I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (17 page)

He got no argument from anyone at the table. They could cal-culate the cut as easily as he could: Half the door came to a little 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 119

I’m Dying Up Here

119

more than $800 per person. Leno didn’t need the money. Like Dreesen, he was making a good living on the nightclub showroom circuit. Letterman’s managers were negotiating a so-called holding deal with NBC that would pay him $250,000 to sit tight while the network figured out what to do with him. Robin Wil liams was a newly minted millionaire. Of the five who’d performed in the Main Room that night, only Boosler wasn’t in a high tax bracket.

Dreesen kept thinking about Michael Rapport having to borrow five bucks for breakfast on New Year’s morning after performing in one of the most prestigious entertainment venues in the country. And plenty of other Comedy Store regulars in Canter’s that night were in the same boat. Eight hundred bucks would make their month, covering rent, food, and transportation. Some of them were in fairly desperate circumstances, practically sub-sisting on the two free beers they got for performing and on the condiments at the bar—the cocktail cherries, olives, and lemon wedges that they only half-jokingly referred to as “the buffet.”

There was no end to the survival stories. Marsha Warfield was often so broke that she was reduced to stealing restaurant crackers, which she took home to the apartment she shared with comics Brad Sanders and Jimmy Cook and turned into fried cornmeal.

Cook was the only one of the three who had a car, so on nights when there was no money for gas or Cook couldn’t pick her up, Warfield walked home from the Comedy Store at 2:00 a.m., a one-hour trek to the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Tama rind Street through an area being terrorized by a sadistic serial killer known as the Hillside Strangler.

Acting on a tip from comic Johnny Witherspoon, Warfield and Sanders sometimes went to the Comedy Store in the morning and crawled around on the floor in search of change dropped by the previous night’s customers. One day, they came up with just enough to buy some Rice-A-Roni at the Ranch Market on Vine Street. Hoping to stretch the meal a little further, Sanders slipped a package of ground beef down the front of his pants, but an old 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 120

120

William Knoedelseder

security guard spotted him and confronted the pair with a can of mace. “I’m not going to call the police because I can tell you’re hungry,” he said, “but you have to put it back and leave.”

Warfield even panhandled for food on occasion, but always in true stand-up comic style. She’d walk up to women on the street and ask, “How are you doing today? Do you have any food in your purse? ” She learned that a surprisingly high percentage of them did, about one in ten. And the percentage only dropped slightly when she specified, “You got any chicken? ”

The experiences were hilarious in the retelling, but they’d been humiliating in the moment. The talk at the table quickly turned from getting a cut of the door in the Main Room to getting paid in the Original Room and at Westwood, too—the ultimate heresy.

Why shouldn’t they get paid in all the rooms? A lot had changed in four years. The Store wasn’t a small struggling club anymore. It was a massive, cash-generating laugh factory. And Mitzi was no longer a brand-new divorcee worrying about how to keep the business afloat and feed the four kids. She was driving a silver Jag and having an affair with Steve Landesberg. Rents had risen, and gas had just gone to $1 a gallon. About the only thing that hadn’t changed was Mitzi’s policy of not paying them.

For Leno, it was a matter of principle. “The sense is that our time and effort and talents aren’t worth anything,” he said.

“Jay’s right. This isn’t fair anymore,” Boosler said. “We gotta have a meeting.”

She and Dottie Archibald worked the phones the following week. It was a little like herding cats, but they managed to corral about twenty comics, including Leno, Letterman, Dreesen, Robin Williams, George Miller, Gallagher, and most of the headliners who were being asked to appear in the Main Room.

They met at Boosler’s apartment on Sweetzer Avenue in West Hollywood, about half a mile from the Comedy Store. It was her third apartment in three years, and Leno had helped her move 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 121

I’m Dying Up Here

121

into each one. The last one, on Larabee Street, they nicknamed

“the thirty-nine steps” because they had to haul all her belong-ings up several flights of stairs. At the end of the day, he pleaded,

“Promise me you’ll never buy a couch.”

She had one now, plus a dining room table and chairs and a real bed—all signs of her burgeoning career. But she still had two wooden salad bowls in her cupboard that she’d “borrowed” from the Comedy Store in the early days, when they were all she had.

Most of the comics had swiped dinnerware from the Store. They saw it as a kind of payback for not being paid, an unauthorized perk.

Despite the supposedly serious intent of the gathering, the conversation quickly took on the cadence of a session at Canter’s, with people talking over one another and lobbing good-natured insults at anyone trying to make a point. Comics just can’t help themselves; it’s their nature. Life’s a roast.

As host, Boosler tried to focus the group’s attention on the subject at hand: getting paid for performing in the Main Room. “All of a sudden there are rules,” she said. “We’re not allowed to break in new material. We have to do what Mitzi calls ‘a Vegas act.’ We’re supposed to dress up, no jeans and sneakers like in the Original Room. We’re not allowed to ‘experiment.’ Does that sound like a workshop to you? What the hell. Why aren’t we being paid?”

Once again, there was little disagreement. All present thought they should be paid some portion of the door. After all, Mitzi was already splitting the take with the older performers, so there was a precedent. All they had to do was ask her. They’d never done that before. Surely she’d realize that it was only fair and reasonable.

Leno was so convinced she’d go along that he volunteered to be the go-between. After about an hour, the meeting appeared to be heading toward an easy resolution when Boosler asked a question that few of them expected. “What about the Original Room?”

Her question hung in the air unanswered as they pondered its import. The Original Room
was
the Comedy Store, its heart and its soul. For most of them, the Original Room had served as a 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 122

122

William Knoedelseder

womb, where they were nurtured in their fetal stage of funny.

Professionally speaking, they were born in the Original Room. To propose any kind of change seemed like blasphemy. “No payment” was a founding premise of the place. To ask for money in exchange for performing there was like proposing that the “all men are created equal” line be removed from the Declaration of Independence. At least that was how Mitzi was likely to see it.

A psychologist would have had a field day with their conflict-ing feelings toward Shore. She was by turns their boss, their friend, their surrogate mother, their harshest critic, and their biggest fan. They flattered her to her face, made fun of her behind her back, craved her approval, and resented her dominion over their lives. They admired her and thought she was wacko. But none of them disliked her, and all felt a measure of gratitude for her patronage. Was this any way to show it?

Dreesen finally broke the silence. “The thing is, us getting paid for working the Main Room doesn’t help the majority of our fellow comics who
aren’t
working the Main Room and who really need the money,” he said. “I don’t think anyone here has had to borrow five bucks for breakfast recently.”

There was no easy consensus this time. Some thought it was wrong to expect to be paid in the Original Room because most of the comics performing there weren’t at a professional level yet.

The workshop atmosphere allowed anyone with talent to rise at their own pace, they said. And weren’t they all proof that the system worked? Why turn it into a professional room and run the risk of fucking everything up?

Others argued that it was a professional room already because there was so much media and industry presence on any given night that some comics had stopped trying out new material for fear of, as Robin Williams put it, “going down
el tubo
in front of the man from
Time
magazine.”

Leno and Boosler floated a compromise idea borrowed from the New York Improv, where the new owners—Budd Friedman’s ex-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 123

I’m Dying Up Here

123

wife Silver and her partner Chris Albrecht—were giving comics $5 to cover cab fare between clubs so they could do sets at several places a night. Mitzi could give the comics $5 a night, too, they said, but call it “gas money” instead. That way she could preserve her no-payment policy and the comics still would be able to buy breakfast. Dreesen, Miller, and Letterman were among those who liked the idea and thought Mitzi might go for it. Leno again volunteered to be the messenger. But after more discussion, they decided they didn’t feel comfortable speaking for the entire comedy community. By their own estimate, as many as two hundred performers worked the local club scene, with more hopefuls arriving every week. Shouldn’t they have a say in this, too?

It was partly the optimism of the age and partly their sense of community that led them to believe they could get that many comics into a room to debate a common cause. It had never been done before. There’d never been a need. But now there was a growing feeling among them that the time had come to take some control of their futures. They’d been going to comedy college long enough. It was time to graduate.

They left Boosler’s apartment that evening with a promise to call every comic they knew and use their status as Comedy Store headliners to convince their colleagues to show up at a time and place to be determined. It was a nutty notion—a convocation of comedians? Woodstock for clowns?—and a haphazard plan. But the stage was set for a historic confrontation.

“
This page left intentionally blank.
”

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 125

Drugs and Theft

Mike Binder felt like he’d died and gone to heaven. Among his earliest memories of growing up in Detroit was riding by Baker’s Keyboard Lounge down the street from his house and seeing Lenny Bruce’s name on the marquee. It was one of the first things he was able to read. He remembered watching Woody Allen on
The Ed Sullivan Show
and practically wearing out his George Carlin and Robert Klein albums. From age thirteen on, all he wanted to be was a comedian.

Now he was. More than that, he stood at the epicenter of comedy in America, a regular at the Comedy Store, where he might run into Carlin any night. And if that happened, he’d likely say, as casually as he could, “Hey, George,” and shake his hand. And Carlin would say, “Hey,” back and maybe even know who he was.

It was heady stuff for someone six months shy of his nineteenth birthday. Headier still was the feeling Binder had that he belonged there. He’d come to Los Angeles two years earlier clutching a copy of Phil Berger’s book
The Last Laugh: The World of Stand-up
Comics
, which chronicled the New York comedy scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Within days of his arrival, Binder was rubbing elbows with some of the guys in the book: Richard Lewis, Jay 125

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 126

126

William Knoedelseder

Leno, Michael Preminger. The first money he earned in show business was $25 that George Miller paid him for a joke he wrote:

“When I was in high school, I did a lot of drugs. Yeah, it was high High.” It was a stupid joke, but filtered through George’s persona, it was funny as hell. The night George used it on
The Tonight
Show
, Binder called his father in Detroit to tell him to be sure to stay awake all the way to the stand-up comic near the end. “The guy’s a friend of mine, Dad. And I wrote the fifth joke in.” In the Comedy Store kitchen later that night, they all gathered around the TV to watch, and Binder’s joke got a big laugh from both audiences.

Binder reveled in the camaraderie, loving the hanging out nearly as much as the performing. He was closest to Leno, who was ten years his senior and had slipped easily into the role of watchful big brother. One night, when Binder was deathly ill with an intestinal virus, bleeding from his butt and scared out of his mind, Leno literally carried him to the hospital and then phoned his father in Detroit to tell him what was happening and assure him that everything would be okay.

On a more typical night, Leno would pick Binder up in his mammoth ’58 Buick Roadmaster—“Mr. Buick,” as Jay called it—

and they’d motor to the Store, where Binder would do an early spot and then wait around for Leno to perform in prime time. He never tired of seeing Leno rock a room. Afterwards, they’d hit Canter’s and then head over to Jay’s place to play the board game Risk for hours or watch tapes of other comics on
The Tonight
Show.
For all his good fellowship, Leno had a latent cruel streak.

He taped every comic on Carson and loved nothing better than to invite people over to watch particularly bad performances.

“Hey, you wanna watch [so-and-so] bomb? ”

Some weeknights they’d go to the Posh Bagel on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood to see Andy Kaufman perform, not as a comic but as a busboy. One or two nights a week, the 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 127

I’m Dying Up Here

127

breakout star of a hit network sitcom worked for minimum wage and went unrecognized for the most part, which is why he did it and why his comedian friends would show up to participate in his peculiar brand of performance art. They’d sit at a table like normal patrons, pretending not to know him. He’d ignore them and go about his busboy business. Then, something would happen: He’d drop or spill something, or they would. An argument would break out; shouting would ensue. Chairs might be knocked over, bagels thrown. Kaufman’s pals would bolt for the parking lot before dissolving into laughter, and he’d resume bussing tables for the stunned customers without ever breaking character.