I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (12 page)

The women comics didn’t need Carson to tell them what they already knew from watching the show and dealing with the talent coordinators: Johnny preferred breathy and busty to ballsy, zany to brainy. To make the cut, a female performer had to project a nonthreatening “golly-jeepers-oh-Johnny” quality, like Carol Wayne.

She had to appeal to older male viewers who liked to go to Vegas. If she wasn’t a bimbo, she at least had to be willing to play one on TV.

By those criteria, Elayne Boosler didn’t have a prayer. Word kept coming back to her from
The Tonight Show
talent coordinators that she was “too tough.”

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The Comedy Store women knew that Carson’s prejudice threatened their livelihood. Without a presence on
The Tonight
Show
, they had a tougher time landing other TV gigs. Their lack of exposure to a national audience made it harder to convince club owners to hire them. And without more chances to perform live, they couldn’t develop their acts. It was a vicious cycle.

Fortunately, they thought, they had the backing of the most powerful woman in comedy, and Mitzi had a plan for breaking the log jam. In the belly of the Comedy Store, she was going to build them a room of their own.

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Guns, Drugs,

and Westwood

For the comedy community, 1977 started out with a bang, literally. In the early morning hours of January 28, Freddie Prinze, stoned on cocaine and quaaludes, put a .32 caliber pistol to his temple and fired a bullet into his brain. He lingered on life support for thirty-three hours and died on January 29. He was twenty-two.

Prinze’s peers were stunned. For the past three years, they had measured their success against his. Freddie’s career path was their road map—Comedy Store, Carson, Hollywood, the world. He’d performed at President Jimmy Carter’s inaugural ball just the week before, and he’d dropped by the Westwood Store several times in the past month. Nothing seemed amiss; he was the same old Freddie. Sure, everybody knew he had some problems. His wife of two years, Kathy, was divorcing him and had obtained a restraining order against him. And he’d been arrested in November for driving under the influence of methaqualone, his favorite drug, which had been prescribed by his shrink. But drugs were an old story with Freddie, dating back to his days at the New York Improv. Everyone knew he liked to wash down his ’ludes with cognac and do some blow to stay on his feet. Freddie was ahead of the curve when it came to the 81

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harder drugs. He could afford them, whereas most of his friends had to settle for pot. Freddie got sloppy, slurred his words, and sometimes had to be supported by his female companion(s), but he was always sweet and amiable, never angry or belligerent. You’d never meet a nicer or more charming guy. And even though his success seemed out of proportion to his talent, no one resented him for it.

In the aftermath of Prinze’s death, a more disturbing picture began to emerge. News footage from the Carter inaugural showed Freddie looking pretty wired, with his eyes darting all around.

Comic Alan Bursky, one of Prinze’s closest friends, told people he went to Freddy’s apartment at the Beverly Comstock after the shooting and found “a mayonnaise jar full of coke.” That was a lot of blow even by Freddie’s standards. There were stories of bizarre gunplay going back a couple of years. Jay Leno recalled the time Freddie stayed at his apartment in Boston and fired so many bullets into the living room wall that it made a hole “the size of a small window” into his bedroom. Others told of Freddie’s shooting his gun (the rumor was that Bursky had given it to him) out the window of his apartment on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills and of his scaring people by pretending to play Russian roulette, spinning the cylinder then pointing the barrel at his head and pulling the trigger, not telling them that the gun was empty. His cruelest joke was on a female assistant who heard the gun go off in the next room and ran in to find Freddie sprawled on the floor. After she screamed, he raised his head and grinned, “Fooled you, didn’t I?” It was as if he’d been rehearsing his final act.

The Los Angeles coroner ruled the death a suicide based on a statement from his manager, who was present at the time of the shooting and claimed he tried to grab the gun, and on a series of phone calls Prinze made and a note he left behind that repeated the line, “I can’t go on.”

Prinze was buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Burbank after a celebrity-studded funeral. Writing in his autobiography twenty-five years later, Leno still seemed miffed that Prinze’s man-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 83

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ager arranged front-row seating for Freddie’s new “big-name”

friends Tony Orlando, Sammy Davis Jr., and
Chico and the Man
costar Jack Albertson, while his old pals from the Improv and the Comedy Store practically had to crash the event. He also noted the irony that above the door of the Forest Lawn chapel, an en-graving commemorated the first skirmish of the Revolutionary War: “The shot heard ’round the world.”

In the end, the media chalked the tragedy up as a case of too much too soon: Prinze just couldn’t handle his success. Prinze’s comedian friends drew a narrower lesson: Freddie just couldn’t handle his drugs.

Within days of Prinze’s death, comedians were hit with another calamity: The Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard was forced to close because Mitzi Shore lost her lease, which was all the more shocking because she owned the building. She had purchased the property on July 5, 1976, the day after the nation’s two hundredth birthday, and immediately marked it as her own by painting the exte-rior black to match the inside. She’d never seen an entirely black building before and thought perhaps it was the only one in existence.

In any case, she was sure it would make a statement and be noticed.

Even though Shore owned the property, she didn’t control all of it. The building came with a tenant grandfathered in by the previous landlord, Frank Sennes, who’d owned the building since it housed Ciro’s nightclub in the 1940s and 1950s. The tenant was Art Laboe, a longtime Los Angeles disc jockey who’d coined the phrase “oldies but goodies.” Laboe produced his KRLA radio show from the first floor of the building in the space next to the Comedy Store. Shore coveted Laboe’s space, which was larger than hers. She dreamed of turning it into a Vegas-style showroom for established comedians like Jackie Mason, Shecky Green, Buddy Hackett, and Rodney Dangerfield, performers she’d hung out with during her years with Sammy.

Laboe still had a year to go on his lease, but Shore hatched a plan to get him out sooner. No one had used the offices above 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 84

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Laboe’s studio, which were part of his lease, for years, and they were trashed. Shore had her lawyers take pictures of the mess and then filed a lawsuit seeking to evict Laboe on the grounds that he wasn’t taking proper care of the building and was creating a fire hazard. Problem was, Laboe’s lease also included the space that housed the Comedy Store, which Shore subleased from him. And it just so happened that Shore’s lease was up. So Laboe countersued to have her evicted, and he won.

Shore moved her entire operation to the Westwood Comedy Store, and the comics banded together in support, agreeing to cut their sets to ten minutes so that no one lost any stage time. As if to rub salt in the wound, Laboe opened his own comedy room in the Sunset building. Called the Funny Farm and featuring comedian Leonard Barr, an old crony of Dean Martin, it played as a poor impersonation of the Comedy Store and was doomed from the start. None of Shore’s comics would work there. After a few months, Shore ended the pissing match by paying Laboe $50,000

to relinquish his lease on the Sunset building, and everything returned to normal on the Los Angeles comedy scene. The one change was that the months of exile had firmly established the Westwood club as a major entertainment venue in its own right, not just the poor stepsister of the Sunset Store.

From the start, the Westwood Store had a different vibe from Sunset. It was formerly Leadbetter’s, a coffeehouse named after folk blues legend Huddie Leadbetter, known as Leadbelly, and owned by Randy Sparks, founder of the New Christy Minstrels, the perky and very popular folk-music troupe of the 1960s. The room was larger than Sunset—220 seats—with a bar accessible to customers and brick walls that bounced the laughter all over the place. With UCLA a short walk away, the club catered to the college crowd with a $2 cover charge and $3 pitchers of beer. It also featured a limited menu of inexpensive entrees so that patrons under twenty-one could be admitted legally. That drew students from Beverly Hills and Taft and El Camino high schools in the San Fernando 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 85

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Valley. As a result, the Westwood audience was younger and whiter than the Sunset crowd. Sunset had a hip, New York kind of feel, which was why many of the East Coast comics preferred it.

Westwood was all-American.

Shore tailored her Westwood lineup to reflect the audience.

Comic Argus Hamilton described the core group, of which he was a member, as “Mitzi’s little Anglo Saxon Triple A ball club.”

Hamilton was the son, grandson, and great grandson of southern Methodist ministers. His grandfather, Argus Hamilton III, was a lifelong friend of Will Rogers; their fathers had fought together in the Confederate army. His father, Argus IV, delivered Roger’s eulogy on NBC Radio. Argus V decided to become a comic one night when he was lounging around the ATO fraternity house at the University of Oklahoma and caught Freddie Prinze’s debut on
The Tonight Show
. After graduating in 1976, Hamilton drove straight to Los Angeles in his new MG Midget, a gift from his “very indulgent parents.” He quickly became a Mitzi Shore favorite and a devoted employee, drawing three salaries as emcee, doorman, and Shore’s personal “runner.”

Another Westwood regular, Mike Binder, was younger than almost anyone in the audience—just seventeen and fresh out of high school when he arrived at the Sunset Strip club only to find it closed due to the lease dispute.

“Where do the comedians go? ” he asked a guy who was sweeping up in front.

“They don’t anymore,” he was told. Binder had driven from his hometown of Detroit in four days, having told his father, a well-to-do home builder, that he had a job waiting for him. Fortunately, he found his way to Westwood and killed in his first Monday night audition. Shore put him in the lineup, gave him a part-time job as a doorman, and sort of adopted him as a member of her family.

Shore’s other white-bread regulars at Westwood included Ollie Joe Prater from Michigan, Nebraskan Skip Stephenson, Bill Kirchenbauer from St. Petersberg, and San Diegans Biff Maynard 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 86

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and Tim Thomerson. She added color to the lineup with Jimmie Walker, who worked the first and second shows every Friday night, John Witherspoon, Brad Sanders, and Marsha Warfield, as well as with Native Americans Charlie Hill and Gary Muledeer.

The Westwood comics were a hard-partying crew. At closing time, they’d pull aside the most attractive women, turn on the beer taps, turn up the Eagles tunes, fire up a few joints, lock the doors, and carry on until 4:00 a.m. Occasionally someone would score some coke, which meant they could drink longer. Sometimes they’d party until the sun came up at Fort Bursky or Argus Hamilton’s Beverly Hills apartment, nicknamed “the Crosby Ranch” because of Argus’s penchant for breaking into an impression of Bing Crosby doing his famous Minute Maid orange juice commercials:

“Here at the Crosby Ranch, we like to pick our oranges. It’s a shame we can’t pick our children” (two of Crosby’s older sons had recently accused him of being a physically abusive father).

The Westwood clique was younger than the Canter’s crowd by a couple of years. Born deeper into the baby boom, they were less affected by the Vietnam War and the draft, and their material tended to be less political. “We’re just as funny but not as afraid,”

Hamilton joked. They were more likely to employ props in their acts and engage in outright silliness on stage. Leno and George Miller, in particular, disdained prop comedy. “Props are the enemy of wit,” Leno liked to say. But the two groups mixed easily and shared a communal sensibility left over from the 1960s. When Hamilton competed as a contestant on
Hollywood Squares
and won six hundred steaks (complete with a freezer to store them) from Cattleman’s in Omaha, he immediately threw a party at the Crosby Ranch and split the spoils with twenty other comics.

Everybody went home with a stack of steaks.

It was a time of no comic left behind. Nobody ever went without a beer, a joint, or a ride to the club. It was Camelot. And it wouldn’t last.

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Comedy University

The Sunset Strip Comedy Store had one thing that no other comedy club had: Richard Pryor.

Beginning with the preparations for his 1974 breakthrough album
That Nigger’s Crazy
, Pryor used the Sunset Store almost exclusively as his incubator, trying out the material that would fill his best-selling, Grammy-winning follow-up albums:
Is It Something I
Said?
(1975),
Bicentennial Nigger
(1976), and
Wanted: Richard Pryor
Live in Concert
(1978). At the Sunset Store, Pryor completed his transformation from Bill Cosby clone to comedy revolutionary, perfecting the dangerously funny stage persona that Argus Hamilton described as “Dark Twain.”

For Mitzi Shore, Pryor was the goose that laid the golden egg.