HOWARD STORM, director and former comedian:
David Astor and I were very good friends back then and that’s how I first heard about the Improv. In fact, when my first wife and I split up, I moved in with Dave. He had a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side. And then, as fate would have it, Dave moved in with me after his wife left him. I loved Dave, and he was brilliant, but living under the same roof with him was absolute madness because he was also nuts. He was kind of our ringleader at the Improv.
Years later, he bought a farm in Ventura, California, and turned it into a pot farm where he sold marijuana. He made a ton of money doing it, but the sad part was that he didn’t need to because he was a very talented guy. No matter how well things were going, he’d always find a way to fuck them up.
LOU ALEXANDER:
Dave was a very troubled and self-destructive person, but you can’t take away the fact that he still deserves a lion’s share of credit for what the Improv became. Basically, he came in one night to break in new material and that was it.
Once again, fate intervened and we were living up to our name. Yet as much as Dave opened my eyes and gave me a newfound appreciation for comedians I’d never had before, I certainly wasn’t going to throw the baby out with the bathwater by no longer presenting singers—at least initially. Not only had they been our backbone from day one, they were also still enormous crowd-pleasers and I’m convinced that the Improv wouldn’t have survived if I’d done away with them completely.
Coincidentally, one of the most popular acts in between the period when I first heard Dave and began managing Bette was her future musical director Barry Manilow. Barry would, of course, go on to become one of the most successful male recording artists in popular music history, with a monumental string of hits in the 1970s like “Mandy,” “Copacabana,” “Can’t Smile Without You,” and “Weekend in New England.”
By the time I hired him to become the Improv’s house piano player in 1969, he was already making a name for himself, as an accompanist, arranger, producer, and soon-to-be jingle writer for Kentucky Fried Chicken, Alka-Seltzer, State Farm Insurance, Band-Aid, and McDonald’s, some of which are still on the air today. We met the previous year when he was the lyricist and musical director for the off-Broadway musical The Drunkard, which I’d wanted to invest in.
Although it never came to pass because I couldn’t come up with the money, I continued to be on the lookout for other shows. In one sense, however, the fact that I wasn’t able to be involved in The Drunkard would prove prophetic. With comedians now coming into the club with more frequency towards the late 1960s, not only did my preference for stand-up intensify, it also convinced me I should run with it.
Or at least jog.
One reason was that the more comedians I heard, the more I began to realize that I had a much more receptive ear when it came to hearing the same jokes repeated and improved upon with nuances versus listening to the same songs over and over again, which quickly grew tiresome. What I enjoyed most, though, was the setup and then the build leading up to the punch line when everybody in the room was feeding off of one another. You got a vibe that was completely different from only having singers. And then, all of a sudden, without fanfare, even more comedians started dropping in.
Besides Dave Astor, who was our Pied Piper, there was also David Frye, a masterful impressionist, who was already well known for his spot-on political impersonations of Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Spiro Agnew, as well as film stars like James Cagney, Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas, and George C. Scott.
BILL SALUGA, comedian:
David Frye was an oddball and he wasn’t very outgoing. He also couldn’t do an impression unless he was looking at a picture of the person he was imitating. Whenever he’d turn around onstage, he was looking at their photograph.
MARTY NADLER, screenwriter and comedian:
Frye was fine except that he just didn’t have any personality because he was imitating all these people, so you never knew who he really was. One night, a bunch of us were standing at the bar with Rodney Dangerfield when somebody came up to us and said, “David Frye is here.”
And Rodney goes, “Good, who’s he here as? You know what I think of David Frye? He’s a mimic. They’re three places below a juggler.” Rodney was always commenting on everybody and if he didn’t like them, he’d let you know it.
Without missing a beat, David would usually come into the club with a drink in his hand and do about five minutes onstage, then leave. He used to also practice his impressions in the men’s room, so if you hadn’t seen him when he first arrived and you walked by the men’s room and heard voices, you knew it was him.
FRED WILLARD, comedian, actor, and writer:
You’d always hear stories about people going into the bathroom and hearing voices from the adjacent stall. This was David going over his bits before he went on, and when he wasn’t performing, he ran hot and cold. There was always some anger and some slight he sensed somewhere. He could be your best friend one minute and then he wouldn’t talk to you the next. As a comic, though, he was one of the ones who made me laugh harder than anybody else.
BETTE MIDLER:
What a horrible, inconsiderate man David Frye was. One time when Budd was managing me, he had me booked at this nightclub outside of Boston called Paul’s Mall. Jay Leno used to perform there a lot. Anyway, the time I was performing there they didn’t have a dressing room for me. I wound up changing in this little area behind the kitchen where they kept the tomato sauce. It was kind of a big pantry where there were no mirrors and about an inch of water on the floor, so I poked my head into David Frye’s dressing room to see if my makeup was okay while he was onstage.
Somehow, he got wind of it because afterwards David came up to me and started screaming: “If you ever put your face in my dressing room again, I’ll have you fired.” I think I may have played there a couple of times after that, but that night with him was horrible.
SILVER SAUNDORS FRIEDMAN:
David was very talented—and crazy—which was fine with us, because the two usually went hand in hand, and we’d be crazy right along with him. But he was also an alcoholic and a serial womanizer who’d supposedly had a number of kids out of wedlock, and he became increasingly paranoid that one of these women was going to shoot him.
As a result, he wound up having a vasectomy that backfired. Occasionally, he’d have to excuse himself during the middle of his act, and then he’d go backstage and pee in a bucket. I think that probably ruined his sense of self and his career.
DANNY AIELLO:
When I was working at the Improv, some of the performers occasionally hired me to do side jobs and one of them was David. He paid me $500 a week to be his road manager on a West Coast tour he was doing. That was a lot of money back then, and Budd was always very cool about it, although I was basically a glorified gofer.
But as masterful as David was when it came to doing impressions, he was also a heavy drinker on top of having a weak bladder, which didn’t make for the best combination—especially since he had to go often, and even though he incorporated it into his routine by sneaking behind a partition in back of the stage to pee in an ice bucket at regular intervals. The audience had no idea why he was doing this, and they found it funny. I didn’t, particularly when he told me that part of my job was to empty the piss-filled bucket.
Needless to say, I refused, and everything was fine until one night we were at the upscale Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco and he walked right off the end of the stage like Wile E. Coyote during the middle of his James Cagney impression and without missing a beat went outside. He never came back after that.
Then there was Jackie Vernon, a former trumpet player turned comic, who often carried a cornet as a prop even though he seldom played. Dubbed the “King of Deadpan,” he was a veteran performer who supplied the voice of Frosty the Snowman in the animated Christmas special of the same name and was an occasional opening act for Jud
y Garland. At the Improv, he used to sit in the back with his writers until I could coax him to get up onstage. But once I finally did, there was no stopping him. Jackie’s signature opening line was, “To look at me now, it’s hard to believe I was once considered a dull guy,” and with material on topics like prisons, trying to turn a watermelon into a house pet, and traveling to the Grand Canyon only to find it closed, his routines often veered from the darkly surreal to the absurd.
I also had a great deal of affection for him personally because when I was managing Bette Midler, he hired her to be his opening act at Mister Kelly’s in Chicago, which was a huge break for her. He also performed at the Hollywood Improv after I first opened on the West Coast, and then a number of times after that when we had a club in Las Vegas.
Not only was Jackie talented and extremely loyal, it was electrifying when he and other comics went on. Their performances, both good and bad, brought the entire meaning of stand-up as an art form home to me. Yet, while the residual impact of seeing them so closely, along with hearing the laughter, was exhilarating, I still had no idea that I had stumbled on a viable new business model for showcasing talent.
SILVER SAUNDORS FRIEDMAN:
They were blessings. No doubt about it, the addition of comedians was a blessing for us, and they all pretty much came up from Greenwich Village and did whatever they were doing down there. If they had talent, they knew Budd would eventually give them stage time. He was very good when it came to validating acts and he didn’t mistreat them. I like to think I had something to do with this in terms of creating an environment where they got appreciation and respect because the audiences were good.
In the beginning, I was often the emcee, which I loved. Besides being onstage itself, one of my favorite parts was bringing up newcomers because there was always an element of surprise. This was perhaps first evident in 1964 when future talk-show legend Dick Cavett came in—and fell completely flat with the material he did, even though he already had a formidable reputation as a comedy writer. He was also nearly two years into his second tenure working for The Tonight Show, where he’d served as both the talent coordinator and then-host Jack Paar’s monologue writer.
I first met Dick through his manager, Jack Rollins, who along with his partner, Charles Joffe, were two of the biggest power brokers in comedy long before there was such a term. Jack got his start in show business as a Broadway producer in World War II, then founded a one-man talent agency that represented writers, dramatic actors, and singers, including Harry Belafonte. Charlie worked briefly as an agent for MCA before joining forces with Jack in 1953 and eventually handling comedians almost exclusively from the early 1960s through the late ’80s—among them Dick Cavett, Woody Allen, Robert Klein, Joan Rivers, Nichols and May, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, and David Letterman. If Jack and Charlie represented you, you’d made it.
MARTY NADLER:
Part of the magic of the New York Improv was that once they got to know you, you’d have all these mentors who would help you. When I say that Jack Rollins was incredible to me, I’m not exaggerating. Besides doing stand-up, I was also writing material for a lot of other comics, so Jack would always ask me if I had a script because he knew I wanted to break into television. As a matter of fact, I wrote one spec script for All in the Family and Jack offered to pass it along to Norman Lear.
The premise was that Rob Reiner’s character, “Meathead,” was involved in a Vietnam War protest, and sure enough, Jack showed it to Norman. About a week or two later, he called me into his office up on West 57th Street near the Russian Tea Room and handed me a letter. It was from Norman and it was a rejection, telling me he liked my script but that they didn’t have any room on the writing staff—meaning that it really wasn’t that good.
Jack was still very encouraging, but the even more amazing part was that he opened up his desk and pulled out this huge stack of rejection letters held together by a rubber band. At first, the only thing I could think of was that they were all for me. But then Jack looked at me and said, “No, these are all Woody’s.”
Jack was great. And you know what? I eventually showed that All in the Family spec script to Garry Marshall, which is how I got my first job as an apprentice writer on The Odd Couple.
Not only was Jack the model for the title character in Woody Allen’s 1984 film, Broadway Danny Rose, he was the one who had initially convinced Allen he should try stand-up. And it was Dick Cavett who was put in charge of grooming Allen for his first appearance on The Tonight Show.
DICK CAVETT, author, former talk-show host, and comedian:
Not long after I got there, The Tonight Show sent me to the Blue Angel in New York to see this new, young comic named Woody Allen. By the way, at this point Jack Paar was saying to me, “I’m not sure if trying to make Woody Allen a stand-up comic is one of our genius ideas.” As it turned out, it wasn’t, because Woody hated it and he’d throw up before he went on. Then, once he finally made it up onto the stage, he stood with his face right behind the bulky microphone and the audience kept talking.
I was stunned. It was like being at a convention where there’s a boring speaker and the whole audience is talking. But suddenly, the genius jokes firing from Woody to me at the back of the room were better than the best line any comedian had in their act that night. Some of the funniest were the ones about Woody’s first wife, Harlene Rosen, who later sued him for doing jokes about her. Anyway, I put him on the show and Jack Paar didn’t like him. Then he later claimed that he started Woody’s career.
Woody Allen came to the Improv a few times, but he was never a regular. His manager, Jack Rollins, of course, was. Though I was also very friendly with his partner, Charlie, and their wives, Jane and Carol, I was especially close to Jack in New York. We were both Upper West Siders and played poker together. And when it came to his management skills, there was and still is nobody else like him, so when he made the case for Dick, I gave him the go-ahead without hesitation.
DICK CAVETT:
I had never been to the Improv before, and when I got there I just remember it being this kind of a joint with some tables and chairs that had a stage and nothing else. The thing about it was, you knew when you walked in that the Improv was where you wanted to be allowed to go.
The routine he did about attending the wedding of a wealthy classmate from Yale, unfortunately, faltered during the second joke. The problem was that the setup, which began with a bit about his friend being so rich they had caviar flown all the way in from Beluga, was so highbrow it went over everybody’s head as it had when he’d done it the previous evening at The Bitter End in Greenwich Village. Still, I liked it and I thought he had something special, so I invited him back. And after eliminating the caviar joke, which I still found amusing even though I also didn’t understand it initially, Dick did much better the following week and the half-dozen times he went on after that.
DICK CAVETT:
My lifelong friendship with Woody Allen began when I was grooming him to do The Tonight Show, and he’s the one who introduced me to Jack Rollins, who encouraged me to try stand-up after I told him I’d been a magician as a kid and that I liked performing. He said, “Why don’t you try it, lad. You know how you’ve been watching Woody and seeing how we’ve been trying to turn him into a performer.”
I thought why not, although when I told Woody, he attempted to warn me how difficult it was. He said, “You might be able to churn material out at lightning speed for another performer, but when it comes to writing for yourself it could take hours just to get one good joke.”
What Woody said to me was right on the money, but I wanted to give stand-up a shot anyway. One of the first places I appeared was down at The Bitter End on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. In those days, comics like Bill Cosby, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and Joan Rivers were there. George Carlin would also show up occasionally and there was a ferrety-looking guy with a guitar on his back who I thought was never going to get anywhere.
Th
is turned out to be Bob Dylan, and there were a lot of others you could never be completely sure about, but anyway I went to The Bitter End and did this routine about Beluga caviar at a wedding. It failed so spectacularly that I literally had sweat damming up over my eyebrows, so I tried to stay still because I knew the sweat would run down my face if I moved. Before I was even halfway through, I remember looking into the audience and noticing that Jack Rollins and the owner Fred Weintraub had discreetly stepped outside because they couldn’t bear to watch the murder that was taking place onstage.
Bombing at The Bitter End was the bitter beginning for me in terms of stand-up. The Improv kind of became my redemption, because right after that, Jack came up to me and said, “Well, lad. You fouled out tonight, but you’ll be back in the saddle tomorrow night at a place called the Improv.” When I said I didn’t want to, he told me I had to, and I did. As soon as I got there, Budd was extremely friendly and encouraging. The first thing he said to me was, “Jack Rollins thinks you’re going to be great.” And then he put me right on. It was a real watershed moment for me in terms of confidence.
ELEVEN
The Anointment of King Richard
Richard Pryor also started coming into the Improv around 1964, and I became a fan immediately. Though I don’t remember exactly what he did the first time, I do recall receiving complaints on several occasions about his constant use of the word “fuck” onstage, which wasn’t nearly as commonplace with comedians as it is now. He was also doing drugs, although I’m not sure which ones.
Speaking of drugs, I should also say here that I was completely oblivious to anyone’s drug use back then. Yes, we were a New York club that catered to a late-night, largely show-business crowd, and it was the 1960s, but all I drank was red wine. Plus, I detested cigarettes, which I begrudgingly had to tolerate, even though my clothes used to reek of secondhand smoke every night. So if people were doing drugs—and of course, they were—they did them behind my back and it came as a complete surprise when I found out.
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