I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (10 page)

Sonny Bono’s manager heard his comment and walked over and stood next to him. “You can’t be serious,” he said. “This is a
network
show. If you leave now, you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”

Lewis contemplated their absurd reflection in the mirror for a few more seconds before bolting from the room. He went to his apartment and washed off the greasepaint, then hit the Improv, where he did an inspired set. An agent from the William Morris Agency was in the audience and called him the next morning.

Within twenty-four hours of walking out on Sonny and Cher, he was signed to one of the biggest talent agencies in Hollywood.

Steve Lubetkin’s personal life took a turn for the better on a spring day in 1976 when he walked into his neighborhood grocery store. As usual, he hadn’t had anything to eat that morning, so he headed straight for a card table set up at the end of an aisle where a young woman was handing out food samples. Her name was Susan Evans. A vibrant redhead with a master’s degree in speech interpretation, she was working with actor-director Victor French as a member of Company of Angels, an equity-waiver theater on Melrose Avenue, all of which apparently qualified her to dish out small cups of ice cream in a Hollywood supermarket.

Lubetkin reacted to the hair, the ice cream, and the girl the way any young comic would—he started doing his routine, and within a few minutes, he had Susan Evans laughing so loudly that other shoppers started forming a circle around the two of them, and she feared she would be fired. Fortunately, it was time for her lunch break, and they were able to take their cute meeting outside to a little patch of grass under a browning palm tree. She was instantly attracted to him, with his long, dark hair, rakish moustache, and warm smile that seemed to draw her in. His personality 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 64

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was positively vivid; she’d never met anyone like him or laughed so hard.

He showed up at the same time the next day and over lunch invited her to dinner that night at his place. When she arrived at the address he gave her, she discovered that he really didn’t have a “place” but a room in someone else’s apartment. The only furniture in his room was a mattress on the floor. He had access to the kitchen, but he had no food in the fridge, no money to buy any, and no clue how to cook it if he did. So, she shopped for dinner and cooked it, too, an inauspicious first date, but she didn’t mind because he was so charming and appreciative, telling her that he’d had only a handful of home-cooked meals since his mother died when he was twelve. He talked to her about Mitzi Shore and
Dante Shocko
and his show business dreams.

Over the next few weeks, they became inseparable. He took her to the Comedy Store, where she met Letterman and Leno, who were clearly the big men on that campus. He introduced her to Mitzi, who didn’t seem at all like the warm, nurturing mother figure he’d described. After a couple of months, he moved in with her, arriving at her single-room apartment with a small, cheap suitcase stuffed with his clothes, a cardboard file box full of notes and jokes, and a cassette recorder. It was everything he owned.

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Six Minutes,

Twenty-two Laughs

It took Tom Dreesen six months, but in October 1975, he finally convinced
The Tonight Show
’s Craig Tennis to come see him at the Comedy Store. Tennis arranged a so-called showcase audition for Dreesen and two other acts, a comedy team called Bauman & Estin and a new kid in town by the name of Billy Crystal. It was set for Tuesday night, the early show, when normally only about twenty people would be in the audience. Dreesen was a little worried because he knew that the bigger the crowd, the bigger the laughs, but when he pulled up to the club in his old VW, he saw at least 150 people milling around outside the club. “Fucking great,” he said as he drove up the ramp to the parking lot behind the Hyatt House. It got fucking greater when he reached the entrance and saw that the crowd included Norman Lear and Carl Reiner, two of the biggest names in television comedy. “Holy shit,” Dreesen said as he bounded inside, where a few audience members were already seated. He counted eighteen, including Tennis, as he paced nervously and waited for the rest to be let in.

But before they had, Tennis told him it was time to go on.

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“What do you mean? ” Dreesen asked. “What about all those people outside? Aren’t they going to let them in? ”

“No,” said Tennis. “They are here to see Billy Crystal, and his managers don’t want them to see anyone else. That’s the way it’s done.”

Dreesen did twenty minutes and made all eighteen people laugh heartily. When he finished, Tennis said to him, “Come to my office Tuesday.” Passing through the Crystal crowd on the way out, Dreesen thought, Well, at least he didn’t reject me. (Billy Crystal passed his audition, too, winning a spot on
The Tonight Show
and a recurring role on Norman Lear’s hit show
Mary Hartman, Mary
Hartman
. Bauman & Estin didn’t make the cut.) On Tuesday, Tennis got right down to it: “Tell me what material you’d do on
The Tonight Show.
”

Dreesen started going through the bits he’d done at the Comedy Store audition.

“No, take that one out,” Tennis would cut in. “Yeah, that’s good. Keep that one.”

At the end of the session, Tennis smiled and said matter-of-factly, “You got the show. You’re on next week.”

Dreesen left with his brain doing cartwheels. “I got
The Tonight
Show
,” he shouted as he ran down Sunset Boulevard to find a pay phone to call his wife and everyone else he ever knew. “I got the fucking
Tonight Show.
”

Then he was hit by a wave of fear. Oh shit! he thought. What if it doesn’t work? What if I bomb, with every agent, manager, studio and network executive in the world watching? He spent the next week working out at the Comedy Store and the Improv, doing all three shows every night.

Dreesen knew that Johnny Carson had a very strict view of what worked on
The Tonight Show
and what didn’t. Johnny expected comics to deliver a fast-paced, joke-filled, laugh-packed set no shorter than five minutes and no longer than six. No long setups: You needed quick payoffs—a punch line every thirty sec-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 67

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onds. For a stand-up comic, a minute on TV without a laugh was death. And Carson was adamant about the formula. He had recently stopped by the Improv to see Jay Leno and Andy Kaufman perform and had pronounced both of them “not ready,”

telling Budd Friedman, “They’re funny, but they don’t have six minutes.”

By Dreesen’s calculation, his six minutes contained twenty-two laughs. On the appointed day, October 21, he went to the NBC

studios in beautiful downtown Burbank all by himself. He needed to focus. He tried not to think about the fact that everyone he knew inside the business and out would be watching, that this could be the biggest break of his career or the end of it. Some comics who were good enough to get on
The Tonight Show
still avoided it out of fear that the slightest stumble would put them out of the business. Dreesen sat nervously in the green room through most of the then ninety-minute show. Comics were always the last to go on. The minutes ticked away, and then time ran out. The interviews with Eydie Gorme, Vincent Price, and Buddy Hackett had run long, and he’d been bumped. He would have to come back another night. He drove home feeling equal parts disappointed and relieved. At least he got paid—a grand total of $212.

Over the next few weeks, the scene repeated itself as Dreesen was bumped on October 28, when time was eaten up by actor Robert Blake, and on December 2, when Lucille Ball and Johnny Mathis exceeded their allotted minutes. His hometown newspapers in Chicago picked up on his ordeal. “Waiting (and Waiting and Waiting) for Tom,” read one of the headlines. The ground -

swell of interest only served to heighten his anxiety. On December 9, he was sitting in the makeup chair for the fourth time when
Tonight Show
executive producer Fred DeCordova walked in and said, “I have some bad news for you.” DeCordova paused for a beat before delivering the punch line. “You’re going on.”

In his head Dreesen saw a scene from his days in the navy—on a ship, running for battle stations, with the sound of a horn and a 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 68

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voice coming through the loudspeakers: “This is not a drill. I repeat. This is not a drill.”

Then began an age-old
Tonight Show
ritual. He was walked down a long hallway to a designated station just behind the curtain. As he passed among them, all the stagehands turned their backs or looked away so as not to make him more nervous than he was. He could hear them whispering, “It’s his first time.”

At the end of the hall, he was left standing alone facing the stage curtain that separated him from 10 million TV viewers.

“You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re okay,” he kept telling himself. He was hyperventilating. Coming out of the last commercial break, Doc Severson and the band were playing. Then the music stopped, along with his heart. He heard Johnny saying the words he would remember the rest of his life.

“We’re back now, and I’m glad you’re in such a good mood because my next guest is making his first appearance on
The Tonight
Show.
Please welcome . . .
Tom Dreesen
!”

Like hundreds before him, Dreesen stepped into the blinding light of
The Tonight Show
arena. It was nothing like a nightclub, more like an operating room. The audience was hidden in shadows beyond the lights and cameras; he couldn’t see faces. He stepped to the
T
marker taped to the floor and looked straight at the red light on the center camera. This was it.

“I grew up in a suburb on the south side of Chicago called Harvey, Illinois,” he began, and the audience applauded, presumably for Chicago. “It was what you’d call a ‘changing’ neighborhood.”

He told of attending “St. Rocky Graziano grade school” and of all the black guys who apparently thought he was some Chinese kid named Sayfoo “because every time I walked by they’d call out

‘Say, foo’!”

The line got a big laugh, and he was off to the races. He described what happened after one black classmate taught him the art of “woofing,” which was (much like a dog barking) bluffing an 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 69

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opponent by acting braver than you really are: “One day, one of the nuns reached into her drawer for a ruler to rap me on the knuckles, and I said to her, ‘I’m thinking you better be pullin’ a gun outta there.’”

After counting eleven applause breaks, he closed with an endearing appeal to the crowd. “You’ve been a wonderful audience,”

he said. “And because this is my first appearance here and show business is such a tough life, I’d just like to say this to you: If you liked me and you are a Protestant, then say a prayer for me. If you are a Catholic, then light a candle. And if you are Jewish, then someone in your family owns a nightclub, so please tell them about me. Thank you very much. Good night.”

He’d killed, and he knew it. He turned and walked back through the stage curtain, where Craig Tennis grabbed him by the arm and propelled him back toward the stage. “No, no, no,” he said. “Johnny wants you back out there to take a bow.”

The audience was still applauding wildly as he stepped back into the lights, waved, and bowed. Over to the right he could see Carson smiling broadly, nodding approval, and giving him the big okay sign. He thought he might pop. He had never experienced such a sense of exhilaration.

Back at the Comedy Store, David Letterman, George Miller, and Johnny Dark were gathered around the little black-and-white TV in the kitchen, watching their friend’s triumph with a mixture of pride and envy. He was the first of their class to make it. As Dreesen walked on rubber legs past the stagehands on his way out that night, they all turned toward him and applauded.

The next day, a William Morris agent named Herb Karp got a call from CBS development executive Lee Curlin, who said, “I saw this kid on Carson last night. His name is Tom Dreesen. Do you have him under contract?”

“Why, are you interested in him? ” Karp replied, not answering the question.

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“Yes, we are.”

“Deal interested? ”

“Yes, deal interested.”

“I know Dreesen,” Karp said. “I’ve played softball with him.

I’ll give him a call.”

Karp told a surprised Dreesen that he’d like to take him on as a client. “I won’t lie to you,” he said. “There’s a deal waiting for you.”

So, within twenty-four hours of his first
Tonight Show
appearance, Tom Dreesen had signed with the biggest talent agency in Hollywood and had a $25,000 development deal with a major TV network. That was enough to pay for his food and rent for an entire year.

He would never again pick up an unemployment check.

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The Boys’ Club

When Elayne Boosler arrived in Los Angeles in the spring of 1976, she already had a rep. She was, after all, the only female regular at the New York Improv and a headliner to boot. It didn’t hurt that she’d been Andy Kaufman’s girlfriend and protégé for two years—he was the newest big sensation on the comedy scene.

And unlike most of the young comics on the West Coast, she was making a living. She’d toured as an opening act for the Pointer Sisters, had performed on an NBC comedy show called
Saturday
Night
(hosted by sportscaster Howard Cosell), and was booked to appear on a summer replacement TV series starring Monty Hall, the longtime host of the game show
Let’s Make a Deal.