And while we’re on the subject of distinct impressions and some of the other young performers we had who helped us get press in those days, Lily Tomlin was serendipitously soon one of them. We met through Louis St. Louis, another piano player I had during this period who later became famous for writing the song “Sandy” in the 1978 film version of Grease. Louis was a friend of Lily’s from Detroit, where they’d both grown up, and when he recommended her to me in the fall of 1966, I immediately told him to have her come in for an audition.
Aside from Louis’s endorsement, which always helps when it comes to getting me to take a look at a performer I’ve never seen before, part of what sparked my interest was that she had recently made her first national television appearance on The Gary Moore Show, which was then one of the most popular weekly variety programs in the country. But little could I have imagined that my initial encounter was to include a limousine.
LILY TOMLIN:
I’d already been living in New York for several years. In the summer of 1966, Madeline Kahn got me a job at the Upstairs at the Downstairs. Then that fall I got a job on The Gary Moore Show, but I was dropped after about three episodes because I argued with them all the time about material. I didn’t hold out, but I was friendly with a couple of young guys from the show who had been working with Ron Carey, who was already a regular at the Improv.
Louis St. Louis might have recommended me to Budd, but it was through Ron that I heard about it and I may have even gone there once or twice just to check it out before my audition. In the old days, the club had a glass window in the front, and I had a lot of vintage clothes, which is what I decided to wear that evening. I remember I had on a blue velvet halter dress and a white fox fur that was pretty beat-up, but it looked pretty good at night. So I put it on, and took the subway from where I was living on 5th Street between Second and Third Avenues all the way uptown to Times Square. When I came out of the subway, I walked over to the St. James Theatre a few blocks away from the Improv and spotted a limousine parked out front.
Obviously, I wanted to impress Budd, and so I gave the driver like ten dollars or something to have him take me over to the club and wait for me. I went in and did a very solid monologue with several characters in it that Budd loved, even though it didn’t have a particularly great ending. Perhaps it was heightened by the fact that I showed up in a limousine, but Budd immediately began giving me spots.
I happened to be standing out in front of the club when this limousine pulled up and it immediately got my attention. Lily was wearing this very chic avant-garde outfit and she was putting on these little white gloves when the driver opened the door. I’m not sure if I said it out loud and she heard me, but I definitely said to myself: “What the fuck is this?”
Then she said, “Are you Mr. Friedman?”
I said, “Yes.”
And she said, “I’m Lily Tomlin. I’m supposed to audition for you.”
So I invited her inside and she did this monologue with about six different characters, each one better than the next. I think I told her she could perform anytime she wanted, although it wasn’t until about three weeks later when she finally started coming in on a regular basis that she confessed to me how she’d paid a limo driver to bring her to the Improv so that she could make her grand entrance.
LILY TOMLIN:
I came in and I didn’t know much about Budd, even though I’d wanted to impress him—and I’m not even sure if I thought about it being an audition. After that, I came back and just started working on stuff.
JOHN MEYER:
I was one of Lily’s voice coaches. She didn’t have a musical act back then, but what she did do at the Improv was a precursor for all of her later characters like Edith Ann and Ernestine the telephone operator. Even then, she had an incredible range, and she was always wonderfully funny and imaginative.
FIFTEEN
The One and Only Rodney Dangerfield
In mid-1966, the Improv scored what was to be one of our biggest home runs hurled out of left field in the form of a fidgety, hard-drinking curveball. By the time he came to my attention—after having adopted the name Rodney Dangerfield, which I later discovered he’d chosen from the phonebook—Rodney was already well into what would be a long road towards the second phase of his stand-up career, even though he was still at least another five years away from becoming a major star.
One afternoon in the midsummer, I stopped off at the newsstand around the corner from the club and picked up the New York Post. As I sat with my coffee and began reading the paper, the first thing I noticed when I turned to the features section was a small one-column review of Rodney, who was appearing at the Living Room on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. And then, in a “truth is stranger than fiction” twist of fate, he showed up on our doorstep unannounced that same evening.
I was completely taken aback, although much less due to the fact that I had read a review of him only hours earlier. It was because when Rodney walked in, there was no resemblance whatsoever to the urbane Ivy League type the newspaper had described. Instead—and to put it absolutely bluntly—he was shitfaced. Dressed in a wrinkled suit and wearing a stained tie that dangled loosely around his neck, I could immediately smell the booze on his breath as he staggered in, even though I was standing in the opposite direction. When he spoke, his words were slurred. I forget what was said, but with the review still fresh in my mind—and in spite of his inebriated condition against what ultimately proved to be my better judgment—I put him on anyway and he absolutely bombed. And so badly, I should add, that you could literally feel the chorus of boos ricocheting off the walls as customers began asking for their checks and clamoring to leave.
But then, he came back in again the next night stone sober and asked to go on again. It’s like somebody had put him up to it on a dare. And you know what? After I reluctantly relented, this time he killed it, as if to say, “I’ll show these people.” And in as much as his first set was one of the biggest flops I’ve ever witnessed, the second one was also one of the most spectacular comebacks I have ever seen.
So giving Rodney another chance turned out to be one of the best things I ever did and he immediately became a regular after that. And for the next two and a half years, he was my unofficial emcee, a practice that he occasionally continued long after becoming famous and even when he’d opened his own club, Dangerfield’s, on First Avenue in 1969. Rodney was always a crowd-pleaser among customers and comedians alike. One of the most unforgettable evenings at the Improv was the night he emceed with Bill Cosby in the audience.
Cosby was already an established comedian by this point, having also broken the race barrier to become the first African American prime-time television star on the NBC action-adventure series I Spy. I’m not sure what the occasion was or who was with him that night, but Bill Cosby was one of those people you didn’t ask to perform, so I didn’t even bother trying.
But Rodney never had any inhibitions as far as that was concerned. He just kept goading and goading him, until finally Cosby got up and went on for thirty minutes. It was amazing.
Another time, I remember being with Rodney at Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara’s apartment for Passover. They lived in a gorgeous building on the Upper West Side not far from me, and every year they had a seder. It was wonderful, and they’d invite thirty or forty people, some of whom weren’t even Jewish. One year, Rodney was there drinking martinis, and by the time dinner was served, he’d had about six of them. Then the next thing we knew, he’d passed out facedown at the Stillers’ dining room table. He was completely obliterated, but none of us did anything as we continued eating for about another hour.
At that point, we all went into the living room while the caterers, one of whom was a former acting school classmate of Anne’s, began clearing off the table. About twenty minutes later, he came running in from the kitchen and said, “Mrs. Stiller, Mrs. Stiller. The man’s an animal.”
Annie was like, “What are you talking about,
Bruce?”
And he said, “That guy Rodney. He’s in the kitchen ripping apart the turkey and he’s just destroying everything.” He kept going on and on, growing more and more agitated, until finally Anne looked at him and said, “I never promised you a rose garden.”
It was so funny at the time, especially because of the way Anne said it, and we were all in stitches. Years later, Rodney’s daughter Melanie became a TV producer and my daughter Zoe was working at Comedy Central as a producer and they became reacquainted through a mutual project they were working on. Though they were familiar with each other, they didn’t realize they had been to many functions together as children.
As for Rodney and me, as time passed we never really became friends, despite the fact that he continued to perform at the New York Improv well into the 1970s and also at the LA club in the eighties and early nineties. Though we were both Jewish and obviously shared similar professional and cultural backgrounds, I think the main reason was that I found him very unapproachable and difficult to talk to. He could also be moody and argumentative, especially when he’d been drinking or smoking grass, which led to more than one verbal altercation that nearly became physical, so I tended to keep my distance. For all of Rodney’s shortcomings, however, I will always be grateful for what he did for me and the Improv. In one way or another, like Richard Pryor, he touched the lives of practically everyone he met both inside and outside of the club—and even some he hadn’t.
JIMMY FALLON:
I was probably ten or twelve when I first realized I wanted to be a comedian. My parents were funny and my grandparents were funny, so there was always a lot of joking around, and my sister was funny, too. Irish-Catholic family, always joking, always making people laugh, so no matter what I did, I was always making people laugh.
After a while, I was like, “This is something I’m good at.” Then I started listening to comedy albums like The Smothers Brothers and Rodney Dangerfield. My dad would actually take a key and scratch out the dirty words in Rodney’s albums, so it would skip over the curses and I would never hear the F word.
It was so Irish-Catholic, and it also screwed up the punch line. I didn’t understand half the bits, but the setup was great. I would just listen to them over and over again and then I found that I could kind of impersonate people. As I got older, my parents would give me a dollar. They’d be like, “Go do Rodney for everybody.”
JERRY STILLER:
We all respected Rodney for his ability to get up without any material, talk, and include everybody in the audience in his act to the point where they all felt very connected to him, like he was their father. Other comics didn’t necessarily look at him as a comedian. Instead, they just saw him as a person who happened to have the ability to get up in front of an audience and make them laugh.
FREDDIE ROMAN:
Rodney was the character of the Western world. The man was high every night of his life. Budd opened the Improv before Rodney opened Dangerfield’s, and the strangest thing about his club was that he hardly ever worked there. If he had to do a Tonight Show, he would also go to the Improv to break in new material instead of his own club, which made no sense.
RICK NEWMAN, producer and founder of Catch A Rising Star:
Rodney always used to kid around at the end of his act. He’d go, “I know you’re wondering why I’m up here. But why would I want to be bad at my place? I’m trying out new material.” It was very funny that he would work out at the Improv and Catch A Rising Star when he had his own place ten blocks away. But he always used to say, “I don’t want to be bad at my place.”
ALAN ZWEIBEL:
He was the first guy I wrote for who had a defined character. When you’d write for those Catskills guys, you were just writing for a guy in a tuxedo. If this tuxedo guy didn’t like the joke, he’d give it to the next tuxedo guy. Rodney already had, “I don’t get no respect.” It was really easy for me to build on that and have him say, “Even as an infant, I didn’t get no respect. My mother wouldn’t breastfeed me. She said she liked me as a friend.”
I used to hang out with him. Even when I was doing Saturday Night Live and he hosted, I hung out with him that week. I learned a lot from him because here was a guy who totally reinvented himself from being Jack Roy and all of that. There was a hipness to him because he had been friends with Joe Ancis and Lenny Bruce. As commercial as he was, there was an underground Bitter End kind of quality to him, plus he did coke.
BILL SALUGA:
I don’t think I ever saw Rodney do a bad set, even though he was half in the bag all the time. One night not long after I got to the Improv, there were these two Irish women who got up to sing. They were these pure, lovely looking girls and they sang some sort of virginal song. Well, that was all it took to get Rodney going because afterwards he said, “Hey, weren’t they great? You know what I’d like to see, ladies and gentlemen? I’d like to see them cum together.” You could literally see their faces turning bright red as they got offstage. You could also hear the collective gasps of shock from the audience when he said it. But that was Rodney. As crude and insensitive as he could be sometimes, he almost always managed to pull it off because he was so funny.
BOB “UNCLE DIRTY” ALTMAN, comedian:
I knew Rodney from the Improv, of course, but then when he opened his own club, Dangerfield’s on First Avenue in New York, we all used to go over there and get high down in the basement. People would do lines of coke like you wouldn’t believe—we’re talking like an eighth of an inch and three inches long like vacuum cleaners.
BILL GULINO, author, pianist, composer, and arranger:
I was at the Improv in New York with Rodney one night sometime in the late seventies or early eighties when he spotted this woman who was a total stranger and said to her, “Hey, honey, can I bum a cigarette from you? Mine are in the machine.” It was just such a Rodney joke.
JOHN DEBELLIS:
Rodney was one of a kind, and it’s not a stretch to say they broke the mold when they made him. One evening after some road gig, we went back to the Improv to have a nightcap and we were standing at the bar. By this point, he had about three or four drinks in him, and all of the sudden he looked at me and said, “Hey, John, let me get you a prostitute. We’ll go back to my place and we’ll have hookers.”
Well, suffice it to say, the thought of seeing Rodney naked in a room with a bunch of hookers was beyond repulsive to me. I must have used every excuse I could come up with to try to get out of it. I think I may have even told him I had a girlfriend who I’d been going steady with for a couple of years. I mean, there was just no way I was going to do this. Rodney didn’t persist, but I remember he always used to say to me, “You know, John, in life you think you’ve gotten the perfect blow job and then a week later you think you can get a better one.” Honest to God, that was his philosophy.
MARTY NADLER:
One night he was in the middle of his act at the Improv and an interracial couple came into the club. He was black, she was white, and as soon as Rodney spotted them from the stage, he interrupted the bit he was doing and said, “If there’s anything I hate, it’s a white woman going out with a Jew.” Of course, everyone just started laughing hysterically and then he goes, “What do you think, I’m going to get killed here?” He was absolutely brilliant at that kind of stuff—and fearless, too.
The other thing about Rodney was that he was even funnier offstage. I remember another night several years later at the Hollywood Improv when I and a few other comics went over to Canter’s Deli on Fairfax Avenue to get something to eat afterwards. We walked in and before we sat down at a table, the first thing Rodney noticed was another comic named Joe E. Ross, who wasn’t part of our group but happened to be there also.
Joe was a mediocre comedian at best, but he’d had a fairly successful television career back in the fifties and sixties playing a second banana on sitcoms like The Phil Silvers Show and Car 54, Where Are You?, where his signature line was, “Ooh! Ooh!
” Before that, he and Rodney used to perform in strip clubs together and Rodney hated his guts.
So finally we got seated, and just as the waitress was about to bring out our food, Joe comes up to us without even saying hello or apologizing for interrupting our meal and says, “Rodney, it’s not fair. I mean, you’re funny, but I’m funny, too. You do Carson every month and I can’t even get on once.”
By this point, Rodney was really starting to get annoyed and he looked over at Joe and said, “Joey, if life was fair you’d have been dead twenty years ago.”
Not too long after that, Richard Lewis and I went to see Rodney at his club back in New York. Either before or after the show, we were downstairs in his dressing room and the first thing we noticed was a framed copy of Joe’s comedy album that was prominently displayed. Because we knew how much Rodney loathed him, we naturally wanted to find out why. So we asked him and his response was this: “So that I can look at it and know that I’m not the ugliest fucking man in the world!”
FRED WILLARD:
The funniest night was when a bunch of us comics were all together at the New York Improv. Rodney was the emcee. Dave Frye did his act. Then another comic named Jimmy Martinez, who never went too far but was one of my favorites, went on. He made me laugh so hard. Anyway, Rodney came on and there were no boundaries to what he did that night. He got extremely, inappropriately blue. Some guy was heckling him and he turns around and goes, “Oh, you’re going to judge me now.” Two young girls who were twins were there, and he made some inappropriate sexual remark. I can’t remember what it was, but it was just hilariously funny.
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