ” Jeff Altman asked Shore.

“I would never disgrace the profession by paying a comedian $5

for a performance,” she responded. “The Original Room and Westwood are showcases. And I’m standing by this. They are not nightclubs. They are places for you to learn your craft and work out new material.”

“Mitzi, I’m sorry,” Kip Addotta cut in, “but I’ll break in new material at Caesar’s Palace before I will the Comedy Store, because you never know who’s going to be in the audience. It could be the end of your career.”

At that, Shore’s paramour, Steve Landesberg, stood up and shouted, “Career? What career? If you’re still working here, then you don’t have a career yet.”

Before the day was done, Shore had issued a statement to the
Los Angeles Times
: “The Comedy Store is a workshop type club. If the 40 or more comedians working nightly in the workshop were paid, the workshop simply would not exist.” The Comedy Store’s publicist, Estelle Endler, added that Shore would not comment further until the dispute was settled.

Tom Dreesen’s phone would not stop ringing following the meeting. Jay Leno called. George Miller called. Elayne Boosler called. The
Los Angeles Times
called. Everyone wanted to know what the dissidents were going to do next. So did Dreesen. He volunteered to host a meeting at his house in Sherman Oaks the next afternoon, but he stopped short of issuing a call for everyone to attend. They needed to organize a plan of action, and he didn’t think one hundred agitated comics would help that process.

That night at Sunset and Westwood, at the Improv and at Canter’s, the comics talked—or argued—about one thing: to be 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 158

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paid or not to be paid. Emotions ran high, especially on the pro-Mitzi side, but it appeared that sentiment was running about two to one in favor of being paid.

About thirty comics showed up out at Dreesen’s the next day, including Leno, Miller, Mooney, and Boosler, as well as Marsha Warfield, Dottie Archibald, and Jo Anne Astrow. Dreesen was surprised at the percentage of women who turned out. Astrow brought her husband, Mark Lonow. Ken Browning also attended, introduced by Dreesen as “our lawyer.” He handed out business cards to everyone.

The first order of business was to get a clearer picture of their support in the comedy community. “We need to see how strong we are,” Dreesen said. “We need a list of every comic who works in this town, and we need to call them and ask, ‘Are you for us or against us? Yes or no? Do you think comics should get paid?’”

From his years with the Jaycees, he knew the organization had to form committees, put people in charge of them, and let them do their work. Jo Anne Astrow volunteered to head the membership committee. She was to enlist a handful of others to canvas the comics to see where they stood. She was also tasked with finding a place for the next general meeting, the sooner the better, and letting everyone know the date and time.

Steve Bluestein volunteered to chair the media committee.

The press was already onto the story. Not only was the
Los Angeles
Times
calling, but the
Hollywood Reporter
had run a small item that morning headlined “Comics to Picket Comedy Stores.” The item reported erroneously that both Sunset and Westwood “will be struck at 6 p.m. today by comedians who play those clubs,”

attributing the information to “a spokesperson.” The fact that there’d been no talk of picketing and that there was no spokes -

person for their group pointed up the need to control the information that went out. Everyone agreed that Dreesen should be the spokes man. Which immediately raised the question, spokesman for what? They didn’t have a name for themselves. For whom 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 159

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would he be speaking? After many suggestions and much debate, they settled on the name Comedians for Compensation (CFC), which stated clearly what they were about and avoided making them sound like a labor union.

Since no one present thought they shouldn’t get paid, most of the meeting was taken up with discussion about what would constitute fair and acceptable payment. In the Sunday night meeting with Dreesen’s delegation, Mitzi had rejected two proposals for payment in the Original Room—$5 per set and 50 percent of the door—as well as the idea of splitting the door in the Main Room.

But she didn’t mention the Main Room in her big meeting Monday, which might indicate that she was open to negotiating. Some people thought they should take a fifty-fifty split in the Main Room if they could get her to agree. Perhaps they could then divide that money up among all the comics. Others were adamantly opposed to accepting payment in the Main Room only. “A cover charge is meant to
cover
the cost of entertainment,” Marsha Warfield argued,

“so Mitzi should pay us in any room where she charges a cover.”

Through it all, Leno maintained that Mitzi could still be reasoned with and offered to approach her. Ultimately, it was decided that the newly named CFC spokesman was the more appropriate person to conduct any negotiations. The general feeling was that Jay would be too willing to compromise to make peace. Dreesen agreed to talk to Mitzi. As Warfield described it later, “It’s like your mother told you she wasn’t going to feed you anymore. You can’t quite believe it, so you go back and ask again.”

Toward the end of the meeting, Mark Lonow finally spoke up.

“You know, at some point you are going to have to decide how far you are willing to go with this,” he said. “If you keep asking, and she keeps saying no, then either you agree that you’ll never get paid, or you go on strike and throw up a picket line around the place. Unless that is one of your options—unless she believes it’s one of your options—she has no reason to change the way she’s been doing business.”

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A startled hush settled on the room. Despite the
Hollywood Reporter
item that morning, no one had given a serious thought to actually going on strike. At first blush, it seemed like a ridiculous notion: comedians’ strike? Wasn’t that an oxymoron or something?

The idea of a strike came naturally to Lonow. He’d been raised in Brighton Beach, Long Island, by his paternal grandparents, Minnie and Davin Lonow, Russian immigrants who were card-carrying Communist labor agitators. A so-called red diaper baby, Mark had been bounced on Paul Robeson’s knee as a child and grew up in a home steeped in revolution, where talk of union organizing, staging strikes, and manipulating public opinion in favor of the workers was served up nightly with dinner. He was sent for two weeks every summer to a Zionist sleepaway camp in New Jersey where, in the spirit of the Boy Scouts, Jewish children were trained as guerilla fighters. During the first week, half the campers would occupy a house, and the other half would try to take it over; then, they’d switch for the second week.

It might have given Mitzi Shore pause to learn that one of her rebellious Belly Room comediennes was married to the grand-nephew of Eli Swerdloff, the first president of the Soviet Union and the man who, according to Lonow family lore, not only signed the death warrants but also physically carried out the execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family in the basement of the Romanoff summer palace in 1918. Mark remembered his grandmother tut-tutting on more than one occasion, “They shouldn’t have shot the children.”

Dreesen knew that Lonow’s observation about their willingness to strike was true. He’d been a member of the Teamsters in the years between his navy stint and his stand-up career. But he didn’t want to think about a strike just yet, and he certainly didn’t want to be pegged as some sort of Jimmy Hoffa union heavy. For now, he just wanted to keep the dispute inside the comedy family and prove to Mitzi that the community overwhelmingly supported the comics.

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After the meeting, as Jo Anne Astrow and her membership committee began phoning up the rank and file, Dreesen went after a couple of big names. First, he drove to the home of Jimmie Walker, whose name on the Comedy Store marquee during the height of the “dy-no-mite” craziness had been invaluable. Only Richard Pryor had contributed more to the club’s prestige. Dreesen figured that eliciting Walker’s support for the CFC would go a long way toward persuading Mitzi to negotiate.

Walker was torn. He not only loved Mitzi but had also been a good friend of Steve Landesberg since their days together at the New York Improv. Dreesen lobbied hard, playing up the comics’

shared experience, recalling all those late nights when they made a roomful of drunks laugh their asses off and still didn’t have five bucks to buy breakfast.

Walker agreed that it was wrong to make comedians work for free in a club as successful as the Comedy Store. He didn’t want to go against Mitzi and the Store, but in the end he agreed not to go against the comics, whatever they decided to do. If it came to picketing, he wouldn’t cross the line. That was good enough for Dreesen.

The next stop was Robin Williams, who had the same concerns as Walker and gave Dreesen the same commitment: He wouldn’t go against Mitzi, but neither would he go against the comics. If a picket line went up, he would honor it. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

That was two down and one to go. Richard Pryor, the most sacred of Mitzi’s sacred cows, was at his home on Maui, and Paul Mooney had agreed to approach him. Dreesen reasoned that if Pryor needed persuading, then Mooney was the man for the job.

Few people outside the comedy community knew that Mooney had been a major influence in Pryor’s transformation from lovable, middle-of-the-road comedian to incendiary social commen-tator. Mooney was the éminence grise behind Dark Twain. Pryor trusted his instincts and listened to him.

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Back at CFC Central, the news from the membership committee was all good. For starters, they’d obtained the Comedy Store’s master phone list of all the comics who worked the clubs. A friendly employee in the front office just gave it to them. More surprisingly, they’d requested and received permission to hold the next CFC meeting on Monday evening in the Original Room.

And, best of all, they were finding overwhelming support among the comics, easily 90 percent. In the aftermath of Mitzi’s meeting, people were calling
them
, volunteering to help in any way they could. Her gambit appeared to have backfired.

With all that in his hip pocket, Dreesen put in a call to Shore.

She was a little frosty, but the conversation was polite. She said that after considerable thought, she’d decided that she would be willing to give performers 50 percent of the door in the Main Room Thursday through Saturday. That was a major concession on her part, and it would have sufficed a few weeks before. Now, however, the offer stood little chance of being accepted. Not forty-eight hours before she’d tried to pit the rank and file against the headliners; now she was putting forward a plan that would only pay the headliners. What was she thinking?

Dreesen explained as gently as he could that the CFC had widespread support, including that of Robin Williams and Jimmie Walker, and that the issue had moved beyond the Main Room. If she didn’t offer some sort of payment for performances in the Original Room and at Westwood, then he was afraid the situation would become more inflamed.

After half an hour of back-and-forth, they arrived at a compromise. She would offer to donate all the Saturday night cover charges once a month to a fund to be distributed equally among all the comics working the three locations. It would cost her less than the $5-per-set proposal that she’d already rejected, and it would preserve the notion of the Comedy Store as a workshop since donating to a fund was not the same as paying for performances. Dreesen thought it just might fly. He told her he would 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 163

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put it up for a vote at the meeting on Monday. He hung up feeling hopeful. They might just pull this thing off.

On Wednesday, Steve Bluestein arranged for both Dreesen and Mooney to talk to the
Los Angeles Times
about the dispute, and he set up interviews with
Variety
and the
Hollywood Reporter
as well.