I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (2 page)

I’m Dying Up Here

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having them both in the same room might have proved a major distraction. Once good friends, they’d had a famous falling out in 1991, when NBC chose Leno over Letterman to succeed Johnny Carson as host of
The Tonight Show
, and time had not healed the wound. Neither man ever talked publicly about the rift, but their mutual friends in the room knew both sides by heart: Leno expressed bewilderment that Letterman blamed him for the fact that NBC offered him the gig after deciding—for whatever reasons—that Dave wasn’t right for it. That’s the way the showbiz cookie crumbled, he figured; it was all in the game.

What was he supposed to do, turn down the opportunity of a lifetime?

The way Letterman saw it: yes. Dave thought their sixteen-year friendship should have precluded Jay from lobbying for, and making a secret deal to take over, the show that he himself had always dreamed of inheriting. As much as Dave coveted the job, he couldn’t imagine going behind Leno’s back to get it. He didn’t know if he would ever be able to trust Jay again.

These were treacherous waters for their fellow comics to navi-gate.
The Tonight Show Starring Jay Leno
and
The Late Show with
David Letterman
were the twin peaks of the stand-up comedy business—the best TV exposure a comic could get. So, no one wanted to appear to take sides in the Dave-Jay thing for fear of losing both a friend and a potential buyer. Truth be told, given the opportunity, most—if not all—of them would have done what Leno did, but they probably would have felt worse about doing it. Nobody blamed Jay, but everybody understood why Dave felt betrayed. Letterman was nothing if not loyal to his old friends (the joke among them was that he hadn’t made a new one since 1979). In addition to Miller, he regularly brought on longtime pals Tom Dreesen, Richard Lewis, Johnny Dark, and Johnny Witherspoon. And it was, ironically, Letterman’s frequent booking of Leno on NBC’s
Late Night
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William Knoedelseder

helped propel Leno to the top rank of stand-up comedy and ultimately put him first in line for Carson’s crown.

In contrast, Leno rarely featured stand-up comics on
The
Tonight Show
, explaining to his old friends that the network didn’t think they drew viewers, that the research showed people even tuned out when comics came on. The comics didn’t buy it.

They thought that, as host, Leno should buck the network brass and book anyone he thought was funny, just like Carson had before him. Fair or not, the knock on Jay was that he wouldn’t go out of his way to help a fellow comic.

And yet, here he was, one of the busiest men in show business, spending a Sunday afternoon at the Laugh Factory, mixing easily with the old gang and reminiscing with obvious affection about a guy he hadn’t hung out with in twenty-five years.

“George and I had nothing in common,” Leno said. “Not one thing. Cars? [Leno collects them; George drove his mother’s bat-tered Chrysler LeBaron with cracked Corinthian leather seats and a peeling vinyl top.] Drugs? [Leno never did them; Miller never stopped.] But George always made me laugh,” he said. “He was a true comic—not a sitcom actor or an improv performer. He was a classic stand-up; it was what he was meant to do.”

He noted that their relationship had been conducted mostly by phone in recent years, with George calling frequently to cri-tique his
Tonight Show
monologues or to apologize cheekily “for not being able to get me on the Letterman show. He suggested I send a tape.”

One by one, Miller’s old pals followed Leno to the microphone to share their favorite George joke or anecdote. The famously garrulous Dreesen explained why he was chosen to emcee by telling Miller’s favorite joke about him: “The cops stopped Tom Dreesen the other night and asked him, ‘You wanna talk here or down at the station?’ Dreesen said, ‘Both, and in the car, too.’”

Native American comic Charlie Hill launched into a call-and-response with some of Miller’s best-remembered bits.

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“Why are so many people drinking diet cola? ” he shouted.

“Because they are fat and thirsty,” the crowd hollered back
.

“A cow on speed . . . (rapid fire) Moo-moo-moo-moo-moo.”

“How much does [comic] Paul Mooney weigh? . . . 200 pounds; 180 without cologne.”

“Last night I was watching an Elvis Presley movie on diet pills and Xanax . . . because that’s the way Elvis would have wanted it.”

“I went to see the movie
Accidental Tourist
and something horrible happened in the middle. . . . It continued.”

The dialogue quickly devolved into a kind of shorthand that only they understood, as people in the audience began calling out their own favorite lines to uproarious reaction:

“Then the head waiter came over . . . ” (guffaws, whooping).

“I’m chewin’ and he’s lookin’, and I’m chewin’ and he’s lookin’

. . . ” (hands slapping on tables, tears of laughter).

“Yesterday I was sitting at Denny’s having a waffle . . . ” (falling out of their chairs).

And finally, some one shouted out, “one hundred eighteen,”

which they all apparently considered the funniest number in the universe.

The “George stories” were more accessible to an outsider. Ross Schafer told of the time one of Miller’s girlfriends broke up with him. “So, George took this picture of Jesus she had on her wall and wrote on it, ‘Rot in hell,’ and put it on the windshield of her car. The woman called the cops, who showed up at George’s apartment and told him that the woman feared he was making a threat because it was a picture of Jesus. ‘Oh, gee,’ said George. ‘I thought it was Dan Fogelberg.’”

Johnny Dark recalled the time that Miller got into an argument with the manager of his neighborhood Starbucks and was told to get out and never come back. “Oh, my God,” George had wailed. “Where am I ever going to find another Starbucks? ”

Elayne Boosler remembered a middle-of-the night phone call the week she moved to Los Angeles in 1976:

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“A voice says, ‘Hi, it’s George Miller. You met me last night at the Comedy Store. You’ve gotta come out to the corner of Sunset and Sweetzer and give me some money so I can buy some drugs.’

“I didn’t even have a checking account in those days,” Boosler went on, “and I had $75 in cash to my name. But for some reason I got in my car and drove there, and he was standing by the curb.

I rolled down my window, he reached in and took the money, and I drove away. Years later his punch line to me was, ‘You handed me $75 when you didn’t even know who I was . . . so I consider you an enabler and the reason that I have a drug problem today.’”

Miller’s drug consumption was conspicuous even among this drug-experienced crowd. Quaaludes were his favorite in the early days; he preferred prescription Soma in later years. It was the dope as much as the leukemia that killed him because he’d get so high that he’d forget to take his life-preserving medicine. Dreesen, Letterman, Gary Muledeer, and Laugh Factory owner Jamie Masada had tried to stage an intervention with him in the months before he died—to no avail. Letterman flew to Los Angeles to be there, but when Miller saw them all together, he said, “Oh, this is that intervention shit, isn’t it? We’ll I’m not going for it.”

“George, you have to get straight,” Letterman told him. “You have to get well or else.”

“What does that mean? ” Miller shot back nastily. “That you’re not going to put me on your show anymore? ”

For Letterman it was like a sucker punch to the gut. He left hurt and angry, and he and Miller didn’t talk to each other for weeks afterwards—the only time in their long friendship that had ever happened.

Naturally, none of this was mentioned at the memorial, where one of the biggest laughs of the night was prompted by Kelly Montieth’s drug-referenced quip, “George probably doesn’t know he’s dead yet.”

When it seemed for a second that Dreesen was steering dangerously close to sentimentality, saying, “I’m going to miss George’s 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 7

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criticism of me,” Elayne Boosler pulled him back from the brink by calling out, “I’ll fill in for him,” to which someone in the back of the room added, “And when she dies. . . . ”

The exchange kicked off a volley of high-spirited heckling, with insults and put-downs caroming around the room—“Yeah? It won’t be the first time you’ve used my material”—all goosed along gleefully by a beaming Leno, dressed as of old in well-worn jeans and a rumpled denim shirt and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Mike Binder, with whom he’d had a painful parting of the ways more than two decades before.

In that moment, they all seemed transformed. The years fell away. Suddenly, it was the mid-1970s. They were twenty-something, bubbling with ambition and bursting with dreams. No one was rich; no one was famous. No one had been to rehab; no one had died.

Dave and Jay were still pals. They were all having the time of their lives. And no one had any inkling of what was about to happen.

“
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Blood Brothers

Richard Lewis was scared. On a cool April evening in 1971, he was on the way from his apartment in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, to midtown Manhattan, driving through the Lincoln Tunnel in his silver Chevy Vega, a car with more electrical problems than he had neuroses. No mechanic could figure out what was wrong with the car. Typically, the tape deck would begin to slow down, causing the high-pitched vocals of Procol Harum to drop to the deepest of bass, and then the headlights would dim, alert-ing him to the fact that he was a mile or so from hell, when the engine would die. Which could be a big problem in the tunnel.

But that’s not what he was afraid of. Earlier in the day, Lewis, a twenty-four-year-old Ohio State graduate with a degree in marketing, had finally decided what he wanted to be in life, what he had to be: a stand-up comic. And that scared the shit out of him.

Lewis had been funny as far back as he could remember, the class clown from kindergarten on. He fell in love with laughter at the age of five and gobbled up whatever comedy early television had to offer—
The Colgate Comedy Hour
with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis,
Texaco Star Theater
with Milton Berle,
Your Show of
Shows
with Sid Caesar,
The Ed Wynn Show.
By age nine, he had 9

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memorized the
TV Guide
schedule and was a discerning enough consumer of comedy to prefer Steve Allen to Ed Sullivan on Sunday night. He tried not to miss Oscar Levant’s weekday afternoon show and stayed up late to catch Alexander King and Shelley Berman on Jack Paar.

Humor provided solace from the sense of isolation he felt growing up as the baby of his family with a considerably older brother and sister who consequently paid little attention to him. His father, William Lewis, known in northern New Jersey as “the King of Caterers,” was devoted to his business and was seldom home. His mother was lonely and often depressed. The only time “Richie” felt connected to his parents was on the rare occasions when he would lie between them in their bed watching
The Honey mooners.
But the feeling lasted only as long as the show. So, he sought comfort in the company of comedians he found first on television and later on record albums: Jonathan Winters, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, and Carl Reiner. He came to think of himself as a rebel, laughing at authority, like Holden Caulfield.

He experienced an epiphany one day at Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood, New Jersey. During an assembly in the school gymnasium, he was mocking the people on stage under his breath and cracking up everyone around him when the principal suddenly stepped to the microphone and halted the proceedings.

He directed the students to file out of the gym homeroom by homeroom until only Lewis’s homeroom remained. Then he ordered the class to file out row by row until, out of the original nine hundred kids, only Lewis was left in the gym, whereupon the principal looked down at him and said, “Richard Lewis, you are
the
troublemaker of this school.”

Most teenagers would have been mortified, terrified, undone by such a singling out. But Lewis appreciated the absurdity. His first thought was, “Hey, I might be able to make a living at this.”

At first his plan was just to write comedy. In college he started jotting down funny premises and jokes in a notebook that he car-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 11

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ried everywhere he went. He fantasized about transitioning directly from student life to that of a staff writer for a TV star like Sid Caesar, which was how Woody Allen had gotten his start.

When that didn’t happen upon graduation, he hung around Columbus, Ohio, for nearly a year, doing odd jobs, afraid to return home to New Jersey and face his father’s inevitable questions about finding “a real job.”

What finally moved him out of Ohio was the news that one of his comic heroes, Robert Klein, was going to host a summer

“replacement” show on network TV. A friend tracked down the address of Klein’s manager, Buddy Morra, who was with the prestigious firm of (Jack) Rollins and (Charles) Joffe, which also managed Woody Allen and Dick Cavett. Lewis mailed off a pack age of material he wrote specifically for Klein and followed up a week later with a phone call to Morra, who’d been impressed enough with what he read to pass it on to Klein. Morra told Lewis to call him the next time he was in the New York area, and he’d arrange a meeting with the comedian. Lewis couldn’t get back to New York quickly enough.