I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (35 page)

When the police left, she called Barry in New York. “Steve’s dead,” she told him. “He jumped off a building next to the Comedy Store.” She couldn’t bear to stay in the apartment, didn’t even want to look around. She walked out in a daze and sometime later found herself wandering the second-floor back hallways of the Comedy Store. In an empty room, she came upon a framed poster from
Dante Shocko
leaning against a desk. She and Steve had one hanging on the wall in the hallway outside their apartment, but she was surprised to find one in the Comedy Store. She could hear muffled laughter from a show downstairs, but it was all very strange and quiet around her. She picked up the poster and took it into Mitzi’s office, propped it up on a sofa opposite the desk, and wrote on the wall above it in Magic Marker, “Got the message.”

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Lue Deck walked into the office at that point and thought at first that he was interrupting a burglary. But he realized who and what he was dealing with when the apparently disoriented woman said softly, “Mitzi killed Steve.” He led her gently by the arm out the back door of the club and turned her over to a group of comics who seemed to know her.

Richard Lewis arrived at the Improv that night already distraught because he had broken up with Nina the day before. She was now on a plane back to Copenhagen, and he was feeling more alone than he had in his entire life. He hoped a couple of drinks and a good set would help fill the void. But as he crossed the room by the bar, a comic he barely knew called out to him,

“Hey, Lewis, did you hear about Lubetkin? He jumped off the Hyatt House and killed himself.” In an explosion of rage at what he thought was some sort of sick joke, Lewis grabbed the guy by his shirt front, slammed him up against the wall, and screamed,

“If you’re fucking with me, I will fucking kill you.”

The two were quickly separated, and others present said that they, too, had heard that Steve was dead; apparently, the police had confirmed it with the Comedy Store. In a state of shock, Lewis asked a friend to drive him to Steve’s apartment. He knocked and called out, but Susan was not home. He was wracked with guilt because he hadn’t told anyone about Steve’s seeing faces in the rug.

Maybe if he had, then Steve could have gotten help and would still be alive. So I’m responsible for my best friend’s death, he thought.

Back at the Improv, he sat down at the bar and started in on a bender that would last fifteen years.

Shortly before midnight, Tom Dreesen was in his dressing room getting ready to go on stage at Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe when the phone rang. It was Leno, mistakenly thinking he was calling just as Tom was coming
off
stage.

“Did you hear? ” Leno asked. “Steve Lubetkin committed suicide by jumping off the Hyatt House.”

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“Oh fuck, please don’t tell me that,” Dreesen replied, flashing on his last conversation with Steve.

“He left a note about not being allowed to work at the Comedy Store anymore,” Leno said, his voice quavering.

Dreesen’s mind reeled. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” was all he could think of to say. Then came the knock at the door.

“Two minutes, Mr. Dreesen.”

Later that night, after the most difficult performance of his career, Dreesen sat on the bed in his hotel room blaming himself for what had happened: If I had just left the fucking thing alone and not jumped up to chair that first meeting, then Steve would still be alive. Once again, he thought of the promise he made: I won’t go back until you go back.

He was going to keep that promise. Since Steve was never going back to the Comedy Store again, neither was he.

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A Standing Ovation

Barry and Ginny Lubetkin arrived in Los Angeles the next day, having left New York without even telling Jack Lubetkin that Steve was dead. They weren’t sure the seventy-six-year-old patri-arch was strong enough to hear the news that his youngest son had died in such a manner. They needed time to think, and the circumstances did not allow for that.

During the flight, Barry could think only about how he had let Steve down. He was a mental health professional, after all. He was supposed to be able to anticipate such things. How could he have missed it? What had blinded him to the fact that his little brother was in danger of taking his own life? If only he’d stayed longer or taken Steve back to New York for treatment. He knew he was going to regret his decision to leave for the rest of his life.

The trip to LA was supposed to be a private family matter to finalize Steve’s affairs and escort his body back home. The couple wasn’t expecting to land in the middle of a publicized show business controversy. But by the time they reached their hotel room, the wheels were already in motion for a bizarre and unseemly display of competitive mourning.

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On Saturday, Steve’s name suddenly appeared where it never had before—on the Comedy Store marquee: “In Memoriam, Steve Lubetkin.” Under normal circumstances, it would have seemed only fitting for the club to mark the passing of a performer who had been part of its tight-knit creative community for nearly six years. It stood to reason that Mitzi Shore would be shocked and saddened by the sudden death of a young man whom she had invited into her home and whose career she had promoted. And anyone who knew Steve might imagine that he was smiling down from Comedy Heaven at the sight of his name in lights on Sunset Strip (with single billing to boot). Given the events of the past few months, however, the marquee and Shore’s announced plan to hold a memorial service for Steve at the club the next day drove CFC members into paroxysms of rage.
How dare she!

As the CFC saw it, Lubetkin was theirs. He had worked and died for the cause. Mitzi had blackballed him. He had killed himself because of her unfair system and intransigence. She had no right.

The CFC began arrangements for its own memorial at Hum -

perdinck’s in Santa Monica. Barry Lubetkin tried to get the two sides to hold a single service on neutral ground, but Shore refused to cancel her plan. The way she saw it, she had
every
right.

So, despite Steve’s hope that his death would bring the two sides together, the dueling memorials went off as planned. No strikebreakers attended the one at Humperdinck’s, and none of the CFC leaders appeared at the Comedy Store. The Lubetkins attended both, but Barry took pains to point out that his presence at Shore’s service was dictated by the fact that, unlike the CFC, she had thought to have a rabbi present. “I went to the Comedy Store simply out of respect because my brother’s body was lying in a funeral home, and no rabbi had prayed,” he said. “I was in no way supporting Mitzi Shore or the Comedy Store. I want that made clear.”

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At Humperdinck’s, Barry addressed a packed house of Steve’s friends and fellow comics from the stage where he’d watched his brother perform two weeks before. “I’m not a comedian; I’m a psychologist,” he said. “This has hurt me deeply as a brother and as someone who is sworn and trained to prevent this kind of thing from happening. Well, I couldn’t. I didn’t.”

He told them he planned to initiate a program at his psychology center in New York “to develop free counseling services for comedians, where they can go and share their pain and their hurt and frustrations, so that this never happens again. It’s a lonely plastic town out there. We’re all a little bit fragile, a little bit on the brink. Steve just went over.”

Susan Evans did not speak at the memorial. She had not returned to the apartment she shared with Steve and had spent two nights sleeping on a friend’s couch with her head between two pil-lows, crying and, at times, screaming. To get through the memorial, she had calmed her grief and rage with a large dose of valium borrowed from Ginny, which left her feeling as if she were wrapped in cotton.

Ashen-faced and hollow-eyed, Richard Lewis wept uncontrol-lably through most of the memorial but managed to pull himself together somewhat when it came time to deliver the keynote eulogy.

He talked about the “blood brother” days and nights in Greenwich Village when he and Steve dreamed of stardom and promised to help one another no matter what. “And I know Steve would have achieved those things that he wanted and he would have been on all those panel shows that he always talked about, because he was good and because he deserved it,” he said. For ten minutes, he paced the stage, running his hands through his shoulder-length hair, sobbing with grief, talking about his dead friend, and getting laughs.

The connection between pain and laughter was never more tangi-ble, causing more than one person present to wonder if providence hadn’t created humor and comedians for this very purpose.

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The service closed with the recording that Steve requested in his suicide note: his final set at Westwood on March 24.

You know what I was thinking the other day? Wouldn’t it be wild if they made men’s contraceptives in sizes? Imagine the ego trips guys would go on. Can you see a guy swaggering into the drug store? “Wanna give me a dozen Trojan Big Boys and a handful of Moby Dicks? ” Of course, the ego trip is shattered the minute he gets back to the car and the girl friend says, “Did you get your Tom Thumbs and Gherkin Pickles? ”

I’ve been a little depressed lately because a comedian friend of mine had a nervous breakdown. . . . He had to go up against the Ayatollah Khomeini on
Make Me Laugh
.

You really have to love LA because they have so many weird people out here. I read about a guy who died the other day and his family put out a statement saying that in lieu of flowers they would appreciate . . . stereo equipment.

On tape, the Westwood crowd roared its approval; at Hum -

perdinck’s the audience wept as well and gave him a standing ovation.

The next day, Barry and Ginny, Susan, Richard, and Steve flew back to New York. Richard crashed at the apartment of his childhood friend and fellow stand-up, Larry David, while Susan stayed with Ginny and Barry, who took on the excruciating task of telling his father about Steve. As a precaution, Barry first called Jack’s next door neighbor, a cardiologist, and asked him to be present.

“Dad, I have terrible news,” he said after Jack invited them into his apartment. “Steve has passed away.” The elder Lubetkin did not collapse as Barry had feared, but he was rocked to his core and reacted with stunned disbelief. Barry instinctively withheld the fact that Steve had taken his own life. Instead, he told his father there had been an “accident” and that Steve “fell off a build-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 249

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ing,” which caused the old man to wonder aloud, “Why would he fall off a roof? Was it drugs? ”

At a memorial service for family members the next day, Richard found himself sitting next to Susan. For three days, he’d been carrying around the crushing burden of a guilty secret; now he couldn’t hold it in any longer. “I know something important that no one else knows,” he told her, as the story of Steve seeing faces in the weeks before his death poured out of him. When Susan responded that both she and Barry knew about the faces, too, he almost wept with relief. It wasn’t all on him after all.

Steve was buried next to his mother at Wellwood Cemetery in Pinelawn, Long Island. Later in the afternoon, Barry and Richard walked to the East River a few blocks from the Lubetkin’s apartment and sat on a bench for several hours talking about the brother they had shared.

Back in Los Angeles, the hostilities between Mitzi Shore and the CFC (now calling itself Comedians for Comedians) continued unabated. On June 6, the CFC took out a half-page in memoriam ad in
Daily Variety
, choosing to quote not a sampling of Steve’s humor but rather an excerpt from the essay he wrote titled, “What the CFC Is All About.” Shore responded by having the city of Los Angeles proclaim June 6 “Comedy Store Day.” Written in flowery script with wording provided by the Comedy Store, the official proclamation was stamped with the seal of the city and suitable for framing:

WHEREAS June 6, 1979 will mark the 6th anniversary of The Comedy Store and,

WHEREAS the primary purpose of The Comedy Store is to develop new comedy talent through a graduated process, which starts on Monday nights when anyone who wants to is invited to experience five minutes in front of a mike; and WHEREAS The Comedy Store is frequented by managers, agents, casting directors, producers, talent coordinators, network 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 250

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executives and studio executives and is a showcase and springboard for the comedians who play there; and

WHEREAS, a creative consultant for ABC-TV, Mitzi Shore is the innovator of every new program that The Comedy Store offers; and in order to encourage the growth of women in comedy she opened The Comedy Store Belly Room last season for female comics, and her latest innovation is Video Workshop sessions where growing comedians will work out in front of a camera in a classroom environment;

NOW, THEREFORE, I, TOM BRADLEY, Mayor of the City of Los Angeles, on behalf of its citizens do hereby proclaim June 6, 1979 as “The Comedy Store Day” in recognition of its sixth anniversary and commend the many talented comedians for sharing their unique ability to make people laugh; and FURTHER, I congratulate Mitzi Shore for her outstanding contributions and wish her continued success in her future endeavors.

Not content to hang the proclamation on her office wall, Shore had the document reproduced as a full-page ad in
Daily Variety
at a cost of nearly $1,500, which would have covered a week’s worth of paid time slots.