I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (15 page)

A quartet of TV heavyweights stopped by the Sunset Comedy Store on February 23 to check out Andy Kaufman’s performance in the Main Room. James L. Brooks, Ed. Weinberger, Stan Daniel, and Dave Davis were the writing-producing team responsible for one of the most successful sitcoms in TV history,
The Mary Tyler
Moore Show
, and they wanted to see if Kaufman’s “Foreign Man”

character would fit into their follow-up sitcom, which was to be set in a New York cab company.

Kaufman was about the last young comic you’d expect to take a regular role on a sitcom. A veteran of seven appearances on
SNL

and four on
The Tonight Show
, he was enjoying a thriving business on the college concert circuit and was booked to play such upscale venues as the Huntington Hartford Theater in Los Angeles and Town Hall in New York. Kaufman’s envelope- pushing act—

featuring Conga lines, bikini-clad female wrestlers, and audience sing-alongs of “The Cow Goes Moo”—seemed the antithesis of prime-time network fare. And he had a reputation among his 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 104

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peers (no matter how weird they thought he was personally) as a true and fearless artist. It would be like Belushi taking a role on
Three’s Company.

But the historical imperatives were compelling. Freddie Prinze had proved to TV executives that it was time for baby boom comics to take over the American sitcom (
Chico and the Man
didn’t survive Prinze’s death by much), so the networks were offering bags of money and making unusual creative concessions to young comic talent. To everyone’s surprise, including his own, Kaufman agreed to join the cast of
Taxi
, playing the gibberish-spouting mechanic Latka Gravis. His pay was $10,000 per epis -

ode. He assuaged any guilt he may have had by agreeing to appear in only eight episodes in the first season.

The same month, two other unlikely candidates for sitcom stardom, Richard Lewis and Robin Williams, sat side by side in a Paramount casting office waiting to audition for a guest-starring role in an episode of the hit sitcom
Happy Days.
The episode was titled “My Favorite Orkan,” and the role was that of an alien named Mork from the planet Ork. Lewis knew he didn’t have a chance in hell because you were supposed to deliver the lines in what you imagined was the voice of a space alien. Lewis didn’t do voices. The best he could manage was a pathetic imitation of his girlfriend Nina’s accent. Williams, on the other hand, couldn’t stop doing voices. “Man, this is practically written for you,” Lewis said. “If you don’t get this part, it’s a joke.”

Lewis was called into the audition room first. He started reading as if he were a Danish alien but then stopped. “You know, Robin Williams is next,” he told the casting director and his assistants.

“He
is
Mork, and if he doesn’t get this, then you are all crazy. I don’t want to waste any more of your time,” he said, walking to the door and opening it. “Mork is waiting outside, and I’d like to bring him in right now. So would you all please welcome . . .
Robin
Williams!
”

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Williams bounded into the room and blew the doors off the place. He got the part “because he was the only alien who showed up for the audition,” executive producer Gary Marshall was quoted as saying later. When the “My Favorite Orkan” episode aired a few weeks later, Williams’s performance as Mork generated the most viewer mail in the show’s history, and he was offered his own spin-off series,
Mork & Mindy
, beginning in the fall. The contract that Paramount put on the table was for $15,000 an episode, or $3 million over five years. Williams quickly worked into his club act a mock-Shakespearean soliloquy about the decision he faced: TV or not TV; that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler to do stupid shit at 8 o’clock, aye to take the money and run and yet buy a condominium, this all vexes me thus. Yon video will take your mind and turn it to Jell-O, but yet whether ’tis nobler to take arms against the God Nielsen or to stay here and be in small clubs. . . .

In the end he took the money but passed on the condo in favor of a house in Topanga Canyon near the beach.

Mork & Mindy
premiered September 1 on ABC and quickly became the No. 1 show on television. Williams was featured in
Time
magazine and
Newsweek
.
US
magazine and
People
both put him on the cover, the latter proclaiming him “the lunatic spark of TV’s newest smash.” The
Los Angeles Times
called him “comedy’s newest phenomenon . . . an immediate contender for the sort of massive appeal that Steve Martin commands.” Actually, Williams was more than a contender. With about 57 million viewers tuning in to see him each week, he clearly held the title as America’s favorite funnyman. And all the media attention focused on him served to shine the spotlight more brightly on the Comedy Store and his fellow comics.

Mike Binder was working as the doorman at Sunset one night when
All in the Family
producer Norman Lear walked up to him 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 106

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and said, “Call me tomorrow.” Binder did, and Lear cast him as a regular on his new sitcom,
Apple Pie
, guaranteeing the eighteen-year-old an income of at least $100,000.

Jay Leno was standing outside the club when a noted Czech film director named Ivan Passer handed him a card and asked if he wanted to be in a movie. Leno didn’t recognize the name and thought it was a joke at first, but several weeks later he was on location in Switzerland, making a movie called
The Silver Bears
with Michael Caine and Cybil Shepherd.

At times, it seemed as if there were more Hollywood talent hunters, entertainment reporters, and celebrities in the audience than there were paying customers. At Westwood one night, the comics were unnerved to find themselves facing an audience that included Johnny Carson, Steve Martin, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr. At Sunset, Burt Reynolds and his then girlfriend Sally Field, Willie Nelson, and Sugar Ray Leonard came to see Richard Pryor, and after the show, they all sat at a table in the main room while Nelson played guitar and performed a private concert until 5 a.m.

Ringo Starr made a memorable solo appearance at Sunset one night, arriving so intoxicated that Mike Binder, who was working the door, had to help him to a seat in back. Starr was seated just as David Letterman took the stage, and the former Beatle immediately began heckling him, which attracted the attention of every comic within earshot. Letterman had a reputation for evis-cerating hecklers, and as word spread along the back hallway, other comics started filing into the room to watch the impending bloodshed.

It wasn’t a fair fight. In the spotlight, Letterman couldn’t see who the heckler was, so he showed no mercy, and Starr was too drunk to appreciate how badly Letterman was beating him up. Finally, one of the comics took pity and called out, “Hey, Dave, it’s Ringo.”

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“Oh, that makes sense,” Letterman shot back in the direction of Starr. “You ruined your career, and now you’ve come here to ruin mine.” George Miller almost fell off his stool laughing.

Letterman’s TV career was starting to heat up. With the help of his new management company, Rollins-Joffe, he was cast, along with Michael Keaton, as a regular on
Mary
, CBS’s new Mary Tyler Moore musical variety show
.
The series’s show-within-a-show conceit had him playing the part of a behind-the-scenes staff member helping put together Mary’s weekly TV variety program.

Almost the only things the critics liked about
Mary
were Letterman and Keaton. Viewers avoided the show, and the network pulled the plug after only two months, but not before it dragooned Letterman into appearing as a member of “Team CBS” on
Battle of
the Network Stars V.

He was still smarting from that indignity when he finally got the break he’d been waiting for. Talent scouts from
The Tonight
Show
had checked him out at the Comedy Store three or four times, and each time they’d come away saying he was “not quite ready.” But on the strength of his performance on
Mary
, Rollins-Joffe went over the heads of the talent coordinators and arranged a meeting with the NBC development department, which was eager to have Letterman in its talent stable. With Carson’s approval, NBC agreed to an unprecedented package of three
Tonight Show
appearances with a guarantee that Letterman would be invited over to sit on the panel with Johnny on his debut night.

Letterman was elated with the deal, but discomfited as well because it seemed as if he was being given an exemption that the other guys didn’t get. Traditionally, you had to earn that invitation to sit on the couch; there was suspense. But thanks to his high-powered managers, he knew the outcome in advance. As he sheepishly admitted to Tom Dreesen, “It feels like a fixed fight.”

Even so, Letterman was nervous and distracted on the day of his first appearance. Dreesen went with him to the taping, and 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 108

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while they were sitting in the green room waiting for the call to go on, Dave turned to him and said, “Well, this is it. Tomorrow I’ll be back in Indianapolis.”

Letterman’s jitters evaporated the instant he stepped through the curtain. He could hear and feel the audience out there in the blackness beyond the camera lights, but the pressure wasn’t the same as when he stood on a nightclub stage facing an expectant crowd of people who had hired babysitters, driven miles, parked their cars, and paid good money. The fear of letting the audience down was muted. He’d been practicing the lines for years, and they flowed flawlessly: “Yeah, Dave, this is Earl down at the garage. . . . ”

After the show, Letterman said no to Dreesen’s suggestion that they celebrate his triumph by watching the show with the gang at the Comedy Store. Dave wanted to be alone that night because, as usual, he didn’t think he’d done very well.

Johnny Carson disagreed. The next day,
The Tonight Show
opened discussions with Rollins-Joffe about having Dave appear not as a guest but rather as a guest host. That was a breathtaking leap of fortune, on a par with Freddie Prinze’s rocket ride out of obscurity. Just a few weeks earlier, Letterman had been unable to persuade Chris Albrecht, the manager of the New York Improv, to cash a $10 check. Now the world was being very nice to him.

Nothing had changed except everything.

Jay Leno was not among those who got scooped up by network TV in 1978. He believed it was because the programming executives were afraid that his prodigious chin would scare away viewers, not because he was a lousy actor. He was a fierce competitor, but he didn’t waste time brooding about the rejection because that summer he attained a longtime career goal by landing a two-week engagement opening for singer Tom Jones at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. When he was growing up and hoping to become a comedian, Caesar’s was as good as it got, signaling that you’d made 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 109

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it to the big time. So the way he saw it, he didn’t need TV; he was a stand-up comic, not a sitcom performer.

For Steve Lubetkin, 1978 turned out to be another disappoint-ing year. After six months of occasional appearances at small clubs and a handful of late-night spots at the Westwood Comedy Store, the comedy team of Lubetkin & Evans called it quits, agreeing that she was happier as an actress, and he was better as a solo act. Susan knew it was hard for him to see everyone else catching breaks and succeeding, even though he was genuinely happy for them. He accompanied Richard to a live interview on
The Paul Wallich Show
on KIEV radio and recorded it for posterity on his portable cassette recorder. It meant so much to him when Richard gave him a shout-out on the air that he put the tape away with his keepsakes, writing on the label, “Lewis on Wallich, August 18, 1978; mentions my name.”

Susan was supporting them with an office job, and Steve’s dad contributed regularly. On a trip to LA, ostensibly to meet Susan, Jack Lubetkin bought Steve a car, a 1963 Buick Skylark. Susan and Jack hit it off immediately, and she could see that he adored Steve. On an outing to the Santa Monica pier, the two played off one another constantly, doing what they called “schticklacht,”

making it obvious where Steve got his offbeat sense of humor.

But even in the most lighthearted of moments, she would see a worried look flicker across on Jack’s face as he contemplated his son. He was proud of Steve’s ability to make people laugh but doubtful that, given the economics of the club scene, it would lead to happiness for him. “Stevie,” he would say, “maybe this just isn’t for you.”

Susan knew that deep down Steve wanted to be like his dad, a mensch who took care of his family and loved ones. But she also saw that Steve couldn’t conceive of making a living in a practical way. He’d worked for a while as a file clerk at Paramount, where he contributed a comedy column to the company newsletter and 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 110

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played Santa Claus at the office Christmas party. But Steve had a resistance to what he called “straight jobs,” believing that any time he spent in them subtracted from his chance of making it as a comic. His usual routine was to write in the morning, rehearse in the afternoon, and perform at night, working out the material in tiny venues like the Natural Fudge and Vegetarian Restaurant until he thought it was ready for the Westwood Comedy Store.

Susan believed in Steve and his talent. She’d been in the audience at Westwood on nights when he was so “on” that people had tears of laughter in their eyes. The high of those moments, coupled with the success he saw happening all around him, kept Steve’s comedy dreams alive. As he wrote in a motivational message to himself titled “Why I Should Never Get Uptight About Stand-up,”