Beyond this area was a private office with the door closed. I heard men’s voices. One of those voices belonged to Joe Franklin. I waited a few minutes and then knocked on the door. When a guy opened the door and looked at me in my tuxedo-shirt costume, he was startled. I got a glimpse of little Joe sitting behind his desk. Joe also looked startled. The two of them got even more startled when, with my hair pushed down over my forehead, I opened up my mouth and started talking in my nerdy Jerry voice.
“Oh, Mr. Franklin, you just gotta let me on your show, ’cause I got this magic formula I gotta tell the world about,” I said as I moved toward the talk show host.
The other guy quickly moved between me and Joe. He was worried I was some pervert who’d wandered off sleazy Forty-Second Street.
“Get outta here, kid,” he said.
He got even more alarmed when I turned my back and reached into my shirt. Maybe he was scared I was reaching for a gun. But before he could grab me I had already recombed my hair into the Danny Zuko style, put on my leather jacket, hit the play button on my boom box and was singing the first explosive notes of “Greased Lightning.” I sang the song right in Joe’s face.
Joe loved it. He knew talent when he saw it.
“So how can I help you, kid?”
“Put me on your TV show, Mr. Franklin.”
“It’s a little soon for that, isn’t it?”
“Not really. I think it’s right on time.”
Joe laughed. “I like your confidence, but this is something you gotta earn. If you wanna earn it, here’s what you can do. There’s a place out in Queens called Fireside Lounge. On dead nights during the week different acts compete against each other. If you win the first night, you get to go to the grand finale. If you win the grand finale, you get to be the opening act for Tiny Tim. Tim’s gonna headline two weekends at the Fireside. Plus you get to come on my show. How does that sound?”
“Sounds great, Mr. Franklin. Sounds like I’ll be on your show in a month.”
I was.
The club out in Queens held four hundred people. One of the contestants was actually Ron Jeremy, the future porn star, trying to be a comic. He wasn’t too funny. Lucky for him that later on he started using his head—the one at the end of his foot-and-a-half-long dick.
Lucky for me, during the early show before the big finale I met a sexy little Broadway dancer named Bright who volunteered to help me improve my moves. She asked me up to her apartment, where she wore a half-top T-shirt and teeny-tiny red short shorts. She turned out to be a great teacher, wrapping her dancer’s legs around my back as we stood on her balcony twenty-eight floors above a lit-up Times Square while I thought, What a view.
With Bright’s help, my “Greased Lightning” was better than ever. I blew the doors off of the Fireside Lounge in Queens. I won the contest and got to open for Tiny Tim, who was a huge star, with his ukulele and his tiptoeing around the tulips and his marriage to Miss Vicki live on Johnny Carson that garnered the biggest ratings in TV history. Soon after I made my first TV appearance.
Joe Franklin was a sweetheart. He practically fell down laughing as I went through my characters, which now included killer versions of Stallone and Pacino. He predicted I’d wind up in Hollywood. He was right, but I had to go in through the back door.
THE COAST
CALIFORNIA KEPT COMING up in conversation.
Mitchell Walters, a comedian from L.A., had come back to Brooklyn to visit Pips, where he used to play. After seeing me onstage, he came over to my dad and told him that I had to get out to L.A. and meet the owner of the Comedy Store, Mitzi Shore.
“Mitzi,” Mitchell told Dad, “would love your kid.”
This was something I had to think about. I’d built up a reputation in the great borough of Brooklyn and conquered Pips. I’d gotten myself on TV with Joe Franklin, and everyone in the neighborhood thought I was the greatest. But that was the thing. I hadn’t ever left the neighborhood. That was good, ’cause I loved the neighborhood, but that was bad, because the neighborhood might have been holding me back. The neighborhood wasn’t the world. I wanted to conquer the world. When I talked to my parents, they were thinking the same way. Great minds think alike.
The tipping point came when Mitchell Walters kept calling my father from L.A., insisting that I needed to be out there. On one of those calls he mentioned Sandy Hackett, son of the great comic Buddy Hackett, who was running a comedy showcase in Tahoe. Mitchell said that Sandy was willing to put me on.
It was a gray winter day when my parents drove me to Kennedy airport. All three of us were sharing the same feelings: we were happy, we were sad, we were excited. And we all agreed on one thing: I had to go.
• • •
Tahoe was cold and snowy. Pine trees everywhere. I was all worked up and ready to kill. I was in my nutty prof getup when I first met Sandy Hackett. But since no one had told him about my act, he was confused. He saw me in the oversized tux shirt and thought I was some crazy guy off the street. He tried to kick me off the stage. In my Jerry voice, I kept saying, “No, I’m supposed to be here, I’m the guy, I’m really the guy.” It wasn’t until I turned into Travolta that he got it. By then “Greased Lightning” was blasting and the audience was howling, and I was the big hit of the night.
• • •
Next day I flew into Vegas, where my sister and her husband drove in from San Diego and picked me up at the airport. I couldn’t believe the place. In 1979, Vegas was still wide open spaces and Sinatra and Tom Jones and Sammy Davis and Wayne Newton. I loved the boiling sun, the dry desert, the neon craziness, the action, the throngs of people who came from everywhere but mostly seemed to come from New York. To me, Vegas spoke with a New York accent. It felt like my town. I looked at Vegas as a suburb of Brooklyn.
I hit the Sahara, sat down at a slot machine, dropped in a couple of quarters, and yanked the one-armed bandit. Ka-ching. Lights flashed, and a flood of coins clanged into the tray. I’d won $400. What better omen? Actually, that would turn out to be the most expensive win of my life—but we’ll get to gambling later. Then, I didn’t have time for gambling. I had to focus on playing a showcase at the Sahara, also run by Sandy Hackett. The focus worked. My act went over. Standing ovation.
I went back to San Diego with my sister, who was telling me that in Southern California the comedy club craze was everywhere. It was through the clubs that huge comedians like Robin Williams and Jay Leno were breaking out. There was even a Comedy Store in La Jolla, a well-to-do suburb of San Diego that was run by Sandi Shore, the daughter of Mitzi, who owned the big clubs in L.A.
We drove up the coast in early afternoon. I was gazing out at the ocean and thinking this was fuckin’ paradise. I saw there was an open mic that night at the La Jolla Comedy Store and I told the man at the bar I wanted to perform. He said to talk to Sandi Shore. I knocked on the door of her office.
“What do you want?” asked a voice that sounded tough as nails.
“I wanna make you laugh.”
She opened the door and looked me over. I did the same. She had a nice-Jewish-girl look. Black curly hair. Big boobs. Nice ass.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“Brooklyn.”
She liked that. She said, “You can put your name on the list, but there’s no guarantee you’ll get on.”
“I gotta get on.”
“You gotta? Why do you gotta?”
“ ’Cause I got the greatest fuckin’ act in the world—that’s why.”
“What’s it like?”
“Put me on and you’ll see.”
“And if it’s not funny?”
“That’s not even remotely possible.”
I saw she liked me, and I was sure she was gonna put me on the bill. But she didn’t say so.
“Come back at eight and I’ll see what I can do.”
I showed up at eight, went on at nine, and by nine thirty I owned La Jolla. Sandi Shore was laughing harder than anyone in the club.
>
After the show I whispered to Natalie, “Drive on back to San Diego. I think I’ll stay out here tonight.”
Natalie, who knew me as well as anyone, kissed me on the cheek and said, “I’m proud to be your sister.”
Sandi saw me hanging around the club.
“What are you waiting for?” she asked.
“You.”
Another laugh. A couple of drinks, and twenty minutes later I was riding shotgun in Sandi’s big Riviera. She told me how she, her brother, and her mom each had their own condo on the ocean. We were going to Sandi’s place, where, I’m happy to say, my life in California started off with a helluva bang.
MOTHER MITZI
BEFORE I COULD get to the Comedy Store and meet Mitzi Shore, I had to find a place to crash. My friend Jan Barrie, one of my original Nostrand Avenue boys, came through. Jan had moved to the coast a couple years earlier. Married to a nice Mexican gal, he lived in Alhambra, a town outside L.A., in a small one-bedroom apartment. He set me up on the couch.
“Hey, Andrew,” said Jan’s wife. “How’d you like a date?”
“I’d love a date,” I said.
“Let me call my girlfriend.”
I heard her telling her girlfriend how she had this good-looking guy from Brooklyn staying over. I couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation, but I was getting the idea that the girlfriend might be hesitant, so I said, “Tell her I’ll cook dinner for everyone.”
The invitation worked. I ran out to get some London broil and baked potatoes. I fixed up a beautiful salad and cooked the meat to perfection, just like Mom had taught me.
My date was chubby, but I like chubby. She had a pretty face and long black curly hair. She liked to smile and laugh and told me I was a great cook. All-around good time. We all watched an old horror flick on TV and, feeling tired, Jan and his wife went to bed.
Not more than fifteen minutes later I had my date’s ass just slammin’ into me on the couch on the other side of their bedroom wall. Next thing you know we were flipped over and she was on top of me and we were sixty-nining, her big brown tits flopping on my stomach, and then she started screaming. But she wasn’t your normal screamer. She screamed the play-by-play like she was Vin Scully announcing a Dodgers game: “Up the middle! Deep to right! Oh, no—you’re out!”
The next morning Jan told me that he and his wife had heard the whole thing and that his wife was upset.
I was surprised. I thought his wife liked baseball.
• • •
A few days later, thanks to Mitchell Walters, who arranged it, I got invited to audition at Mitzi’s Comedy Store on Sunset. When I got to the club, I introduced myself to the emcee, who told me I had to limit my set to three minutes. He gave me my time slot, and I went into the bathroom to change. While I was putting on my costume, a guy came in. He looked me over and then said, “You know, you’re awfully cute.”
“Sorry, pal,” I said. “That’s not what I do.”
“Me either,” he said. “I’m just messing with you. Just don’t go over four minutes. They’re very tight.”
“I’m Andrew Clay,” I said, extending my freshly washed hand.
“I’m Garry Shandling,” he said. “Good luck.”
I didn’t need luck, but I did need more than four minutes. So I took twenty-eight. I knew it was twenty-eight because the comic who was the emcee had timed me. He came up to me afterward and said, “No one comes in this club and does a twenty-eight-minute audition.”
“I just did,” I said, “and I left the audience screaming for more.”
“That’s not the point.”
“I thought that’s the whole fuckin’ point—to please the fuckin’ audience.”
“There’s protocol.”
“Well, it looks like I just broke it.”
The next day I got a call from Steve Moore, one of Mitzi’s assistants. Word about my set had spread. Mitzi wanted me to come over and sign a contract. This had to be a good thing, right? Nothing felt certain, because I still hadn’t met her. I raced over to the Comedy Store, and as I parked my car I saw Henry Mancini—the legendary composer of a million hits like “Moon River” and the theme from The Pink Panther and Peter Gunn—walking into the club to film a commercial side by side with Kirk Douglas. Fucking Spartacus! I admit it, I gawked like a tourist. I snapped out of it, got my shit together, and found Steve, who pulled out the paperwork for me to sign. It was official. Mitzi wanted me to start performing that night at the Westwood Comedy Store.
Right after I finished the Westwood gig, I got the word I was waiting for: Mitzi wanted to meet me. I was beyond excited. This was the woman who held the key to the kingdom. In the world of comedy, she was a queen bee. I hustled into my car and headed up to Sunset.
I found Mitzi in the back parking lot of the Comedy Store with a bunch of comics, her favorites, I would learn later: Argus Hamilton, Ollie Joe Prater, Alan Stephens, and Mitchell Walters. I stepped out of the car and started walking across the parking lot toward them.
“Hey, Mitzi,” said Mitchell, spotting me as I came closer. “Here he is. Andrew Clay. Your new star. Have you met him?”
“No,” she said. “But my daughter has.”
Mitzi said it with a smile. She was a small woman in her midforties, not bad looking but not spectacular. I was taken in by her eyes, tiny lasers that stared right through you. I would learn later that Mitzi was a woman who would say whatever the fuck was on her mind—nasty or nice, it didn’t matter.
“Sandi said you were a nice Jewish boy, Andrew. Is that true?”
“Of course I’m nice,” I said, “but so is your daughter.”
“I’m glad you two are getting along.”
I could tell that she approved of our relationship, even if I myself was not interested in anything permanent.
“You interested in working down in La Jolla again?”
“Sure,” I said. “But I’m more interested in working here.”
“My daughter said you have movie star looks, and I agree. So I’m not going to make you a doorman. Movie stars don’t work the door. There’s never been a comedian who looks like a movie star. Gangsters have looked like stars. You even look a little like Bugsy Siegel. You’re definitely star material.”
• • •
Sandi Shore might have fallen for me in a romantic way. She was always happy when Mitzi sent me down to La Jolla to work her club. But, at least in my mind, it wasn’t anything serious. On the other hand, I believe that Mitzi fell for me in a motherly way. Although Mitzi was hardly a prude—she wasn’t above fucking certain comics she took a fancy to—our relationship was always above the table. I became one of Mitzi’s favorites because she saw I was sincere about working my ass off to get to the top. She also saw that, unlike the other typical comics, I wasn’t a schlub. I didn’t wear corduroy sport jackets or khaki pants. I didn’t belong to the Woody Allen tradition of the poor Jewish nerd who can’t get laid. Fact is, my act—going from the nerdy prof to Travolta—was about turning that tradition on its fuckin’ head. In short, Mitzi saw that I had nothing to do with the past and everything to do with the future. That got her excited. It also got her to take me under her wing. Early in our relationship she said to me, “You got the stuff—the talent and the looks—to be more than a comic. You got the stuff to be a movie star.”
CRESTHILL
CRESTHILL WAS THE street, just up the hill from the Sunset Strip Comedy Club, where Mitzi owned a big Spanish-style house. Her favorite comics got to live there. Just weeks after I met Mitzi, she let me know I could live there too.
Granted, I was put in the maid’s room, but I was still plenty excited. The maid’s room was right off the kitchen. From floor to ceiling the maid’s room was painted red, the color of the Comedy Store. The ceiling was red, the carpet, the walls, even the furniture. And not just a mild red, but fuckin’ fire-engine red. I liked this. I thought it was hot. And so did the girls I took there. But before I get into sex scenes in the Red
Room, let me describe the cast of characters who were also living in the house.
First there was Yakov Smirnoff. Yakov was a great guy. He might have been a little scared of me ’cause I was so Brooklyn. I’m not sure he’d encountered my kind of bold Brooklyn before. Early on, though, I put him at ease and let him know that I wanted to make friends. He was much further along in his career than me. Maybe ’cause he was Russian and had to be smart to survive in the Soviet Union, he was careful with his money and had more cash than the rest of us. His big line was “What a country!” He had jokes like “I come to New York and see a big sign, ‘America loves Smirnoff.’ What a country!” Or “I read want ad in paper for ‘Part-Time Woman Wanted’ and think, Even transvestites work here. What a country!” Yakov was also a good wheeler-dealer. He’d take off for a few days and fly to Germany to buy a couple of Benzes cheap. He’d sell one and with the profits keep the other.
When Mitzi found out that the comics using the phone at Cresthill had made $10,000 worth of calls, she yanked out the line. Only Yakov had enough money to put a phone in his bedroom. Yakov was shrewd and funny and knew how to charm the right people. He won over Johnny Carson, which, in those days, was like getting blessed by the Pope.
Bill Hicks and Argus Hamilton were also living at Cresthill. Because Argus was Mitzi’s boyfriend, he got the big bedroom. He was a smart political satirist from Oklahoma who idolized Johnny Carson. When Johnny had him on, Argus nearly collapsed from happiness. He also nearly collapsed from partying. This was a time—the late seventies—when Cresthill was headquarters for beer drinking, wild sex, and drugs. Of all those things, I didn’t give a shit about any except the sex.
Argus was also a guy who used the word “brilliant” a lot. Every comedy show was “brilliant.” Every comic was “brilliant.” This guy’s got a “brilliant” future, and that guy’s a “brilliant” writer. Mitzi also liked saying “brilliant.” I figured this was Hollywood talk. In Brooklyn you’d use the word “okay.” In Hollywood, “okay” wasn’t good enough. You had to be “brilliant.”
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