I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (34 page)

show called
Real People
. As he was hurrying for the door, Steve Lubetkin intercepted him.

“Tom, please, can I talk to you for a minute? ”

Dreesen resisted the temptation to glance at his watch and beg off. Something in Steve’s voice, a kind of desperation, made him stop and listen.

“What’s up? ”

“I called in to the Store this week, and Mitzi did not give me any time slots, and it’s happened to other people, too,” Lubetkin said. “I’m afraid that if you and the other big guys leave the group, then she’s going to retaliate against all us little guys who were active in the strike.”

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 236

236

William Knoedelseder

Dreesen smiled. “That’s not going to happen, Steve. She can’t retaliate. It’s right there in the contract, and she signed it.”

Lubetkin nodded but he didn’t look reassured.

“Okay, I’ll tell you what,” Dreesen said, looking him straight in the eye. “I promise I won’t go back to the Comedy Store until you go back, okay? ”

That seemed to help. They hugged, and Dreesen rushed off to his appointment confident that everything would work out fine for Steve.

A couple nights later, Lubetkin phoned Richard Lewis at home, where he was watching a boxing match on television. After some small talk about the state of the fight game, Steve said that he was seeing faces in rugs and carpets. The statement was such a wild non sequitur that Lewis sensed it was the real reason Steve had called.

“We can all do that,” Richard responded. “If you stare at something long enough, your mind starts playing tricks on you. Remember that bit I used to do in my act about seeing my dead uncle as a cloud in the sky? ”

“Do me a favor,” Steve said. “Go into your bathroom and stare at that little rug you have there and tell me if you see anything.”

Lewis couldn’t tell if Steve was goofing or not; he sounded curious more than anything else. Playing along, he put down the phone and went into bathroom and checked the rug.

“Okay, fine,” he said, back on the phone. “I think I can see the outline of a face, but I can’t tell if it’s Theodore Roosevelt or Thur-man Munson.”

Lubetkin chuckled and then let the subject drop. They talked a little more about sports before hanging up. Lewis was puzzled that Steve seemed so serious about something so silly, but he shrugged it off as Steve just being weird. He was a comic, after all—weird was a prerequisite for the job.

Susan Evans had been hearing about the faces too. Steve told her he was seeing them in trees as well, and he speculated that they were the faces of dead spirits, of all the people who had ever 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 237

I’m Dying Up Here

237

lived on earth. She was concerned, but not alarmed, because he invariably defused his remarks with a joke, so she didn’t know if he was being serious or working on a concept for his act. His humor always tended toward the far-out and absurd.

He had scared her once, however, back in February, when she accompanied him down to La Jolla for his first paid gig at the Comedy Store branch there. They stayed in one of the condos Mitzi provided for the comics, and one morning he told her that he had gotten up during the night convinced that they were supposed to go to another planet and start a whole new civilization together, like Adam and Eve. So, he had gone to the kitchen to turn on the gas to help them get to that other place more quickly.

“But apparently God didn’t want that to happen,” he said, “because the oven turned out to be electric.” It was his light, laughing delivery of the last line that pulled her back from feeling utterly horror-struck. Again, she managed to dismiss the episode as Steve’s trying out some new material, which bombed badly as far as she was concerned.

It quickly became apparent that the CFC’s settlement agreement with the Comedy Store had not settled much of anything.

With the Belly Room still dark and the Main Room still featuring improv performers, Shore abruptly closed the Westwood club on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights, claiming she was losing money due to small crowds. That reduced the number of Comedy Store time slots to 70 a week (from a prestrike high of more than 250). The closure was a flagrant violation of the agreement, according to the CFC, which also accused Shore of retaliating against the strike leaders by denying them stage time. In the two weeks since the settlement, eight or nine members of the executive committee—including Steve Lubetkin, Jo Anne Astrow, Dottie Archibald, and former headliners George Miller and Elayne Boosler—had not been given any time slots.

To make matters worse, a club that the CFC had touted as one of its saving alternatives to the Comedy Store, Jerry Van Dyke’s, 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 238

238

William Knoedelseder

closed due to financial difficulties. Humperdinck’s, too, was struggling. The comics had won their battle to be paid, but apparently it was a pyrrhic victory.

The deteriorating situation coincided with a downward spiral in Lubetkin’s mental state. As he saw it, his worst fear had been realized: He was broke, blackballed from the Comedy Store, and effectively banished from the business of comedy. Over and over he told Susan and his CFC brethren that his career was finished, that Mitzi was going to make sure he never worked in LA again. It didn’t help his frame of mind when, on May 20, the
Los Angeles
Times
’ Sunday Calendar section ran a big spread headlined “The Diary of Four Young Comics” that profiled Richard Lewis along with Jay Leno, David Letterman, and Elayne Boosler as the

“hottest stand-up comics to recently emerge from the comedy club system.” He was happy for Richard but sad for himself. He sounded listless and despondent when he called his brother, Barry, that week. “Something’s not right. He wasn’t making much sense; he was not himself,” Barry told his wife, Ginny, as he packed for a flight to Los Angeles the next day.

In LA, Susan told Barry about the faces and confirmed that Steve had gone into an emotional tailspin since the strike ended. A practicing psychologist, Barry spent the next few days hanging out with Steve and casually probing for clues to what was going on with him psychically. Steve wasn’t hallucinating, hearing voices, or using drugs (other than his usual pot), but he was clearly depressed, enveloped in sadness, particularly about his sundered relationship with Mitzi Shore. He talked constantly about losing the gig in La Jolla and how unfair it was. He talked about how much he loved Susan and his fellow comics. For the most part, he was rational, but at times his conversation consisted of a flight of ideas that would suddenly shift to something entirely unconnected. At one point, Steve broke down sobbing, hugging Barry closely and saying that he

“would give anything if I could just talk to Mom one more time.”

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 239

I’m Dying Up Here

239

Barry arranged an appointment for Steve with a psychiatrist he knew who practiced out of Veteran’s Hospital in West Los Angeles. He drove Steve to the appointment and nervously read magazines in the waiting room while Steve talked to the doctor. During the drive home, Steve said the doctor thought he was depressed for all the obvious reasons, and he’d set up another appointment for the following week on May 31, but he had prescribed no anti-depressant drugs. Over the next few days, Steve’s outlook seemed to improve, and Barry flew back to New York cautiously hopeful that a crisis had been averted.

On Friday morning, June 1, Steve and several other CFC executive committee members met with AGVA’s business agents at the union’s Hollywood headquarters. They didn’t like AGVA, but it appeared to them that Mitzi had no intention of living up to the agreement, so they wanted to see if the union had any ideas for helping them. They came away after an hour convinced that an affiliation with AGVA was not a solution to their problems.

Late that afternoon, Jo Anne Astrow convened a meeting at her house
.
Lubetkin attended, along with Astrow’s husband Mark Lonow, Dottie Archibald, George Miller, Elayne Boosler, and CFC

secretary Susan Sweetzer. The situation was worse than ever, with a rash of complaints coming in from members freaked out about the dearth of time slots. The brand-new brotherhood of stand-up comedians appeared to be bombing, with comics bickering among themselves and threatening to break ranks. Some wanted to return to working for free at Westwood if Shore would reopen the club.

In the battle for stage time, it was beginning to look like every comic for him- or herself. The committee tried to reach Shore by phone but was told that she was out of town. They wished that Tom Dreesen and Jay Leno were there with them—Tom for his cool in the midst of crisis and Jay for his leavening sense of silly.

Lubetkin remained uncharacteristically calm during the sometimes chaotic meeting. At one point, he seemed to be filling in for 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 240

240

William Knoedelseder

Jay when he executed a series of pratfalls off the couch, doing goofy shoulder rolls onto the floor.

The committee members were commiserating about the fact that for the third week in a row none of them had been given any time slots when Steve suddenly stood up and announced that he

“had an appointment.” On his way out the door, he stopped and turned to them. “I want you all not to worry anymore,” he said.

“Everything is going to be fine. I’m going to take care of it.” When he was gone, the others exchanged looks and shrugged.
Whatever.

Lubetkin drove to the Sunset Strip and parked his Buick on Queens Road, around the corner from the Comedy Store. Leaving the keys in the ignition, he walked east on Sunset and passed right in front of the club, where he ran into comic Mitch Walters, who greeted him warmly and wanted to chat. Lubetkin said he needed to take a walk up the street but would be right back.

“You look terrible,” Walters said as Steve walked away. “Is everything alright? ”

A few minutes later, at approximately 6:40 p.m., Kent January looked out the window of his apartment at 8440 Sunset, across the street from the Comedy Store, and noticed a man on the roof of the Continental Hyatt House. Then, as January watched in horror, the man suddenly leaped off the building.

Segio Sais and Julie Abarzu were walking together about fifty feet from the Hyatt when they heard a scream, turned, and saw a body hurtling down from the roof, head first with arms spread out, toward the concrete parking lot.

The body hit with such impact from the 105-foot drop that it sounded like a small explosion to Robert Delagran, who was staying in Room 926 at the Hyatt. He heard someone screaming, looked out the window, and saw a woman pointing to where a body was lying on the pavement. He called the lobby and said, “I think somebody just jumped off your building.”

Donald Hicks, the hotel’s chief maintenance engineer, bolted out the front door of the hotel and around the side to where a man 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 241

I’m Dying Up Here

241

was lying about twenty feet from the building on the ramp leading to the Comedy Store parking lot. Blood was flowing from the man’s nose and ears, and he had a gaping wound in his forehead.

Hicks felt the man’s left wrist for a pulse but couldn’t find one.

Paramedics arrived within few minutes but were unable to revive the victim. They were followed an hour later by four police investigators, one of whom pulled a handwritten note from the left hip pocket of the dead man’s faded blue jeans.

My name is Steve Lubetkin. Call Susan Evans at 403-7861.

I used to work at the Comedy Store. Maybe this will help to bring about fairness.

To Barry—I love you. You’ve been generous and good to me always.

To Dad—I love you for raising me and giving me my sense of humor.

To Susan—I love you but it would have been hell for us to continue.

To Mom—I’ll be joining you soon. I love you.

To Ginny—I love you, beautiful sister-in-law. You’re terrific.

To Rich Lewis—You’re the best blood brother a man can have. I love you.

To the CFC—I guess nice guys do finish last.

To the world—Fairness, fairness, fairness, please, before it’s too late.

To all comedians—Unite, it’s in your best interest.

Suze—Play my “dum dum dum last set in Westwood” cassette at the funeral in LA. Bury me next to Mom in New York.

No revenge, please, only love.

Lubetkin’s body lay on the concrete covered by a police tarpau-lin for more than two hours before an investigator from the coroner’s office arrived to examine it. He noted “multiple crushing wounds to chest, face and head.” A hundred feet away, the show 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 242

242

William Knoedelseder

was going on at the Comedy Store, where the comics and staff were buzzing with macabre jokes about “the jumper” next door.

No one thought to connect the grim scene outside to their world until a police detective walked up to the front entrance of the club and asked if the owner was present. Lue Deck, who was working as the night manager, told him that Mitzi was in La Jolla. The officer wrote down her name and telephone number and then told Deck it appeared the “decedent” may have been a Comedy Store employee. He handed Deck a plastic baggie containing Lubetkin’s driver’s license.

“Did you know him? ” the detective asked.

Deck recoiled. The license was smeared with blood. He confirmed that Lubetkin had worked at the club on and off for the past several years, but he refused the detective’s request that he walk over and identify the body.

“I can’t,” he said. “I don’t think I could handle it.”

As the word of the jumper’s identity ricocheted around the club, Susan Evans arrived home from work to find two policemen waiting by her door. “We need to talk to you,” one of them said.

She listened to what they said but could not speak a word in response. Neither could she cry. She was numb, in shock.