I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (33 page)

Dreesen had never had an easier act to follow. He delivered his well-honed spiel on the unfairness of comics working for free in a profitable club where all other employees were paid for their labor.

Astrow closed with an appeal to the delegates’ sense of brotherhood, pointing out that as many as ninety CFC members, herself included, were card-carrying, dues-paying members of AFTRA and therefore deserved their support and protection. After Maynard, it probably didn’t matter much what they said, but as the trio left the banquet room to considerably-more-than-polite applause, they knew that they had killed. Indeed, Bud Wolff gave them a 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 228

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look and a nod that told them they’d be getting their statement of support. They were celebrating in the lobby when Biff Maynard banged through the double doors, scowled at them, and stomped out of the building. Giddy with excitement, they raced back to the Store, where they were regaling Leno and the other picketers with details of Maynard’s epic bomb, when they heard the roar of a car engine and a squeal of tires as Maynard made a belligerent left turn off Sunset into the Comedy Store parking lot. He veered toward Leno and Lonow, who were standing in the driveway talking.

They leaped out of the way of the car, but Lonow apparently leaped faster. There was loud thump, and Leno went down.

“Jay’s been hit,” someone screamed. Within seconds there was pandemonium as people ran over to where he lay crumpled on the pavement. “Is he okay? Is he breathing? Somebody call an ambulance.” Leno’s eyes were closed, and he was moaning. Astrow and several other women were in tears. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

Maynard didn’t stop. He gunned his car to the back of the employee parking lot and ran inside the club, announcing with alarm, “I just hit Jay Leno with my car!” Dreesen started to chase after him but was restrained by others. “I’ll kill that mother-fucker,” he raged. Leno was moaning louder now and starting to move. Dreesen knelt down and put his face close to his friend.

“Jay, can you hear me? ” Loud and clear, apparently. Leno immediately opened one eye and winked at him. Dreesen drew back in surprise:
Holy shit! He’s faking!

It was a brilliant bit of improv, street theater worthy of Andy Kaufman. Jay had merely slapped the side of Biff’s car as it went by and executed a classic NBA flop. Realizing that no one else had seen the wink, Dreesen leaned back down and whispered in Leno’s ear. “What do you want to do now? I think an ambulance is on the way.” Leno moaned louder, indicating that he wanted to play it out. “We need to get him to the hospital fast,” Dreesen told the others. “There’s no time for the ambulance.” So Leno 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 229

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was quickly lifted into a car, crying out in convincing agony, and was driven off in the direction of Cedars Sinai Hospital.

Dreesen immediately let Lonow in on the joke and was going to tell the others, but Lonow argued for keeping quiet about it for as long as possible. He explained that according to labor law, an employer is liable whenever a picketer is injured on the line. “If Mitzi doesn’t know that, then her lawyers will certainly tell her, and she will freak. Let’s see what happens.”

They didn’t have to wait long. Fifteen minutes after “the accident,” Shore’s assistant, Meg Staahl, suddenly materialized and said to Dreesen, “Mitzi would like to see you.”

She escorted him into the office, where a tired-looking Shore was sitting with Danny Mora and her attorney, Steve Mason.

“Let’s end this whole thing right now, tonight,” she said.

Dreesen was so astonished by the rapid turn of events that he was almost speechless. “Whatever you say, Mitzi,” was about all he could manage to get out.

He put in a call to Ken Browning, who hurried to the club for what turned out to be a long, strange night of negotiations, with Mitzi and Mason in her office, Dreesen alone in an adjoining office, and Browning shuttling between the club and the CFC leaders—

Astrow, Lonow, Boosler, Miller, and a miraculously recovered Leno—who were gathered at the Hyatt House coffee shop next door. Shore would not let Browning (whom she referred to as “that sleazy Ivy League lawyer”) enter the club, so he had to confer with Dreesen out front and then return to the others at the Hyatt.

By 5:00 a.m. they had hammered out a settlement agreement that gave the comics 50 percent of the door in the Main Room and $25 per set in the Original Room and at Westwood, with negotiations regarding the Belly Room to be conducted at a later date.

The six-page document was signed in Shore’s office. She drew the shape of a heart next to her signature. Meg Staahl had tears in her eyes as Mitzi and Tom hugged.

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“Does this mean you will finally come back? ” Shore asked.

“I’ll come back when the contract is honored,” he said.

After more hugs at the Hyatt House, the half dozen bone-tired CFC leaders trudged up the ramp to the parking lot and drove home in the dawn light, elated by their apparent victory but not quite believing that it was all over.

Of course, it wasn’t.

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“My Name Is

Steve Lubetkin”

Much of the comedy community was awakened brutally early on Thursday morning, May 2, by excited phone calls from colleagues telling them that overnight, while they were sleeping, the strike had been resolved. Mitzi had caved! Short of a
Variety
headline proclaiming, “Nets Slate Sitcom for Every Stand-up,” it was about the best news any of them could have imagined.

The surprising development seemed to render moot the morning’s trade paper reports that the Screen Actors Guild and AFTRA had issued a joint statement urging their members to support the CFC and honor their picket line. “The strikers have taken a courageous step in organizing themselves and walking out without actual representation by a major union,” SAG executive secretary Chester Migden was quoted as saying. “This is the sort of action that brought unions into existence in the 1920s and 1930s, and it is a rare thing today. We must commend and admire the strikers for their fortitude.”

The CFC membership still had to ratify the settlement agreement, so Tom Dreesen called for an emergency membership meeting Friday afternoon at Humperdinck’s, one of the three local 231

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nightclubs that had entered into an exclusive booking arrangement with the comedians’ group. Only about 50 of the CFC’s claimed 137

members made it to the hastily arranged meeting, but the mood was ebullient, with much back slapping and bravado, even before the agreement was read to the gathering. There was talk of printing up T-shirts proclaiming, “The CFC did it for me.”

“This is
our
contract the way
we
wanted it,” Dreesen told the cheering “brotherhood of stand-up comedians.” In the two-year agreement, Mitzi Shore recognized the CFC as the “exclusive bargaining representative of the comedians.” She agreed to a compensation formula that called for twelve paid twenty-minute sets in the Original Room on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday nights, with forty-five minutes set aside “at the beginning and/or end” of each night for nonpaid performances. On Fridays and Saturdays, there would be two shows of five paid sets per night and no nonpaid performances. Mondays would remain nonpaid

“potluck” nights. The formula for Westwood varied slightly in that it called for thirteen fifteen-minute paid sets on weeknights.

The Main Room was a straight fifty-fifty split of the cover charges.

And the Belly Room would remain closed “until the parties shall enter into a further written agreement.”

Considering that the comics had started out five months earlier talking about $5 per set for “gas money,” the document read like a huge win for the CFC. The icing on the cake was paragraph 6: Neither party (or its members, employees, officers, principals or agents) shall take any discriminatory or retaliatory action, either directly or indirectly, against the other, by reason of any of the activities, picketing, negotiations, or discussions hereto.

In laymen’s language, this meant that in putting together her future lineups, Mitzi could not reward strikebreakers or punish picketers.

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At 3:15 p.m., the agreement was ratified almost unanimously.

Within minutes, the Comedy Store’s phone lines lit up with calls from comics advising of their availability to perform over the weekend. Estelle Endler issued a statement on behalf of the club, saying, “It’s back to funny business.” Shore, however, made it clear that she was not happy with the agreement, telling the
Los
Angeles Times
, “It is against my basic philosophy and the principles of the Comedy Store that this settlement was made. You might say I was unionized into a corner.”

In a victory statement to reporters, Dreesen said, “Mitzi Shore is a formidable opponent, but we won the battle because our cause was honest, fair and just. I think what we’ve done is a nice legacy for the young kids coming up. Maybe they won’t have to go through what we went through.”

Perhaps no one was happier than Dreesen to see the strike end. He’d dropped more than twenty pounds since January and had endured a recurring, sweat-drenched nightmare in which the strike dragged on for four years, leaving him as the last lonely picketer standing in front of the Comedy Store, refusing to give up the fight. He’d also lost a small fortune in bookings that he turned down to attend to his CFC duties. With the agreement ratified, he joked, “Now I can get back into show business.”

Before the champagne corks were popped and the celebrating of the armistice could begin, however, Floyd Ackerman of AGVA threw a wrench in the works by announcing that the strike wasn’t over until he said it was. “AGVA does not recognize any agreement made by the dissident comics short of a union contract between AGVA and the Comedy Store,” he said in a statement,

“because the CFC is not certified by the U.S. Department of Labor as a bargaining unit. We’re the only union that’s chartered to handle a situation like this.”

What’s more, Ackerman claimed that an invisible picket line still existed around the club and threatened to reactivate a “physical”

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line with AGVA members unless the Comedy Store came to as yet undefined terms with the union. “Walking into that club constitutes crossing the line whether there’s a physical line there or not,” he said. “We expect and assume that our sister unions will enjoin their members from crossing the line or working there.”

Ackerman went so far as to claim credit for the settlement agreement that, in his opinion, had not ended the strike. Noting that the Federation of Labor sanction AGVA had obtained against the Comedy Store caused the club to be placed on the AFL-CIO

“Do Not Patronize” list, Ackerman said, “Only then did Mitzi Shore return to the bargaining table.”

Ackerman’s aggressive stance stunned AGVA’s sister unions.

Spokesmen for both SAG and AFTRA stammered that they were unaware of AGVA’s invisible picket line and therefore could not say whether they would enjoin their members from crossing it.

“That would have to come from our national office,” said Allan Davis, director of AFTRA’s western region. “We’d have to determine whether AGVA really represents the CFC and whether it’s a legitimate AGVA picket line. If it is, then that’s another matter.

It’s a delicate situation. We do have an obligation to support our sister unions’ efforts to organize their legitimate areas of jurisdiction. But I don’t know if that’s the case here.”

Ken Browning advised the CFC leadership to ignore Ackerman and proceed under the terms of the agreement while the big unions worked out their jurisdictional issues. But the prospect of AGVA’s reasserting itself in the comedy club business unnerved Budd Friedman. “Once the unions are involved, they can kill everything,” he said. “If I have to start dealing with them, it will become no fun. I have alternate plans. Maybe it’s time for me to move on to something else. I never really got rich in this business anyway.”

The following week, the CFC executive committee met at Dreesen’s house to deal with myriad poststrike issues. They didn’t have to worry about manning a picket line anymore, at least not a visible one, but that headache had been replaced with the 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 235

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equally grinding task of enforcing the new contract and making sure that people got paid properly. Not surprisingly, there were a lot of bugs in the new system, and grievances were coming in from the membership.

The meeting was to be Dreesen’s swan song, his farewell to the troops. He was resigning as chairman and handing over the reins to Jo Anne Astrow, who would serve as acting chair pending the election of new officers. Dreesen was set to go on the road with Sammy Davis Jr. in a few weeks, and he was definitely looking forward to the trip after five months in the pressure cooker. At the same time, he’d grown close to the twelve people on the executive committee. They had been through a strange boot camp together, and he knew he was going to miss them.

“I just want to congratulate you guys,” he said at the end of the meeting. “I am so proud of you all. Because of the great job you did and how hard you worked, comedians all over the country are now going to be paid fairly for their performances. You have done a wonderful thing for your fellow comics. But I’m out of here now. You need to elect new officers, and I need to move on and get back to my career.”

He kept his comments uncharacteristically short because he was already late for a meeting with the producers of a new TV