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Rapport for weeks, begging, “Can I please go to Canter’s with you tonight? ” before he finally agreed to take her. She found the scene as instructive as watching the guys onstage.
Typically, there were at least twenty comics on hand, divided up among three or four tables. The atmosphere was brutally competitive, but in a good-natured way, as they tried to top one another’s stories. The one-liners and the laughter came like bursts of machine-gun fire, and you could cut the testosterone in the air with a machete.
Jay Leno was a human joke machine—put in a quarter and out they came, one after another, a seemingly inexhaustible supply.
Letterman was his polar opposite, never taking center stage at one of the larger tables, preferring to sit a little apart at a deuce or four-top, talking with Dreesen or George Miller. Dreesen played paterfamilias, moving from table to table, telling tales of growing up poor and working the Playboy circuit. Johnny Dark entertained the entire restaurant with his wildly physical impressions, such as John Wayne trying to coax his horse up to Letterman’s table, urging, “C’mon boy, c’mon, that’s it,” then hollering
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” as the frightened invisible animal reared, wheeled around, and galloped about round the room with the Duke bug-eyed and hanging on for dear life. Dark’s peers considered him the world’s greatest “table comic.” The only one who could compete with Johnny was Robin Williams, who’d come in still throbbing from a performance, put his head between two pieces of bread, jump up on a table, and emit sounds like he was speaking in tongues.
Everyone got their moment in the spotlight. One night, comic Mark Goldstein arrived fresh from working a private party at a Beverly Hills mansion, where the owner had paid him a whopping $200 to entertain one hundred people gathered for his wife’s sixty-fifth birthday. As recounted by Goldstein in his morose, loser stage manner, the evening had not gone well. He performed his 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 77
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act in the middle of the living room under a huge chandelier and could not get a laugh to save his life. “So I went abusive on them,”
he confessed, ticking off the insults he hurled at the stunned guests sitting around on the expensive sofas. When he was finished, the wife got up, walked over to him, looked him straight in the eye, and said sadly, “You ruined my birthday.” Then, she turned, ran up the stairs, and disappeared. Goldstein’s monotone, deadpan delivery made Dottie Archibald laugh so hard she slid off her seat and ended up lying under the table, gasping for breath.
For Archibald and Warfield, the most impressive aspect of these sessions was that amid all the boyish showboating, Elayne Boosler more than held her own, proving that contrary to the conventional wisdom of the time, women could compete with men in the comedy arena. That was the reason Boosler’s prime-time weekend sets at the Comedy Store were “must see” performances for the female comics who were just starting to break into the lineup at the club. She was their dog in the fight, their gladia-tor in the Coliseum.
All handpicked by Mitzi Shore, they ranged in sensibility from Robin Tyler, a militant feminist lesbian given to snarling at male hecklers, “You can be replaced by a tampon,” to waiflike Lotus Wein stock, a classically trained musician and former student at the Philadelphia Dance Academy, who was once engaged to Lenny Bruce and dropped bon mots like “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.” Jo Anne Astrow was a young mother who had fled from a suffocating marriage to the son of a wealthy Manhattan dress manufacturer, fallen in love with an actor named Mark Lonow, and joined him in the comedy improv trio they called Off the Wall—a series of decisions her Brooklyn family likened to running off and joining the circus. Off the Wall was performing regularly at the New York Improv when Lonow landed a role in a TV
series called Husbands, Wives and Lovers, which was produced in Los Angeles . So the trio joined the westward migration. Once in 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 78
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LA, Astrow was encouraged by her old pal from Brooklyn, Elayne Boosler, to give stand-up a try. Emily Levine was an honors graduate from Radcliff who was teaching emotionally disturbed children before she moved to Los Angeles as part of a comedy troupe named the New York Stickball Team. The club’s growing female roster also included Shirley Hem phill, Lois Bromfield, Roberta Kent, Anne Kellogg, Diane Nichols, Hilda Vincent, Susan Sweetzer, Maureen Murphy, and a caustic part-time manicurist named Sandra Bernhard.
Despite Shore’s patronage and the preeminence of the Comedy Store, they all faced an uphill battle, Boosler included, because Johnny Carson thought that, with the exception of Joan Rivers, women weren’t particularly good at stand-up comedy. As he explained in an infamous Rolling Stone interview at the time, A woman is feminine, a woman is not abrasive, a woman is not a hustler. So when you see a gal who does “stand-up” one-liners, she has to overcome that built-in identification as a retiring, meek woman. I mean, if a woman comes out and starts firing one-liners, those little abrasive things, you can take that from a man. The ones that try sometimes are a little aggressive for my taste. I’ll take it from a guy, but from women, sometimes, it just doesn’t fit too well.
The women comics didn’t need Carson to tell them what they already knew from watching the show and dealing with the talent coordinators: Johnny preferred breathy and busty to ballsy, zany to brainy. To make the cut, a female performer had to project a nonthreatening “golly-jeepers-oh-Johnny” quality, like Carol Wayne.
She had to appeal to older male viewers who liked to go to Vegas. If she wasn’t a bimbo, she at least had to be willing to play one on TV.
By those criteria, Elayne Boosler didn’t have a prayer. Word kept coming back to her from The Tonight Show talent coordinators that she was “too tough.”
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The Comedy Store women knew that Carson’s prejudice threatened their livelihood. Without a presence on The Tonight Show, they had a tougher time landing other TV gigs. Their lack of exposure to a national audience made it harder to convince club owners to hire them. And without more chances to perform live, they couldn’t develop their acts. It was a vicious cycle.
Fortunately, they thought, they had the backing of the most powerful woman in comedy, and Mitzi had a plan for breaking the log jam. In the belly of the Comedy Store, she was going to build them a room of their own.
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Guns, Drugs,
and Westwood
For the comedy community, 1977 started out with a bang, literally. In the early morning hours of January 28, Freddie Prinze, stoned on cocaine and quaaludes, put a .32 caliber pistol to his temple and fired a bullet into his brain. He lingered on life support for thirty-three hours and died on January 29. He was twenty-two.
Prinze’s peers were stunned. For the past three years, they had measured their success against his. Freddie’s career path was their road map—Comedy Store, Carson, Hollywood, the world. He’d performed at President Jimmy Carter’s inaugural ball just the week before, and he’d dropped by the Westwood Store several times in the past month. Nothing seemed amiss; he was the same old Freddie. Sure, everybody knew he had some problems. His wife of two years, Kathy, was divorcing him and had obtained a restraining order against him. And he’d been arrested in November for driving under the influence of methaqualone, his favorite drug, which had been prescribed by his shrink. But drugs were an old story with Freddie, dating back to his days at the New York Improv. Everyone knew he liked to wash down his ’ludes with cognac and do some blow to stay on his feet. Freddie was ahead of the curve when it came to the 81
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harder drugs. He could afford them, whereas most of his friends had to settle for pot. Freddie got sloppy, slurred his words, and sometimes had to be supported by his female companion(s), but he was always sweet and amiable, never angry or belligerent. You’d never meet a nicer or more charming guy. And even though his success seemed out of proportion to his talent, no one resented him for it.
In the aftermath of Prinze’s death, a more disturbing picture began to emerge. News footage from the Carter inaugural showed Freddie looking pretty wired, with his eyes darting all around.
Comic Alan Bursky, one of Prinze’s closest friends, told people he went to Freddy’s apartment at the Beverly Comstock after the shooting and found “a mayonnaise jar full of coke.” That was a lot of blow even by Freddie’s standards. There were stories of bizarre gunplay going back a couple of years. Jay Leno recalled the time Freddie stayed at his apartment in Boston and fired so many bullets into the living room wall that it made a hole “the size of a small window” into his bedroom. Others told of Freddie’s shooting his gun (the rumor was that Bursky had given it to him) out the window of his apartment on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills and of his scaring people by pretending to play Russian roulette, spinning the cylinder then pointing the barrel at his head and pulling the trigger, not telling them that the gun was empty. His cruelest joke was on a female assistant who heard the gun go off in the next room and ran in to find Freddie sprawled on the floor. After she screamed, he raised his head and grinned, “Fooled you, didn’t I?” It was as if he’d been rehearsing his final act.
The Los Angeles coroner ruled the death a suicide based on a statement from his manager, who was present at the time of the shooting and claimed he tried to grab the gun, and on a series of phone calls Prinze made and a note he left behind that repeated the line, “I can’t go on.”
Prinze was buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Burbank after a celebrity-studded funeral. Writing in his autobiography twenty-five years later, Leno still seemed miffed that Prinze’s man-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 83
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ager arranged front-row seating for Freddie’s new “big-name”
friends Tony Orlando, Sammy Davis Jr., and Chico and the Man costar Jack Albertson, while his old pals from the Improv and the Comedy Store practically had to crash the event. He also noted the irony that above the door of the Forest Lawn chapel, an en-graving commemorated the first skirmish of the Revolutionary War: “The shot heard ’round the world.”
In the end, the media chalked the tragedy up as a case of too much too soon: Prinze just couldn’t handle his success. Prinze’s comedian friends drew a narrower lesson: Freddie just couldn’t handle his drugs.
Within days of Prinze’s death, comedians were hit with another calamity: The Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard was forced to close because Mitzi Shore lost her lease, which was all the more shocking because she owned the building. She had purchased the property on July 5, 1976, the day after the nation’s two hundredth birthday, and immediately marked it as her own by painting the exte-rior black to match the inside. She’d never seen an entirely black building before and thought perhaps it was the only one in existence.
In any case, she was sure it would make a statement and be noticed.
Even though Shore owned the property, she didn’t control all of it. The building came with a tenant grandfathered in by the previous landlord, Frank Sennes, who’d owned the building since it housed Ciro’s nightclub in the 1940s and 1950s. The tenant was Art Laboe, a longtime Los Angeles disc jockey who’d coined the phrase “oldies but goodies.” Laboe produced his KRLA radio show from the first floor of the building in the space next to the Comedy Store. Shore coveted Laboe’s space, which was larger than hers. She dreamed of turning it into a Vegas-style showroom for established comedians like Jackie Mason, Shecky Green, Buddy Hackett, and Rodney Dangerfield, performers she’d hung out with during her years with Sammy.
Laboe still had a year to go on his lease, but Shore hatched a plan to get him out sooner. No one had used the offices above 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 84
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Laboe’s studio, which were part of his lease, for years, and they were trashed. Shore had her lawyers take pictures of the mess and then filed a lawsuit seeking to evict Laboe on the grounds that he wasn’t taking proper care of the building and was creating a fire hazard. Problem was, Laboe’s lease also included the space that housed the Comedy Store, which Shore subleased from him. And it just so happened that Shore’s lease was up. So Laboe countersued to have her evicted, and he won.
Shore moved her entire operation to the Westwood Comedy Store, and the comics banded together in support, agreeing to cut their sets to ten minutes so that no one lost any stage time. As if to rub salt in the wound, Laboe opened his own comedy room in the Sunset building. Called the Funny Farm and featuring comedian Leonard Barr, an old crony of Dean Martin, it played as a poor impersonation of the Comedy Store and was doomed from the start. None of Shore’s comics would work there. After a few months, Shore ended the pissing match by paying Laboe $50,000
to relinquish his lease on the Sunset building, and everything returned to normal on the Los Angeles comedy scene. The one change was that the months of exile had firmly established the Westwood club as a major entertainment venue in its own right, not just the poor stepsister of the Sunset Store.
From the start, the Westwood Store had a different vibe from Sunset. It was formerly Leadbetter’s, a coffeehouse named after folk blues legend Huddie Leadbetter, known as Leadbelly, and owned by Randy Sparks, founder of the New Christy Minstrels, the perky and very popular folk-music troupe of the 1960s. The room was larger than Sunset—220 seats—with a bar accessible to customers and brick walls that bounced the laughter all over the place. With UCLA a short walk away, the club catered to the college crowd with a $2 cover charge and $3 pitchers of beer. It also featured a limited menu of inexpensive entrees so that patrons under twenty-one could be admitted legally. That drew students from Beverly Hills and Taft and El Camino high schools in the San Fernando 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 85
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Valley. As a result, the Westwood audience was younger and whiter than the Sunset crowd. Sunset had a hip, New York kind of feel, which was why many of the East Coast comics preferred it.
Westwood was all-American.
Shore tailored her Westwood lineup to reflect the audience.
Comic Argus Hamilton described the core group, of which he was a member, as “Mitzi’s little Anglo Saxon Triple A ball club.”
Hamilton was the son, grandson, and great grandson of southern Methodist ministers. His grandfather, Argus Hamilton III, was a lifelong friend of Will Rogers; their fathers had fought together in the Confederate army. His father, Argus IV, delivered Roger’s eulogy on NBC Radio. Argus V decided to become a comic one night when he was lounging around the ATO fraternity house at the University of Oklahoma and caught Freddie Prinze’s debut on The Tonight Show. After graduating in 1976, Hamilton drove straight to Los Angeles in his new MG Midget, a gift from his “very indulgent parents.” He quickly became a Mitzi Shore favorite and a devoted employee, drawing three salaries as emcee, doorman, and Shore’s personal “runner.”
Another Westwood regular, Mike Binder, was younger than almost anyone in the audience—just seventeen and fresh out of high school when he arrived at the Sunset Strip club only to find it closed due to the lease dispute.
“Where do the comedians go? ” he asked a guy who was sweeping up in front.
“They don’t anymore,” he was told. Binder had driven from his hometown of Detroit in four days, having told his father, a well-to-do home builder, that he had a job waiting for him. Fortunately, he found his way to Westwood and killed in his first
Monday night audition. Shore put him in the lineup, gave him a part-time job as a doorman, and sort of adopted him as a member of her family.
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and Tim Thomerson. She added color to the lineup with Jimmie Walker, who worked the first and second shows every Friday night, John Witherspoon, Brad Sanders, and Marsha Warfield, as well as with Native Americans Charlie Hill and Gary Muledeer.
The Westwood comics were a hard-partying crew. At closing time, they’d pull aside the most attractive women, turn on the beer taps, turn up the Eagles tunes, fire up a few joints, lock the doors, and carry on until 4:00 a.m. Occasionally someone would score some coke, which meant they could drink longer. Sometimes they’d party until the sun came up at Fort Bursky or Argus Hamilton’s Beverly Hills apartment, nicknamed “the Crosby Ranch” because of Argus’s penchant for breaking into an impression of Bing Crosby doing his famous Minute Maid orange juice commercials:
“Here at the Crosby Ranch, we like to pick our oranges. It’s a shame we can’t pick our children” (two of Crosby’s older sons had recently accused him of being a physically abusive father).
The Westwood clique was younger than the Canter’s crowd by a couple of years. Born deeper into the baby boom, they were less affected by the Vietnam War and the draft, and their material tended to be less political. “We’re just as funny but not as afraid,”
Hamilton joked. They were more likely to employ props in their acts and engage in outright silliness on stage. Leno and George Miller, in particular, disdained prop comedy. “Props are the enemy of wit,” Leno liked to say. But the two groups mixed easily and shared a communal sensibility left over from the 1960s. When Hamilton competed as a contestant on Hollywood Squares and won six hundred steaks (complete with a freezer to store them) from Cattleman’s in Omaha, he immediately threw a party at the Crosby Ranch and split the spoils with twenty other comics.
I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era Page 9
