I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (30 page)

On Friday, March 30, the fourth night of picketing, a dozen comics took a break from the strike to participate in the First Annual Battle of the Stars basketball game at the Forum, home of the Los Angeles Lakers. The charity benefit pitted the Comedy Store 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 202

202

William Knoedelseder

Bombers against the Deep Pizza Celebrity All-Stars, whose only bona fide celebrity was Larry Wilcox, the costar of the hit TV series
C.H.I.P.S
. Although only one of the Bombers, Lue Deck, sided with Shore, all of them donned the uniforms she’d paid for to play in what would turn out to be their final game, which they won by a score none of them could remember the next day.

At the end of the first week of picketing, Budd Friedman met with CFC leaders at the Improv, where comics were performing nightly for free on a makeshift stage. Friedman opened his books to the group and signed an agreement to begin paying for performances when full operations resumed in six to eight weeks. The exact amount and manner of the payment was subject to future good faith bargaining.

“I agreed, in effect, to pay them
something
,
”
he said in announcing the agreement. “Basically, I am against the strike. But if that’s what they want, then maybe it’s the tenor of the times. Or, as my ex-wife said, ‘Maybe it’s the end of an era.’”

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 203

Dave’s Big Night

After a week’s shutdown, Mitzi Shore reopened the Sunset club, but it was hardly a return to business as usual. At 10:00 p.m., prime time, on Tuesday, April 3, the Original Room was only one-quarter filled, the line-up consisted entirely of amateurs culled from the previous night’s potluck auditions, and admission was free (though the two-drink minimum remained in effect).

Outside, former regulars and headliners were working hard to make the media understand the issues underlying the picket signs and the slogans. “There are comedians in this town who have done all the talk shows and don’t have $100 net worth,” said Jay Leno. “It’s humiliating after you’ve been on TV to have to get a job at Nate ’n Al’s deli. All we want is a little gas money, just a couple of dollars, that’s all it comes down to. It amazes me that it’s come to this.”

Elayne Boosler told a reporter that because of the Comedy Store’s success, “showcase rooms are replacing paying rooms; it’s sweeping the country. As it is now, you have to be a TV star like Robin Williams or you have to work for free. [Mitzi Shore] calls this a showcase when no one has been allowed to showcase [perform for agents, managers, or producers] on the weekends. And it’s 203

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 204

204

William Knoedelseder

not really a workshop anymore. If you bomb in there, you don’t continue to work in there. She recently told a comedian he was

‘too experimental.’”

Tom Dreesen said that even though he was earning as much as $15,000 a week in Vegas, “I had a [club owner] offer me $250 a week recently. He said, ‘Well you work for
free
at the Comedy Store.’ We’ve got the best show in town for $4.50. We did this to ourselves; we agreed to work for free six years ago. Now we’re trying to undo it.”

All around them on the sidewalk, their colleagues were trying to dissuade potential patrons from entering the club, handing out mimeographed fliers that read, “Please honor the comedians’

boycott. At the Comedy Store only the comedians are not paid.

The people you have come to see receive nothing for their work.”

The picketers also provided printed directions to the Improv and the lineup of comics set to perform there that night.

At one point, a huge tour bus carrying the Canadian rock band April Wine pulled up, and the band members and their road crew disembarked. Comedian Susan Sweetzer and several others pleaded with them, “Please don’t cross our picket line. We’re performers, too, and we’re just trying to get paid for what we do.” The musicians climbed back onto the bus and left, to much cheering and praising of the Canadian people. But the bus returned an hour later, and this time those fucking Canucks, the April Winos, crossed the line and went in to watch the show.

Periodically, Shore loyalists would emerge from the club to engage the other side in debate or name calling. Harris Peet and the other doormen liked to rile the picketers up by making a show of writing down their names as if compiling a future blacklist. Argus Hamilton did his best to keep things collegial, allowing Dreesen or Dottie Archibald to complete his or her pitch to a would-be patron about not entering the club before presenting his case for crossing the line, which usually began with something like, “With all due 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 205

I’m Dying Up Here

205

respect to my friend and colleague, who is a very talented performer. . . . ” Though he was Mitzi Shore’s most ardent defender, Hamilton could not bring himself to view the picketers as the enemy. He had partied with almost every one of them, stayed up all night laughing and talking and sharing dreams. He saw them as honorable opponents who had a different view of what the Comedy Store should be. The great-grandson of a Confederate officer, he believed he was fighting the good fight for a cause greater than himself. It was a civil war, to be sure, but he was a Southern gentleman who knew that one day Arkansas and Illinois would get along again.

The war heated up as the week wore on and Shore supporters began taking the stage to perform. Argus Hamilton led the charge, urging the others to follow him into the breach. Most of Mitzi’s boys did, prompting Elayne Boosler to start the sidewalk chant, “The doormen are the headliners. The doormen are the headliners.”

Behind every crossing of the picket line was a story:

• When Lue Deck went over, it marked the end of the comedy team of Heck and Deck because his partner, Jimmy Heck, supported the CFC. Best friends from Houston, the pair had performed together for five years, touting themselves as “Heck and Deck, funny as a train wreck.”

• Yakov Smirnoff, an émigré from the Soviet Union, was employed by Shore as the club’s carpenter. Along with a handful of other strikebreakers, he was paying only a few hundred dollars a month to live in a comfortable seven-bedroom house that Shore owned on Crest Hill Drive a few blocks above the Sunset club.

• Charlie Hill had been an ardent supporter of the American Indian Movement during the bloody siege of Wounded Knee in 1973, which colored his view of the comedians’ uprising: “I didn’t see any of them there with me at the federal building when the FBI was killing my brothers on the Pine Ridge reservation.”

• Garry Shandling was the scion of a family with manufacturing holdings and decidedly antiunion views. He had not shared the 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 206

206

William Knoedelseder

struggling comic experience. He was a successful sitcom writer trying to break into stand-up, and prior to the strike, Shore had refused to put him in the regular lineup because she didn’t think he was good enough. Of course, that changed the minute he crossed the picket line.

• Lois Bromfield was the only woman to join the strikebreakers.

Naturally, a number of male comics took it as solid evidence that she was Mitzi’s secret lesbian lover.

Inside the club, Mitzi urged her supporters to keep constant watch on the pickets outside “because I don’t know whether they might try something violent. I wouldn’t put it past them.” Some pickets delighted in playing to her paranoia by lighting pieces of paper on fire and waving them in the air, shouting things like,

“Remember the Improv.” Such antics were more inflammatory than the pickets realized because Shore and some of her closest cohorts suspected that Budd Friedman was behind the torching of his club, calling it a “fire of convenience” and “a case of Italian lightning.” At one point, there appeared to be a genuine threat to the Sunset club when two Los Angeles Police Department detectives showed up with a tape of a phone call they said had come into the precinct warning that a bomb had been planted in the building. Upon hearing the tape, Shore blurted out, “Gee, that sounds like Ollie.” After the cops left, reassured by Shore that it was all just a misunderstanding, a terrified Ollie Joe Prater admitted to several people that he had phoned in the bomb scare—he just never imagined those calls were taped.

The atmosphere on the picket line was also growing increasingly tense. Whereas the first week was highlighted by such play-ful stunts as Leno, dressed as Che Guevara, wheeling up in a Volks wagen “Thing” painted in camouflage to resemble an armored personnel carrier, the second week was marked by angry confrontations. In one instance, a shouting match between an apparently unchastened Prater and Jimmy Aleck led to Prater’s 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 207

I’m Dying Up Here

207

chasing Aleck through the parking lot with a baseball bat, an astonishing sight given Prater’s bulk and the fact that Aleck moved with a pronounced limp left behind by a childhood bout of polio.

Prater had Aleck cornered against a couple of cars, and a crowd was starting to gather around them, when Dreesen pulled his car into the parking lot, jumped out, and got between them.

“What’s going on, Ollie? ” he barked.

“It’s none of your business. Stay out of it,” Prater said.

“This
is
my business.”

“I’m going to break his fucking jaw.”

“Then I’ll have to break yours.”

Dreesen was fairly confident that he could take Prater, who was heaving from the short sprint, but he was relieved when the much larger man backed off and trudged down the ramp toward the club. He shook his head in disbelief at what had just taken place. What did all this have to do with being funny for a living?

With the strikebreakers forming a semblance of a professional lineup, Shore reinstituted the cover charge over the weekend, but the mood inside the club remained as dark as the décor. Shore cycled between self-righteous rage and self-pity, with no stop in between for self-reflection. Her staff was concerned that in her pain and anger, she might do something rash. Rumor around the building had it that Glendale Federal Bank had made her an offer to buy the business. Hamilton feared they were getting dangerously close to the point at which she just might say, “Fuck ’em,” and sell the place.

If Shore saw any bright spots as she stood night after night looking out the window at the picketers, it was the fact that, with the exception of Leno, none of her favorites had shown up to parade around with the others, shouting slogans and calling her names—not Robin Williams or Jimmie Walker or Richard Pryor, not Sandra Bernhard, and not David Letterman. That was about to change.

Monday, April 9, was Oscar night. Most of Hollywood was buzzing with speculation about which of the two Vietnam war 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 208

208

William Knoedelseder

dramas, Michael Cimino’s epic
The Deerhunter
or the Jane Fonda vehicle
Coming Home
, would win for best picture. The comedy community, however, was focused on a sidebar story: Johnny Carson was hosting the Academy Awards ceremony, and as a result, one of their own, David Letterman, was filling in as host of
The
Tonight Show
. There wasn’t a comic on either side of the strike who didn’t know what this meant for Dave. It made him in the business, not just as a stand-up but as a major league entertainer. It was bigger than what had happened with Freddy. Dave was being anointed as Carson’s heir apparent. It was all the comics were talking about on the picket line, not just because Dave was universally well-liked but also because it gave them hope for themselves.

Once again, Dreesen accompanied Letterman to the early evening taping, but this time it wasn’t solely for moral support; he was booked as a guest. A veteran of umpteen
Tonight Show
appearances, Tom was cool and calm backstage before the show, while Dave was a nervous wreck, running through his routine of self-deprecation: “This time tomorrow I’ll be back in Indianapolis.”

As Ed McMahon introduced Letterman, Dreesen was standing in the wings watching when he felt a presence behind him. He turned to see talk show host Tom Snyder, whose
Late Night
followed the Carson show. “I gotta see how the audience responds to this no-name,” Snyder said snarkily.

Once again, Dave’s jitters didn’t make it past the curtain; when the cameras started rolling, he was smooth as silk. Dreesen had seen his friend perform countless times at the Comedy Store and other clubs, and he never really understood why Dave didn’t feel entirely comfortable in that setting. Seeing him now in the TV host chair, he finally got it. Oh, my God, he thought. This is where he belongs. He’s home.

It was a heady moment when Letterman introduced Dreesen for the stand-up segment of the show, something that neither of them could have imagined just two years earlier. “Thank you, 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 209

I’m Dying Up Here

209

ladies and gentlemen,” Dreesen said at the top of his routine. “I always like being here on
The Tonight Show
. . . . Of course, I like it a lot better when Johnny is here.” Off to his right, he heard Dave break up.

They planned to drive together to the Comedy Store after the taping. Letterman hadn’t been there since the picketing started because he’d been working every night getting ready for the show.

But as they were headed down the hall toward the door, Carson’s longtime producer, Fred DeCordova, stopped them and told Letterman that, like all guest hosts, he was expected to attend the postshow staff meeting. To Dreesen’s astonishment, Letterman begged off, saying, “I’m really sorry, Freddy, but I can’t stay because I made a commitment to walk the picket line at the Comedy Store tonight.”

When Letterman’s red truck pulled into the Comedy Store parking lot twenty minutes later, the crowd on the sidewalk cheered. As he walked down the ramp and took his place on the line, his fellow Comedians for Compensation broke into a scat version of
The
Tonight Show
theme, singing “dah-dah, dah-dah-dah-dahdah-dah.”