Dynomite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times--A Memoir (31 page)

So now with NBC giving Leno a little extra money for his Monday gig, Jerry, his manager, figured Jay could pay back the Greek by putting him on staff at the
Tonight Show
at the minimum salary, about $1,750 a week.

But Leno wasn’t keen on the idea. He thought the Greek was too “jokey,” too much like a Bob Hope type of writer. Also, because he chattered all the time, some people could only take the Greek in small doses. Leno was one of those people.

I called Ray Peno and said, “Come on, bring the Greek in!”

Helen had her usual reaction, asking, “Why do we need the Greek? What is he going to do for us?”

As usual, I said, “He’s funny!”

Jerry kept pressuring Leno and finally got the Greek the gig. Leno was not thrilled, but he did it for Jerry and me. Steve was so incredibly happy. Being a full-time comedy writer was all he ever wanted to do with his life, and now he was doing it, in Hollywood, for the
Tonight Show
.

Every day the Greek and I went over the jokes he wanted to send to Leno for Monday. Jay needed about fourteen jokes a week from a staff of about eight writers, including the prolific Wayne Kline. Each of them might submit ten a week. The Greek would tell me thirty a day! Then he would send Jay twenty pages—not twenty jokes, twenty pages—every week. The sheer volume overwhelmed Leno. He complained that Steve was clogging his fax machine and told the Greek to slow down.

While we were on the phone together, the Greek and I would watch the
Tonight Show
on Mondays, waiting to hear Leno do one of his jokes. But Jay never told any of his jokes. Week after week and never one of Steve’s jokes. The Greek became frustrated and then angry, getting to the point of hating Leno. Jay must have noticed, because he came to Jerry and me and said he wanted Steve off his staff. But we convinced him to keep the Greek—even though he still did not use any of his jokes.

When Jerry got cancer and passed away in 1989, Leno told Helen and me that he was going to let Steve go. I begged him over and over not to do it. I knew what being fired would do to the Greek. That job was his life. He had worked really hard, and he was damn good. But my only ally, Jerry, was gone. The fact that I could not stop Jay from firing the Greek pained me terribly.

The Greek phoned me at about 8 o’clock that night. He was beside himself, crying crazy tears. We talked until three in the morning. During the next few days I saw him depressed for the first time. No longer his chattering self, he became withdrawn and moody. I said I would pay him something every week, but there was no way I could cover what a staff salary might be. Leno threw him a bone by agreeing to let him once again submit as a freelancer at fifty bucks a joke, just like everyone else. I suggested to the Greek that he lower the volume of his submissions to Leno so as not to piss him off any more.

What did he do? Instead of writing thirty jokes a day, he wrote sixty jokes a day, often working from the moment the
Tonight Show
went off the air to 4:30 in the morning. He continued to fax Leno twenty pages a week. I paid him for some of his jokes too, using them in my act. But not Leno, until one day the Greek thought Leno did use one of his jokes.

During Operation Desert Storm, the Greek came up with “They’re putting up a no-fly zone in Iraq. Too bad we can’t have one of those at Denny’s.” He faxed the joke to Leno and to me.

Jokes are like the blood flowing through a comic’s body. They are part of you, and without them you are no longer a comedian. That is why stealing jokes is a very serious offense, though many comedians, including famous ones such as Steve Martin and Robin Williams, have at one time or other been accused of that crime. In general most well-known stand-ups brush it off if a comic lower on the ladder “adapts” a joke, like when I was starting out and borrowed from Godfrey Cambridge and Dick Gregory. No harm, no foul. But if it is a comic around the same level as you—and especially if the same audiences are hearing both of you—then it becomes an issue. Once word travels through the comedy grapevine that a comic stole a joke, that stigma can follow you the rest of your career.

The situation becomes even more heinous when an entire routine is identified with you and someone else infringes on the territory you have staked out as yours. I was at the Improv in New York one night when John Byner, who did impressions such as his great one of George Jessel, did his Ed Sullivan during his act. While Byner was on stage, Will Jordan happened to come into the club. Jordan’s stock in trade was
his
Ed Sullivan impression. He was the one who established “really big shoe” (meaning “show”) as the quintessential Sullivan impersonator catchphrase.

Jordan was livid watching Byner. When Byner came off stage, Jordan confronted him.

“Hey, you’re doing my Sullivan!”

“What are you talking about?” Byner said. “We all do Sullivan.”

Jordan yelled, “The shoulders, man, the shoulders!
I
do the shoulders! No one did that before me! You stole my Sullivan shoulders! The walk, the spin around, the shoulders, they are all mine!”

As their argument heated up, enter David Frye. Though Frye became famous for his impressions of Richard Nixon and other political figures, he too did a stellar Sullivan.

Frye interrupted Jordan. “Wait a minute,
I
had the shoulders!
I
did the no-neck bit!”

Jordan came back. “But I was first! Nobody did the shoulders but me!”

The three of them almost came to blows.

The reality is that many comics will sometimes come up with the same idea at about the same time. That does not mean one person stole the joke from another person.

Leno did the Denny’s no-fly zone joke on his show and it killed. The Greek thought that not only was he going to get $50 but Leno would then call him up to say, “You know, I made a mistake. You’re back in the house.”

But the Greek did not get a call or a check. He asked me to contact Leno. Jay said that someone on his staff had written the joke. I have no doubt that was true because within ten minutes of the Greek faxing me that joke, three other writers had faxed me essentially the same joke. But the Greek had gotten his hopes up and now he was crushed. From that day forward he grew more distant from everyone in LA, including me. He stopped talking to some people completely, and when he did talk, he would explode angrily about Leno.

Within two weeks he moved back to Pittsburgh, back to his parents’ house. I couldn’t reach him on the phone, but I spoke with his dad. He told me the Greek was very down, not his usual happy self. Eventually, he became the cohost of a Pittsburgh radio morning show, billing himself as Steve the Jokeman. But he had already been to the mountaintop, so anything else was a comedown.

Three years later his smoking habit finally caught up with him, and the Greek was diagnosed with lung cancer. He moved out of his parents’ house and into an apartment. He told them not to call him. He said he would call once a week and if he did not, that probably meant he was dead. He no longer cared to live or for anyone to care whether he did or not.

A week went by without a call home. The police busted down the door to his apartment and found him dead.

The Greek was a great funny guy who could not catch a break. I only wish more people had the chance to really know him. Though a Lubetkin who jumps off a building to his death is memorialized, there are so many more talented people—like the Greek—who come to Hollywood but then leave as if they were never there at all.

The Greek’s obituary in the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
quoted, of all people, Leno. “He was what you would call a good old-fashioned joke writer,” Leno said. “He was like a joke machine. He could bang out a bunch of them. If you said, ‘I need jokes on Clinton hurting his knee,’ he could give you two pages. Some guys write topical or cerebral—he could’ve written jokes for Bob Hope.”

I was very unhappy reading that quote. At best it was hypocritical. Make no mistake about it—Leno could hire and fire whomever he wanted; he did not kill Steve Crantz. But he sure as hell didn’t show any heart. As one comedian has said to me privately: “Jay Leno will show up at your funeral, but he’ll be the reason you died.”

The Crantz episode was not an isolated situation either. Bob Shaw, Leno’s old partner from his Boston days and the comic whose poverty helped instigate the Great Comedy Strike, was another funny guy who never received his just due. At one point he fell ill and needed a couple of shots to qualify for the performing union’s insurance plan. Boosler called Leno and asked him to book Shaw for the two shots. Why not? Shaw was his friend! Leno passed. Boosler went ballistic and never forgave Jay. Fortunately, Shaw eventually became a writer on
Seinfeld
. He also cowrote
A Bug’s Life
.

Only when Leno began guest hosting the
Tonight Show
on Mondays did Helen express any genuine confidence in him—because he became her chance to land the biggest prize in television. But for Leno to take over the
Tonight Show
she would have to push Carson off his throne: No one knew when Johnny wanted to step down. Besides, everyone expected Letterman, his favorite, to be his successor someday. After all, he was doing his own successful show right after Carson, and Johnny clearly had anointed him.

Helen had a plan. I know that because she told me what she had in mind. I tried to dissuade her, saying it would be “suicide” for Leno to stab Carson in the back. When I brought up Letterman’s widely accepted right of succession, she said, “Fuck Letterman! We’ll kill his show!” There was nothing anyone could do to stop her.

Her scheme included doing a complete makeover on Leno. She had him cut his hair and she put him in suits. No longer would he drive to the studio on his motorcycle. When Jay was on the road, he would visit the NBC affiliates and make friends. When he was in LA, he would glad-hand the press and praise Johnny. She also stopped him from doing the Letterman show in New York, which did not sit well with Dave. When I appeared on Letterman’s show, producer Bob Morton begged me to call Jay and ask him to do the show again. But nothing I said would help.

That Letterman appearance was the legendary show with guest Shirley MacLaine. Dave wanted to have fun talking about her past lives. She did not and said “maybe Cher was right, maybe you are an asshole.” Dave was so shocked that even he struggled to joke his way out of the awkward situation. When the segment ended, Shirley refused to shake his hand. After the commercial break, I came on.

My first line was “I was so happy Shirley MacLaine was here. I talked to her and we found out that in one of her previous lives I was one of her slaves!” It killed. Dave laughed, easing the tension, thank you very much.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes Helen was at work trying to oust Johnny. Among her tactics was to ask certain hipper guests to perform only on the
Tonight Show
when Jay was hosting. If they crossed her, she threatened that they would never appear on the show again. She also planted stories in the entertainment trade magazines about Carson being out of date, about NBC wanting him to retire sooner rather than later, and about Leno being the network’s desired successor. Then she arranged for a February 1991 story in the
New York Post
that laid all of that out for the public for the first time. Carson was made to look feeble and impotent, and he was embarrassed. Finally, in May, Carson announced that he would retire the following year.

Leno—not Letterman—took over the
Tonight Show
. Author Bill Knoedelseder said it best: “Given the opportunity, most—if not all—of them [his fellow comics] would have done what Leno did, but they probably would have felt worse about doing it. Nobody blamed Jay, but everyone understood why Dave felt betrayed.”

Helen became the executive producer of the
Tonight Show with Jay Leno
. As part of the deal the Kushnicks sold to NBC their management company, which largely consisted of clients I had brought in many years earlier—dominated now by Leno, who I had fought to keep her from dropping. The price tag was $7 million. When I finally revealed to Leno how Helen had forced me from my own company years earlier, he refused to believe it, felt I was slandering her. He told Helen what I had said, and she banned me from the
Tonight Show
.

I wasn’t the only one. Helen made it known that if any guest appeared on Letterman’s show or anywhere else when she wanted them, they would not be welcome on the
Tonight Show with Jay Leno
. Helen vowed to bury both Letterman and Arsenio, who foolishly boasted that he would “kick Jay’s ass” in the ratings. She launched a Hollywood reign of terror. Agents and managers were downright frightened, but they kept the prohibition quiet.

Then country singer Travis Tritt was booked to do Arsenio. The
Tonight Show
also wanted Tritt—and on a date before his Arsenio appearance. Tritt’s manager, Kenny Kragen, tried to accommodate Helen, but in the end he had committed Tritt to Arsenio first and felt he had to stand by his word. Helen went berserk, saying she would never speak with Kragen again and slammed the phone down. According to author Bill Carter in
The Late Shift
, Helen’s office then called Kragen back within half an hour and canceled an upcoming appearance by another of his clients, Trisha Yearwood.

To most power brokers in Hollywood Helen wielded a big stick. If you crossed her, you could be dead in the water. As a matter of fact, that is what she would yell: “You are dead!” But Kragen, the man behind the “We Are the World” and Hands Across America antihunger benefits, had enormous credibility and respect throughout Hollywood. He also had guts and integrity. Helen had not figured on Kragen deciding that enough was enough. He went public in the
Los Angeles Times
about what was going on. The floodgates opened with revelations about Helen’s vindictive style running the
Tonight Show
. The backlash against her was fierce.