I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (26 page)

Would I feel better using their stage to get ahead or having my work priced at $15? ”

Argus Hamilton felt no such ambivalence. He was among a group of about a dozen hard-core loyalists who quickly formed a protective circle around Shore. Shore was clearly shaken by the events of the previous week, stunned by both the number and names of the comics apparently allied with the CFC. Jay Leno?

David Letterman? She couldn’t believe they would turn on her after all she had done for them. My God, Dave was set to guest-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 171

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host
The Tonight Show
in a few weeks after only two previous appearances on the show! Wasn’t that proof enough that her concept worked? Couldn’t he see that the Store was the light?

Hamilton had never seen Mitzi so agitated and unsure of herself. He took on the role of Dreesen’s counterpart, lobbying other comics to support her in her time of trial, rallying everyone he could around the queen. And no one could talk up Mitzi better than Argus. In describing her particular genius, he would work himself into flights of pure Southern oratory. “She plays each one of us like a different instrument,” he’d say, “and has an incredible capacity for knowing just how to tune each one, especially those of us she has developed from scratch. The comics are her palette, and each night she uses the colors to paint a different beautiful picture that is the Comedy Store.” It moved some people nearly to tears and made others want to puke, but everyone knew it came from his heart, and they respected him.

That wasn’t the case with Ollie Joe Prater, who assumed a less admirable role in Mitzi’s defense, that of spy or snitch. Pretending to be sympathetic to the CFC, he eavesdropped on conversations and reported back to Mitzi on what he heard. That’s how she knew about Letterman’s leanings. Of course, everyone knew what Prater was doing because he was as subtle as an anvil. He might as well have cupped his hand to his ear.

The CFC had its own spies in Shore’s camp. A waitress named Robin called Dreesen to say that she had eavesdropped on an early evening meeting between Shore and her supporters in the Original Room and had overheard something she thought he should know about. Dreesen arranged to meet her at the coffee shop of the Continental Hyatt House. Robin told him that in the meeting Mitzi had expressed concern that the comics might boycott the Store in favor of the Improv. Argus and others said they doubted that would happen because, first and foremost, comics needed stage time, and the Improv only put on ten comics a night to the Comedy Store’s forty. The CFC would never get a majority 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 172

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to go along with eliminating that many time slots. But Mitzi wasn’t convinced. Then someone in the back of the room, maybe Ollie Joe or Biff Maynard—Robin said she couldn’t tell because it was dark—shouted out, “What if there were no Improv? ”

Dreesen didn’t attach any significance to the comment. He was just glad to know that Mitzi was worried that they might go on strike. He thanked Robin and told her to keep her eyes and ears open.

Shore was absent from the Sunset club that Monday night when the CFC held its meeting to vote on her payment offer.

More than one hundred comics showed up, including the Mitzi loyalists and the headliners. Once again, Dreesen chaired the meeting, and once again Leno played class clown to a whole class of clowns. This time, however, there was an underlying soberness in the room that wasn’t there when they gathered at the union hall back in February. Dreesen saw determined faces looking back at him. They weren’t there to fuck around; they were there to get something done.

The first thing they did was officially elect him chairman of the CFC. He was both moved and unnerved by the vote. Did he really want to put himself in this position? Did he want to be responsible for all these inordinately needy people? Was he out of his mind?

For the first order of business, he yielded the floor to Paul Mooney, who had received a telegram earlier in the day that he wanted to read aloud. Mooney held his hand up for quiet, and when the crowd settled down, he started in:

To the comics of the newly formed comedy union I write these words of support because I believe your cause to be just and wholly within the concept of management and labor. It is not only immoral to work for nothing, it is also illegal. Slavery was banned with the signing of the emancipation proclamation over one century ago. I believe it is within the artist’s rights and 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 173

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privileges to receive proper compensation for his or her efforts.

I want you to know I would honor your picket lines if need be. I am sure that most fair-minded artists in the community would be supportive of you also.

Sincerely,

Richard Pryor

A collective whoop of surprise went up as people jumped to their feet and applauded wildly, while Mitzi loyalists sat in slack-jawed silence. Dreesen followed Mooney by reading his telegram from Bob Hope. Again, there was a combination of applause and glum looks. Hope wasn’t anywhere near as popular with this crowd as Pryor, but no one missed the significance of the two statements: The CFC had support across the broad spectrum of established comedians, from Hope to Pryor.

Thus emboldened, the assemblage quickly voted down Mitzi’s offer by a wide margin. “If she charges a cover, then she has to pay” had become a battle cry. They weren’t going to accept any proposal that didn’t include payment for performances in the Original Room and at Westwood. Before they adjourned, several shouting matches broke out between dissidents and Shore stal-warts, causing some to wonder whether they were witnessing the first shots fired in a civil war.

Dreesen was troubled by the evening’s events. He’d been hoping the membership would accept Shore’s offer and everything could return to how it was before. He was surprised at how strong and united they’d become. He felt some pride about that, but he also worried that they were about to pass the point of no return. If Mitzi didn’t come back with a better offer, then what was their option other than, as Mark Lonow had said, to throw up a picket line and shut the place down? And where would that put him? At the front of a pack of placard-carrying clowns demanding to be treated like longshoremen? Holy shit! How in the fuck did he get here?

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In the middle of a fitful sleep that night, he sat bolt upright in bed. He had it! An idea that would solve everything! He marched right into Shore’s office the next day.

“Mitzi, I think I have a way for everybody to get what they want. It hit me last night; you just raise the cover charge by a dollar, from $4.50 to $5.50, and give that dollar to the comics. They get paid and it doesn’t cost you a dime. It so simple I can’t believe we didn’t think of it before.”

She looked at him as if he were a tiresome child and began shaking her head.

“No, Tommy. Like I keep telling you, the Store is a workshop and in that environment the comics don’t deserve to get paid.”

He sat there for a few moments saying nothing, running her statement through his head: They don’t deserve to get paid. So, it was never about money, he thought; it was always about power and control. And she was never going to pay them unless she was forced to. Holy shit, indeed.

As he got up to go, she said, “I don’t want you here anymore.”

She was talking about the CFC meetings, but he knew that she meant him, too.

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Fire!

However much Budd Friedman may have secretly been enjoying Mitzi Shore’s travails, he knew that sooner or later the mob would come for him. Several comics had told him as much, joking, “Hey, Budd, you’re on next.”

To which he replied, not joking at all, “Fuck you. I bust my ass to keep this place going. The comics I put on my stage at 9:00 p.m.

should be paying
me
, and the day I’m forced to pay them is the day I close down and open a restaurant.”

That was all bluster, of course. Friedman knew that if Mitzi made a deal to pay the comics then he would have to make the same deal, and that worried him. He was going through a divorce, and it appeared likely that he’d wind up having to relinquish ownership of the New York club to his estranged wife, Silver. New York was a cash cow; LA was barely breaking even. He’d recently opened a branch in Las Vegas, and the roof had promptly collapsed. Mitzi could afford to make a deal with the comics. He wasn’t sure he could.

Still, it wasn’t as if he was having a bad time. For Budd, moving to Los Angeles had been a longtime dream come true. He loved the weather. He loved his house in the Hollywood Hills with its 175

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pool and hot tub. He loved his year-round tan. And even though it didn’t make as much money as the New York club, he loved his Melrose place, in no small part because it was such a great venue for meeting women. He was forty-seven, freshly single, and feeling frisky, and the club’s female employees, patrons, and performers soon learned that he was something of a hound. Every night it seemed that he was entertaining another woman with bottles of champagne in his cordoned-off VIP section of the back room. He was unabashed about it and took offense whenever anyone suggested he was conducting some kind of couch-casting operation. “I would
never
put an act on my stage because I went to bed with them,” he’d say, adding after a pause, “unless they were good on stage. I have too much pride in my business, and I wouldn’t want to be embarrassed. I wouldn’t want anyone to know I slept with a bad singer or comedienne.”

A few nights after the CFC vote, Friedman took a rare night off from the Improv and went on a double date with Dottie and Tom Archibald to see Bobby Short at a club in Century City. His plan was to be back at the club before midnight to close up.

Around 11:00 p.m., a young singer named Barbara McGraw was on stage at Melrose, bantering with the midweek audience of about forty people. As she was introducing her next song, the piano player, Cliff Grisham, whispered to her, “Barb, I think I smell smoke.” She went ahead with the song, but two verses into it she smelled the smoke, too. It was coming through the back wall right behind them. The audience hadn’t noticed yet.

“Excuse me, everyone, but we’re smelling smoke up here,” McGraw said, “so we think it might be wise if we all got up and left the room until we can check this out.”

The patrons picked up their drinks and calmly filed out of the room, down the short hallway and into the bar area. McGraw and Grisham were the last ones out, and by the time they got into the bar, the smoke was billowing out of the back room. They suddenly remembered that Budd had installed a new sound system a few 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 177

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days earlier. “We should go back and see if we can at least get the sound board,” McGraw said. They went back in, but there was too much smoke to see. By the time they made their way back out to the bar, it was filled with smoke, too. The bartender had called the fire department, and people were hurrying out the front door to the street.

Several blocks away, Budd was sitting with his date in the back seat of the Archibalds’ car as it inched along in oddly heavy traffic. “What the hell is this? ” he asked, seconds before the smell of smoke wafted through the car windows with the answer. “Oh, my God,” he shouted, “it’s the club!” He jumped out of the car while it was still moving and ran down the sidewalk.

Driving down Melrose Avenue from the opposite direction, Robert Schimmel and his wife encountered the same acrid smoke and traffic snarl. Schimmel, a stereo salesman turned stand-up comic from Scottsdale, Arizona, was excited to show his wife the club where he was going to be working. He’d performed there several months before on an open mike night, prompted by a dare from his sister. It was his first time on stage. Afterwards, Budd Friedman had come up to him and invited him to “come back and play the club anytime.” An ecstatic Schimmel went home to Scotts dale, quit his job at Jerry’s Audio, and convinced his wife that they should sell their house and move to Los Angeles. They were just now arriving in town. He’d pulled off the Hollywood freeway to give her a peek at their bright future.

“Oh, great,” she said when they got close enough to read the sign on the front of the burning building.

“It’ll be okay,” he said, as much to reassure himself as her.

“They have to be insured.”

Around the perimeter set up by firefighters, the club’s performers and denizens huddled together in heartbroken disbelief as the flames at the back of the building licked the sky. Many were crying.

This was the center of their lives, their family room. Their home was burning down.

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Robert Schimmel parked his car a few blocks away and jogged back to the scene, where he found Budd Friedman pacing back and forth in the street, running his hands through his hair, his eyes brimming with tears.

“Jesus, Budd, I can’t believe this,” he said.

Friedman looked at him and asked, “Who are you? ”

Schimmel reintroduced himself, explaining, “You told me that I was funny and to sign up for spots.”

“Yeah, well, I’m trying to deal with this right now,” Friedman said as he turned away.

By the time the firemen extinguished the blaze, the back room, more than half the structure, was gone. Few who were inside when the fire started had left the scene, as if by staying they could somehow make everything come out alright. Friedman picked through the blackened ruins, a picture of despair. He knew that his fire insurance policy wouldn’t begin to cover the loss. “I’m out of business,” he kept saying, “I’m out of business.”