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“What do you mean? ” Dreesen asked. “What about all those people outside? Aren’t they going to let them in? ”
“No,” said Tennis. “They are here to see Billy Crystal, and his managers don’t want them to see anyone else. That’s the way it’s done.”
Dreesen did twenty minutes and made all eighteen people laugh heartily. When he finished, Tennis said to him, “Come to my office Tuesday.” Passing through the Crystal crowd on the way out, Dreesen thought, Well, at least he didn’t reject me. (Billy Crystal passed his audition, too, winning a spot on The Tonight Show and a recurring role on Norman Lear’s hit show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Bauman & Estin didn’t make the cut.) On Tuesday, Tennis got right down to it: “Tell me what material you’d do on The Tonight Show. ”
Dreesen started going through the bits he’d done at the Comedy Store audition.
“No, take that one out,” Tennis would cut in. “Yeah, that’s good. Keep that one.”
At the end of the session, Tennis smiled and said matter-of-factly, “You got the show. You’re on next week.”
Dreesen left with his brain doing cartwheels. “I got The Tonight Show,” he shouted as he ran down Sunset Boulevard to find a pay phone to call his wife and everyone else he ever knew. “I got the fucking Tonight Show. ”
Then he was hit by a wave of fear. Oh shit! he thought. What if it doesn’t work? What if I bomb, with every agent, manager, studio and network executive in the world watching? He spent the next week working out at the Comedy Store and the Improv, doing all three shows every night.
Dreesen knew that Johnny Carson had a very strict view of what worked on The Tonight Show and what didn’t. Johnny expected comics to deliver a fast-paced, joke-filled, laugh-packed set no shorter than five minutes and no longer than six. No long setups: You needed quick payoffs—a punch line every thirty sec-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 67
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onds. For a stand-up comic, a minute on TV without a laugh was death. And Carson was adamant about the formula. He had recently stopped by the Improv to see Jay Leno and Andy Kaufman perform and had pronounced both of them “not ready,”
telling Budd Friedman, “They’re funny, but they don’t have six minutes.”
By Dreesen’s calculation, his six minutes contained twenty-two laughs. On the appointed day, October 21, he went to the NBC
studios in beautiful downtown Burbank all by himself. He needed to focus. He tried not to think about the fact that everyone he knew inside the business and out would be watching, that this could be the biggest break of his career or the end of it. Some comics who were good enough to get on The Tonight Show still avoided it out of fear that the slightest stumble would put them out of the business. Dreesen sat nervously in the green room through most of the then ninety-minute show. Comics were always the last to go on. The minutes ticked away, and then time ran out. The interviews with Eydie Gorme, Vincent Price, and Buddy Hackett had run long, and he’d been bumped. He would have to come back another night. He drove home feeling equal parts disappointed and relieved. At least he got paid—a grand total of $212.
Over the next few weeks, the scene repeated itself as Dreesen was bumped on October 28, when time was eaten up by actor Robert Blake, and on December 2, when Lucille Ball and Johnny Mathis exceeded their allotted minutes. His hometown newspapers in Chicago picked up on his ordeal. “Waiting (and Waiting and Waiting) for Tom,” read one of the headlines. The ground -
swell of interest only served to heighten his anxiety. On December 9, he was sitting in the makeup chair for the fourth time when Tonight Show executive producer Fred DeCordova walked in and said, “I have some bad news for you.” DeCordova paused for a beat before delivering the punch line. “You’re going on.”
In his head Dreesen saw a scene from his days in the navy—on a ship, running for battle stations, with the sound of a horn and a 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 68
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voice coming through the loudspeakers: “This is not a drill. I repeat. This is not a drill.”
Then began an age-old Tonight Show ritual. He was walked down a long hallway to a designated station just behind the curtain. As he passed among them, all the stagehands turned their backs or looked away so as not to make him more nervous than he was. He could hear them whispering, “It’s his first time.”
At the end of the hall, he was left standing alone facing the stage curtain that separated him from 10 million TV viewers.
“You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re okay,” he kept telling himself. He was hyperventilating. Coming out of the last commercial break, Doc Severson and the band were playing. Then the music stopped, along with his heart. He heard Johnny saying the words he would remember the rest of his life.
“We’re back now, and I’m glad you’re in such a good mood because my next guest is making his first appearance on The Tonight Show. Please welcome . . . Tom Dreesen!”
Like hundreds before him, Dreesen stepped into the blinding light of The Tonight Show arena. It was nothing like a nightclub, more like an operating room. The audience was hidden in shadows beyond the lights and cameras; he couldn’t see faces. He stepped to the T marker taped to the floor and looked straight at the red light on the center camera. This was it.
“I grew up in a suburb on the south side of Chicago called Harvey, Illinois,” he began, and the audience applauded, presumably for Chicago. “It was what you’d call a ‘changing’ neighborhood.”
He told of attending “St. Rocky Graziano grade school” and of all the black guys who apparently thought he was some Chinese kid named Sayfoo “because every time I walked by they’d call out
‘Say, foo’!”
The line got a big laugh, and he was off to the races. He described what happened after one black classmate taught him the art of “woofing,” which was (much like a dog barking) bluffing an 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 69
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opponent by acting braver than you really are: “One day, one of the nuns reached into her drawer for a ruler to rap me on the knuckles, and I said to her, ‘I’m thinking you better be pullin’ a gun outta there.’”
After counting eleven applause breaks, he closed with an endearing appeal to the crowd. “You’ve been a wonderful audience,”
he said. “And because this is my first appearance here and show business is such a tough life, I’d just like to say this to you: If you liked me and you are a Protestant, then say a prayer for me. If you are a Catholic, then light a candle. And if you are Jewish, then someone in your family owns a nightclub, so please tell them about me. Thank you very much. Good night.”
He’d killed, and he knew it. He turned and walked back through the stage curtain, where Craig Tennis grabbed him by the arm and propelled him back toward the stage. “No, no, no,” he said. “Johnny wants you back out there to take a bow.”
The audience was still applauding wildly as he stepped back into the lights, waved, and bowed. Over to the right he could see Carson smiling broadly, nodding approval, and giving him the big okay sign. He thought he might pop. He had never experienced such a sense of exhilaration.
Back at the Comedy Store, David Letterman, George Miller, and Johnny Dark were gathered around the little black-and-white TV in the kitchen, watching their friend’s triumph with a mixture of pride and envy. He was the first of their class to make it. As Dreesen walked on rubber legs past the stagehands on his way out that night, they all turned toward him and applauded.
The next day, a William Morris agent named Herb Karp got a call from CBS development executive Lee Curlin, who said, “I saw this kid on Carson last night. His name is Tom Dreesen. Do you have him under contract?”
“Why, are you interested in him? ” Karp replied, not answering the ques
tion.
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“Yes, we are.”
“Deal interested? ”
“Yes, deal interested.”
“I know Dreesen,” Karp said. “I’ve played softball with him.
I’ll give him a call.”
Karp told a surprised Dreesen that he’d like to take him on as a client. “I won’t lie to you,” he said. “There’s a deal waiting for you.”
So, within twenty-four hours of his first Tonight Show appearance, Tom Dreesen had signed with the biggest talent agency in Hollywood and had a $25,000 development deal with a major TV network. That was enough to pay for his food and rent for an entire year.
He would never again pick up an unemployment check.
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The Boys’ Club
When Elayne Boosler arrived in Los Angeles in the spring of 1976, she already had a rep. She was, after all, the only female regular at the New York Improv and a headliner to boot. It didn’t hurt that she’d been Andy Kaufman’s girlfriend and protégé for two years—he was the newest big sensation on the comedy scene.
And unlike most of the young comics on the West Coast, she was making a living. She’d toured as an opening act for the Pointer Sisters, had performed on an NBC comedy show called Saturday Night (hosted by sportscaster Howard Cosell), and was booked to appear on a summer replacement TV series starring Monty Hall, the longtime host of the game show Let’s Make a Deal.
The word among her fellow comics was that Boosler had balls.
At the New York Improv, she would beg Budd Friedman to let her go on after Freddie Prinze, a slot her male counterparts preferred to avoid because Freddie was the proverbial tough act to follow. (Andy Kaufman was the toughest because he closed his set by leading the audience in a Conga line out of the club and into the street.) But Boosler’s attitude was, “I’m as good as any of the boys. Don’t make it easy on me because I’m a girl.”
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No one made it easy on her, that’s for sure. “Hey, baby, you wanna fuck? ” was a common heckle she heard from the crowd in the early days. She handled the abuse with such aplomb that Richard Lewis dubbed her “the Jackie Robinson of stand-up comedy.” She preferred to describe herself as “the first young, unmarried, dressed-up-for-a-date female stand-up comic.”
Boosler’s material sprang from a female perspective, but it stopped short of being stridently feminist. “They never want you to think the pictures are posed,” she said of the then dominant Playboy magazine. “‘We just happened to catch Cathy typing—nude on top of a Volvo in a field this morning.’ Maybe I’m sheltered, but I don’t know anybody who takes a shower in a baseball cap and knee socks.” On the subject of prostitution, she quipped, “Why would any woman sleep with a total stranger without having had dinner and a movie first?”
It was originally expected that Boosler would be among the headliners at the new Los Angeles Improv. But before leaving New York, she had a falling out with Budd Friedman, who’d paid her only $78 a week as a hostess for two and a half years, and she vowed that she would never again work in a club he had anything to do with.
Boosler auditioned for Mitzi Shore on a Monday night at the new Westwood Comedy Store. She had no problem breaking into the regular lineup or gaining admittance to the West Coast boys’
club of comics. Richard Lewis and Jay Leno, of course, were old pals from the Improv, and she was soon a fixture at Tom Dreesen’s nightly after-hours gatherings at Theodore’s and Canter’s Deli, where she met Johnny Dark, George Miller, and David Letterman. Boosler thought the guys were a godsend, especially Dreesen and Dark because they were older and married, with kids and homes you could always go to on the holidays. It was like the best version of a family that she would have designed for herself, comprised entirely of quirky, funny people on a shared mission and completely supportive of one another.
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Working the Westwood Store, she got to know an entirely different group of comics: Michael Keaton, who was edgy and sexy and did a hysterical routine as a driving-school instructor with a flip chart; Charlie Hill, a Native American comic who drew constant titters from the crowd by holding a tom-tom in his hand throughout his entire set without ever acknowledging its presence; the comedy team of Rick Granat and Jim Carozzo, who became heroes to poor and hungry comics—and the butt of many Jay Leno jokes—for discovering that every Tuesday night, the Ralph’s supermarket on Wilshire Boulevard in West Los Angeles tossed a veritable truckload of slightly spoiled, but still very edible produce in its dumpster; and Mitch Walters, a chronically broke, inveterate gambler whose day job selling lightbulbs in a telephone sales call center provided him with emergency material he used whenever his act bogged down on stage. He’d urge people in the audience to shout out where they were from, then dazzle them with his encyclopedic knowledge of U.S. area codes:
“Atlanta? Hey, 404. Lansing? 517. Sierra Madre? What, are you kidding me? 818.” Boosler was amazed that the bit rarely failed to save his butt from bombing.
On nights Boosler wasn’t with her fellow comics, she would hang at the Tropicana coffee shop on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood with a group of musicians that included Tom Waits and Chuck E. Weiss. Her regular routine was to have dinner with friends until around 10:00 p.m., head back to her apartment to do her hair and makeup, hit the Comedy Store for her set at 11:00 or 12:00, then hang out with the guys until dawn. Being one of the few females running with a pack of randy young men meant that she didn’t lack for male attention. After breaking up with Andy Kaufman (they remained close friends until his death from a rare form of lung cancer in 1984), she had brief, friendly flings with both Letterman and Leno, then a more serious romance with Robin Williams that ended in heartbreak when she learned that he was simultaneously engaged to dancer Valerie Velardi, whom 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 74
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he eventually married. Boosler’s liaisons with four of the fastest-rising young comics only added to her reputation in the comedy community. As Tom Dreesen joked, “Maybe we should all start dating Elayne.”
Boosler worked as hard as she played. As a client of Jimmie Walker’s Ebony Genius Management, along with Leno and Letterman, she booked any paying gig she could get, from country club lunches to movie studio promotional parties. When Grease opened, Paramount threw a huge party on the lot with little pockets of entertainment scattered around the grounds for the strolling guests. Boosler sat on a stool at her assigned station and launched into her act whenever people passed by. “I feel kind of like a mental patient on the street,” she cracked.
She was hired several times as a secret backup for young female guest stars in sitcoms who’d landed the parts for reasons other than their acting ability. She was paid to sit in a room near the soundstage and watch rehearsals on closed-circuit TV. If the actress in question didn’t cut it, Boosler was expected to step into the role for the run-through with the rest of the cast. She never had to, but that was okay because she got paid anyway. Everything is an adventure, she told herself. Nothing is bad because it’s all going somewhere.
Though she was hardly a household name, Boosler was quickly becoming a role model to a growing number of young female stand-ups. They were trickling into Los Angeles from around the country at a ratio of about one to twenty of their male counterparts. They saw her success as proof that they didn’t have to be Phyllis Diller or Joan Rivers, that maybe there could be a female Mort Sahl, that there was more to women’s comedy than vacuum cleaners and visits to the gynecologist.
Dottie Archibald was a thirty-year
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watching David Brenner on The Tonight Show, she announced to her startled husband, “I’m going to become a stand-up comic.” She wrote up a five-minute act about being a housewife in Ojai and invited all the doctors, lawyers, and neighbors she knew in Ojai to come see her try out on a Monday night at the Comedy Store.
Onstage for the first time in her life, she rushed through her five minutes of material in about a minute and a half and didn’t get a single laugh, not even an embarrassed giggle. The crowd applauded politely when she was done, and her husband jumped up from his seat to present her with a bouquet of roses, but she knew that she’d bombed beyond hideously and thought it would be a mercy to die right then and there.
Instead, she went back twelve more Monday nights and suffered through the same stony silence from the crowd. On her thirteenth try, she broke down and started crying, and someone laughed. The seeds of an act were sown.
Marsha Warfield spent two years working for free at Tom Dreesen’s Monday night comedy showcase in Chicago before she decided to follow him west. “I can be broke anywhere,” she told her friends. “I might as well be broke where it’s warm.” She flew to Los Angeles the day after her twenty-first birthday with $100 in her pocketbook, a return ticket paid for by her mother, and no intention of ever going home. She checked into the Continental Hyatt House, then walked straight next door to the Comedy Store and waited for it to open. She watched every night for the next two weeks until she got up the nerve to go onstage at a Monday tryout in Westwood. Letterman and Leno were sitting in the back and came up to her afterward offering encouragement. “They kind of adopted me as a little sister mascot,” she recalled years later. “I wouldn’t go away, so they accepted me.”
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I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era Page 8
