I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (11 page)

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-old housewife living in Ojai, California, an artsy little community in the Santa Monica Moun-tains between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. One night after 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 75

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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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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.