My heart absolutely went through the floor, although I continued to believe that Freddie would make it as long as he was alive. When Freddie’s mother got there, I wrote a note to her in English and Spanish for one of the nurses to give her. When I found out he had died, I got in the car and drove home, but I had to keep pulling over. When I finally got home, I went on a three-day bender after that. It was just awful. I still can’t think about it without crying.
As we continued to get periodic reports from the hospital that there had been no change in his condition, I decided to keep the Improv open and go on with the show. I like to think Freddie would have wanted it that way.
The official time of Freddie’s death was Saturday, January 29, at 1 PM Pacific Standard after his mother, Maria Pruetzel, who hadn’t left his side, decided to take him off life support. The reactions over the next forty-eight hours and during the weeks after were a surreal blend of sadness, what-ifs, and whys. The funeral was that Monday at the Old North Church Forest Lawn in the Hollywood Hills.
Many of his old comedy friends were also conspicuously absent from the service’s invitation-only VIP list in favor of stars like Lucille Ball, Tony Orlando, Sammy Davis Jr., and his Chico and the Man co-star Jack Albertson. Composer Paul Williams was one of the pallbearers. For Freddie’s old friends, being shunned only added insult to their injury. But even so, several of them, including Jay Leno and Richard Lewis, decided to attend anyway.
JAY LENO:
We were sort of hysterical because here we were, all of the guys who’d started out with him in New York seated in the back row, and Freddie’s “close friends” like Lucille Ball and Tony Orlando were up front. We were all like, “How do they even know who he is?”
I knew Freddie well, of course, and we both considered each other friends, which is why I chose to stay away. Knowing the three-ring celebrity circus it would be, and how fame itself had largely propelled his demise, I just couldn’t stand to witness the spectacle. I had a quiet lunch alone at Schwab’s drugstore instead. I also needed to mourn Freddie on my own terms. In many ways, I’ve never stopped.
THIRTY-ONE
A Troubling Nemesis Named Mitzi Shore
Especially in the beginning at the Hollywood Improv, having Freddie Prinze and Robin Williams alongside our constantly growing roster of celebrity customers like Redd Foxx—who was then starring on the NBC mega-hit Sanford and Son and came in one night and bought champagne for everyone not long after we opened—certainly convinced me that the West Coast comedy gold rush, created in large part because of Johnny Carson’s arrival, was far more potent than I’d ever imagined.
Every week, it seemed like one of our comedians was either appearing on The Tonight Show or well on their way towards landing a sitcom because of it. There were also hundreds of former class clowns and assorted office watercooler cutups migrating to Los Angeles like Pied Pipers from all across the country, hoping to join the fray. Some even called it Comedy Camelot.
The New York club was also thriving thanks to a bumper crop of young acts, who were all either just starting to come into their own or simply trying to find their footing on West 44th Street.
STEVE MITTLEMAN:
During the summer of 1976—my third or fourth time ever at the Improv—Diana Ross was in the audience and I freaked out. I literally smacked myself on the forehead like they used to do in those V8 tomato juice commercials and said, “Holy shit!”
I’m not sure if Diana heard me or not, but I quickly regained my composure because I knew I had to and I did just fine. Back then, I had this routine where I did a fairly decent imitation of Richard Nixon. I also had a bit about bakeries that were located in New York subway stations where they used to have these signs that said, “We do wedding cakes.”
I’d go, “Who would buy their wedding cake in a subway bake shop?” Then I’d pretend to be a customer and say, “Hello, subway bake shop. Do you do wedding cakes? Can you make mine in the shape of the M train?” Then I’d make these gestures where on top of the cake the bride and groom would be holding onto a strap.
It got big laughs and whenever the emcee would introduce me they’d say, “Ladies and gentlemen, this guy’s got hormones in all the right places. Ladies, sit back on your hands. Gentlemen, hold on to your dates.” That was all it took for them to start laughing before I even said a word. Sometimes this would go on for thirty seconds or more.
PAUL PROVENZA:
I was a kid obsessed with comedians, and whenever you’d see them on one of the talk shows, they’d all say the same thing: “I started at the Improv.” I remember literally going through the Yellow Pages when it was still listed as the Improvisation and calling the club to find out how you became a comedian.
I’d been going there once a month for about two years before I finally started auditioning in 1975. The hot young act was a comedy team called Overton & Sullivan. Rick Overton really took me under his wing and championed me along with another comic named Glenn Hirsch. Glenn was the house emcee and he was really electrifying because he was so unpredictable.
Budd had already gone to LA by this point, but he’d still come back a few times a year and whenever he did, it was very clear that he was the authority. The sentiment among the younger comics was that Budd was the grandfather and Chris Albrecht was the avuncular father figure, which he was to me in a lot of ways because my own father died when I was seventeen.
More than comedy lessons, Chris would give me life lessons. He’d say things to me like, “You know what, cool your jets. You’re probably not going to get on for a while until you can demonstrate that you understand what the other comics are trying to do here and that it’s about more than you just trying to get stage time.”
JOE PISCOPO:
Chris’s nickname was The General. We called him that because he was our boss. Then when the grand, exalted mystic ruler Budd Friedman walked in, it was like, “Whoa!” I did a lot of observational humor back then—“Hey, how about this?” or, “Did you ever do that?”—and then one night I was seated back near the kitchen, which was where all the comics who wanted to become regulars sat, and Chris gestured to me with his index finger and told me I was going to be one of them.
It was just like being knighted, and then not long after that, he made me one of the emcees. One of the first lessons I learned was that if I saw something, I wasn’t going to say anything. As a matter of fact, there used to be a slogan in the midseventies: “If you see something, don’t say something.”
So I tried to follow that mantra until one night in 1976, this guy walked into the club stoned out of his mind singing Paul McCartney’s song “Let ’Em In”—you know, “Somebody’s knocking at the door, someone’s ringing the bell . . .” Then he sat down and took his shoes off.
First, he removed one sneaker, then the other, and when he did this, they both hit the floor with a loud thud. However, I didn’t say anything, and then the next thing I knew he took off his shirt and threw it in the middle of the floor. But I still didn’t say anything—and neither did anybody else—until he took his pants off, sans underwear, and suddenly he was standing there completely stark-ass naked in the middle of the Improv.
Well, as soon as Chris saw this, he said, “What the fuck are you doing?” Next, he gingerly grabbed him by the back of the arms and with Glenn Hirsch, who was working the door, they pushed him out onto the street and into the snow where he was still singing “Somebody’s knocking at the door” stark naked.
But then the strangest thing happened, because Judy Orbach, who was the assistant manager and was there with her boyfriend that night, started to take pity on the guy. So they grabbed his pants and started to run after him, getting mugged in the process. What saved them was giving the mugger this guy’s wallet, which I never questioned. I just figured this was the new world I was in.
With the continued rise of our good fortunes, there was also the groundswell of publicity that the Hollywood Improv was receiving thanks to On Location: Fredd
ie Prinze and Friends, which would be the very first of HBO’s stand-up specials featuring Freddie, Jay, Andy, Elayne, and other then unknowns like Tim Thomerson, Gary Mule Deer, and Bob Shaw.
There were also no signs that the frenzied excitement and frenetic activity on both coasts were going to be letting up anytime soon either. In 1977, the LA Times even began devoting an entire beat to stand-up comedy.
WILLIAM KNOEDELSEDER:
They’d recently hired a guy named Irv Letofsky to take over the Calendar section, which was pretty much a sales tool for the entertainment industry back then. Irv came from Minneapolis and he wanted to make the section grittier and more on the inside as opposed to just reporting on the new movies that were premiering that week. Irv had a different take on things, and I guess he’d been to some comedy clubs and the acts weren’t like the comics he’d seen before. When I walked into his office one day looking for work, he said, “There’s something going on here. It feels like Greenwich Village in the 1960s.” Then he asked me if I wanted to cover it, and it became my beat. Mostly I was writing profiles, and the comics were all twenty-six or twenty-seven like me. We’d all come from someplace else recently, so it was easy to understand them. They were the class clowns and I’d been the class clown even though I never wanted to do it professionally. However, the idea of covering comedy and learning about these people who were my age turned out to be the best job I ever had.
At the same time all of this was happening, however, I continued to square off with an increasingly antagonistic adversary. You know that old saying—one bad apple spoils the whole bunch? Well, in my case the proverbial worm came in the form of a frizzy-haired fellow club owner named Mitzi Shore, who owned the nearby Comedy Store less than a mile from the Hollywood Improv.
Some history: Several weeks before Johnny Carson moved The Tonight Show to LA in the spring of 1972, an old-school comic and old acquaintance of mine named Sammy Shore and his writing partner Rudy DeLuca decided to open a small comedy club at 8433 Sunset Boulevard in the heart of the Sunset Strip. Formerly the home of the famed celebrity nightclub Ciro’s—and once frequented by virtually every A-list Hollywood celebrity of the 1940s and ’50s from Ronald Reagan, Clark Gable, and Humphrey Bogart to Betty Grable, Ava Gardner, and Lana Turner—the building’s lineage was the stuff show-business legends are made of.
Though he was never a household name, Sammy, too, had had a formidable career as an opening act for Sammy Davis Jr., Ann-Margret, Tony Bennett, and most recently on tour and in Las Vegas for Elvis Presley. At the time, Sammy and Rudy, who had recently joined the writing staff of The Carol Burnett Show, had been coming in to the New York club off and on for several years.
I wouldn’t say the three of us were close necessarily, but I certainly liked and respected them. Moreover, when they were first considering opening The Comedy Store, which my pal Jack Knight also helped them to build, one of the first people they consulted was me. Basically their idea had been to create a smaller-scale version of the Improv, a place for them to hang out with their other comedian friends and try out new material when they weren’t on the road. Plus, they’d gotten a rent-free deal from the owner on top of a handshake agreement to split whatever was left over on drinks and cover charges minus expenses.
RUDY DELUCA, screenwriter, actor, and co-founder of The Comedy Store:
I don’t recall a lot of specific evenings, and I didn’t know Budd terribly well in those days, but Sammy and I used to drop in to the New York Improv on a fairly regular basis to hear comics and singers. By the time I’d moved to California to write comedy when I was working with Sammy, we’d been tossing around the idea of opening a place of our own where comics could go and try out new material. I was also having trouble finding other work and I was looking for something to do.
One day not long after this, we were driving past Ciro’s, which had recently closed, and Sammy said to me, “Gee, I’d like to get this place, rent it out, and just call it the Sammy Shore Room.” But knowing this could never work, I said, “Sammy, how many people are going to come see you at the Sammy Shore Room? Your family and three others. Let’s make it an Improv like Budd Friedman has in New York.”
That’s exactly how it happened. Not too long after that, I talked to Budd and he said, “Go ahead. Open it up.” I asked him for permission in a way, although I didn’t need it. It was just opening up another kind of club. We didn’t even have a name for it, nor did we know exactly what it was going to be.
With my decision to open a second club in LA still at least another two years away, I gave Rudy and Sammy my blessing without hesitation. Naturally, I had no idea that when Sammy and his wife, Mitzi, split up soon after this, she would be taking over The Comedy Store—which she’d named and later repainted and remodeled—as part of the divorce settlement.
As a result, not only had the Store become hugely successful by the time I arrived on the scene, Mitzi also had a monopoly—attributable in no small part to the fact that she was now using many of my best former New York comics, including Freddie Prinze, Steve Landesberg, Jay Leno, and Jimmie Walker.
JAY LENO:
You had to live on your wits as a comedian, and that’s how I decided I was going to live when I left Boston and moved to LA in 1972. In Boston, I had acquired a few things and I was in my apartment one afternoon when I thought to myself, “If I stay here, I’m going to buy more stuff. Then I’m going to have to get a job to pay for this stuff.”
I basically told my neighbors they could take anything they wanted and I left. I booked a red-eye to LA and when I got off the plane, I went straight to The Comedy Store and slept on the stairs for the next week.
Mitzi was fine at the time. She had just gotten the club in the divorce from Sammy. Like the Improv in New York, it was a great place because you finally got to meet people who did the same thing as you. She was wonderful to me in the beginning. She ran the Store like a housemother.
In truth, Mitzi really saw her role more as being LA’s self-appointed queen bee of comedy, although at the time of my arrival, I still had no indication that I was walking into a hornet’s nest.
The main reason I didn’t know it was because I barely knew Mitzi at all. I’d actually only met her once about a year earlier, when I was in town with a comedian and impressionist I managed named Maureen Murphy who was scheduled to appear on The Merv Griffin Show. The night before, Maureen and I hitchhiked over to the Store from the nearby motel we were staying in, and Mitzi couldn’t have been nicer or more gracious. She even gave us free drinks and invited Maureen to perform.
But when I moved there in 1975, all niceties were off from day one. First, she laid down the law to the comics that they could only work at her place and not the Improv, literally forcing their hands and pitting them against me, which made absolutely no sense, especially since comics needed practice on more than one stage to get better.
She also began attacking me in the press, and in an attempt to rewrite history and kill my baby in the cradle, she even told any reporter who would listen that I had stolen her idea.
Fortunately, many of the comedians refused to cave in. Most vocally, Jay Leno, who was already a huge draw even though it would be another seventeen years before he took over as host of The Tonight Show, was the first one to call her bluff. After telling her that I had been his first manager and that he would only work for me if he had to choose, she immediately backed down. While a then unknown David Letterman stayed almost exclusively with The Comedy Store, Freddie Prinze, who was one of my first investors, worked at both clubs.
So did Elayne Boosler and her then boyfriend Andy Kaufman, both of whom I’d personally brought out separately to headline for a month when I first opened—and where I also introduced Andy to his future manager, George Shapiro, on the same day that George’s uncle, Carl Reiner, had told him about Andy.
GEORGE SHAPIRO:
My connection with Budd runs very deep and goes back more than fifty years. I first met him because I us
ed to go to the New York Improv a lot even though I was already living out in California when he opened. We weren’t close, close friends, but we had enough of a rapport for him to tell me about Andy the same day Carl Reiner did.
This is what happened. Uncle Carl has total recall and he had just gotten back from New York where he’d seen Andy perform at Catch A Rising Star. On this particular day, I was having lunch with him and Dick Van Dyke in the NBC commissary, when Uncle Carl did Andy’s entire act for me verbatim with the intonations and impersonating Jimmy Carter in the Foreign Man accent exactly the way Andy did. He said, “He’s so unique. You have to fly to New York and see him because he’s so special.”
CARL REINER:
My wife Estelle and I were in New York and we’d gone to Catch A Rising Star one night where Andy happened to be performing. We were sitting about twenty feet away, and when he got onstage, he started to do things that were so crazy and so bad. Every impression sounded exactly the same and at first I thought he was an idiot.
But then he did a spot-on impression of Elvis Presley. And then, I don’t know if it was before or after, he sat on a stool and started reading The Great Gatsby. I went backstage afterwards and asked him where the hell he’d been. He told me this was his first paying job and that he was getting paid fifteen dollars. So I told him to look me up if he ever came out to the West Coast, and I immediately told George about him as soon as I got back to LA.
As luck would have it, I was gearing up to do a Dick Van Dyke special, and he and I were having lunch with George at the NBC commissary a few days later. At first, George was resistant to the idea of managing Andy. But then when I started impersonating his entire act in his Foreign Man voice, Dick said, “That’s hysterical. Let’s have him on.” And then George called him and he became his manager.
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