GEORGE SHAPIRO:
I’ve known Uncle Carl ever since I was twelve when he married my Aunt Estelle, and I’d never seen him this excited about anything. His enthusiasm about Andy was absolutely infectious, but my plate was already full with other clients. Then, about four or five o’clock that same afternoon, I was back in my office when I got a call from Budd.
He said, “I’m flying this kid Andy Kaufman out from New York and I’d like for you to take a look at his act for management.”
I said, “I can’t believe this. Carl Reiner just did his act for me and he loves him. I’ll definitely come to see him.”
From the moment I did, Andy captured my heart, particularly Foreign Man, which I thought was such a funny, wonderful thing. I also thought he was amazing musically—playing the conga drums, singing, and dancing. I absolutely loved what he did because it was so bizarre. My immediate reaction was that I wanted to work with him and here’s why.
For a personal manager working in comedy, if you like a comedian and you laugh in your soul, it’s like falling in love. However, I also had a fear of him being insane. At first, I didn’t know if he was on drugs or just absolutely crazy. But then after meeting with him and discovering he wasn’t insane—just partially insane—Andy won me over.
Unfortunately, bringing Andy out to the West Coast did little to quell my escalating troubles with Mitzi even after he began performing at The Comedy Store also. Happily, by the same token, Mitzi’s constant bullying and threats for the most part fell on deaf ears when it came to many of the more established comedians. In fact, the only out-and-out holdouts were Jimmie Walker and Steve Landesberg, who each had hit TV shows.
While I never complained or tried to stop them, I was particularly disappointed when it came to Steve, who had been one of my first comics in New York and was by then starring as the erudite New York City police detective Arthur P. Dietrich on ABC’s Barney Miller. However, he was also now Mitzi’s live-in boyfriend and so his reasons were at least understandable.
Even if he hadn’t been involved with her, I can’t say I was terribly surprised by Mitzi’s behavior either, especially since this kind of one-upmanship happens regularly in almost every business. Plus, she had just opened a second club in Westwood. So in one sense I could relate to her fears, and I had even experienced similar suspicions myself with Rick Newman back in New York after he opened Catch A Rising Star in 1972. But Rick and I had since become good friends, which we’ve remained. Our clubs also ultimately benefited from one another on nights when we didn’t have enough comics. For months, I held out hope that I might be able to have a similar arrangement with Mitzi, or that at the very least, we could be cordial even if we never became friends.
However, this was simply not to be, and as her unfounded accusations and vicious retaliation against me grew worse, I literally felt like I was being stung. What angered me even more was that Jimmie Walker refused to perform at the Hollywood Improv. Jimmie had been one of my first investors in LA and had gotten his big break on the Norman Lear sitcom Good Times as a direct result of Allan Manings, one of Lear’s producers, seeing him in the New York club and recommending him to Norman for the breakout role of J. J. “Dynomite!” Evans.
His reasons for not doing so—because he claimed we had too many people from the industry and that it hampered his ability to experiment—were also completely without merit. In the first place, Mitzi had a much bigger show-business crowd simply by virtue of the fact the Store had been there longer. Regardless, I felt Jimmie owed me. From my vantage point, it was the ultimate slap in the face and more than forty years later, he remains the single most ungrateful comic I have ever known.
JIMMIE WALKER:
Mitzi was always going ballistic, so you couldn’t say, “I’m more aware of this ballistic outbreak than that outbreak.” It was kind of like saying, “Donald Trump said something crazy today.”
Mitzi was always going crazy about something. It could have been about anything, so you basically took it with a grain of salt. When Budd opened out here, her reaction seemed like no big deal, and I was so busy with Good Times that I’m not sure if I was even paying attention.
However, the real reason why I chose to remain exclusively with The Comedy Store was because by that point I’d already been in LA for a few years and I was established there. I was also happy to invest in Budd’s club, and I give the New York Improv credit for what I became. But by this time, I’d already moved on to another stage, which happened to be The Comedy Store’s, so I just said, “In order to keep peace in the family, I’ll just stay where I am.” It was nothing against Budd at all—absolutely nothing.
THIRTY-TWO
Going Up in Flames
Even as my ongoing battles with Mitzi continued on top of the Improv’s lingering grief over the sudden death of Freddie Prinze in January 1977, that following year—1978—also turned out to be one of the most successful, if not seminal, years in the history of American comedy.
Starting with Woody Allen’s unprecedented four-win Oscar sweep for Annie Hall, including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Director, in April, Tinsel Town suddenly had more comedy films than you could count. Fortified with optimism by Annie Hall ’s triumph—and in an effort to trump it—virtually all the major studios had multipicture deals with everyone from Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, and Cheech and Chong to Improv alums Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin, and David Steinberg. That fall, National Lampoon’s Animal House starring John Belushi became the highest grossing comedy film of all time.
As a result, the pot got even sweeter as many stars like Steve Martin received what was becoming known as “the Woody Allen deal.” It netted him half a million dollars to write and star in his first movie, The Jerk, plus 50 percent of the profits and the option to direct it, along with the last word on both the film’s final cut and marketing campaign.
On the TV sitcom front, even though the decade’s biggest trailblazer Norman Lear had decided to call it quits to devote more time to political activism, most of his shows like All in the Family, One Day at a Time, and The Jeffersons remained in the top ten. You also had Improv regulars like Robin Williams and Andy Kaufman, whose new shows Mork and Mindy and Taxi had taken the country by storm almost overnight.
And with stand-up comedy albums also now going multi-platinum and selling off the charts, this put me and Mitzi Shore in the catbird seat as armies of talent managers, agents, studio heads, and network executives swarmed both our clubs nightly in search of new, young blood to feed the public’s increasingly voracious appetite for humor.
At first, it seemed like I stood the most to gain, especially after Mitzi lost the lease on her Sunset Boulevard club within days of Freddie’s death because of a grandfathered tenant from the previous owner who still held the rights to the show room even though the building was legally hers. In effect, she was a squatter in her own domain, which forced her to move the entire base of operations to the Store’s smaller satellite club in Westwood.
But unfortunately, I wasn’t able to benefit because I was saddled with my own real estate nightmare following an ill-timed attempt to start another Improv in Las Vegas. In doing so, I temporarily left Chris Albrecht in charge of Melrose Avenue, which thrived in my absence. However, my first foray into Vegas turned out to be a disaster thanks to a leaky roof that caved in one night, along with my balance sheet, following a bad thunderstorm.
CHRIS ALBRECHT:
When Budd left me in charge of the New York Improv, he pretty much let me do whatever I wanted as long as we made money, which we did. So when he called to tell me he was opening a club in Las Vegas, the first thing I told him was that he needed to leave somebody he could trust in charge in LA, not knowing I was the person he had in mind.
But then the very next day, he called me again and said, “I’ve been thinking about what you told me and I have just one question for you—How soon can you start?”
I think this was maybe in September of ’78. I
don’t remember when the Las Vegas club officially started, but I do remember flying out there to see it and thinking that its location in a strip mall made absolutely no sense.
I also had my doubts about my ability to run the LA club, which was in shambles when I got there. The kitchen was a mess and there were roaches everywhere. Plus, the ceiling was too high, and I didn’t think it was a great room for comedy acoustically. So I ended up hiring a scene designer who built a backdrop that was draped, which made the sound better. I also changed exterminators, or maybe I even hired one. All I know is that it became like a self-fulfilling prophecy and the people came because I made it more fun.
The Improv was always fun and I kind of resent Chris saying that, although I’ll grant you that the improvements he made were needed ones that I probably overlooked because I’d been there every day and I was too busy to notice.
On top of my first Vegas club going under and my ongoing travails with Mitzi Shore, I was also having problems in my personal life. My already-troubled marriage to Silver had gotten much worse since we moved to California and we’d recently begun divorce proceedings.
Not that I was complaining. We were both miserable and I felt like a caged animal. I also wanted the divorce to be as easy as possible, and with Silver planning to move back East with our two daughters anyway, I said, “You take the New York club,” not realizing it would eventually edge Chris out and have far-reaching consequences down the road.
RITA RUDNER, comedian, writer, and actor:
When I started doing stand-up in 1980, I was in Annie on Broadway where the theater was right around the corner from the New York Improv. Chris took a liking to me instantly and put me right on, but when Silver came back, I didn’t start going on until well after midnight, by which point I was exhausted after having just done a full performance of Annie.
Her reason was because she said my voice was too quiet, and she told me I had to take voice lessons even though people were laughing. I never understood that—especially since the fact that I have a softer voice usually means that I don’t command an audience as well if they aren’t entirely sober, which most of them usually weren’t at that hour. I never got what her beef was, and so finally I decided to start going to Catch A Rising Star where they immediately began giving me earlier spots.
CHRIS ALBRECHT:
Silver saw plots everywhere and when she came back to New York, the whole spirit of the club changed. I remember we had this chef named George who made decent food, but Silver decided to fire him. When she did, she also withheld his paycheck and George went into the kitchen, got a butcher knife, and came back out threatening to kill himself. He literally said, “I’m going to get my money or I’m going to die tonight.”
Silver and I got along okay personally, although I eventually became an agent for International Creative Management (ICM) and sold her my share in the club for $100,000. But she was also suspicious of everyone from the beginning, including me, and I think she was angry about what had happened between her and Budd. They were already separated by the time I came out to run the LA club in 1978.
RITCH SHYDNER:
I was there during all this and my take, for what it’s worth, is that when Silver came back, she wanted to establish that she was running the club. In doing so, she decided to pick the comics she was going to champion, plus Chris took a lot of guys to LA with him when he joined ICM. This opened the door for a lot of newer guys to say, “Here’s my opportunity to get to know Silver,” although her temperament wasn’t the same as Chris’s.
So between that and having different comedic tastes, there were definitely some conflicts there. I will say, however, that Silver was one of my biggest champions when it came to recommending me to Budd for An Evening at the Improv. She basically told him he had to use me and he did.
Because the New York Improv was easily worth five times what the LA club was at the time, Silver had to pay me $400 a month in alimony, plus travel expenses to New York so I could visit our two daughters four times a year.
In the meantime, I lost 80 percent of my net worth, which complicated matters even further with Mitzi, who’d gotten her lease back on Sunset Boulevard. As a result, she now owned two clubs, which were both booming, and I was again the underdog.
What I did have, however, was a bar and a restaurant with a full menu. The Comedy Store had neither, meaning that the only way you could order drinks was at your table and the only food items she offered were snacks.
And meaning also that the comics preferred to hang out at the Improv even if they weren’t performing. Some of them even met their future spouses as I eventually did. It was incredible and I was thrilled, especially since they weren’t all comedians either. Not unlike my New York club, we had practically every A-lister in Hollywood coming in at the time. Jessica Lange, Sam Shepard, Faye Dunaway, John Travolta, a young and still unknown Bruce Willis, and O. J. Simpson—the list goes on and on. Nobody ever bothered them and they were there practically every single night.
As all this star mixing was taking place, Mitzi’s manipulative, domineering ways were about to come back and bite her. Though she’d long had that reputation, she’d managed to prevail, largely because she owned two clubs, and many comedians, especially the less-established ones, still feared her wrath—provided they could even get on.
KEVIN NEALON:
My dream, by the way, was to get my name on The Comedy Store alongside all the other “professional comics” working there. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen until recently. Even though I would kill and get standing ovations on open mic nights there, Mitzi told me to go work someplace else because she knew I was Budd’s bartender. She also used the excuse that she already had a tall comic working there by the name of Tom Wilson. The great thing was that I eventually got my name on a huge billboard across the street from the Store when I did Weeds on Showtime. I felt it was my redemption.
Well, before that, Mitzi’s fiefdom would nearly collapse—and deservedly so—with the first chinks in her armor already starting to appear not long after she aggressively began expanding her empire in 1978. First, she spent $50,000 overhauling the Sunset Strip club, upgrading it into a 450-seat show room called “the Main Room,” alongside a second one off to the side for women comics, which she christened “the Belly Room,” in addition to maintaining what had been the club’s smaller first space, now called “the Original Room.”
With most of her labor force composed of willing young male comedians, she next opened a Comedy Store outpost in the Pacific Beach section of San Diego. She also launched a national college concert tour branded “A Night at The Comedy Store.”
Meanwhile, the shit had already started to hit the fan when Mitzi began giving headliners whatever she made on the cover charge to perform in the Main Room on Sunset Boulevard, but refused to give the showcase comics who were her bread and butter anything.
On the other hand, as much grief as she’d caused me, I could also understand her position, particularly since I wasn’t paying the comics either, and it was a policy I’d actually started when I first opened in New York. But I also hadn’t just undergone a major expansion. And even if I had, and I couldn’t pay them—which I was now in no position to anyway—I was still sympathetic to their plight, especially since many of them were so broke they couldn’t afford basic necessities like food and gas.
My own uncertain financial situation at the time aside, though, it’s important to note that one of the reasons I didn’t pay comics in the beginning, and still wasn’t at that time, was that the thought never really occurred to me. For one thing, the New York Improv didn’t become profitable until our second decade. The second thing is that we were strictly a singer-oriented club at first and the whole idea was to create a comfortable place where they could eat, drink, unwind, and perform if they wanted to. But there was never any pressure, nor was it ever a requirement. It was the same thing with the comics, even after they began to dominate and we became a comedy club as a resu
lt. Not only that, we gave them a stage and a live audience where they could experiment and work out—essentially a gym or an incubator—where in exchange they got the opportunity to get seen by the right people who could jump-start their careers virtually overnight.
Ditto when it came to the already-established comics whom we never paid either because they weren’t being billed as headliners when they came to give what was basically an impromptu dress rehearsal for an upcoming appearance on The Tonight Show.
Compared to what Mitzi was doing, it was an apples-to-oranges scenario that had worked in our favor. The comedians got what they needed, oftentimes more, and nobody ever complained, especially since I never told them they couldn’t work anywhere else.
All of this said, though, by the late seventies, times were changing. And fortuitously around the same period, many of Mitzi’s comics were so fed up with her that they’d already slowly begun coming over to my side. Consequently, when a group of them, including Jay Leno, David Letterman, George Miller, Elayne Boosler, Dottie Archibald, Tom Dreesen, JoAnne Astrow, and Marsha Warfield decided to organize a talent strike against her, there was every indication to suggest that I’d have the upper hand.
I’m not exactly sure how soon the dice begun to be cast after her expansion, but one of the most telling signs that something was amiss purportedly occurred in the early hours of New Year’s Day morning 1979. That’s when several from this group gathered at Canter’s Deli to blow off steam and get something to eat after having just come down off the high of their New Year’s Eve performances at the Store. Both the Sunset Strip and Westwood clubs had been filled to the rafters, and after one of the comics—Michael Rapaport—finished raving about his killer set, he leaned over to Tom Dreesen and asked in a whisper if he could borrow five dollars for breakfast.
The Improv Page 31
