I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era

by William Knoedelseder

Almost the only things the critics liked about Mary were Letterman and Keaton. Viewers avoided the show, and the network pulled the plug after only two months, but not before it dragooned Letterman into appearing as a member of “Team CBS” on Battle of the Network Stars V.

  He was still smarting from that indignity when he finally got the break he’d been waiting for. Talent scouts from The Tonight Show had checked him out at the Comedy Store three or four times, and each time they’d come away saying he was “not quite ready.” But on the strength of his performance on Mary, Rollins-Joffe went over the heads of the talent coordinators and arranged a meeting with the NBC development department, which was eager to have Letterman in its talent stable. With Carson’s approval, NBC agreed to an unprecedented package of three Tonight Show appearances with a guarantee that Letterman would be invited over to sit on the panel with Johnny on his debut night.

  Letterman was elated with the deal, but discomfited as well because it seemed as if he was being given an exemption that the other guys didn’t get. Traditionally, you had to earn that invitation to sit on the couch; there was suspense. But thanks to his high-powered managers, he knew the outcome in advance. As he sheepishly admitted to Tom Dreesen, “It feels like a fixed fight.”

  Even so, Letterman was nervous and distracted on the day of his first appearance. Dreesen went with him to the taping, and 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 108

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  while they were sitting in the green room waiting for the call to go on, Dave turned to him and said, “Well, this is it. Tomorrow I’ll be back in Indianapolis.”

  Letterman’s jitters evaporated the instant he stepped through the curtain. He could hear and feel the audience out there in the blackness beyond the camera lights, but the pressure wasn’t the same as when he stood on a nightclub stage facing an expectant crowd of people who had hired babysitters, driven miles, parked their cars, and paid good money. The fear of letting the audience down was muted. He’d been practicing the lines for years, and they flowed flawlessly: “Yeah, Dave, this is Earl down at the garage. . . . ”

  After the show, Letterman said no to Dreesen’s suggestion that they celebrate his triumph by watching the show with the gang at the Comedy Store. Dave wanted to be alone that night because, as usual, he didn’t think he’d done very well.

  Johnny Carson disagreed. The next day, The Tonight Show opened discussions with Rollins-Joffe about having Dave appear not as a guest but rather as a guest host. That was a breathtaking leap of fortune, on a par with Freddie Prinze’s rocket ride out of obscurity. Just a few weeks earlier, Letterman had been unable to persuade Chris Albrecht, the manager of the New York Improv, to cash a $10 check. Now the world was being very nice to him.

  Nothing had changed except everything.

  Jay Leno was not among those who got scooped up by network TV in 1978. He believed it was because the programming executives were afraid that his prodigious chin would scare away viewers, not because he was a lousy actor. He was a fierce competitor, but he didn’t waste time brooding about the rejection because that summer he attained a longtime career goal by landing a two-week engagement opening for singer Tom Jones at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. When he was growing up and hoping to become a comedian, Caesar’s was as good as it got, signaling that you’d made 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 109

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  it to the big time. So the way he saw it, he didn’t need TV; he was a stand-up comic, not a sitcom performer.

  For Steve Lubetkin, 1978 turned out to be another disappoint-ing year. After six months of occasional appearances at small clubs and a handful of late-night spots at the Westwood Comedy Store, the comedy team of Lubetkin & Evans called it quits, agreeing that she was happier as an actress, and he was better as a solo act. Susan knew it was hard for him to see everyone else catching breaks and succeeding, even though he was genuinely happy for them. He accompanied Richard to a live interview on The Paul Wallich Show on KIEV radio and recorded it for posterity on his portable cassette recorder. It meant so much to him when Richard gave him a shout-out on the air that he put the tape away with his keepsakes, writing on the label, “Lewis on Wallich, August 18, 1978; mentions my name.”

  Susan was supporting them with an office job, and Steve’s dad contributed regularly. On a trip to LA, ostensibly to meet Susan, Jack Lubetkin bought Steve a car, a 1963 Buick Skylark. Susan and Jack hit it off immediately, and she could see that he adored Steve. On an outing to the Santa Monica pier, the two played off one another constantly, doing what they called “schticklacht,”

  making it obvious where Steve got his offbeat sense of humor.

  But even in the most lighthearted of moments, she would see a worried look flicker across on Jack’s face as he contemplated his son. He was proud of Steve’s ability to make people laugh but doubtful that, given the economics of the club scene, it would lead to happiness for him. “Stevie,” he would say, “maybe this just isn’t for you.”

  Susan knew that deep down Steve wanted to be like his dad, a mensch who took care of his family and loved ones. But she also saw that Steve couldn’t conceive of making a living in a practical way. He’d worked for a while as a file clerk at Paramount, where he contributed a comedy column to the company newsletter and 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 110

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  played Santa Claus at the office Christmas party. But Steve had a resistance to what he called “straight jobs,” believing that any time he spent in them subtracted from his chance of making it as a comic. His usual routine was to write in the morning, rehearse in the afternoon, and perform at night, working out the material in tiny venues like the Natural Fudge and Vegetarian Restaurant until he thought it was ready for the Westwood Comedy Store.

  Susan believed in Steve and his talent. She’d been in the audience at Westwood on nights when he was so “on” that people had tears of laughter in their eyes. The high of those moments, coupled with the success he saw happening all around him, kept Steve’s comedy dreams alive. As he wrote in a motivational message to himself titled “Why I Should Never Get Uptight About Stand-up,”

  • It’s the thing I do best.

  • It’s the only thing I can do well that I can make big money with.

  • I need to show success to Dad and Bar.

  • I could advocate for good if I was famous—for decency, national health insurance, candidates I like.

  • It’s the only way I can achieve fame.

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  Roommates

  Mitzi Shore had reason to feel proud. Not quite five years after her ex-husband asked her to tend to his troubled business while he was out of town, she sat at the center of the biggest boom in show business. Yes, she’d been lucky to be in the right place at the right moment, but she had made that moment her own. The networks’

  prime-time schedule read like a roster of young comics whose careers she’d fostered: Jimmie Walker, Andy Kaufman, Robin Williams, David Letterman, Jay Leno, Michael Keaton, Mike Binder, Billy Crystal (now a regular on the sitcom Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman), and Steve Landesberg (a regular on the sitcom Barney Miller). Of course, Budd Friedman could—and did—claim the same influence over many of their careers (“According to Budd, Magellan got his start there,” Letterman once quipped).

  But Shore got more ink, partly because she was a female in the traditionally male role of club owner and partly because she was so odd that she made for a better story than Budd, what with her un-forgettable voice, stringy beatnik hair, and dark, rococo office lit only by Tiffany lamps that made the room look, in the words of one comic, “like a brothel designed by Disney.” This, after all, was a woman who named her daughter Sandi Cee Shore.

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  Shore no longer held a monopoly. There was now a third major showcase club in New York, the Comic Strip, and two more paying clubs in the Los Angeles area, the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach and the Laff Stop in Newport Beach.

  Clubs that used to feature comics as entertainment one night a week were adding nights, and more clubs were being planned.

  But the Comedy Store was more than a nightclub. Under her tutelage, it had become an institution. And Shore was more than a club owner. ABC made that official by signing her to a contract as a consultant, charged with seeking out young comic talent for the network’s shows. As 1978 drew to a close, Mitzi Shore was the undisputed queen bee of comedy, and her hive was humming.

  Shore chose that moment to reveal her latest plan for expansion. She called a meeting of all her female comics and told them that she was going to convert an empty space next to her office on the second floor of the Sunset building into a showroom for women only. It would be called the Belly Room, in honor of the belly dancers who had performed there back in the days of Ciro’s.

  She liked the name because it also called to mind the womb and the best kind of laughter. So it had a triple meaning.

  “This will be your own space where you can develop your own style of comedy,” she said. It would be a supportive atmosphere, where they could be their feminine selves, free from the testosterone-fueled competition and male dominance of the other rooms.

  “Women are not like men,” she explained. “You can’t do the same kind of comedy they do. Now Totie Fields, God rest her soul, she could because she had a very masculine delivery, but most women can’t.”

  The twenty or so women gathered in the Original Room to hear Shore ranged from thirty-six-year-old Lotus Weinstock to fifteen-year-old Alison Arngrim. So Shore’s words fell upon ears separated by a generation. Weinstock loved the idea so much that 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 113

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  some of the others suspected she had planted it with Mitzi. Robin Tyler, too, was all for it. Of course, as a militant feminist lesbian, she was pretty much for anything that excluded men. Some of the younger women were ambivalent. They were happy to hear that Mitzi understood their plight as women comics and wanted to do something about it. And they could sure use the additional time slots. But they wondered if this was the best way to gain parity with the men in the marketplace. To be assigned to a special room? Sent to special school? They worried about being marginal-ized, ghettoized.

  Elayne Boosler dismissed the whole idea as ridiculous. There was no need to separate the sexes, she thought. People laughed at what was funny. No one ever sat there and said, “Gee, that was funny. Too bad you’re a girl.” Marsha Warfield was offended, “just like I would be if someone was proposing a ‘Negro Night.’” Neither woman had any intention of ever performing in the Belly Room. No way.

  The youngest in the room, Alison Arngrim, was appalled by what she heard but not completely surprised. She’d experienced a side of Mitzi that few, if any, of the others had seen.

  Arngrim was not a typical teenager. For one thing, she was already famous. America knew her as Nellie Olson, the mean little girl on Little House on the Prairie. Arngrim had grown up in Los Angeles, the product of a show business family. She’d been around performers, agents, managers, producers, and impresarios all her life. But she thought she’d never met anyone more cunningly manipulative than Mitzi Shore.

  After passing a Monday night audition, Arngrim had started performing at Sunset, mostly in the wee hours on weeknights. By law, she couldn’t even be inside the club unless she was performing. So, she waited out in the parking lot until someone signaled through the front window that it was time for her to go on. Then, she’d run into the building and up onto the stage and launch into 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 114

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  an act that played off her precocity: “Hi, I just came from the Roman Polanksi Day Care Center.”

  The fact that a young actress on a hit TV show still aspired to be a stand-up comic indicated the respect the profession was accorded at that moment. And for all her Hollywood worldliness, Arngrim still retained some vestige of teenage girlhood. She had a secret crush on Jay Leno and thought he had a really cute butt.

  Arngrim had been performing for a few months when Shore called her and said she wanted to meet with her in her office. “No one else, just you alone,” she said. As a fifteen-year-old, Arngrim wasn’t allowed to go anywhere unescorted. Someone always accompanied her to auditions and engagements. Her agent thought Shore’s request was weird but decided it was okay for Arngrim to go because Shore was a woman—“and what could she possibly do to you.”

  In the course of the meeting, Arngrim concluded that Shore wanted to control her, dictate what kind of material she did, become her mother. Shore launched into a spiel about “what was appropriate for a young lady,” as if she found the very idea of a fifteen-year-old female comic distasteful. After a few minutes, Arngrim cut her off with her own spiel.

  “Look, if you don’t like my act and don’t think I’m funny, then don’t give me any times,” she said. “If I come in and perform and people don’t laugh, then don’t book me. And if you don’t think that any of the tourists in the audience watch Little House and sometimes come here because they heard the girl from Little House is performing here, then okay.”

  Shore wasn’t used to being talked to that way. She was seething when Arngrim left, and Arngrim felt like she’d just done battle with Cruella De Vil. Shore kept booking her, but not at Sunset, only at Westwood, which suited Arngrim just fine because she thought the Sunset building had a kind of dark, spooky energy.

  As she listened to Shore sharing her vision of the Belly Room several months later, Arngrim realized that the previous en-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 115

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  counter really hadn’t been about her at all. Shore was just the product of another time. She was channeling her Jewish mother and grandmother from whom she’d inherited the mind-set that women had certain roles to play. It was like in the 1950s when young women were told what courses to take in college to attract a good husband. “My home ec teacher wouldn’t give this speech,”

  Arngrim thought to herself. “Any minute she’s going to start telling us what kind of material we should do to be better wives and mothers.”

  Shore didn’t hear any of the women’s concerns about the Belly Room, however. No one said anything to her that day for fear of upsetting her. She may have been wrongheaded, but she still owned the club. Most of the women adopted a wait-and-see attitude.

  As far as Shore was concerned, the main problem she faced at the Comedy Store had to do with the Main Room—it wasn’t working out as planned. Hoping to rekindle the glamorous spirit of Ciro’s by offering a taste of the Las Vegas strip on Sunset Strip, she had opened the venue with considerable fanfare in the fall of 1977, with Jackie Mason headlining a four-night stand. After Mason came similar multiple-night runs by Mort Sahl, Shelley Ber -

  man, Dick Gregory, and Andy Kaufman. But booking acts with names big enough to sell tickets became more difficult as 1978

  wore on because the Vegas headliners Shore had been counting on—the Don Rickles and Shecky Greens of the world, her old buddies—couldn’t be convinced to appear there. Even with her offer of half the door—amounting to an easy five grand for 90

  minutes of in-town work—they worried about the financial impact on their careers. They earned their biggest paychecks in Vegas and feared that if people could see them in Los Angeles—just a six-hour drive or one-hour plane flight away—then it would siphon off their customers in the casinos, causing their prices to drop. They sympathized, but it just wasn’t worth the risk, they told her. As a result, Shore was reduced to booking such margin
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  night. After she’d spent a small fortune redecorating it, the Main Room sat empty most of the time.

  She was discussing the problem one day with two of her most loyal employees, Argus Hamilton and Biff Maynard, when Hamilton hit on a possible solution. Why not put her most popular performers in there, say, a package of five, doing twenty-minute sets?

  Imagine the marquee: “Tonight: Robin Williams, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Elayne Boosler, and Tom Dreesen.” Who wouldn’t pay $5 or $10 a pop to see that? Call it “The Best of the Comedy Store.” It had a young, rock ’n’ roll ring to it, like “The Comedy Store’s Greatest Hits.” It could be a record album.

  Shore thought it was brilliant, a no-brainer: more time slots for the comics, more customers for the Store. Win-win. It never occurred to her that it would spark a rebellion, with the women at the forefront.

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  The New Year’s Resolution

  At 3:00 a.m. on New Year’s Day 1979, the tables at Canter’s Deli were groaning with comics just coming down from the high of their New Year’s Eve performances at the Comedy Store. Both the Sunset and Westwood clubs had been filled to capacity, and the crowds ringing out the Year of Comedy had been promiscu-ous with their laughter. To hear the comics tell it, there’d been so much killing, destroying, and massacring from the stage that it was a miracle anyone in the audience got out alive.

  At Tom Dreesen’s table, Michael Rapport was rhapsodizing about his set at Westwood, telling the others, “It was the best I ever did. I mean, every bit worked. I’ve never experienced anything like it.” A few minutes later, he turned to Dreesen and said, sotto voce, “Hey, Tommy, can you lend me five bucks for breakfast? ”

  “Sure, man,” Dreesen whispered, digging a bill out of his wallet and passing it under the table. Dottie Archibald caught the exchange and quickly turned away so as not to embarrass Rapport. Like Dreesen, she was known as a soft touch and had been hit up for a fiver numerous times. It always made her feel sad; there were so many broke comics.