I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (6 page)

And I’m having trouble trying to get a deal for a damn talk show.

What happened next has become the stuff of show biz legend, much like the discovery of Lana Turner at the lunch counter at Schwab’s Drug Store. On December 6, 1973, Prinze appeared on
The Tonight Show.
His friends at the Improv were gathered around the TV on the bar, watching as he broke through the curtains.

Freddie did an engaging five-minute set that so tickled Carson that the host immediately waved him over to the panel to chat.

Jaws dropped at the Improv, where the crowd of compulsive Car-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 35

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son watchers instantly recognized that they were seeing history: Never before had Johnny done that for a young comic making his debut on the show. Comments around the bar ranged from “Holy shit,” to “I can’t fucking believe this,” to “Right on, Freddie.”

Within weeks, NBC announced that it had signed Prinze to star in the title role of a new NBC sitcom called
Chico and the
Man.
Overnight Freddie had become rich and famous. He was only nineteen. (The next time anyone saw him at the Improv, he was climbing out of a limousine wearing a purple velvet suit, two babes on his arms, high on quaaludes, and headed for big trouble.) Few comics failed to notice one more thing about Prinze’s
Tonight Show
debut: Johnny introduced him as “a young comedian who’s appearing here in town at the Comedy Store.” That statement put the Comedy Store on every comic’s map and created a new equation in their heads: One set at the Comedy Store plus one appearance on Carson equals the whole world. If it happened to Freddie, then it could happen to any of them. You could almost hear the suitcases being packed.

Sammy Shore’s bags were packed, too. As 1973 came to a close, he had to return to Las Vegas to fulfill a contract with the Hilton left over from his days with Elvis. He would be working solo in the lounge for several months, which posed a problem: Who was going to run the Comedy Store while he was gone? Rudy DeLuca was going to work as a writer for
The Carol Burnett Show.
The only person he could think of to take over was his wife, Mitzi. They’d been married nearly twenty years and had four children, ages six to nineteen. She had been the quintessential long-suffering showman’s wife, raising the kids alone while he was on the road and sometimes hauling them along with her to wherever he was performing, which is how the youngest, Pauly, came to pee on Elvis’s pant leg.

Careerwise, Sammy was no Bill Cosby, but he’d been a good pro -

vider. The Shores owned a beautiful home on Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills that was built by Cecil B. DeMille for his daughter and over the years had been the residence of Dorothy Lamour, 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 36

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Joan Blondell, Andy Williams, and Carol Burnett. But Sammy knew that Mitzi had ambitions beyond homemaking. She had been a career girl when he met her: Mitzi Lee Saidel, the twenty-year-old secretary to the owner of the Pinewood Resort in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, where he was the social director. She was attracted by his Jewishness. “I grew up as the only Jew in Green Bay,”

she joked. Everything about her was different from any other woman he’d ever met—from the way she dressed (vaguely bo-hemian, dramatic), to the way she talked (in a piercing nasal voice that once heard can’t be forgotten), to the way she thought (“When everyone else goes right, she goes left,” Sammy always said). And she was smart as hell. She’d done fairly well as the pro-prietress of the Pickle Barrel, a funky clothing store/gift shop that Sammy financed for her across the street from the Comedy Store.

But it bored her, so they closed it down after eight months.

Sammy knew that Mitzi loved comedians, finding them endlessly fascinating. So he asked her, “Why don’t you take over the Store while I’m in Vegas? Run the place. It’ll be fun for you.”

She said okay with no visible excitement. But once he was gone, she jumped on the opportunity like a dog on a bone.

She turned her attention first to the growing number of young comics who’d been coming in night after night and sitting in the back hoping to get on. Under Sammy’s whoever’s-famous-goes-first rule, they rarely got a chance. But Mitzi saw potential in the youngsters, both as performers and as a labor pool. She immediately set them to work at $2.50 an hour redecorating the club to her specifications. She had them paint the entire room black—

walls, ceilings, tables—and ordered that the stage be lit with a single spotlight. “That way, all of the audience’s attention is focused on the comic,” she explained. She removed the bar from the room and put it in the back by the kitchen so that patrons had no access to it and had to order their drinks from cocktail waitresses, who then brought them to the tables. She initiated a two-drink minimum. Taking a page from Budd Friedman’s play-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 37

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book, she established Monday as “Potluck Night,” when anyone could get up on stage for a few minutes to try out. And she instituted a system of nightly lineups, featuring a dozen or more young comics, starting with beginners doing five-minute sets in the early evening and then moving to increasingly polished performers and longer sets as the night went on and the crowd grew. No one stayed onstage more than twenty minutes. She put on two shows a night, clearing the room after the first to make way for another paying audience. Each show was stitched together by an emcee and tightly timed with an amber light that warned performers they had sixty seconds to wrap it up and get off the stage.

Comics were supposed to check with the club on Monday to get their assigned time slots for the following week and to take the stage on the minute. Mitzi made the comics run on time.

And she made herself into the impresario, personally putting together each night’s lineup and determining the order and length of more than a hundred sets per week, based on her knowledge of each comic’s act. Unlike Budd Friedman, she believed that a comic
could
follow a comic if you carefully managed the mix of material and the pacing, always building to a big finish at the end.

“You have to produce the show,” she said. “You can’t just let it happen.”

The one thing she didn’t change was Sammy’s policy of not paying the comics. The way she saw it, the Comedy Store was a place for them to find opportunity, not their employer.

After a month in Vegas, Sammy arrived back in town and was astonished by the changes Mitzi had wrought. For starters, the place was packed; there was hardly an empty seat. The bar was gone, the room was black on black, and the only thing you could see clearly was the young comic onstage. Instead of a middle-aged bartender, young waitresses slung drinks right and left. Mitzi sat at the cash register just inside the entrance, barking instructions.

Everything was very neat and clean, with plants hanging all around. Fucking plants! He greeted her with his best, “Hi, Honey, 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 38

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I’m home,” and she looked at him and said, “Yeah, hi, Sammy, could you give me a minute and step out of the way there.” Then she turned to a young comic he’d never seen before and said,

“Okay, you are going on at 10:15 for fifteen minutes and then you get off, understand?”

Sammy felt the ground move under his feet. “Oh, my God,” he thought. “She’s finally found something she’s been looking for all her life, and she doesn’t need me anymore. She doesn’t want to get off that seat. I’m history.”

He was right. Within months they were in divorce proceedings.

Mitzi hired hotshot divorce attorney Marvin Mitchelson, who would later pioneer the concept of “palimony” for unmarried co-habitants. In the end, Mitzi got the house and the club. Thanks to Mitchelson’s penchant for publicity, it was reported that Sammy

“lost” the club. In fact, he voluntarily relinquished his share of ownership in exchange for a reduction in alimony from $1,100 to $600 a month. Though ridiculed as “the man who gave away the Store,” he really didn’t care that much about the club. It had been fun, but he felt no emotional connection to it. No one had discovered
him
there. And he thought Mitzi deserved it. After all, she’d turned it into a business.

Steve Lubetkin was one of the first of the New York Improv comics to head west. “All the action is out in California,” he told his father. “If I’m really going to do something with this, then I have to go to the Comedy Store.”

Jack Lubetkin and Steve’s brother, Barry, were concerned. Jack couldn’t see how you could make a career out of comedy when it didn’t pay a living wage. Ten or twenty bucks for a night’s work?

You could do better at McDonald’s. Barry knew Steve had talent—

he’d seen him on stage many times and been filled with pride that his little brother could get up in front of a room full of strangers and make them laugh. But he also knew that Steve was a fragile soul, sensitive to rejection, with a tendency toward sadness. He’d seen how Steve reacted whenever he bombed: he’d be angry and 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 39

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hurt, and you couldn’t even talk to him for a few minutes. Steve had never really been away from home. He’d gone to college on Long Island. How would he fare in a tough town like Los Angeles?

But Steve was determined and convincing. He pointed to Freddie Prinze and Jimmie Walker, who’d just been cast in a new sitcom called
Good Times
after auditioning at the Comedy Store. “I
know
these guys; they’re my
friends
,” he said. “I can do that, too.”

So, Jack Lubetkin flew to Los Angeles with Steve to help him find an apartment for between $100 and $200 a month. They settled on a one-bedroom with a few pieces of shabby furniture in a building located where La Cienega Boulevard dead-ended at Sunset Strip. It was a dump, but to Steve it was better than a pent-house on Park Avenue because he could walk to the Comedy Store in eight minutes. He was there the very next Monday night, standing in line with several dozen others waiting to take their first step toward comedy stardom: auditioning for Mitzi Shore. He couldn’t quite believe it when he got on that night or that he did as well as he did. But Shore said to him afterward, “You’re funny. Come back next week.” He did, and every night in between. Soon he was getting weeknight time slots, not prime-time spots but more than Budd Friedman ever gave him. He quickly became part of Shore’s inner circle of young male comics who doted on her and ran her errands. She invited him to dinner at her house, and he was among the few she allowed to join her in her special booth at the club. In his mind, she became as important to his future as Johnny Carson.

He felt like he was finally on a roll, in the right place at the right time. It was all going to happen for him, he was sure of it.

Lubetkin fell right in with other recent comedy émigrés, including George Miller, who’d come down from Seattle the year before and lived in an apartment building directly across the street from the Store. Johnny Dark lived in an apartment a few blocks away on Laurel Avenue. Dark, a Philadelphian, had come to Los Angeles from Atlanta, where he’d been the drummer and lead singer in a lounge band called the Johnny Dark Thing. Now he 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 40

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was trying his hand at stand-up, and Mitzi Shore liked him. Dark’s wife, Suzy, was a waitress at the Comedy Store, which meant that she got paid, but he didn’t. Half a dozen other Comedy Store performers lived in Dark’s building, including Steve Blue stein, who was a buyer for Macy’s by day, and Alan Bursky, the youngest comic ever to appear on
The Tonight Show
(he was eighteen at the time but looked twelve). Bursky’s parents, Herman and Helen, managed the apartment building, which would eventually house more than twenty comics and become known as Fort Bursky.

With their new TV shows being produced in Los Angeles, Freddie Prinze and Jimmie Walker started showing up at the Comedy Store all the time, either to perform or hang out. Prinze moved in with Bursky. Another Improv alum, Steve Landesberg, began coming into town regularly to do showcase auditions at the Store, trying to land a TV job.

It was all getting too much for Jay Leno. Back in Boston, he was watching
The Tonight Show
when Carson introduced another

“young comedian who is appearing here in town at the Comedy Store.” It was Walker. Leno had performed on the same bill with Jimmie many times at the Improv and other clubs, and he’d done as well, if not better, with the crowd. So why was Jimmie now performing ten feet away from Johnny while he was sitting on the couch in this crummy apartment? He would later describe it as a

“pivotal” moment in his life and career. He stood up and announced to the empty room. “That’s it. I’m going to the Comedy Store.” He booked a flight to Los Angeles, and the next day he withdrew his $1,500 in savings, packed a single bag, and walked out of his apartment, leaving the door open behind him. “Take whatever you want,” he told the neighbors.

In Los Angeles, he instructed the cab driver, “Take me to Sunset Strip.” He spent his first night in town sleeping on the couch of a comedian pal, Billy Braver, who lived in the same building as George Miller. For the next few weeks, he lived like a vagabond, bouncing from couch to couch, crashing for several days at Fred-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 41

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die Prinze’s place in Fort Bursky, even sleeping on the back stairs at the Comedy Store several nights. The police stopped him one night at the corner of Hollywood and Vine.

“Where do you live? ” one cop asked him.

“I’m a comedian, and I don’t really live anywhere yet,” he said.

They told him to get into the squad car, and he rode around with them for the whole shift, telling jokes.