CHAPTER 25
All through the 1970s at the Comedy Store, I’m tight with Mitzi Shore. I genuinely like the woman. And Mitzi loves me right back. She tells young comics who are just coming up, “You want to learn about comedy, watch Paul.” She gives me lots of sets. Whenever I want to work the Store, it’s there for me. I’m one of Mitzi’s regulars.
But she and I have one area of serious disagreement. “Mitzi,” I tell her, “slavery is dead. You got to start paying the comics.”
I don’t even say, “You have to start paying me.” I don’t put it that way, even though I am still hardscrabbling and I could use the money. I put it in terms she can relate to—namely, looking out for her own best interests. If you don’t support these young comics, I tell her, you will have a rebellion on your hands.
Mitzi is stubborn about it. No way, she says. She’s got this idea in her head that we are all some big comedy commune, and the Store provides a service: a place for comics to work out their routines. I think somewhere in her mind Mitzi be-lieves the comics should be paying her for the privilege of time in front of a microphone.
On most nights, Mitzi perches like a hawk on the cashier’s chair at the entrance of the Store, a tiny, thin, pale woman with straggly black hair. She dispenses her trademark gifts of cigarettes and bubble gum. She’s effusive with support and encouragement. She loves mothering the comics. Half of them do dead-on impressions of Mitzi’s nasal voice.
She gives love, but that’s it. She refuses to toss even a small coin into the begging bowls of the performers who are filling her club with paying customers.
Make that “clubs,” plural. Mitzi has built the Store into an empire. She’s got a Comedy Store West, located near UCLA in Westwood, and one in San Diego. I’m seeing all this prosperity and success, and I’m thinking, this ain’t right. How much money are we making for this woman, working for free?
It’s a thing we comics talk about among ourselves, trying to total up the money coming in and the money going out. The door charge back then is $4.50. And the Store is packing them in—fifty to a hundred in the Original Room, a couple hundred in the Main Room. That’s a thousand-plus per night just on door fees, never mind the drink tabs.
What would it take to pay the comics? There are maybe a hundred or a hundred fifty regulars who work the Store at least once a month. Twelve sets a night in the Original Room. If they rotate to all the rooms, there can be three or four dozen comedians working every night. Say Mitzi paid a bare-bones minimum of $5 for a set. She’s still clearing a thousand dollars every night on the cover charges alone.
“Mitzi, give them something,” I tell her over and over. “Give them five dollars a set.”
She folds her arms across her chest and digs in her heels. No way.
I argue with her. I know how messy the beef will get if it goes public. “Let’s settle this whole thing among ourselves, in the house,” I say. “Nobody goes to the press, no big blowups. If this shit ever gets out on the street, we’ll never get over it.”
“No, Paul,” Mitzi says. “That’s not the way it works.” That is her main line that she repeats again and again. That’s not the way it works.
“Well, it ain’t working this way, either. You are going to have a comic riot on your hands. There will be comedians splattered all over Sunset Strip. Their blood will be on your hands.”
Mitzi reminds me of a rich woman who is getting alimony from her ex. She doesn’t need it, but she’s like a she-bear going after it. Her only reason for doing it is because she can.
In those days, comics call up the Store every evening to find out if they are scheduled that night. It’s hard on the nerves. The performers are like court jesters, waiting on the favors of a queen.
I talk to the comics. Back then, people like Gary Shandling, Robin Williams, Michael Keaton, David Letterman, Johnny Dark, Elayne Boosler, and Jay Leno are Store regulars. I know that things are coming to a head, so I go back to Mitzi about it. I keep the tone light, but I hock her constantly. At first, she doesn’t budge. When she does, she just makes things worse.
In 1977, Mitzi opens the big Main Room with professional Vegas-style comics, her ex-husband Sammy’s people, Jackie Mason, Shelley Berman, and Mort Sahl, those types. Mitzi wants the Main Room to be a nightclub, like a casino lounge, so she pays them. But the Vegas comics would much rather work Vegas. So in fall 1978, Mitzi books the Main Room with the most popular of her regulars. Letterman and Leno both pack them in, filling the three-hundred-seat space.
Mitzi doesn’t pay them a dime. She’s not used to paying the young crop of comics who she has nurtured and work-shopped. Just because they’re booked in the Main Room, she doesn’t see why she should change her ways.
That’s it, I figure. That’s where we draw the line. I reach out to the other comics. I go to everybody. “Shelley Berman works the Main Room,” I say, “and he draws half crowds, but he gets all the money from the door. Then Dave or Jay come in and pack the place, and they get nothing? What kind of shit is that?”
I tell Mitzi that the rebellion I warned her about has arrived. Leno and Letterman are furious. Mitzi backs down. Okay, she says, anyone in the Main Room gets a share of the door. But the cat has been let out of the bag. We’re calling ourselves Comedians for Compensation now, and we turn down Mitzi’s compromise. Just like I warned her, once the beef gets out on the street, it turns ugly.
In March 1979, I help organize a meeting, getting a hundred angry comics together in one room. The result is chaos, like a clown convention. Everybody yells at once. I wonder if this is going to work. Comics cooperating? A disunion union?
Miraculously, we get our shit together. We bring in a figurehead white boy, Tom Dreesen, a comic and a former union guy, to be the public face of the strike. We organize picket lines, carrying signs that read THE YUK STOPS HERE and NO MONEY AIN’T FUNNY.
Richard supports the strike and even comes out with me to the picket line. Jimmie Walker, a former Store regular and a huge star from his show Good Times, backs us up, too. Garry Shandling starts out with us but eventually crosses the picket line to perform after Mitzi offers $25 a set for weekends only. And Howie Mandel never honors the strike at all.
“You’re working, so what do you care about this?” Howie asks me one night as I’m on the picket line.
“I care because it’s about us,” I say. “The comics.” He stares at me blankly. It’s like trying to explain slavery to a white man. He gets it, but not really. Howie walks past me into the Store. I channel Miss Amerae and level a silent curse at him, wishing that all his hair will fall out and he’ll wind up hosting a stupid game show.
It is Jay Leno who finally turns the tide. I am out on the picket line every night that spring, mostly alongside my main man Detroit Johnny Witherspoon, who before the strike acts as the emcee for the Store. The two of us are there when one of the strikebreakers pulls his car into the driveway of the Store’s parking lot. Blocked by the picket line, the scab bulls his car forward, and Leno does a pratfall backward. I can tell Jay is taking a fake showbiz flop, but it looks bad enough, and people freak.
Mitzi is at her usual post, watching the picket line from her big bay window in the Store. I don’t know if she sees Leno fall down, but she finally caves. She agrees to pay all comics who appear at the Store $25 per set.
The strike ends, and most us go back to work, but the bad blood still flows. Mitzi feels betrayed. She freezes out some of the most active strikers. I get a pass because I tried to talk to her about it before the walk-out went down. She admits me back into her good graces. She’s Mitzi the Mom again.
But not everybody feels the love. A comic named Steve Lubetkin thinks Mitzi has blackballed him. He’s not getting sets. He goes into a funk. He climbs up to the roof of the Continental Hyatt, right next door to the Store, and jumps off, landing on the ramp to the club’s parking lot after a fourteen-floor fall. His suicide note reads, “My name is Steve Lubetkin. I used to work at the Comedy Store.”
I know Steve. I don’t believe his suicide has anything to do with the Store. He is always on the edge. If it isn’t the strike that sends him over, then it’s something else.
The night he jumps, I’m at the Roxy, doing a show. I head to the Store afterward. They tell me a comic jumped, but they get the name wrong, another Steve, a guy I know just got a nose job.
“Are you sure?” I say. “A guy who just got a nose job won’t mess it up by jumping off a building.” I was right. It was the wrong Steve.