Then there was the time at Bobcat Goldthwait’s house during a party where it was the end of the night and I found myself telling a story. It was some really juvenile thing about masturbation and actor Joel Murray, singer Tom Petty, and Eric Idle were all there. After I’d finished, Robin just looked at me and said, “Goodnight, Mike”—at which point Joel said to me, “That was pretty cool telling a story to Robin Williams.”
All of the sudden, I was starstruck. I said, “Oh my God. You’re right. That was weird.”
KEVIN NEALON:
The Improv wasn’t where I first met Robin. The first time was very early during my career at this little club in Newport Beach. I’ll never forget it because he came in, walked through the crowd, and began rifling through women’s purses. Then he put on this huge floppy hat and he began doing Shakespeare. I just remember thinking to myself, “What am I even doing here trying to do comedy?” Watching Robin was like seeing Mozart and then being the guy who always thought of himself as mediocre.
I started working at the Hollywood Improv right around the time Robin got really big on Mork and Mindy. When he used to come in from the studio unannounced to do a surprise set, he’d still have his suspenders on, and we used to have to sneak him back through the kitchen so he could get onstage without causing a scene.
JOE PISCOPO:
In New York, we had this steel door to the right of the stage that served as the fire exit. The running joke was that there’d sometimes be a knock at the door during the middle of the show. It was like The Dean Martin Show, but then whenever it happened, I’d open it and it would usually be Robin and I’d hand him the microphone. It wasn’t always him, but most of the time it was.
JACK KNIGHT:
I’m not a comedian, so I never felt that sense of competition, but I remember seeing Robin perform and thinking he had a computer instead of a brain. I’d see him try stuff out, get a huge laugh, and then I’d never see it again until one night at the right time in the right place, he’d take it out from wherever it was stored and kill again.
PAULA POUNDSTONE:
The truth is that even before Robin got famous, he already had a reputation of being this kind of Tasmanian devil of stand-up comedy. I always tell people this because it’s true. He didn’t invent it by any means, but he certainly reinvigorated it because of the frenzied excitement he created by doing away with segues and grabbing things off the shelf willy-nilly.
Whenever Robin walked into the room, whoever was onstage at the time knew they might as well get off. However, he was never egotistical about it, and I don’t think his attitude was ever, “Get off because I’m here.” But even so, most of us had the good sense to say, “Robin’s here, have a good time.”
ADAM SANDLER:
I remember Robin coming in one night, killing, and then me following him. I did pretty well, which was something that I carried around for a while, and I still do.
GILBERT GOTTFRIED:
Robin would stop in everywhere. Once I was about to go on at the Improv in New York—literally down to the second they were getting ready to announce me—when in walked Robin. He was still doing Mork and Mindy, and like any other club, their attitude was, “Get Robin onstage!” But then he did the most incredible thing. He said, “I’ve got people coming to see me, but I want them to see Gilbert go on first.”
DAVID STEINBERG, film producer and talent manager:
I managed Robin right up until his death, and our association dated all the way back to when he did the film Popeye. Back then, during the years when he was drinking heavily and doing drugs, he was out of his mind. When he came into the Improv, no one ever wanted to follow him and he never wanted to bump people off a show.
That’s why he used to like to go on last, and because there was never any fifteen-minute rule for Robin, he would just go on and on and on without notes. Robin wrote while he was talking and it was always a stream of consciousness where he could thrive on somebody just saying something. Robin didn’t give a shit if there were only ten people in the audience. He loved the danger of never knowing what he was going to be talking about.
While the other comedians almost all thrived on that adrenaline as well, there were also those occasions when Robin incited their wrath—especially if one of their jokes wound up in his act.
ROBERT WUHL:
There was always the argument that his mind worked so fast because he was absorbing everything. I used to say to him, “Do me a favor, Robin. Turn your mind absorption thing off while I’m onstage.” It happened quite often with a lot of other comedians besides me. They would complain to me about it. Robin was indiscriminate and he was an equal opportunity joke stealer. That said, he was still an absolute force of nature.
RICHARD LEWIS:
Robin was the Muhammad Ali of comedians. No one was faster, and I knew him for over thirty-five years. I used to call him the pastor and he called me the rabbi. But again, the problem he always had that he admitted was that he was like a sponge. He could listen to a mediocre riff from a second-rate comedian and then turn it into gold without ever remembering where he first heard it.
It’s very possible—I think—that with brain chemistry like his that he could have easily thought it was his. The heartbreak was when he did this with a young comic who was getting ready for his first shot on David Letterman or The Tonight Show and it’s fair to say that some comics hated him for that.
But I wasn’t one of them. I was never threatened by him at all and we were great friends. Once or twice, I told him not to come to my show. I said, “I know your problem, Robin, and I don’t want to be part of it.”
He was totally fine with that. He just said, “Okay.”
Regularly continuing to flex his comic muscles at the Improv as he became one of the most beloved stars on the planet over the next three and a half decades, Robin’s life would, of course, come to a heartbreaking end on August 11, 2014, when he committed suicide by hanging himself in his home at the age of sixty-three.
Obviously, you’re never prepared for something like this when it happens—and despite his well-publicized bouts with substance abuse and depression—we were all overcome with tremendous grief. It was also, sadly, a road that by now we’d traveled down several times before, beginning with another brilliant comic who was already at the apex of his fame just as Robin’s star was rising. What none of us knew at the time was that both their lives would end by different means, yet ultimately in the same way. We will never get over our grief.
THIRTY
Comedy’s Tragic Prinze
The name of this other comedian is Freddie Prinze, and of all the chapters in this book, this is probably one of the most bittersweet and important for me to write. The biggest reason for this is that younger people today are likely more familiar with his son, actor Freddie Prinze Jr. Though he’s a tremendous talent in his own right, in the mid-1970s, his dad, Freddie Sr., was arguably the biggest overnight sensation in America. My hope in sharing my own memories, the good and the bad—along with the ones of those who knew Freddie best—is that it will shed new light on both his prodigious gifts as a comedian as well as his demons.
The year I opened the Hollywood Improv in 1975, he was starring in the title role of one of the decade’s most popular sitcoms, Chico and the Man, which ran for four seasons on NBC from 1974 until 1978. Freddie played Francisco “Chico” Rodriguez, a wisecracking Chicano auto mechanic working for “the Man”—Ed Brown (portrayed by veteran actor Jack Albertson)—the verbally abusive, hard-drinking owner of a run-down East Los Angeles garage. While the premise was basically a Hispanic variation of Fred Sanford, the cantankerous African American junk dealer played by Redd Foxx on Sanford and Son, which it followed on Friday nights, viewers old enough to remember still regard Chico and the Man as one of the funniest TV comedies of all time, even though it’s rarely shown in reruns.
To say that America had an instant love affair with Freddie, who went on to become a popular guest host on The To
night Show in addition to headlining at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and entertaining at Jimmy Carter’s 1977 presidential inaugural gala, isn’t an overstatement. My personal association with Freddie, like Jay Leno, who also auditioned for me in New York on the same night, had a storybook beginning and I immediately made him a regular. Born Frederick Karl Pruetzel and raised in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, he was just seventeen when I first met him.
At the time, he was a senior on the verge of dropping out of the Fiorello LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts, which he soon did. Though his early material, where he introduced himself to audiences as “Hungarican” (part Hungarian and part Puerto Rican), wasn’t terribly remarkable, his stage presence, delivery, and sense of timing were incredible, and he absolutely blew me away with his catchphrases “Lookin good!” and “Ees not my job!” Freddie knew it, too, because not long after I met him, he decided that since comedian Alan King already had a lock on the “King of Comedy” sobriquet, he could be the “prince”—hence the name change. I always used to say that Freddie was seventeen going on forty. I had never seen that much raw talent and charisma in somebody so young and he could also be incredibly sweet.
ROBERT KLEIN:
I got a phone call from Budd telling me to come down and see this new kid named Freddie Prinze soon after he auditioned at the Improv. It was the only time I saw him perform live, and he was basically imitating Lenny Bruce—and doing it very well, I might add.
The thing I remember most is being struck by the fact that I’d never seen anyone who was as good at that age. He was just a force of nature. The other thing I remember was taking issue with some of the self-deprecating Puerto Rican material he was doing. Part of that had to do with my own personal tastes coming into play—like when I used to see a black comic using the word shvartza in front of a Jewish audience up in the Catskills to get a laugh. I just didn’t like it and I told Freddie that. But in terms of comedic ability and timing, he was absolutely brilliant.
RICHARD LEWIS:
I can’t say we were thick as thieves, but yeah, Freddie and I were friends, and I’ll echo Robert’s sentiments by saying that Freddie had maybe the strongest presence of anyone that age I had ever seen.
PAUL RODRIGUEZ, comedian and actor:
Freddie Prinze was one of my first points of reference. Later on, when I was stationed in Iceland while serving in the Air Force, I had top-secret clearance for encryptions. That meant I had special access to Armed Forces Radio, and I used to order tapes of Chico and the Man and copies of Freddie’s comedy albums. Even though I never met him, he had a huge influence on me. He was in the moment, he was fast, and he was smart. I knew his routines by heart.
LIZ TORRES:
Freddie was a lot younger than me, but we had a natural bond because we’re both Hispanic and I always thought he was incredibly talented. At one point, though, I was away from New York for about a year living in Los Angeles and no longer working at the Improv. And I’d heard rumors from a number of reliable sources that Freddie had supposedly been stealing my material.
So one night sometime in early or mid 1973, I was back at the club, and Freddie was there with David Brenner, who was Budd’s nemesis. But David and Freddie were great friends, and David asked me if I wanted to meet him. When I said yes and David introduced us, I said, “How do you do? I hear you’re stealing my act, how are you doing with it?”
“I’m killing,” Freddie said.
“Good,” I said, “because if you were bombing I’d hate you and I’d have to kick your ass.”
I don’t know if he really was or wasn’t stealing anything, but he acted very nervous about it.
ALAN ZWEIBEL:
I don’t know if the rumors about Freddie stealing other people’s material were true or not, but I did write some jokes he never paid me for, so I still considered them mine. In fact, one of them, which I later heard he put on an album, was also the first joke I’d ever had on “Weekend Update” on Saturday Night Live when George Carlin hosted. The joke was, “The post office is about to issue a stamp commemorating prostitution. It’s a ten-cent stamp, but if you want to lick it, it’s a quarter.” The joke doesn’t work as well today because people rarely lick stamps because of the adhesive on the backs of them.
DAVID STEINBERG, comedian, director, actor, writer, and talk-show host:
Freddie’s first manager, David Jonas, was a friend of mine, so I used to go see him a lot. He was a terrific comic who could do just about anything. Then when he became an actor, he was terrific at that, too. It’s like he came from out of nowhere, which he basically did.
MARVIN BRAVERMAN:
His talent notwithstanding, the thing I remember most about Freddie is that he made you want to take him under your wing, especially since most of us were a lot older than he was. He kind of became our surrogate son.
TOM DREESEN:
While Tim Reid and I had our comedy team, we eventually began working the Playboy Club circuit. This is how we got really good because in most of the clubs you had to do four to six shows a night. When we worked the New York Playboy Club, this was how I first met Freddie Prinze when he was seventeen. They had a playroom and a penthouse. When one room filled up, you had to wait in the other one until it was time for you to go on.
So one night, Tim and I were up in the penthouse when the drummer came up to me and said, “There’s a comedian downstairs and he’s really, really funny.” I went downstairs and saw him, and he was incredible on top of being this really good-looking kid. The other thing about Freddie was that he was relatively clean, because believe it or not, they didn’t want your material to be too dirty at the Playboy Club—although later on he did this routine about how every guy wanted to suck his own dick where he started talking about how he pulled his leg up over the bedpost.
We became fast friends and we used to hang out at both the New York and LA Improv a lot. Also, not long after we first met, Freddie was opening for a jazz musician named Jonah Jones at the Playboy Club in Chicago where I was still living. Nobody in Chicago really knew who Freddie was at that point, so I tried to get him on a local TV show. I couldn’t get him on, but I got him on a radio show hosted by a guy named Eddie Schwartz. After that, whenever he was in town, Freddie did his show.
I think Freddie realized he was going to become famous long before he was. He just had that self-confidence and he knew it. The thing that made me realize this was the time we were sitting in a bar on Rush Street in Chicago called Jay’s and some music trio was playing on the television in the background. That’s when Freddie turned to me and said, “I’m going to be a big star, Tommy—a BIG star.”
BILLY CRYSTAL:
I didn’t know Freddie exceptionally well, but I do know Eddie Murphy, and I remember thinking of Freddie in a similar way as I later came to regard Eddie, which is that they both always had this superstar quality about them. They were very parallel in that they had that little something extra.
BYRON ALLEN:
Freddie’s wife, Kathy, was pregnant with their son when I sold him a joke. At the time, I recall thinking to myself, “Wow, Freddie’s wife is so beautiful; he’s so young and he has everything.” But as much as I looked up to him, I also wanted to beat him when it came to doing The Tonight Show for the first time. And I did. He was nineteen and I was eighteen.
GLENN HIRSCH:
With Freddie, there was definitely an arrogance about him, but not in a bad way because he had this rare ability to own the room when he was onstage. He talked from his point of view. In other words, he was telling his story and not simply mother-in-law jokes.
PAUL REISER:
I was still in college when he became a star, but Freddie definitely had a major impact on me. His trajectory was one you sort of just watched in amazement, because you realized that the Improv really was a breeding ground for most of the major comics you’d see on television. I remember watching him just get bigger and bigger and bigger.
JIM
MIE WALKER:
Freddie was probably the most confident comic I’ve ever seen in my life. He was the first guy out of all of us to say, “I’m the best, I’m the handsomest, I’m the funniest—I’m the guy.” If you didn’t laugh at the way he delivered it, you’d think, “Gee, there must be something wrong with me.”
CRAIG TENNIS:
I’m pretty sure that when I started seeing Freddie perform at the New York Improv, he was the closer. Aside from the fact that he was always very personable and engaging, the thing I remember most about him initially was that when he didn’t get a laugh, he’d go right for the throat. It’s like he became Andrew Dice Clay and every other word out of his mouth would be shit, fuck, bitch—language that you wouldn’t think anything about now that was still very out there at the time.
Then suddenly Freddie’s act started to become polished, although even after I finally got him booked for his first appearance on The Tonight Show, I still felt like I was taking a huge gamble. The night he went on in 1973, he arrived at the studio dressed in a dark-green velvet suit, looking like a million dollars. Everything seemed fine until the producer, Freddie DeCordova, came rushing up to me about ten minutes before air in a state of panic. He said, “Freddie Prinze. Everyone’s going to hate it. I hate it. He’s not getting on. He’s never getting on.”
But this was DeCordova’s attitude when it came to new guests practically all the time and I was used to it. We also had no one else to fill the spot, so I immediately tried to reassure him and we put him on anyway. As Freddie’s good luck would have it, Sammy Davis Jr. was also on that night, and when he sat down next to Johnny, he had absolutely nothing to say. Now we were in this huge predicament, so when we brought Freddie out, he just absolutely blew the roof off to the point where both Sammy and Johnny were laughing so hard they were literally falling off the couch.
The Improv Page 28
