The Masked Man: A Memoir And Fantasy Of Hollywood

by Tom Wilson

  "Okay, no talk about the future," he said.

  "Good."

  Caroline stepped into the room as the Ranger put his hat on.

  "I thought you were staying for dinner," she said.

  "Whoopee! I forgot!" he said, pulling his gloves back off.

  "How did you get in the pictures if you're a comedian?" he asked. I looked at him for more than a few seconds as he pulled his hat off and unbuckled his gunbelt.

  "What?" he said, "Is that alright to ask?"

  TWELVE

  Steve Martin was in the middle of his set, taking a break from insane happy feet dancing to do a card trick with the audience. He'd finished the banjo playing and the arrow through his head stuff, made balloon animals and given every person in the fourth row a brief massage, and each movement within the manic symphony was greeted with cheering bliss from the thousands who packed the theatre.

  "Okay, I'll need a volunteer from the audience," he said, his white suit a blinding flash in the stage lights.

  Hypnotized and surrounded by the crazed audience, I raised my hand so fast I almost dislocated my shoulder.

  "You there! Yes right there!" he pointed at me, and I stood up as friends whooped and pounded me on the back.

  "Tell us your name!"

  "My name is Tom, Steve," I said, my voice cracking.

  He moved his shoulders slightly, taking on the jazzy dialect and loose limbs of the Czechoslovakian swinger.

  "And Tom, if I may call you Tom," he chuckled, "Where are you from?"

  "Well, Steve," I answered, swinging my shoulders and doing my best impression of him from Saturday Night Live, "I live nearby."

  "We are brothers, then!" Steve Martin himself said to me.

  We did a card trick together where I was the brunt of a joke, and he swung around in my direction, pointing a finger in my face.

  "Sorry about that, Tom," he said, "Just havin' a little fun…at your expense!"

  Three thousand people laughed and cheered and I went home to congratulations and back slaps with my ears ringing. I then took out a notebook and started writing down some stuff that I thought was funny.

  The Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard has offices on the second floor that are sound proof and lined in lead, and rumors still circulate that guys were murdered up there, so from the first moments inside, there is an undeniable feeling that the place is teeming with angry ectoplasm. In the nineteen thirties and forties the place was called "Ciro's," the hottest club in Hollywood, right on the Sunset Strip. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis performed on the main stage there, along with every big time nightclub act and every down and out movie star trying to cobble a few songs and jokes together to make some money on the road. Ciro's is the club where Joey Bishop famously opened the show for Frank Sinatra and watched Marilyn Monroe herself slink through the packed house in mink and diamonds, to sit at a front row table and make the audience forget who Joey Bishop was. As soon as she was comfortable, with every eye on the back of the bottle blonde's head, Joey leaned over and pointed a finger at her, growling "I thought I told you to wait in the truck!"

  Clark Gable and Orson Welles and Cary Grant sipped chilled gin and nodded to each other in there, toasting over the brassy synchopation and fielding the hopeful glances of dolled-up brunettes in silky dresses, while, if the angry poltergeists are to be believed, lots of bad stuff was going on upstairs about people with delinquent loans who were talking while Frank Sinatra was trying to sing.

  The Comedy Store took over the building in the seventies, a giant cube filled with tables, chairs, a microphone, and decades of cumulative cigarette smoke caking the ceiling. Three stories of black cement, with three separate performance rooms inside, it spends long days on Sunset Boulevard locked and quiet, absorbing the blazing California sun, until dusk pries open the doors and the collected heat pours off the stage in the performances of young comedians, exploding in brilliant longing.

  I walked up to the black monolith, a twenty one year old actor/comedian, my face freshly washed in the bathroom of the "Copper Penny," a twenty four hour family restaurant down the street, ready to be seen, loved, cast, and made famous very quickly so that I could get back to New York City, play Jesus in Godspell, and prove to that New York City that kicked me in the teeth that they were wrong and I was so much more than a really big white kid with talent who belonged in a traveling company of "Oklahoma!" I paid my dues, playing the guitar at coffee houses, performing improvisational theatre in moldy basements and campus pizza joints, and I was ready to be a comedian on the Sunset Strip. I took my place in the audition line behind a hundred other jittery wannabe's, snaking through the Comedy Store parking lot waiting for a shot on stage.

  Two major factions of comedians gather in comedy club parking lots, both recognizable by sight; new guys and regulars. I was one of the new guys, confused people who listened to the sadistic friends suggesting they try to be funny as a real job. The new guys stand in line waiting for a bit of stage time at the "open mic," leaning on cars, but only the cars of people they know. Words are their currency and weaponry, and words are all they've got. From every vice-principal's office from every school in the country, the class clowns throw down their shields of pride, intellect, money or ego, and walk naked into the maelstrom of savagery, cloaked thinly only by their wit. If you held all of them upside down and shook, nothing would fall to the asphalt but stubby pencils, scribbled matchbook covers, and maybe ninety cents.

  Shaking the other group upside down would result in some arrests. The power corner of the parking lot is reserved for regular comics with prime stage time, preparing for their sets, or basking in the afterglow of big laughs. After one, five, or fifty appearances on T.V. talk shows, they're usually denied the right to walk across the talk show set and sit on a sofa with real celebrities, but at the club, the parking lot is theirs and they lean on any available car, ready to meet the angry owner with a wisecrack about his jacket. They gather in the dark, near the ladies' room entrance, fishing for slurred compliments from weaving redheads, slashing each other with insults sharpened on honed insolence while mumbling particles of joke ideas into micro recorders. Who knows? It might work on Letterman. Their creed is ridicule the successful, pray to enter their ranks, and drink Long Island iced teas until the sky is pink with dawn and people are jogging. Comics don't jog, they wake up in the afternoon coughing and watch cartoons while eating cereal.

  Not that that's a bad thing. Working for a few minutes a night to a packed house, out with friends at three in the morning, and wake up when the sun is warm, it's a lazy harmonic convergence, and no surprise that the line to audition for the place was so long. The army of class clowns and mental patients off their meds waited for six o'clock, when the doors opened and the list of names were taken for four minute rations of stage time, beginning at seven thirty and going until two in the morning.

  Not in a row, though. The regulars filled the parking lot on Monday night, and dropped in for "guest sets," the right to hop onstage unannounced, walk aimlessly around the stage looking for new material while sighing into the mic "So…what else is going on?" and completely ignore the red light in back that means wrap it up and get off. Lots of desperate new guys could wait in the pitch black back of the room, mumbling jokes to themselves from dinner time until two in the morning with no hope of getting onstage if a regular comic went off the grid and started wandering the stage for hours.

  Things didn't look good for me. I played the tuba as a part of my act and dragged it to every club, fifty pounds of metal taking up the space of two paying customers in back. It always made things far more difficult than they needed to be, and this is show business, so it started out pretty tough already. I clanged the tuba toward the front of the line for my drink ticket and performance time, greeted by a bitter comic, angry about signing up amateurs on open mic night instead of smoking pot in the parking lot with other regulars, leaning on cars and preparing for "Tonight Show" appearances that will probably never happen.
/>
  "What is that thing?" he snorted.

  "A tuba."

  "You play that?"

  "Don't be silly," I said, "I carry it around as a lucky charm."

  He scribbled on a piece of paper and handed it to me without the hint of a smile.

  "I used to wear it as a pendant but the chain broke," I added with a chuckle.

  He shoved the paper in my face with a blank stare of perfect apathy. "Eight forty five," he mumbled, looking beyond me to the next pathetic victim.

  "Thanks!" I enthused, way over the top.

  Eight forty five could mean nine o'clock if things went well, or eleven forty five if a long string of regulars showed up.

  Cocktail waitresses barreled through the back of the room, an obstacle course of needy hopefuls and sloshing vodkas, and I squirted my way to a barstool in the deepest corner, darker than the inside of a closed refrigerator. And the show began, the Comedy Store open mic, the pathetic parade of amateur comedians, people convinced that their voices should be amplified and people should listen to what they have to say. And not even for free, they think that people should pay them for it.

  A bearded Pakistani man trembled in the spotlight, saying "Tonight…we have a really big shoooooooo," doing an impression of Ed Sullivan so badly that it didn't even matter that nobody in the audience knew who Ed Sullivan was.

  "Dating is tough, huh?" almost all of them said in one way or another, following it up with variations on the theme of airline travel and it's inconvenience. "Maybe they should make the plane out of black box material!! Ever think of that, Poindexter?!" The Coke I was nursing was watery with melted ice before it was getting close to my stage time, and I slid my tuba out of the darkness through the maze of chairs toward the stage. The emcee of the show was talking with some hip regular comics, and moaned audibly when I walked up to him carrying a tuba. "I'm up next," I said, "Would you like to know how to introduce me?"

  "Listen" he said, "We're gonna bump you. One of the guys has a Carson set he's working on."

  "Bump me?"

  "Yeah, he's working on a Carson set."

  "Not bump the guy after me?"

  "No, he needs to go on now," he said, turning away from me.

  I dragged the tuba back through the tables, knocking into a couple of them, and sat back down to watch a guy named Greg Travis blow the roof off the place with a loose set of comic riffs that sizzled the room, pushing wild ideas through crazed rhythms and creating the awareness by everyone in the room that this was the wildest, hippest, loudest, most creative place on earth. He was a punk rocker being interviewed, and played both parts, barking into the microphone in a cockney dialect "This isn't me first band. I used to be in a band called the dogs. But we had to break up…one of the dogs got hit by a car."

  I performed right after him, the tough spot after a "Killer set" when the audience is using the next guy up as a comedy intermission. Spilled beer bottles clanked and big haired women walked through the spotlight on the way to the ladies room as I performed my own wild version of standup, praying that they might listen to me eventually, after a minute to adjust in their chairs and order another round. And they did. It was going well, and the next hope was that the owner of the place might see it.

  Mitzi Shore, the owner of the Comedy Store, took over the club after a divorce from her comic ex-husband, and was as well suited to run a comedy club as a health club receptionist at a neurology clinic. Mitzi had the voice of a whining Turkish fire alarm, not that I've ever been to a fire in Turkey, but I'd put money on them being very close. She held her court of darkness in a black vinyl booth on the side of the showroom, surrounded by sycophants and cigarettes, taking phone calls on a tabletop receiver while smoking through a long cigarette holder she must have bought at an Addams Family estate sale.

  Sometimes she watched comedians, but on audition night, a kid who worked for months to get there could get onstage in front of Mitzi only to be ignored through a phone call and told to come back in six months. It took a complete lucky line up of the comedy planets to have her watch you and be accepted as a regular. And the unlucky comic who was being too funny, getting too many loud laughs and disturbing an important conversation could be passed over for being a great comedian at precisely the wrong time.

  I hopped offstage to a strong round of applause, and the emcee walked up to me with his jaw on the ground.

  "Congratulations," he said, "You're a regular."

  "Are you kidding?"

  "No, I'm not," he shrugged, "You got lucky, she was watching your set."

  "She was?"

  "Listen, you're a regular. The thing is, she said you should perform here, and also be a doorman."

  "A doorman?" I asked, "What do you mean?"

  "Like a bouncer, sort of," he said, "watch the room, seat people, you know."

  "A bouncer? I just want to perf--"

  "I would do it, man. If guys don't show up for their sets, doormen get the spots. It's a good way to get onstage."

  "What if I just want to perform?"

  "You're a regular. Congratulations. Call in on Monday with your availability, and call in Tuesday for your spots."

  I called in Monday and got no spots at all, so I became a bouncer on the Sunset Strip.

  The back doorman, to be specific. The kid who sits on a barstool at the back door, pointing toward the bathrooms, watching for cocaine addled rockers trying to sneak in, and walking up to a table of twenty raucous patrons squeezing into a table for eight and asking them if they would be so kind as to think about the feelings of the performers onstage and the people around them, while they shouted "Richard!! Richard Pryor!!" for at least an hour before Mr. Pryor even pulled his Rolls Royce into the parking lot. I watched an endless waterfall of jokes cascade over a sea of darkened heads, sneaking up behind drunken hecklers to assume my "I'm a bouncer, don't mess with me" pretense, grumbling at them to shut up or else, and when they didn't listen, walking away to hop onstage and do a show for the same people an hour later.

  The hallways teemed with comics, all aware of the unspoken caste system. Richard Pryor was king. He was filming his standup concert films at the time and performed every night at the Comedy Store, onstage sets as long as he wanted, on whichever of three stages he wanted to take. He wandered the hallways wafting cigarette smoke and Grey Flannel cologne behind him as the crowds of awestruck comics parted, a red sea of dreamers and potential hangers on, ready to carry him to the stage on a golden throne if asked by James and Rashan, his bodyguards, who were always available to gently clear a way to the stage for Mr. Pryor, or throw an unruly audience member several feet through a set of double doors and into the street if circumstances called for it.

  Richard Pryor performed brilliantly but quietly at the Store, working on new ideas and fresh stories from his fractured psyche, taking his improvisations to an honest whisper into the dented microphone. One night, when the ideas weren't flowing, and his set became more searching silence than manic self revelation, he stood onstage saying nothing. Not pacing while timing out the beginning of his next tangent, but simply staring into the lights for long enough that everyone got giggly and uncomfortable, certain that he was about to shout something obscene and crazy and truthful. A sheen of perspiration rose in his face, and it became clear to everyone that he didn't know what to say next. Richard Pryor was glowing with flop sweat and unable to come up with any words to say. He shifted his weight back and forth for a few seconds, and finally whispered into the mic "You got to excuse me…Uh…this here is the first time I ever performed straight."

  An electrical current of equal parts compassion and amazement coursed through the room, and applause rippled over shouts of "We love you!" "We love you, Richard!"

  "Yeah," he whispered, "You love me, write me some muh-fuggn jokes."

  A guy at a table near the front screamed out "Do Mudbone, Rich!" a character from a Richard Pryor album ten years before. "Love you, man. Do Mudbone!! Whoo!!" Richard stared into the lights
, looking for new material in the foreign sharpness of sobriety, getting heckled by a drunken moron. "Come, on, Rich! Do Mudbone!" he yelled, standing up at his table and spilling a drink. I walked through the room to the right, toward the heckler sitting close to the stage, lit by the wash of stage lights far too brightly for me to sneak in and tell him to shut up in secret.

  "Sir," I whispered from the darkness, "Sit down."

  "Come on," the guy spun around to face the audience, clapping his hands and chanting "MUD-BONE! MUD-BONE! MUD-BONE!"

  I walked into the light, wearing a brightly colored shirt striped with rainbows in tribute to energy, and flash, and Robin Williams, since I hadn't met him yet - and took the man's arm. "Sir, sit down, you're going to have to--"

  "Get y'hands off me!" he spat, spinning on me, ready to square off in the middle of a packed house in the middle of the first show Richard Pryor ever did without drugs.

  "Sit down," I growled, trying to expand my shoulders to bouncer size while praying the guy didn't hit me.

  He took a step toward me, eyes blazing, and through the loudspeakers of the club,

  Richard Pryor's voice boomed with new authority.

  "Hey Muh-Fuggah. You gonna mess with Rainbow Man?"

  The drunk looked around to see who was speaking, and it turned out to be the black man onstage with the microphone, five feet away from us.

  "Bettah sit yo ass down, or Rainbow man'll rip yo muh-fuggn head right offah yo muh-fuggn shoulders."

  He was stuck there, standing up and staring at the hero onstage, unwilling to shout out "Mud Bone" again, but unable to sit back down because a big kid with a multicolored Hawaiian shirt told him to.

  "Fo' you dig yo'self deeper in the hole, you sit yo ass down, muh-fuggah. Rainbow man will just go--