I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (7 page)

All in all, Leno’s transition was fairly painless. He quickly won over Mitzi Shore and became a regular at the Comedy Store, getting prime-time spots in the lineup. He vowed to himself that he wouldn’t take a straight job to support himself. He was going to sink or swim as a comic.

Richard Lewis made his first foray to Los Angeles in February 1974. He flew in to do a paid gig at the Ice House in Pasadena and took a bus from the airport to Lubetkin’s apartment. The first thing Steve did was walk him over to the Comedy Store to show him around. Lewis was shocked by how many comics there were—standing in the back hallway waiting to go on or hitting on girls as they came out of the restroom, gathered in groups around the front entrance or in the parking lot, sitting in cars smoking pot. It was almost overwhelming. Steve’s fixation on Mitzi Shore, about whom he talked incessantly, seemed a bit extreme, but he appeared to be in his element, happy and confident. Which was surprising, con sidering that, according to Steve, he’d just been rejected by
The Tonight Show.

Once again, it had been a case of almost but not quite. The way Steve told it, a
Tonight Show
talent coordinator had caught him at the Comedy Store and asked him to call the office the following week. But the next night, the same guy happened by a little club where Steve was trying out some new material that didn’t go over with the audience. So, when Steve called, he was told, in effect, “Never mind.”

“Oh, man, I’m sorry,” Lewis said, trying to imagine the dis appointment of being turned down by
The Tonight Show.
But Steve 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 42

42

William Knoedelseder

shrugged it off, saying he wasn’t that upset about it because he had something bigger in the offing.

“I’m making a movie,” he said. “I wrote it, and I’m starring in it. It’s called
Dante Shocko
, and it’s a bizarre comedy about this guy who competes in a Man of the Year contest to see who’s the best athlete, chess player, lover, killer, and a bunch of other things.”

“You’re making a fucking movie? ” Lewis replied, astonished.

Not only was he making it, Steve said, but he was also helping to raise the money and auditioning actors for the supporting roles.

He was hooked up with an experienced producer and director, and they were hoping to sell the movie to a major Hollywood studio.

He had even conducted his own market research into its earning potential: He had asked nine of his friends to watch Mel Brooks’s smash hit
Blazing Saddles
and to mark down each time they laughed and to note exactly what kind of laugh it was. Then he asked them to do the same thing while reading his
Dante Shocko
script. The result, he reported proudly, was that while
Blazing Saddles
elicited an average of 7 “killer laughs,” 15 “mediums,” and 27

“chuckles and strong smiles” for a total score of 49,
Dante
produced an average of 60 killers, 106 mediums, and 126 chuckles for a total of 292. Which meant that
Dante
was five times funnier than a movie that had grossed more than $100 million at the box office. “It’s staggering to think what
Dante
can make,” he said.

Steve never ceased to amaze Richard. First, he had the balls to just pick up and move to Los Angeles, and now he was trying to be the next Woody Allen or Mel Brooks. Lewis admired his friend’s courage, his drive and ability to dream large, but he worried about him, too. It seemed that Steve’s expressing himself creatively was never a means to an end, a step toward a certain career plateau.

Rather, it was as though Steve viewed each gig, each set, as a test that he took too seriously. For Steve, every night was
Hamlet
.

Lewis did well at the Ice House, so well that
Tonight Show
talent coordinator Craig Tennis contacted him the next day. “I caught 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 43

I’m Dying Up Here

43

your act last night,” Tennis said. “We’d like you to be on the show.”

It was the call every young comic dreams of getting. He immediately phoned practically everyone he knew back East. “I’m going to be on
The Tonight Show
in two weeks!”

For his national TV debut on March 27, Lewis wore an aqua blue, Western-style leisure suit with a yellow turtleneck. It was an era-appropriate outfit, but, as he would say later, “I looked like a Jewish marionette that was stalking the Muppets.” Lubetkin and Steve Landesberg accompanied him to NBC Studios in Burbank and sat in the green room with him during the taping. With time starting to run out, Carson and actor George Peppard became engaged in an interminable and decidedly unfunny discussion of their respective smoking habits, puffing on cigarettes the whole while. At one point Peppard said to Carson, “Well, John, my cancer is slower than yours.” You could have heard a pin drop in the audience. With seven minutes remaining in the show, Lewis got his cue. At the curtain, he froze for a second, but Landesberg literally put a foot in his butt and pushed him through.

Lewis had his five minutes down pat. He’d run the lines a thousand times, until he could do the material in his sleep—from the shiny yellow raincoat his mother made him wear to school “so child molesters could see me through a dense fog” to his high school coach “Moose Blechas,” who wouldn’t excuse a kid from gym class for any reason: “But, Coach, I have the
measles
.
. . .
Walk it off!”

Sensing correctly that the smoking conversation had left the audience down, he tried to get them back up, working the room as if he were at the Improv, playing to the three hundred people present instead of the millions watching at home. As a result, on the small screen he seemed to be trying too hard, looking off camera and waving his arms frenetically.

When he was done, Carson smiled and clapped politely but didn’t invite Richard over to the panel or even give him the big okay sign. Word came the next day that Carson was upset with 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 44

44

William Knoedelseder

Craig Tennis, saying, “You brought that kid on too early. He wasn’t ready.” Johnny thought he “needed a little seasoning” before he could come back.

Lewis was devastated. After three years of working day and night, he’d finally gotten his big break, and he’d blown it. He knew Carson was right. On TV, if you move around a lot, you look like an amateur. “I was like some escaped mental patient from a comedy jail,” he wailed to Lubetkin.

Lewis flew back to New York in a funk, knowing he was going to have to serve some time in purgatory before he got back on
The
Tonight Show.
He returned to headlining at the Improv and watched as two former headliner pals of his scored big in Los Angeles.

Chico and the Man
and
Good Times
were smash hits out of the box, making Freddie Prinze and Jimmie Walker the breakout stars of the 1974 television season. Their characters’ trademark expressions—“It’s not my job” in the case of Prinze’s Chico and

“Dy-no-mite” from Walker’s J. J. character—entered the American lexicon, picked up and repeated by millions of young viewers.

The word quickly went out from the TV networks to all Hollywood agents and production companies: If you want a show on the air in the 1975 season, then bring us your young and hungry stand-up comedians.

With that, the Great California Comedy Rush was on in ear -

nest, and few would be able to resist its pull. Not even Budd Friedman and the Improv.

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 45

Tom, Dave, and George

America’s only black-and-white stand-up comedy team broke up in early 1975 when Tim Reid told Tom Dreesen that he needed to strike out on his own. Dreesen probably should have seen it coming, but he didn’t. He was devastated and scared. He had a wife and three small children to support (ages four, seven, and ten), and without Tim, he had no act; he was just another white comic with barely five minutes of material.

As he sat downing beer after beer in his favorite Chicago hangout, the Sulky, Dreesen pondered his choices. He either had to find a new black partner or come up with an hour’s worth of new material, which could take months, even a year. Or he could do what his wife wanted him to do: give up his comedy dream and take a steady, stay-in-town job in a local factory. He pushed his beer across the bar and got up off the stool.

“Is that it, Tommy? ” the bartender asked. “Are you quitting for the night? ”

“No, I’m quitting for good,” Dreesen replied. He was referring to the alcohol, not to comedy. He’d made up his mind. He was going to go it alone, and he didn’t want anything to get in the way.

45

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 46

46

William Knoedelseder

Tim and Tom’s last appearance together was at a club in Houston. The split was amicable. (Reid soon gained fame as the pimped-out disc jockey Venus Flytrap in the TV series
WKRP in Cincinnati
.) Dreesen hopped a plane from Houston to Los Angeles, where the twin beacons of
The Tonight Sh
ow and the Comedy Store beck-oned. He told his wife he’d only be gone for two weeks, just enough time to establish a beachhead, and then he’d be back for her and the kids.

He hustled up free lodging by house-sitting for a girl singer he knew, Pat Hollis, who was going on the road for a few weeks. For transportation, he used his thumb, hitchhiking from Hollis’s house in West LA to the Comedy Store. He’d been there before, when he and Reid played the Los Angeles Playboy Club in 1973, so he knew the drill. On his first Monday night in town, he lined up with all the other hopefuls on the sidewalk in front of the club. It didn’t matter that he’d been a working comic for nearly six years.

He had to prove his worth with five minutes of material in front of Mitzi Shore. If he passed muster, then he could use the Comedy Store stage as a springboard to Carson. If he didn’t, then he could always be a factory worker in Chicago. No pressure or anything.

It took him a month of Mondays and every day in between to get an audition with Shore. “Well, you’re funny, and you’ve got some polish from working before,” she said (he had never heard such a voice). “We can use you here.”

The break came not a moment too soon. Pat Hollis had come back off the road and told him he had to leave. Her boyfriend was very jealous and didn’t like the idea of her sharing her house with another man. So, Dreesen moved into an old Nash Rambler that was sitting up on blocks in the alley behind Hollis’s house. Fortunately, it had a fold-down front seat, so he could sleep. Thanks to his childhood training, he knew how to bathe in the restroom sink of a nearby gas station. And he survived on one meal a day at Ken-tucky Fried Chicken, where the “Corn and Cluck for Under a 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 47

I’m Dying Up Here

47

Buck” promotion offered two pieces of chicken, a small ear of corn, mashed potatoes, gravy, and coleslaw for ninety-nine cents.

His only break from the Colonel’s cuisine came the day he hitched over to Jay Leno’s house. Leno wasn’t home, but the pretty girl who opened the door invited him in anyway.

“You hungry? ” she asked. “Want something to eat? ”

“Yeah, sure,” he said.

She looked in the refrigerator. “How ’bout a steak? ”

Dreesen almost laughed out loud. Good old Jay, the Charlie Hustle of stand-up. In town only a matter of weeks and already he had a nice place to live, a good-looking girlfriend, and enough work to afford steak. The one the girl served Dreesen turned out to be the last one in Leno’s fridge, which made it taste even more delicious.

Mitzi Shore put Dreesen in the regular lineup—early and late spots, not prime time—and agreed to let him emcee occasionally.

After a few weeks, he decided it was time to return to Chicago and round up his family, so he hatched a plan to pay his way back home. Pretending to be the manager of a hot new stand-up comic named Tom Dreesen, he called the booking office of a new talk show in Edmonton, Canada, which was paying comics $300 per appearance and flying them round-trip first class. He told them that Dreesen had been on
The Merv Griffin Show
and
The David
Frost Show
(he didn’t mention that he’d appeared as part of a team) and was now a rising star at the Comedy Store. They not only booked him but agreed to fly him home to Chicago rather than back to Los Angeles after his appearance. Once in Chicago, Dreesen talked the owner of Mr. Kelly’s nightclub into letting him open for Fats Domino for two weeks at a whopping $750 a week. He needed every cent of that money to convince his wife to pack up the kids and return with him to Los Angeles.

The Dreesens drove across the country in tandem in a pickup truck and a beat up VW bug. They rented an apartment in the 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 48

48

William Knoedelseder

San Fernando Valley for $225. Tom immediately applied for unemployment and food stamps and went to work at the Comedy Store, a state-funded stand-up comic.

A few months later, in May 1975, twenty-eight-year-old David Letterman and his wife, Michelle, left Indiana and drove to Los Angeles in tandem, he in his 1973 half-ton Chevy pickup, “Old Red,” and she in their 1972 Oldsmobile Cutlass. The pair had met and married when they were students at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, where he majored in radio and television. After college, David became a minor celebrity in his hometown of Indianapolis as the host of a 2:00 a.m. movie show and a substitute weekend weatherman on WLWI-TV. It was there that he pioneered the concept of irony in weathercasting, making up fictitious weather phenomena and spicing up the daily temperature readings with wry comments like, “Muncie, 42 . . .

Anderson, 44 . . . always a close game,”* which didn’t always go over well in rural central Indiana, where most folks liked their weather straight. He also used the station to incubate what would later become some of his trademark late-night bits—making fun of management and using staff members and passers-by (sometimes cruelly) as unwitting foils.