I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (22 page)

After a couple of hours and several motions along the lines of

“I move you go fuck yourself,” money won out over gratitude when a majority voted to send a delegation to Shore to broach the idea of getting paid a modest amount, as little as $5 a set. It was moved, seconded, and carried that Dreesen would head the delegation and pick the others to go with him.

Dreesen wondered what he’d gotten himself into. He hadn’t figured on becoming a spokesman for the group. Looking out over the room, he couldn’t help thinking he was the keynote speaker at an ADD convention. Still, it would be a short booking, he thought, maybe even a one-nighter. Like nearly everyone else, he was sure that Mitzi would see the reasonableness of their position.

Sure, she’d probably get all weepy and do the Jewish (or Catholic) mother trip—after all I’ve done for you kids,
this
is the thanks I get?—but in the end she’d go along with it.

Just to be sure, he picked his fellow delegates carefully. He wanted people whom Mitzi liked personally and professionally, people she felt comfortable with, who had no animosity toward her and wouldn’t antagonize her. She loved Jay, of course, but Jay always wanted to be the center of attention, and he couldn’t be serious for more than a few minutes at a time. Robin Williams couldn’t be serious even that long, and besides, he hadn’t come to the meeting. Mitzi also loved Dave Letterman, but Dave would never do it; he wouldn’t feel comfortable being that involved.

Elayne Boosler was a leader among the women, but Dreesen didn’t know if Mitzi respected her or, for that matter, any of the women.

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He decided on Paul Mooney, who was part of Richard Pryor’s inner circle; Tim Thomerson, a handsome budding actor who had invented the “surfer dude” character on the Comedy Store stage; and George Miller, the only comic that Dreesen had ever seen make Mitzi laugh at herself. On stage one night, with Mitzi in the audience, George launched into an impersonation of her, saying, “That Tom Dreesen! He called me the other day while I was in the kitchen scrubbing out the sink . . . with my hair.” The only person who laughed harder than Mitzi was Marsha Warfield, who appeared to pass the better part of a drink through her nose.

All four men genuinely liked Shore, were grateful for the break she’d given them, and felt they were in her debt. Dreesen figured if they just approached her with respect and affection, she’d agree to their proposal. How could she not?

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Diary of a Young Comic

Richard Lewis didn’t attend the comics meeting, but he had a good excuse. He was caught up in the biggest break of his career.

It came about in the usual way, which was almost a cliché at that point. He had just finished his set at the Improv and was having a drink at the bar one night when a stranger walked up and introduced himself. “Hi, my name is Bennett Tramer. I’m a big fan of yours. I’m writing a show for NBC and producer Lorne Michaels, and I think you’d be great for the lead part.”

“Oh, good, I thought you were a bill collector,” Lewis quipped.

Tramer explained that he was writing the screenplay for a feature film called
Poison Ivy
to be directed by Gary Weis, a young director who’d made a name for himself with his short films on
Saturday Night Live.
Weis also had a deal with Michaels and NBC

to make ninety-minute specials that would air periodically in
SNL
’s time slot, and he wanted to do a film about a young comic from New York trying to make it in Los Angeles. “Your act would fit into it,” Tramer said. “We could include a lot of your performance and shoot it right here.”

Tramer brought Weis to the Improv the following night, and Lewis made their presence part of his act. “There’s a little pressure 141

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on me tonight,” he told the audience as he paced back and forth across the stage, running his hands nervously through his long hair. “There are people here to see me, but I don’t want you to worry about it. I’m going to come through for you. I’m going to come through for myself.” Then, he went into a rant about his grandpa Yikva who, he explained, “was named for a Jewish expression that means ‘killed by an avalanche.’”

Afterwards, Weis told him, “You remind me of Woody Allen,”

and offered him the starring role. Lewis agreed to do it if he could be part of the writing process as well. Done.

Lewis and Tramer crafted a loosely autobiographical script, titled
Diary of a Young Comic
, in which the hero, Billy Gondola, leaves his Jewish family (including Grandpa Yikva) in New York to try for stardom in LA. “We gotta write a scene for my friend Steve,” Lewis told Tramer. “It’ll be a favor but he’ll earn it.” They wrote a scene in which Steve Lubetkin and Susan Evans were to be part of an acting class that Billy attends, and they gave them both lines. Finally, Lewis thought, he could pay Steve back for his help in those early days when they swore a blood oath on a street corner in Greenwich Village.

But hard luck hit Lubetkin once again. Two weeks before filming was to begin, director Weis and the NBC production executives decided they had to cut some scenes from the script to conform to the ninety-minute format, and the acting class scene was among those that had to go. Lewis pleaded for it to be left in, but they had a fifteen-day shoot with a $230,000 budget, the acting class scene was peripheral to the storyline, and none of the people in it (with the exception of Billy) were in any other scene. So, it was the easiest and most logical thing to cut. This was a production decision pure and simple, and Lewis was powerless to do anything about it.

He was sick at heart that his good fortune was going to cause his friend more pain. Here was the double-edged sword of making it in Hollywood, today’s entry in the
real
diary of a young comic.

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He was going to have to tell Steve that he wasn’t invited to the party after all.

They met for coffee at a little restaurant across the alley from Steve’s apartment where they often got together. Not five seconds after they sat down, Lewis blurted out, “I’m so fucking disappointed, man, but they had to make edits when they were finaliz-ing the shooting schedule, they saw how long it was, and they had to make cuts, and they are taking out your scene, and I can’t get them to put it back in.”

Whatever disappointment he felt, Lubetkin didn’t show it.

“That’s cool,” he said. “I know you did the best you could. Don’t worry about it.” He told Lewis that he was working on his solo stand-up act again and was getting good feedback from Mitzi Shore and good time slots at Westwood. He had some great new bits he was doing, including a Jewish pimp wearing a fedora fes-tooned with bagels and shuffling around the stage muttering in an
alter kocker
voice, “Hustle, hustle,” and a “quick impression” of a Polish pope giving the papal blessing by holding his arm in place while moving his body in the sign of the cross. In fact, Mitzi had booked him to play the San Diego Store, and Susan was going down with him to stay for a few days, he said. So things were looking up.

Diary
was shot at a handful of locations around Los Angeles.

A cheap motel in the shade of the Santa Monica freeway recalled the hooker haven next door to Lewis’s first LA apartment, down to the detail of the “used” condoms from the prop department lying around on the ground. A health food store was the setting for Billy to pick up Nina van Pallandt. And the Improv was the scene of Billy’s triumph, complete with Budd Friedman bounding onto the stage just as he did after Lewis’s first performance at the New York club, proclaiming to the audience, “We’ve found the rookie of the year.”

As if to prove he had no bad feelings, Steve came to the set several times during the shoot. He was there for the filming at the 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 144

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Improv and seemed fine. He chatted up Bennett Tramer, who thought he was a really sweet, funny guy. Apparently, there’d been no harm done. At least, that’s what Richard wanted to believe. But in his heart he knew better. Steve always kept his fears and frustrations hidden. On stage he walked with a swagger, ex-uding confidence, a man’s man, but inside he was still a scared little boy who missed his mom and desperately wanted to impress his dad.

As the air date for
Diary
neared, Lewis was swept up in the network’s promotional push. NBC’s publicity department set up a score of interviews for him, ranging from
Daily Variety
to the
Washington Post
to
The Today Show.
They even booked him on
The Tonight Show
, where he killed. Maybe it was the fact that Johnny Carson wasn’t sitting there judging him (Gabe Kaplan was guest hosting that night), or maybe he was just on a sustained roll with all the hoopla surrounding
Diary
, but it was his best
Tonight
Show
appearance ever. The audience was still applauding as he sat down on the couch next to ABC sportscaster Dick Schapp, who leaned over and said to him, “That’s the hardest I’ve laughed since the last time I saw my old friend Lenny Bruce playing in Greenwich Village.” Lewis would have been hard-pressed to conjure a higher compliment.

NBC flew him to New York first class for his appearance on
The Today Show
and put him up at the Plaza Hotel. On the ride from the airport, his limo driver suggested that he stop at a particular men’s clothing store and charge whatever he wanted to the network’s account, indicating that others before him had done so, and nobody knew the difference. Lewis declined, but he felt great later when he took his mother and her boyfriend to dinner at the Plaza’s famous Oak Room and with a flourish signed the check to his room.

On
The Today Show
the next morning, he chatted with cohosts Tom Brokaw and Jane Pauley and introduced a clip from
Diary
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that reduces everything, including language, to its essence, so that Shirley becomes simply “Shi” and her boyfriend, Fred, is called “Fre.” The bit went over so well on the studio set that at the end of the broadcast, the cohosts cracked Lewis up by signing off as “Tom Bro” and “Jane Pau.”

Diary of a Young Comic
received generally good reviews. Even the critics who noted its production shortcomings and occasionally flat moments lauded its originality and sense of fun. The
Washington Post
’s Tom Shales pronounced it “a pretty darn funny movie” and listed among its highlights a scene in which Billy Gondola goes to a celebrity shrink who has eight-by-ten photos of his famous patients on the wall with black tape over their eyes to disguise their identities. Still, Billy is able to recognize one patient. “Isn’t that Flipper? ”

Diary
got nothing but raves from Lewis’s fellow comics, many of whom watched it crowded around the TV sets at the Comedy Store and the Improv. Lewis was well-liked in both the Los Angeles and New York comedy communities, and his success gave everyone a psychological boost. Not even Robin Williams or Andy Kaufman had yet to star in a movie that he had cowritten. Lewis had pulled off a Woody Allen, and he’d done it with the story of their lives.

At Canter’s Deli the night
Diary
aired, a particularly large gathering of comics greeted Lewis as conquering hero. He was glad Nina was there to share it with him. Robin Williams brought his wife, Valerie, and when they walked over to congratulate Richard, Robin suddenly leaped up onto the table and kicked into an inspired, improvised performance that stopped all other activity in the room. The sight of Mork taking flight on a tabletop caused quite a few forks and jaws to drop in the restaurant. Some of the comics saw it as Williams trying to steal Lewis’s thunder, but Lewis felt anything but upstaged. In his view, Robin was just overcome with happiness for him and was celebrating the best way he knew how—by devouring an audience.

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As laughter rolled around the room, Lewis smiled at the sight of Robin’s right foot bouncing up and down just inches from his corn beef sandwich, and the thought occurred to him that he’d probably remember this moment for the rest of his life.

In all the hilarity and camaraderie, he didn’t even notice that Steve wasn’t there.

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The Gauntlet

On Sunday, March 11, 1979, Tom Dreesen pulled his silver Cadillac Eldorado into the Comedy Store parking lot just before 10:00 p.m. The car was as new as his money, and he’d taken a lot of ribbing about it from the boys, especially Jay Leno. He knew it was flashy and that some of the comics probably thought he was being a self-aggrandizing asshole. But he didn’t care what they thought.

They hadn’t grown up in Harvey, Illinois; they’d never lived out of an abandoned car in an alley. He drove the Eldo for the same reason he stood in the shower every morning until the hot water started to run out. It reminded him of how far he’d come.

In front of the club, George Miller, Paul Mooney, and Tim Thomerson were waiting for him. Tonight was their meeting with Mitzi Shore to talk about getting paid. She was waiting for them at her house about a mile away, so the other three piled into the car for the five-minute drive. On the way, they went over their strategy, such as it was.

The important thing, they agreed, was to be cool and remain calm no matter what happened. Mitzi could be volatile and dramatic, and they didn’t want to do anything to set her off or make her feel threatened. They were four to her one, after all, and with 147