Lucking Out - James Wolcott [30]
What had prompted Pauline’s call? She had read and enjoyed a piece I had published in the Voice about stand-up comics, a reported essay that had me posting myself night after night to the Improv, a comedy showcase located on a stretch of Forty-fourth Street in Times Square where one tended to pick up the pace just in case it became necessary to race for survival. The hostess at the Improv was Elayne Boosler, who also performed and would make a high mid-level name for herself later, a bright presence with a non-demeaning approach to self-deprecation (as opposed to Joan Rivers’s militant ugly-duckling persona that converts Jewish masochism into an assault weapon). If anything, she tended to err on the side of “vivacious,” more Cosmo Girl than cutting edge. The regular comics—nearly all of them men—were a mixed bag of promising minor leaguers trying to nail together a tight set that might win them a spot on Dick Cavett, Merv Griffin, or (the heavenly blue light at the top of the ladder) Johnny Carson, along with more experienced pros who had been around long enough to pick up a fine bouquet of rancor. It was the lull before the waterfall roar of Saturday Night Live’s arrival on NBC, a paradigm shifter that would upend the dues-paying pecking order of stand-up comedy, launching a new battery of clowns—Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, later Eddie Murphy and Bill Murray—whose success bypassed the club circuit and the Vegas strip and didn’t require even the cool nod of Carson’s papal blessing for induction into the golden ring.
(Not long after SNL had altered the gravitational field, I interviewed a veteran comic named Milt Kamen, well-known at the time for doing absurdly detailed plot summaries of the latest movies on Merv and The Mike Douglas Show. After a few cordialities, he spat fire through the phone at how fucking unfair it was that these fucking sketch artists who simply read off of fucking cue cards and never knew what it was to play shitholes and learn their fucking craft got treated like rock stars while older comics got the bum’s rush, a rant that went on so long that he seemed to forget there was somebody listening on the other end of the line, finally braking to say, “But what the hell, to each his own,” which made us both laugh. A few weeks later, Kamen died of a heart attack in Beverly Hills.)
For this same Voice piece I also interviewed Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, then co-starring on Broadway in Good Evening (the show where Moore hopped out as a one-legged actor auditioning for the role of Tarzan). We met in Tuesday Weld’s apartment in the Astoria, an interview that I dragged out so long through nerves and inexperience that when I said, “Well, that’s all I got,” Cook snorted, “That’s all you’ve got?” indicating how tapped dry they were after having so much of their time taken hostage. I left the Astoria mortified, vowing to be less of a yammerer in the future, one of those quick-dissolving vows forgotten as soon as the next round of journalistic stage fright hit.
“And I see that you’re also not a big fan of Marcel Marceau,” Pauline said, his Everyman school of mime being something I had made fun of, like watching Mickey Mouse put on an existential show. She invited me to a screening of a movie whose name has been erased from memory, but I wasn’t invited afterward to join her and the others for whatever they were doing, and I returned to the apartment feeling that we hadn’t quite clicked and it was my unspecified fault. Perhaps I was dressed poorly, a potato to be thrown back into the pile. (Though Pauline was no snob about clothes or social class—one profile of her from the seventies quoted an unnamed publicist who said that Pauline had once shown up at a New York event wearing a dress