The Improv

by Budd Friedman

  BETTE MIDLER:

  I’m sure I sang something from The Threepenny Opera, because when I came to town I had my three little piano arrangements that I had paid for. Those were my audition pieces and I sang them whenever I was required to. They were extremely complicated because I was in the torch-song singing business, which was also torture, but I was very proud of them. They were dirges, there’s no question, and then somewhere along the line my boyfriend at the time introduced me to Mae West. Not literally, but introduced me to who she was and what she had done. I had never seen or heard of her before because I came from Hawaii, so I didn’t know anything about her.

  But when I first saw her movies at this theater down in Greenwich Village where they used to play old revivals, I fell in love with her. She was so funny and so big and blonde and so sexy and so different from the sort of square-type talent that you saw everywhere you looked. I just adored her, but I didn’t know if she was alive or dead. I assumed she wasn’t with us anymore because these were movies that were made in the 1930s and she didn’t look like a spring chicken in those days.

  So I thought that she had passed on to her reward and that it was fair game to sing a couple of her songs. I think that’s sort of where the comedy started because the songs were “Come Up and See Me Sometime” or “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone” or “Frankie and Johnny.” Songs like that had a little bit of an edge to them. That was the first time I started to do songs that were a little bit funnier than my usual dirges. It was a slow transition, but I made it really fun at Budd’s place and at the various open mic nights around town.

  JOHN MEYER:

  If I can say something about that—and I don’t even think I was there that particular night she auditioned—but Bette was always smart and she was funny. The only reservation I had about her in the beginning was that like many girls who aren’t too attractive (which Bette has since become), they want to present themselves as a sex symbol. Bette had tits, and she insisted on showing them and flashing them around. It clashed with her image early on, and that’s why I think she adapted the Mae West persona initially.

  Nevertheless, Bette seemed to be taking it all in stride. If she was upset after her first time at the Improv, you sure couldn’t tell it. She was cool as a cucumber and she never lost her composure. I was also very nice about it, though, and not wanting to offend my friend or hurt Bette’s feelings, I made some offhanded compliment and quickly introduced the next act. But then about three weeks later, I went to see a waitress of mine named Rosalind Harris, who later appeared in Bette’s role in the film version of Fiddler on the Roof, perform at another club not far from the Improv called The African Room and was absolutely blown away when I discovered that Bette was there and I saw her perform again.

  BETTE MIDLER:

  The African Room was very dark. It was like a themed room, so they had a lot of highly combustible décor—jungle stuff, conga drums, and banana trees. I really didn’t get it, plus the acoustics were terrible and the piano wasn’t great. There was hardly anybody there and it seemed like it wasn’t going to be a very exciting booking. Actually, to tell you the truth, I don’t remember whether I was ever formally booked there or if I was doing an open mic night the second time Budd saw me.

  The African Room had this big stuffed ape when you walked in, and as I was sitting there nursing a glass of wine waiting for Rosalind to go on, Bette got up and sang “Am I Blue?” This time, it was absolutely jaw-dropping. What struck me the most was that she could sing that loud, yet she also sang soft and delicate without ever missing a single note.

  From the moment I heard Bette perform for the second time at The African Room, I immediately knew that she had superstar quality. When you believe that about someone and they live up to your expectations, it’s one of the most satisfying feelings in the world. Of course, the opposite is also true when things don’t pan out, and the pain and disappointment can be excruciating. But in Bette’s case, my instincts obviously proved correct. She was just delicious, and not long after she became a regular at the Improv, I became her manager even though I didn’t know the first thing about being one and still had ambitions about someday becoming a producer. I also figured that if I became a manager, it would get me that much closer to Broadway.

  So I did, but it didn’t.

  BETTE MIDLER:

  Budd came up to me right after I sang that night and asked if he could manage me. I thought, “Why not.” And that was it. He was very nonchalant and casual about it, and I wasn’t exactly sure what was going to happen, but it seemed to make sense and so we signed a one-year agreement.

  BUDDY MANTIA:

  Whenever Bette came in to the Improv, she always got great spots because Budd was managing her. But she also had this great concept of what she was doing, especially when she started doing songs like “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” and it all kind of just evolved from there.

  DANNY AIELLO:

  The first person who really made me realize Bette was going to be a star was my sister Rosebud who came into the club one night and proclaimed, “She’s good.” Most people who weren’t there at the time don’t know this, but I used to sing backup behind Bette—me, Buddy Hughes, Bobby Alto, and Buddy Mantia, who was also in a doo-wop group called the Untouchables with me.

  The other thing about Bette was that even back then she was a wonderful actress. One night—I don’t remember the specific year—Bette was onstage singing when this guy from the audience threw a glass of wine at her. She walked offstage in a huff, but then a couple of minutes later she came back on and started crying. Of course, it was all just a put-on, but the audience was absolutely captivated. And then she launched into this amazing love song.

  JAMIE DEROY:

  In the beginning, I remember that Bette was always very hard on herself no matter how well she’d done. When she came offstage, she’d say, “I did terribly.” And I’d be like, “Terribly? What do you mean? You were great.”

  LENNY SCHULTZ, comedian:

  Bette was also very civic-minded. Hell’s Kitchen in those days wasn’t exactly what you’d call the garden spot of America, and Bette had this thing about cleanliness and litter. Whenever she saw somebody throwing something on the ground, she’d scream at them at the top of her lungs. She’d say, “Hey, what the hell are you doing?” Sometimes she’d even chase cars down the block. Littering drove her crazy.

  JOE PISCOPO:

  By the time I got to the Improv in the midseventies, Bette was already a major star and she wasn’t a regular anymore, but she’d still come into the club from time to time and we’d perform for her. She was very quiet and she’d sit way in the back, and we’d all get up onstage. I played the piano and we were all basically just goofing around—which she probably doesn’t even remember—but Bette really seemed to enjoy that.

  ROBERT KLEIN:

  I keep thinking Bette came in about six months after me, which was the first time I saw her. She was in Fiddler on the Roof, and she looked like she wore the costume home. That’s what I remember. She had on a vintage outfit and she wasn’t very pretty, although she had a beautiful body. I’ve said this a million times—you could tell who had it and who didn’t at the Improv—and Budd was obviously astute enough to see that in Bette’s case for sure.

  Bette became a regular at the Improv as I learned the ropes of what being a good manager entails. However, our audiences didn’t always warm up to her in the beginning because of some of the offbeat songs she sang. There were instances when they’d be talking and I’d have to exert my club owner side and tell them to be quiet, although the further she got into a number the more mesmerized they would be.

  Not long after I began managing her, I remember taking Bette to a Friars Club showcase where she entered from the back of the room. At first, people were laughing at her and I was heartbroken. But within the first two minutes after she got onstage, they were laughing with her and she had them wrapped around her finger.

  It also w
asn’t long before I began having some success managing her even though we’d never really mapped out any sort of formal game plan. The first television show I booked her on was with local New York personality Joe Franklin, who had a daily talk show on WOR. My goal at this point was simply to get her any kind of exposure I could, and my persistence paid off. Soon she caught the attention of David Frost’s talent coordinator after I invited her to the Improv to see Bette. It was also one of the first times that Bette’s famously powerful voice would prove to be an enormous advantage because the talent coordinator, who was hard of hearing, immediately offered us five shows in a row. The only problem was that they were syndicated, which meant they didn’t air consecutively.

  So the David Frost shows didn’t have the impact they should have, and while we were both disappointed, this quickly led to five appearances on The Merv Griffin Show, all within a year’s time. Not long after that, I got Bette her first appearance on The Tonight Show. The story leading up to this, which she told on Johnny Carson’s final show in 1992, is that she knew a woman who liked her singing and made two satin gowns for her.

  She wore one of them to the audition, and as we were driving over in a taxi, the gown split down the middle—whereupon Bette leaned over to me and said, “I can’t go in like this. Give me your jacket and I’ll wrap it around.”

  However, instead of giving it to her, all I could think to say was, “I can’t give you my jacket. What about my dignity?”

  And that’s when Bette shot back with one of the cleverest, off-the-cuff comebacks I’ve ever heard. She just looked up at me and said, “What about my ass?”

  Of course, we were both laughing but also panicking, as we got out of the cab and got some safety pins from a drugstore before making our way over to this little theater on West 49th Street near NBC where they were holding the auditions. Needless to say, we were nervous. But then at the appointed moment, after hearing her sing “Am I Blue?”—the same song that won me over back at The African Room—the producers flipped, and we were immediately told that Bette was going to be on the show.

  CRAIG TENNIS, former talent coordinator of The Tonight Show:

  I wasn’t involved in the Bette-Budd drama that day, but here’s how I remember the events leading up to it and afterwards. For a while—and it was only slightly successful—we decided to have open auditions at the Johnny Victor Theatre in Rockefeller Center, which was owned by RCA and sat about sixty people. Johnny Carson came to about three of them before deciding it wasn’t worth his time, and the way it worked was we’d see about fifteen acts and maybe one would get a shot.

  Anyway, Budd was managing Bette and he called me up to see if he could bring her in. Of course, I said yes, but then they got there and Budd said, “Bette’s wearing an antique dress and it tore. She doesn’t want to go on.” I think I said something like, “Budd, this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Get some safety pins, put the dress together, and have her sing.”

  Obviously, she did, and everybody thought she was wonderful because the following day in our production meeting, the associate producer John Gilroy said, “She’s not pretty good. She’s unusual.” So we booked her and Johnny adored her immediately. What I remember specifically about her first audition for us, though, is that I really pushed Budd to push her.

  BETTE MIDLER:

  It was one of the most humiliating and terrifying moments of my entire life. I had auditioned for The Tonight Show several times before and I never made the cut. So I was understandably very nervous about it and then my dress ripped right as we were getting out of the cab. I certainly wasn’t laughing about it. I said, “Budd, my panties are showing. Give me your jacket.”

  It was just awful. But instead of trying to help me out, he was really being mean about it. He just looked at me and said, “I can’t go into The Tonight Show in my shirtsleeves.”

  Making matters worse, we got upstairs and nobody had a safety pin. I wound up undoing a paper clip somebody gave me and going into the ladies’ room to try and sew my dress back together. I remember the distress—and the anger—I felt over the fact this happened and no one helped. In the end, though, I gave what turned out to be a fantastic audition, because I got the gig even though I was so outraged. And then I went on and that was that. But I’ll never forget it. I mean, those kinds of things are indelible.

  Looking back, not giving Bette my jacket in the cab is something I shouldn’t have done and I regret it, although at the time—and in my defense—I also wasn’t doing it to be mean or insensitive. If anything, I think I did it because I was nervous, too, and simply caught up in the moment, plus I didn’t want The Tonight Show people to think I was a slob because I wasn’t dressed properly.

  In any case, things turned out fine because Bette got The Tonight Show, which was ninety minutes in those days, meaning that guests sometimes got to do an encore if time allowed for it. Fortunately, we decided to come prepared just in case. The number Bette chose was “Sh-Boom,” a big, soaring doo-wop tune that afforded her the opportunity to show off her range beyond the downbeat, melancholy ballad “Am I Blue?”

  Bette’s audition turned out to be phenomenal and she went on Carson about a week or two later in a different gown. When it came time to taping the show that afternoon, Bette launched into “Sh-Boom.” However, this time the gown she wore was so flimsy that everything underneath started to jiggle because she wasn’t wearing a bra. Suffice to say that when the startled crew looked out from the control booth, Johnny Carson was literally writhing in his chair with his mouth wide open. It’s not that he was necessarily trying to look, but he just couldn’t help himself. None of us could, and Bette was one of his favorite guests from then on.

  BETTE MIDLER:

  This friend of mine named Annie Flanders had made a dress for me and I wasn’t wearing a bra. It was the height of the bra-burning years, and I wasn’t wearing one because I thought it was the feminist thing to do. In my case, it wasn’t a good thing to do and I was bouncing around a little bit, but there wasn’t anything ripped.

  I think I sang one of Mae West’s numbers, and not long after that, I received a letter from her lawyer telling me to cease and desist. I just thought it was hilarious, first of all, because I didn’t know she was alive. That was for starters. The second thing was, apparently her estate had somebody monitoring this who turned out to be a Mae West impersonator. The whole thing was really an education.

  I really enjoyed my time with Budd, even though I decided to part company with him after the incident of tearing my dress. I’m sure he had his reasons, but I really felt betrayed. So we went our separate ways, although I never disliked him. I always adored him and I always thought he was smart, strategic, and shrewd. He was all those things you would hope to find in a manager, although what I didn’t have was him not putting himself before me. But I always loved him. I think anybody who’s ever come in contact with him in any significant way will for the most part tell you that they’re grateful.

  I can’t remember the exact date we decided to stop working together, but it wasn’t right after her first appearance on The Tonight Show. I can say this with absolutely no hesitation, because I was still representing Bette when she got her next five appearances on The Tonight Show, which I was directly responsible for. I was also with her for a period after that in the early seventies when she began performing at the Continental Baths, an openly gay Turkish bathhouse in the Ansonia Hotel.

  In any case, when we did part company it was very painful, even though the decision was mutual. But deep down, I resented it, especially as she grew more famous. At the same time, however, both the Improv and my life were already slowly veering off into a direction that was about to take a comedic turn I never expected.

  TEN

  Comedians Start Coming to the Improv

  Like I’ve said from the very beginning, it was never my plan for comedians to become a part of the Improv, much less eventually take over. I should also add here that ending my yearlong mana
gement arrangement with Bette wasn’t the catalyst, although it wasn’t long after we parted when I began to realize that I enjoyed listening to comedians more than singers. If I had to place a name and time on it, however, a big reason for this was David Astor, a popular comedian from Brooklyn who became our first comic when he came in one night and asked to go on the year after we opened in 1964.

  At the time, Dave was appearing at the Blue Angel, a hip nightclub on Manhattan’s Upper East Side where Mike Nichols and Elaine May got their start. With material ranging from beat poetry and the nuclear arms race to a popular routine about the First Family (“Caroline Kennedy, an absolutely brilliant child . . . of course, her father’s never, ever gonna let her plan another nuclear invasion”), Dave was what we call a comic’s comic and he struck a chord with me immediately.

  SILVER SAUNDORS FRIEDMAN:

  By about the sixth or eighth month, there were already a lot of people getting up who weren’t in theater or even necessarily singers for that matter. Mainly they were doing improv sketches where they’d take suggestions from the audience. There was a class of about five or six of them like Ron Carey, Martin Friedberg, and J.J. Barry. They were all amazing, but the guy who stood out most was Dave Astor. He was just incredibly fast and sardonic and he seemed to know a lot more about language than the others did.