Philip Berroll

By P.H.I.Berroll
When Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency, I was a college sophomore. His years in office overlapped most of my adolescence. Perhaps that was the reason — beyond his conduct while in the White House — that I hated him as I have not hated any other President, even Ronald Reagan, before or since. Most teenagers have a degree of hostility toward their fathers, and the President is the ultimate patriarch, Big Daddy to the nation. Certainly Nixon himself embraced that concept when he declared in 1972 that “the average American is like the child in the family.”

But then, Nixon always provoked strong feelings. The term “Nixon-haters” enjoyed wide circulation, while I cannot recall seeing “Johnson-haters,” “Carter-haters,” etc. in print. And while few outside his immediate family could be said to love him, those who defended him did so with undying passion, up to and beyond the end of his disgraced presidency. (Just consider Bob Dole, not exactly known as a Sensitive Guy, breaking into tears while speaking at Nixon’s funeral.)

And this is why anyone expecting Oliver Stone’s film Nixon to be a straightforward recitation of historical events was bound to be disappointed. Any treatment other than a no-frills documentary would have to include an emotional component. Any filmmaker who lived through Nixon’s presidency would find it difficult to keep his own personal feelings out of the film — particularly Stone, who has become famous (or notorious) for grafting his own obsessions onto his subject matter.

And it’s not surprising that Nixon has provoked strong – and often negative – reactions across the political spectrum. On the right, George Will has compared Stone to Leni Riefenstahl; the centrist Richard Reeves has denounced the movie as “pretty shabby stuff…the man who made [it] seems to have tunnel vision.” And the left? I have a friend, a veteran of SDS and the 1968 Columbia strike, who refuses to see the film. It has nothing to do with his feelings about Nixon – he just has no respect for anything Stone has to say on the subject.

There is, undeniably, something in Nixon to offend everyone — too harsh for his defenders, too “understanding” for his attackers. And I doubt that Stone would want it any other way; he has always operated on a visceral level, without apology. But too many critics have been unable or unwilling to consider the film on those grounds. They have, instead, couched the discussion of Nixon in terms of accuracy, condemning Stone for allegedly rewriting or fabricating history. Such attacks were to be expected after Stone attempted such a rewrite in JFK (1990). It’s not surprising that he would be held to a higher standard than other filmmakers when dealing with historical events. As with Nixon himself, his enemies have their reasons, and they are legitimate.

But that doesn’t mean that their objections are entirely fair. As John Dean, one of several Watergate figures who served as a consultant to the film, said in an interview: “(W)hen people see Schindler’s List (or) Apollo 13, they don’t ask these questions.” Or, one might add, when they see Danny DeVito’s Hoffa or Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. It all seems to depend on the subject matter, or the director’s reputation.

Certainly, Nixon has plenty of distortions, inaccuracies, and what David Letterman used to call “writer’s embellishments.” Stone implies that Nixon (Anthony Hopkins) was connected to the Bay of Pigs invasion; there is no evidence of this. Stone isn’t content to repeat the allegation that J. Edgar Hoover was gay; he shows Hoover (Bob Hoskins, about twenty years too young for the part) provoking boyfriend Clyde Tolson by flirting with a cute Latino houseboy. And while I am no fan of Henry Kissinger, was it really fair to have Paul Sorvino play him as a devious, amoral bootlicker with no redeeming qualities? (At the other extreme, the recent cable-TV movie Kissinger and Nixon depicted him as a sensitive peacemaker — and Nixon as a bloodthirsty, football-obsessed buffoon whose opening line is “Where’s my Jewboy?”)

But Stone has not claimed to present the verbatim historical record; he wants to convey the emotional truth of Nixon and those around him. Of course we have no way of knowing what Nixon and his wife said to each other when they were alone; but the exchanges between Hopkins and Joan Allen’s bitter, defeated Pat Nixon jibe with everything we know about their troubled relationship. And he also, at times brilliantly, shows the connection between Nixon’s twisted psyche and the larger currents of the society in which he lived.

Nixon ran for office eight times; he won all but twice. Obviously, this was not because of his wit, charm, or good looks, or simply because a majority of the voters agreed with his specific policy positions — or through a combination of good timing and slick p.r., as many liberals would like to believe. Nixon’s genius was in his ability to plug into the darkest emotions of his audience — the fears and hatreds which (try as he might to suppress them) he felt as deeply as they. And those feelings, as Stone shows us, were rooted in Nixon’s Southern California childhood.

By all accounts, Nixon’s early years were grim. His beloved older brother, Harold, died of tuberculosis, as did a younger sibling, Arthur; many observers believed he felt guilty for having survived. Nixon’s father was a humorless, bigoted petty tyrant. His mother, Hannah, was famously described by her son as “a saint.” But it was a saintliness like that of Lady Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited — an implacable self-righteousness, guaranteed to drive her family crazy. In the film, Hannah (Mary Steenburgen) sets impossible standards for her son; she reacts with pleasure when young Richard pledges to be “your humble dog.” (In reality, Nixon said this in a letter to his grandmother, but we get the point.) Both parents preach a gospel of hard work and absolute self-reliance, where nothing is to be expected from other people — what you have, you earn for yourself. “Strength in this world,” says Hannah when Harold dies. “Happiness in the next.”

Such a worldview lends itself all too easily to intolerance and mean-spiritedness toward those who do not live by the same standards. Nixon often described his family as poor, but more accurately, they were lower middle-class — the kind of people whom historians and liberals tend to downplay, or forget completely. They were not the noble, compassionate poor of The Grapes of Wrath; like many Californians, they would have disdained Steinbeck’s Okies as lazy parasites who had failed because they had loose morals or didn’t work hard enough. These were the Americans who never accepted the New Deal, preferring a crude Social Darwinism to Franklin Roosevelt’s vision of a mutually supportive American community.

Though Nixon’s own views became more refined during his years in Washington, he never forgot his roots, and his people knew it. “People vote not out of love, but fear,” he says in the film. The politics of fear, and resentment, was always the key to his appeal — resentment of the despised Other, be it those on the bottom of the economic ladder or the liberals and intellectuals who championed them. (Nixon never went after minorities, but he didn’t have to; his audiences knew that the people he attacked were often members or allies of those groups.)

It was no great stretch for Nixon to brand many of his opponents as “un-American.” On a certain level, he truly believed this. They were in opposition to the established order, which provoked his authoritarian streak. They were often critical of the fairness of American capitalism, and such criticism was anathema to him. Rich liberals, reporters who seemed to share their attitudes, the Eastern Establishment (“They don’t trust us… because we speak for the American people”), the “spoiled rotten” college protesters who need “a good old-fashioned trip to my Ohio father’s woodshed” — all were linked in Nixon’s passionate hatred. He achieved success by channeling and exploiting that hatred. But when he gave it free rein, as he acknowledged in his final speech to his White House staff, it eventually destroyed him.

There are moments in the film when Stone gets off this track. At times he indulges in simplistic Freudianism (Kissinger: “Can you imagine what this man might have been had he ever been loved?”). At others, he attempts to show Nixon as a schlemiel at the mercy of more powerful players — Hoover, the Mafia, the CIA, etc. In a sense, he was, but of forces less vague, and less monstrous, than Stone suggests.

Stone gives us silly, invented sequences where Nixon visits a sinister cabal of Texas billionaires (led by “J.R.” himself, Larry Hagman), who ply him with liquor and loose women to get him to do their bidding. But I wish he had depicted the actual meeting of a group of Southern California businessmen in 1946. These men operated quite openly, and they respected the American system of government; but they hated the New Deal, unions, and any other restrictions on their right to make a buck. They chose a young lawyer and Navy veteran to do their bidding. Richard Nixon did so, with no reluctance, by smearing and demonizing his opponent. And the die was cast, as inexorably as for Macbeth or Richard III.

That first campaign, and the decade of failure and frustration that preceded it, are worthy of a film in themselves (Young Mr. Nixon?). But Stone did not intend his film to be the last word on its subject — at the end of Nixon, we are told that of the 4,000 Watergate tapes, only 60 have been made available to the public. This film is a useful starting point, but there is a great deal more to learn about this man, and what he represented.

In one scene, Howard Hunt (Ed Harris) calls Nixon “the darkness reaching out for the darkness.” That the line is another of Stone’s inventions is ultimately beside the point; what matters is the essential truth of the comment. And the darkness did not die with Nixon. Bush and Dole, Gingrich and Buchanan – more than a few of his successors and acolytes successfully exploited it. We ignore this at our peril.

Originally written for Tikkun magazine, 1995.

Download PDF

By P.H.I.Berroll
Sitting in his neatly furnished Upper West Side apartment, Gary Winick does not seem like a man whom one would expect to find in the sleazy, violent world of crack addicts and their suppliers. But for several years, he was immersed in that world.

Winick, 34, is the director of Sweet Nothing, a raw, grim, uncompromising drama about drug abuse as seen from the addict’s point of view. The film chronicles the crack-fueled tragedy of a working-class Bronxite who loses his job, neglects his family, and steadily degrades himself in the single-minded pursuit of his next fix. It opens March 27 at Film Forum on West Houston Street for a limited run.

Any film about addiction is also about obsession. The same word aptly describes Winick’s experience in making this movie. He speaks of his four-year struggle — first to finish Sweet Nothing, then to get it released — with a mixture of pride and burned-out weariness. “I have called this experience, at times, the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life,” says Winick, a thin, shag-haired man who resembles the actor Treat Williams. “But it has profoundly affected me.”

Winick began his career on a more conventional path. A native New Yorker (Winick’s father is co-partner in a midtown law firm), he graduated from Tufts University in Boston in 1984, then earned a graduate degree in film at the University of Texas at Austin. He spent three years at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, collaborating on a short film with fellow student Carl Franklin (One False Move, Devil in a Blue Dress) and making two no-budget thrillers of his own. Neither was released to theaters, but both made money on the foreign and videocassette markets.

But Winick’s experience on the second film — Out of the Rain (1990), a revenge melodrama which starred a then-unknown Bridget Fonda — left him soured on the industry, and unsure of his place in it.

“That’s my disaster,” Winick says bluntly. “I was influenced a lot by agents, and I didn’t cast the best people (except for Ms. Fonda) for the roles, but the people they wanted. I knew from the first day that I had a bad movie, but I thought I could finesse it somehow — that this is what you do in Hollywood in order to get to the next level. I made that mistake, and I suffered dearly.”

So Winick returned to his native New York, vowing, “I wouldn’t make another film until I found something that I just had to make.” He spent several months directing stage productions at the Julliard theater school. Then a friend who managed an apartment complex in the Bronx told him of a discovery: a woman and her children had been evicted from an apartment, leaving behind a diary kept by the woman’s estranged husband. In clear, unsparing prose, the journal recounted the husband’s losing battle with crack.

“It was fascinating,” says Winick. He tracked the man down, obtained his consent to use the diary, and got him a job and temporary housing. Winick continued to sponsor him for the next eight months, even though “he just kept screwing up.”

Winick hired a scriptwriter, Lee Drysdale, to develop a screenplay. (Much of the film’s voiceover narration is based on entries in the diary.) The two men did extensive research, plunging into the world of addicts, dealers, and narcotics cops. For a man of Winick’s upper-middle class background, it was like traveling to Mars, or Bosnia.

“I have footage of unbelievable stuff, going into crack houses,” says Winick. “The police hooked us up with a pimp and a prostitute who worked underneath the Terminal Market, who were their informers — they’re actually in the film. And I would sit around with recovering addicts at the Phoenix House (drug-treatment center), who’d talk about dealers who would rip an addict’s nipple off with a pair of pliers if he had no money.”

Meanwhile, Winick was continuing to help the diary writer, to whom he refers only by the man’s nickname, “Angel.” This brought him no end of grief. “I was enabling him, but I wanted to get him to stop. I’d give him money, but then I’d have to go shopping with him, because I didn’t want him to spend it on drugs. One time, he stole from his neighbor, and his wife calls me, hysterical, crying… I had to come up at two in the morning to pay the neighbor, who was threatening to beat the guy’s kids up.”

Eventually, Winick was able to get Angel into a drug treatment program. But his own struggles continued. Just before he was to begin shooting in November 1992, his lead actor breached his contract “to do a bigger movie.” He hired a second actor — who also walked. “It was like Kim Basinger in Boxing Helena,” says Winick. “I wanted to sue them, probably could have made some money. But my agent told me, ‘At this point in your career, it’s not what you do.'”

Instead, Winick hired Michael Imperioli, best known as the teenage waiter gunned down by Joe Pesci in GoodFellas. Winick wound up feeling that Imperioli should have been his first choice. “Michael was the best actor I found in New York,” he says, adding that he could see them having a director-star relationship like that of Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni: “He’s my Marcello.” As Imperioli’s wife, Winick cast Mira Sorvino, before her role in Mighty Aphrodite had brought her acclaim.

Unfortunately, both of Winick’s earlier male leads had been part of a package — several film companies had promised him money only if those actors were in the cast, he says, “because a ‘name’ helps video sales.” When the actors departed, so did the backers. Winick had to get financial help from his family, as did his executive producer, Mark Ross. “There were times when it seemed from my family’s perspective,” he acknowledges, “that I was just wasting my life, and this was never going to get done.”

But he finally did complete Sweet Nothing, for less than $500,000. Among other cost-cutting measures, he cast members of Imperioli’s and Sorvino’s families in the film, as well as several recovering addicts from Phoenix House. Post-production was expensive — Winick hired the distinguished film editor Bill Pankow (Scarface, The Untouchables) to cut the film — but the total cost was still under $1 million, a bargain by Hollywood standards.

Then came another year of pain.

Winick, Ross, and co-producer Rick Bowman took the film on the festival circuit from the Hamptons to Seattle, showing it to movie companies large and small. “Every distributor saw it,” says Winick, “and wouldn’t buy the film. Everyone gave us the same answer: ‘You made a great film. Once they’re in the theater, they’ll stay… but we can’t get them in the theater.'” Even officials at Film Forum, who loved the movie, had their caveats. “It deals with what is an unsavory topic to a lot of people,” says press spokesman Michael Maggiore, “and it doesn’t wallow in sentimentality. It’s different from any addiction film we’ve seen.”

Winick agrees — and he’s seen them all, from The Man with the Golden Arm to Drugstore Cowboy. Although he admires those films, he feels that Sweet Nothing is different, both in its utter lack of embellishment and it’s addict’s-eye-view of the situation.

The film depicts the horror of substance abuse through small, snapshot-like details rather than Hollywood sturm und drang. There is one exception, a sequence in which a dealer suspects a colleague of stealing from him and orders Imperioli to chop off the man’s fingers. But for Winick, the most affecting scene is more low-key: when Imperioli waits to meet another dealer for whom he holds a large package of crack. He wants to unload the package both to settle a debt and to get the drug out of his life. But the dealer isn’t coming until 7 o’clock, and the addict is an hour and a half early. Can he hold out without sampling the product?

“So he puts the crack on the table,” says Winick, “and sits down, and sits there sucking lollipops. And the scene of just him watching a minute go by, or two minutes go by, to me is one of the best depictions of addiction — when they say ‘one day at a time,’ it’s more like one minute at a time. This is a guy for whom every minute is the most painful minute of his life.”

Winick has strong opinions about the current debate over American drug laws. While he opposes legalizing aggression-fueling drugs like crack and cocaine — “You’ll have people killing themselves, and killing others” — he is most fervent about the need for more money for treatment programs. “When I got Angel into Phoenix House,” he says, “if I hadn’t pulled some strings, he would have been waiting. And here’s a guy who’s not hitting bottom on Park Avenue, but on the streets, and he’s got to steal to get high, as opposed to just writing a check. So he’s a lot more dangerous. And he was wait-listed.”

But Winick is primarily an artist, not an advocate. He hopes the Film Forum run will finally bring Sweet Nothing a distributor. And if Sorvino wins an Oscar for her Mighty Aphrodite role — Sweet Nothing opens two days after the Academy Awards ceremony — it could bring his film some much-needed publicity.

Whatever happens, he is already looking ahead to his next film, a comedy-drama — loosely based on his own experiences — about coming of age in the disco-polyester era of the late ’70s. Once again, he would be happy to get financing from one of the majors; once again, he is prepared to do without it. “If the studio won’t allow me to have my voice,” he says, “I’ve learned one thing: I can’t make a good film unless it’s personal to me.”

Still, despite all his bucking of the system to make Sweet Nothing, Winick is something of a traditionalist at heart. He has trouble relating to independent films “where I don’t know what the character wants, and I don’t feel anything. You’ve got to think that people will hopefully get tired of seeing that kind of thing over and over again. But I don’t think they will ever get tired of seeing a love story, or a story about greed, or jealousy, or something that’s basically driven by emotion.”

Note: Winick went on to direct such films as The Tic Code, 13 Going on 30, Tadpole and Charlotte’s Web before his untimely death in 2011.

Originally published in Manhattan Spirit weekly newspaper, 1996 .

Download PDF

By P.H.I.Berroll

Diane Cypkin’s Brighton Beach apartment is awash in memories, from the Yiddish and English playbills on her walls to her carefully maintained albums of photos and documents. Over the years, Cypkin has given a good deal of time and energy to the preservation of the past – that of her family, and of her people – and to bringing it alive for newer generations.

Cypkin, 49, is a professor of literature and communications (“I’m in the talk area,” she jokes) at the Westchester campus of Pace University. She is also a dramatic and musical actress who has worked in both the Yiddish and English-language theatre. And this coming Sunday, she will be delivering a special performance: a concert of songs written by her father, Abraham Cypkin, while he was living under the Nazis in the ghetto of the Lithuanian city of Kovno.

The concert will take place at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., in conjunction with the opening of the museum’s new exhibit, “Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto.” The exhibit, which is scheduled to run for two years, is a collection of artifacts, survivor testimony, and archival material. The largest archive was donated by Tel Aviv resident Abraham Tory, who served as president of the ghetto’s Jewish Council. Also in the exhibit are photographs taken by another survivor, George Kaddish.

“When I heard about (the exhibit),” says Cypkin, “I thought, ‘wow!’” But her excitement was tempered by the thought that the program was missing a key element. “It’s true that pictures say a lot, but they’re not alive,” she says. “A picture is still. Music is the soul, it speaks.

“And so I immediately wrote a letter and said, ‘Have you considered incorporating music in the exhibit?’ My letter got to Brett Werb, who’s their musicologist – and he knew my father’s name, because he’d already been doing research into the music that was written in the Kovno ghetto. And I really didn’t have to talk him into (having the concert), because he also felt that music should have a place.”

Cypkin will be accompanied on synthesizer by Ruby Sosnowicz, a Holocaust survivor from Warsaw. “He’s like a one-man orchestra,” says Cypkin. “The synthesizer has the ability to be any instrument – (in this case) the balalaika and the concertina.” Also on the program is Toshi Reagon (daughter of noted gospel singer Bernice Johnson Reagon), performing her own freedom-themed songs. Museum spokeswoman Shana Penn says that while the museum has occasionally featured musical programs in the past, music such as Cypkin’s is “unusual … (but) anything preserved from Kovno is quite unusual.”

The story behind the concert begins in the late 1930s, when Abraham Cypkin and his wife, Etta, were living in Kovno, where Abraham owned a factory that produced children’s clothing. The first disruption in their lives was the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1940, which resulted in the Soviet invasion of Lithuania. (“I once asked them,” says Diane Cypkin, “’What does it sound like when an army invades?’ They told me, “’When the Russians came in, they were singing.’”) As a capitalist, the elder Cypkin could have been sent to Siberia. But he concealed his identity – “and his workers never told on him,” says his daughter. “They liked him.”

But when Hitler broke the agreement and invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941, the Cypkins – and the rest of Kovno’s 30,000 Jews – were less fortunate. The Germans herded them into Slobodka, a slum neighborhood, then reduced their numbers through an “action” at the end of October. The Jews were ordered to appear in a public plaza, from which as many as 10,000 – mostly women, children, and the elderly – were taken to their deaths. Diane Cypkin believes that her mother and brother Louis, then an infant, survived because “she was surrounded by my father, and all her brothers, who were allowed to live because they could work. And so [the Germans] probably didn’t see her.”

Etta Cypkin and her son spent the next few years hiding in their ghetto home. “She was afraid,” says her daughter, “not only of the Germans seeing that she had a little boy, but of other women [who might have informed on her].” Abraham, meanwhile, became head of work detail for the Jews, leading various slave labor “brigades” – in part because he spoke fluent German (among numerous other languages), which impressed the Nazi overlords.

It was while on his daily rounds that Abraham was inspired to compose his lyrics. “He would write them,” says his daughter, “then put them to very famous Russian melodies – famous either just before the war, or concurrent with it. They are marches and waltzes, and exceptionally melodic.”

He shared the songs with his neighbors, who “sang them as they were going to work,” she says, “or while working, to uplift their spirits. Not while a German was standing over them… but to themselves.”

It is easy to see why the songs became popular with the Cypkins’ neighbors: rather than wallowing in despair, they express a defiant spirit of hope for the future. For example, Tsores und Layd (“Pain and Sorrow”), set to the tune of a popular Russian revolutionary song, has a somber tone, but closes on a note of determination:

Mortal, soft hands are kneading hard clay.
Suffering shapes these innocent lives.
Enough of this hell – we want to go home.
Our sorrows pierce us like knives…

Hold on, be strong, eternal Jew.
Keep faith and hope for tomorrow.
Some day your slavery will come to an end,
And with it, your sorrow.
(Translated from Yiddish by Rosaline Schwartz)

Other songs are actually humorous, such as Finsternish (“Darkness”), which is set to a more Yiddish-sounding melody — Diane Cypkin believes that her father took it from one of the American Yiddish performers, like Molly Picon, who frequently came to Kovno before the war. The song, she says, depicts a man coming home at night after a German-imposed blackout: “You could blunder into the wrong apartment… and the wrong bed. And it’s nice if it’s a pretty girl that ends up next to you – but he wakes up and sees it’s an old lady.”

Another song, Maystes, (“The Meat and Poultry House”) – set to the theme of the first Russian sound film, The Happy Boys – is about workers assigned to the local poultry storehouse, from which they would smuggle pieces of fowl back into the ghetto:

Listen, my children! Pluck those fowl with pleasure,
Although your hearts are faint.
I have taken your measure,
And know that no one here is a saint…

So into the ghetto ducks and geese flew.
Chickens joining the pack.
Giving up meat and fat – a kilo or two.
And if it’s three, who can object to that?
(Translated from Yiddish by Rosaline Schwartz)

Meanwhile, outside the ghetto walls, the tide of the war was turning – which brought a new threat to the Cypkins’ survival. Learning that the Nazis planned to destroy the ghetto and send the residents to Dachau and other death camps, the family built a bunker under a woodshed near their house, and moved there along with several friends in the summer of 1944. “They were down there for thirty days,” says Diane Cypkin. “They had poison … if they had been found, they would have killed themselves.”

Finally, in August, Etta Cypkin decided to venture above ground. “It’s hard to know if a war is over – it’s not like anybody blows a whistle,” says her daughter. “But it was very quiet, so my mother went outside, and she saw all the destruction around her. And she saw a soldier. Because she had been underground for so long, her eyes were affected, and she couldn’t see the (shade) of his green uniform — the Russians and the Germans both wore green, but slightly different. And he started to speak to her in Russian. And she knew that they were liberated.”

The family went west to Freiman, an American-administered displaced persons camp in Munich, where they remained for five years. It was there that Abraham Cypkin met Shimon Kaczerginski, an American-based musicologist, who had come to Europe after the war to collect songs for an anthology, Lider Fun di Getos und Lagern (Songs of the Ghettos and Concentration Camps). Kaczerginski and a colleague transcribed Abraham’s songs; they are included in the anthology, which was published, in Yiddish, in America.

In 1949, American relatives helped the Cypkins (including Diane, then seven months old) emigrate to the U.S. It was on the voyage across the Atlantic that Abraham Cypkin composed one last set of lyrics, Mein Haym (“My Home”). “It’s set to a very famous Russian waltz,” says his daughter. “He writes about how he’ll never see his home again, and about the things he remembers of his home – Shabbos, his mother, his father – that are nevermore.”

The Cypkins settled in Brighton Beach, where Diane still lives with her mother. Abraham Cypkin, who stopped writing and resumed his career in the garment business, died in 1979.

But his songs live on through his daughter. Diane has previously performed them in concert; she also made a previous trip to the Holocaust Museum this past September to record several of them on a compact disc, which is scheduled to be released in February.

“It’s not just to honor him,” she says. “The reason his songs were so well liked is they reflected the feelings of many – many who don’t have anyone to say Kaddish for them, or to remember them. He takes a whole ocean of people and their feelings with him. When you listen to his songs, even if you don’t understand the words, you get the feeling of what it’s all about.”

Originally published in Jewish Week weekly newspaper, 1997.

Download PDF

“It’s hard to die.

But not as hard as comedy.”

– attributed to British actor Edmund Gwenn, on his deathbed

 

By P.H.I.Berroll
THERE ISN’T MUCH TO DISTINGUISH THE COMIC STRIP FROM THE other shops, bars, and restaurants on the block, Second Avenue between 81st and 82nd Streets on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. A long maroon canopy bearing the club’s name protrudes onto the sidewalk; that’s it. Look into the small, dark window and you can make out the end of a bar, no different from a dozen others in the neighborhood. Just another cramped watering hole, you assume, for the local yuppie contingent. That is, unless you’ve noticed a sandwich-board sign under the canopy – in the shape of a figure resembling Alfred E. Neuman, with tinted glasses –announcing that this is “NEW YORK’S TOP COMEDY CLUB.”

Scott Blakeman walks into the place at about 8:30 on a chilly Wednesday night in November – as he has done on many such evenings, in many such buildings, for the better part of two and a half decades. Blakeman is in his late forties, but his trim frame, curly brown hair, and cherubic features make him look much younger. He says a quick hello to the husky young bartender, and to Marty, who seats the guests – “maitre d'” is too classy a term for this venue. On weekends, Marty seats no one without a reservation; during the week, he doesn’t bother, for there is no danger of a sellout.

Blakeman strides toward the back of the room. On the wall opposite the bar is a long display of photographs; some of these are fairly recent, some go back to the Seventies. They are head shots, the flattering photos used by show-business hopefuls to attract attention and from there, work. A few of the men and women in the shots have worked as actors, but primarily, if not exclusively, they are professional comedians – in industry shorthand, comics.

The pictures aren’t grouped in any particular order; not alphabetical, not chronological. Many of them are unrecognizable to anyone except comedy-business insiders, and they, too, might have trouble with some of the older, faded faces. But there are others whom even a civilian can easily place.

There’s Eddie Murphy, flashing his wicked grin – Murphy, who first hit “The Strip” as a teenager a few years after its 1976 opening, posing with club co-owner Bob Wachs, who later became his manager. Murphy’s is one of the few color photos on the wall; so is that of his former “Saturday Night Live” colleague, Joe Piscopo. There’s a whole crowd from different eras of “SNL”: Chris Rock, Ellen Cleghorne, Adam Sandler, Sarah Silverman, Jim Breuer. The young Jerry Seinfeld, a curly-haired, earnest-looking Jewish boy. Very old photos of Robert Klein, with hippie-length tresses, and Rodney Dangerfield, looking positively dapper. Ray Romano – he of the hit CBS sitcom, “Everybody Loves Raymond” – and Lisa Ann Walter and Larry Miller, co-stars of ABC’s “Life’s Work,” which was resoundingly not a hit.

Famous or obscure, male or female, black or white, they all have a common status. Even if not famous to a mass audience, they are the upper echelon, the success stories. They can put “entertainer” on their tax forms; they no longer have to lie to their parents or their dates about what they do for a living. They are respected. They are professionals.

Blakeman’s photo is up there with them. It’s fairly recent, showing him posed with arms folded and head cocked downward at a jaunty angle.

He isn’t a star, but he has been making a full-time living from comedy – which in this business is saying something – since 1981, when he left his job as a copywriter at Abraham & Straus (“‘Sale, young misses’ jeans, $9.95’ – I wrote that”). He appears regularly at clubs up and down the Eastern seaboard. He’s done commercials, cable TV, a stint hosting “Funny People” (a summer-replacement series on NBC) in 1988. His annual income varies from year to year, but it’s generally in the neighborhood of $30,000.

Now he walks down a short, narrow corridor, through swinging wooden doors, into the main room. It’s a medium-sized space, even darker than the bar. At its center is a small stage, in front of a wall; facing the stage are about fifteen round little tables with tacky, blue-and-white checkered tablecloths. The only lights in the room are the spotlight trained on the stage and the short, fat candles on the tables. The person on stage can see only the tables closest to him – everything else is a blur of sound (or worse, silence) from somewhere in the dark. From the doorway, Blakeman can count the turnout: 18 people, spread evenly around the room. Not great, not awful; slightly above average for midweek in a cold-weather month.

He’s emceeing tonight for this, the second show of the evening. Five comics, doing ten minutes apiece. Blakeman will open the show with ten minutes of his own, then re-appear between each of the other acts. His appearance will be slightly briefer each time.

Blakeman mentally reviews the jokes he plans to use, and in what order, though he will mix it up if necessary. He isn’t nervous – when you’ve done this sort of thing several thousand times, stage fright is not an issue. But there is always some degree of uncertainty. No two audiences are alike, and the nature of the crowd can’t be gauged without hearing how they react to other comics. And Blakeman, as the opening performer, won’t have that opportunity. He is, in effect, serving as the miners’ canary for those who follow him.

From the glass-enclosed booth at the back of the room, the spotlight operator shouts, “Welcome to the world-famous Comic Strip. And now, let’s give a big welcome to the host of tonight’s show – Scaaaahhhhht BLAKEMANNNN!”

He bounds onto the stage. “Thank you. I just got back from Montreal,” he begins. “I was told there were only about 2000 Jewish families in the whole city… Around here, there are that many in my apartment building.” The audience laughs politely.

Blakeman decides not to waste any more jokes before using the “Where you all from?” ploy. It’s a quick way to get the audience into a “fun” mood, and he can usually spin their answers into a joke or two. (A slight variation is “Anybody here from ____?”)

He discovers that the crowd has some variety – a group from South Africa, a married couple in their 50s. But there’s also a bachelor party, which means that the level of taste will be lower than usual. Most likely, the bride-to-be forbade her fiancé from renting a porn film or a stripper. So the boys have come here, their alcohol and testosterone levels still high.

“You guys work together? Where?”

“Morgan Stanley.”

Blakeman nods, quickly turning it over in his mind – Wall Street… finance… “I don’t have any money,” he says, “but I still watch CNBC.” A good laugh from the boys. Now what? Unable to think of a follow-up, he goes back to where-you-from. “So… is everybody here from the city?”

“Queens,” says a man.

“Queens?” What can I do with this?

“Originally from Russia.” Now, that’s promising. “The F train actually goes directly from St. Petersburg to Queens now… What part of Russia?”

“Georgia.”

“Uh huh.” Unlike some comics, Blakeman has a fairly broad knowledge of current events and recent history. “That’s where Shevardnadze is the leader?”

“Yeah.”

He nods. “I don’t have a joke about that. I just know the name.”

Comics, like baseball players, have strengths and weaknesses. Some players are prized for their hitting, others for their defense. Some comics have great timing – every line, even the pauses in between, are perfectly paced, with no hint of awkwardness or fumbling. Blakeman has never developed that skill. What he tries to do, instead, is make his clumsiness work for him. When he hits a dead end, when he can’t come up with a good segue into a new subject, he says so – aiming for a laugh, or at least some sympathy.

“So… uh…” Tourists. First time in New York. Unfamiliar sights… He does a bit about mass transit in New York, how people often make mistakes with the MetroCard transit pass. “Last week I saw this one guy, completely clueless –” He waves one arm in a frantic, spastic motion. “It was me, actually.” A good laugh all around; self-deprecating humor usually works, if you don’t overdo it.

“And every time I’m on the bus, there’s always somebody who gets on, sits in the back, gets on the cell phone… and in the loudest voice humanly possible, they’re like, ‘HI, I’M ON THE BUS.’ ‘I’m on the bus’ – that’s like the least impressive thing you can say in a conversation. Unless it’s ‘Hi, I’m in the sewer’… Or they review personal details. ‘I’M SORRY I DIDN’T CALL YOU. I HAVE INTIMACY ISSUES, I NEVER SEEM TO GET TO A SECOND DATE, THAT’S MY PROBLEM…’ I think if people are going to talk loudly on the cell phone, we should be allowed to listen in, and make comments. ‘You know what? I don’t think he’s gonna call. I’ve been thinking about it, and that’s my feeling. Because you’re kind of annoying.’”

He can feel it now – he’s passed the first hurdle, the one that must be cleared every time: getting them on his side. He can never assume that the audience comes in prepared to laugh. They have to be approached as if each member is a thorough skeptic with an attitude of “You say you’re funny? Prove it.” Now the power balance has shifted – they want him to be funny, enough to cut him slack for the occasional lame joke or botched segue. They like him.

But it’s now time for the rest of the show. Hopefully, there’s a reservoir of good will for Blakeman to draw on when he comes back. “Okay! Now we want to bring up tonight’s first performer. A very funny guy… he comes to us from Canada… been here many times… let’s hear it for…”

The Canadian is big, shaggy, sloppily dressed. He wastes no time engaging the audience. “I had an HIV test – anybody else?” One man raises his hand. “What’s the matter – don’t the rest of you fuck?”

A few titters. “Fuck, it’s like pullin’ teeth with you people.” He takes a long pause, apparently collecting his thoughts, before he resumes: “I got no pubes, I tell you that?” Blakeman frowns. Though he himself rarely does sex jokes, he is hardly a prude, and has no problem with other comics getting raunchy. But there’s a way to talk about it. Like the great Lenny Bruce, mimicking an anxious couple in bed – “Didja come? Didja come good?” Or his personal idol, Klein, recalling life as a horny teenager who “planned, schemed… got nothing.” Do it with insight or subtlety; use a scalpel. The Canadian is employing a bludgeon.

But he goes on, mostly in the same vein. When he’s finished, Blakeman returns, clapping, with forced enthusiasm – “Let’s have a big hand for… Nice show!” – then comes back to the South Africans, with a line he often uses on tourists. “Are you going to the Thanksgiving Day parade?”

“Maybe,” says one of the group.

“Yeah, there are so many parades in this town, any time of the year…” He throws it out to the rest of the crowd. “What’s your favorite parade? Anybody?”

A few people call out, “St. Patrick’s.”

Perfect. “That’s a little different. That’s the one where they ban gay Irish from the parade – but they let IRA terrorists lead it.” A good laugh.

Somebody else shouts, “Puerto Rican Day.” Blakeman nods. “Wonderful parade. You get Jennifer Lopez, Chita Rivera. My parade is Salute to Israel. We get Dr. Ruth… And you know, in the Salute to Israel parade, they banned gay Jews from marching. Which is absurd. If there were no gay Jews, there’d be no musical theatre in this country.” It’s one of his favorite lines – but it only works when the audience gets the reference. This time, there’s barely a murmur.

Blakeman tries again – “There’d be only two people at the Tony Awards, Bernadette Peters and B.D. Wong” – before giving up. He has many such bits, jokes that work best with listeners of sophistication, those with a decent collective memory. It’s why he is known not only as a “clean,” but also a “smart” comic. These days, that is no guarantee of success.

But there’s no time to dwell on failure. “And the politicians love parades. Like our former mayor, Koch – he thinks he still is mayor…” This is one of his “classic” bits, dating back to when Koch actually held office, but it still works. “He used to insult all the ethnic groups in the city… and then go to their parades. Like I remember seeing him at the Puerto Rican Day Parade and he’s going” – he mimics Koch’s high-pitched whine – “’Today, I’m a Puerto Rican.’ And yeah, I always thought he was.” Now he hears a healthy burst of laughter. Still got ‘em.

Then Blakeman introduces a woman – blonde, perky, dressed in head-to-toe black. She’s back from L.A., where she appears on a sitcom about a teenage girl with supernatural powers. It soon becomes evident that she’s on the same page as the Canadian. Jokes about oral sex, orgies, etc.

Blakeman sighs. He can remember when women like Ellen DeGeneres or Brett Butler said what they wanted to say, with no compulsion to be one of the boys. There are still some female comics (that sexist term “comedienne” has been retired) who work that way; but plenty of others are in the style of the blonde. She’s not as raw as some of the women Blakeman has encountered – the one who talked about “my big pussy,” or the one with the thick Boston accent who thrust out her chest and crotch to make a point. But still.

“You know the thing about Latin men – they all say ‘Mami!’ during sex.” A woman in the front laughs, nodding vigorously. “Don’t worry,” says the blonde, “I didn’t sleep with your boyfriend – they all do it.”

Blakeman comes out again, still hoping to control the direction of the show.

“So… Anybody ever been to any singles events?” No response, but a few nervous looks.

“I know – nobody ever admits it… Even people at a singles event won’t admit that’s why they’re there. ‘I never go to these things. I’m not even here right now.’” From a few people, he hears the guilty laughter of recognition.

“About relationships. When you broke up, what are some of the things your friends said to you to make you feel better?” Again, the uneasy silence. “Oh. Nobody here has ever broken up.” A few chuckles, and he plows on. “You know what they tell me? ‘Don’t worry about it, there’s plenty of fish in the sea.’ Oh, I feel relieved now – I’m alone, but there’s always the fish population. What does the availability of fish have to do with getting a date? And with me, the pool is already limited – because shellfish are out of the question.

He’s beginning to sense a shifting of the crowd’s mood. Whatever mellowness they were feeling earlier seems to have dissipated. They’re still laughing, but it has an edge. The tone of the other comics – not just their material, but their bang-bang, in-your-face style – is starting to put a different vibe on the room. He’s seen it before.

The next comic, pudgy and redheaded, comes on stage to announce that he has a new girlfriend – “which means I had to throw out my porno collection. I was without sex for so long, I forgot my masturbation fantasies.” He mentions another woman who put metal studs in her tongue “to enhance oral sex. I don’t know… when you’re getting blown, do you really find yourself saying, ‘Is this all there is?'”

Blakeman has seen enough. Now the show is what it is, and there’s nothing he can do about it. From this point onward, he’ll just be going through the motions. He ducks out to the bar, not to return until just before the end of the man’s set. (There’s a window in the wall next to the spotlight booth through which he can see both the stage and the red ceiling light that flashes when a comic’s time is almost up.)

Comic #4 is tall, swarthy, mustachioed. He has a vaguely threatening air, as if ready to beat up anyone who doesn’t laugh. He makes a stab at topicality with a sympathetic joke about the homeless; but then it’s back to the program. “Fuckin’ is great, man… but you gotta be careful with skinny girls, it’s like breakin’ and enterin’.”

Now Blakeman has only the briefest of between-act comments – “We’ll all go to a coffee shop afterwards.” Several people are preparing to leave, and the atmosphere is both heating up, in anticipation of the last act, and winding down. It’s the point where the waitresses bring out the checks, and Blakeman urges everyone to tip generously – “they really work hard.”

At the absolute minimum, the bill will come to $20 per person. $10 is the cover charge or “admission,” and the customers are required to buy at least two drinks, or a drink and a food order (generally something fried, or of the fast-food Chinese variety). The prices are absurdly inflated – $5 for a domestic beer? – as they would be at a ball park, a theatre, a movie house. It’s the economics of modern entertainment: the owners insist that they have to jack up the prices to retain some small profit after rent, salaries, operating costs, etc. If you were at home drinking a reasonably priced brew, goes the argument, you’d be missing the unique experience of the live show.

Now for the final act. This man is the show’s headliner, the most successful of tonight’s lineup – barely into his thirties, he’s been on “Tonight,” “Conan O’Brien,” a number of cable shows. Short and feisty in the manner of Michael J. Fox, he looks like a teamster on his coffee break, wearing old jeans, a t-shirt and a painter’s cap. His act is a bit more sophisticated than the others, but at this point, it doesn’t matter – his jokes barely register. The edge that Blakeman had sensed earlier has sharpened, as if the alcohol-lubricated crowd is no longer seeking entertainment; at this point, it’s more like provocation.

From the back of the room comes a voice: “Dull!”

“Excuse me?” says Teamster.

It’s one of the South Africans, a woman. “Dull. You’re dull.”

“And you’re an idiot. Don’t get me mad, I’ll come to the trailer park and kick over your home.”

That silences her, but only briefly. A few minutes later, she gives a loud, drawn-out snore.

Teamster glares at her. “Hey, I’m working here. When you’re working, do I come over and knock the dicks out of your mouth?”

This is not an original line, but it cracks up the whole room, including the woman.

And that’s it. When he finishes, Blakeman comes back, barks out his usual spiel – “Let’s have another round of applause for tonight’s performers… you’ve been a great audience… thanks for coming… hope to see you here again soon… g’night.” Then he returns to the bar, where he gulps a ginger ale (he doesn’t drink much of the hard stuff) and waits out the hour or so until the next show.

He tries not to feel depressed – this has been a particularly lousy night, worse than the norm. But when was the last time he had a really good one.

Of course, it’s never been easy. Stand-up is not a profession for weak hearts or thin skins. Not for nothing is the comic’s insider jargon filled with combat metaphors – if you succeed, you’ve “killed,” if you fail, you’ve “bombed,” and every joke ends with a punchline. When starting out, you should not expect to be a star in six months, or six years. Amusing your family is not the same as entertaining a paying crowd of half- (or fully) drunk clubgoers. Jokes that sounded hilarious in front of your mirror or your friends will fall flat. You must be prepared to go on at 2 a.m. for an audience of three or less, or to wait all evening for a potential spot that never materializes. Hecklers will shout insults; club owners will reject you because “I just don’t think you’re funny,” with no elaboration. You are entering a field where success – laughter – must be achieved at half-minute intervals, or you have failed.

But there was a time when there were countless opportunities to chase that success. Blakeman sometimes speaks, almost wistfully, about the days when “you could do six spots a night, run around killing yourself.” The Strip was hot in the early ‘80s – had been for several years – but there was plenty of competition. A few blocks away was Catch a Rising Star, where Rick Newman, a charming street kid from the Bronx, had showcased what seemed like an endless parade of comic talent: David Brenner, Billy Crystal, Andy Kaufman, Jay Leno, Richard Lewis, Steve Martin, Freddie Prinze, and the club’s prince-of-darkness emcee, Richard Belzer. In midtown, there was the Improvisation – tough Budd Friedman had been around since the mid-‘60s, giving an early boost to people like Klein, George Carlin, Lily Tomlin, and Richard Pryor, and reviving the career of the middle-aged Dangerfield, who went on to open his own club on the East Side. Out in Sheepshead Bay, there was Pip’s, the farm team for the Manhattan clubs, under the aegis of George Schultz, an old pal of Rodney’s from the ‘40s. And Caroline’s, the Comedy Cellar, Stand-Up New York, Comedy U…

All across America, it was the same. By 1980, more than 100 comedy clubs had opened in the U.S.; by 1984, the number had doubled; by 1992, it would be up to 475. Every city of any size had at least one, from Anchorage, AS (P.J.’s Comedy Alley) to North Miami, FL (Coconuts Comedy Club). “The biggest boom in comedy since the heyday of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd,” was the word in People‘s August 1984 cover story. Later that same year, The New York Times Magazine solemnly declared, “Fast-mouthed and restless youngsters with a flair for the outrageous are revitalizing the comedy scene.” That article mentioned established stars such as Carlin, mid-level types like Belzer (“a comic with an angry, sometimes snarling, edge”), and up-and-comers like Blakeman (“a young fellow with a nice sense of the bizarre”).

Sure, the pay was lousy – rates at one of the better New York clubs ran from $10 for a weeknight prime time spot to $75 for emceeing a Friday or Saturday night show. But by working several clubs, coupled with enough out-of-town gigs (where the pay could run to three, even four figures for a night’s work), a comic could have something of a career. If he built enough of a rep in the clubs, he could find new opportunities on cable-TV shows like “Evening at the Improv” and “Caroline’s Comedy Hour.” And who could tell when there would be an agent or producer in the audience, looking for the next Robin Williams?

At the same time, though, a few cautionary voices were warning that it couldn’t last. The business had become overextended, they said, and many of those involved were lacking in serious commitment – too many untalented jerks thought they were funny, too many club owners were trying to cash in on the latest fad after disco. (At one club, says comic Paula Poundstone, “I’d look up and there was a disco ball just out of sight, over my head.”) Supply was beginning to exceed demand; at some point, the bubble had to burst.

Perhaps some comics, had they stopped to think about it, would have realized that it couldn’t go on forever. But they were too busy to think about it… until it was too late.

“Catch” went bankrupt in August 1993, long after Newman had sold his interest in the club. “The Improv” went dark the following year; as of 1996, a scaled-back version was operating on the premises of an Italian restaurant. Since the early ‘90s, hundreds of other clubs around the country have met a similar fate. “It just sort of happened in stages,” says Blakeman. “I never played the road extensively, so I didn’t notice that much. But when local clubs started folding, I saw my options being reduced.”

Those clubs that survived have had to be, well, imaginative – the Strip, like numerous other clubs, uses ticket giveaways to college students and other ploys to pad the house. And for the comics, the club scene, competitive in the best of times, has become Darwinian. In the words of Vanessa Hollingshead, a smart, edgy comic who looks like Shirley MacLaine and sounds like Joan Rivers, “It’s creating a tension that I wish didn’t exist, but does.”

Some have welcomed the end of the boom. In their view, it’s driven out the worst of the bunch – the no-talents, the dilettantes, the people who confused comedy with therapy. If you’re still in the business, they insist, you have to be serious and hard- working, or those who are will quickly push you out. There is a good deal of truth to this; but those who remain have not only found themselves with fewer rooms to work, but with much less “room” to maneuver. For the club environment has also changed, profoundly.

As with other art forms, the history of stand-up – which began roughly in the waning days of the vaudeville era – has been marked by a series of coups and rebellions, one “school” overthrowing another before it, too, was supplanted. From the Twenties through the Fifties, Milton Berle and the “Borscht Belt” comics held sway. Their style – loud, fast, Jewish-inflected, and firmly eschewing any reference to politics, religion, or other topics that audiences might find off-putting – took root in urban nightclubs and burlesque houses, then went national through radio and later, TV. A few younger men like Alan King and Buddy Hackett bent the rules somewhat. But no one tried to smash them until a friend of Hackett, Lenny Bruce, arrived on the scene.

Bruce, with his jazz-influenced rhythms and taboo-shredding comments on race, sex and society, was of course a groundbreaker; but he had a number of allies – youngbloods like Mort Sahl, Bob Newhart, Jonathan Winters and Woody Allen, who drew humor from their observations rather than tired twists on take-my-wife and we-were-so-poor. For the first time, stand-up became relevant, cerebral, hip… and it remained that way through a second wave of rebels such as Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Robert Klein. Then the Seventies brought the school of anti-comedy, led by Steve Martin, Andy Kaufman, David Letterman and Albert Brooks – less political, more surreal, bringing Dada and deconstruction to bear on the clichés of stand-up, and of show business itself. (Think of Martin’s pointless card tricks, or Kaufman’s character Tony Clifton, the ultimate Vegas lounge singer/lizard.)

At the time that Blakeman was starting out, the early-80s boom years, eclecticism ruled; a comic was able to do virtually anything he (or increasingly, she) wanted on stage, in terms of both form and content. But by the end of the decade, the field had again narrowed. Two styles now dominated – embodied by two comics, similar in age and ethnicity but with absolutely nothing else in common.

One was Seinfeld, a “name” in the club world even before his TV success. A regular at the Strip, where Blakeman got to know him, he stood out both for his exceptional work ethic and the way he mined the trivial and transient for his subject matter – whimsical bits about hair on his soap or mismatched socks at the laundry. His admirers called it “observational” humor; his detractors found him soft, boring, a “sweater comic.”

People had plenty of names for Andrew Clay Silverstein, a/k/a Andrew Dice Clay, but “soft” was not one of them. When he started out in New York, his entire act consisted of two imitations: Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor, followed by John Travolta in Grease. By the mid-Eighties, he had morphed into the Diceman, a sneering, snarling thug whose attacks on women and minorities (describing Asian immigrants as “urine-colored,” leading the audience in a chant, “If you can’t learn the language, get the fuck out of this country!”) made him a succés de scandale for several years, until the novelty wore off and he went down in the wreckage of several failed TV and film projects.

But his disciples are still in the clubs. “They’ve all got ‘attitude,'” says Blakeman. “They all come out smoking a cigarette, with that look…” Club owners encourage them – if Clay had packed them in, why tamper with a proven success? What they’ve failed to note is that only certain types of audiences (young, white, male, low on education, high on alcohol intake) had turned out for the Diceman’s brand of humor. By encouraging it at the expense of other styles, they have driven a large chunk of their customers away.

Seinfeld’s influence has been subtler, but equally pervasive. To be sure, there are a number of his imitators in the clubs, popping out softball jokes about commercials, airlines or “relationships.” But comics of every stripe have been trying to replicate his TV-sitcom stardom.

In itself, this is nothing new – stand-ups have been doing sitcoms since Danny Thomas’ “Make Room for Daddy” in 1953, and the success of “The Cosby Show” and “Roseanne” in the ’80s gave jokesters a fresh appeal at the networks. But the frenzy with which today’s comics chase that small-screen dream is unprecedented. Everyone wants their own series… or at the very least, a development deal, one of those unique Hollywood arrangements in which a studio pays a performer while keeping him/her in creative limbo. “I have a deal (with Carsey-Werner, producers of “Roseanne”) for $200,000 for two years,” says Hollingshead. “One of the jokes I do out in California is ‘Hi, it’s really great to be here. It’s a very exciting period of my life. I’m on my second season of “We’re not going to do your show.”‘”

But pursuing the grail of TV stardom has caused many club comics to become lazy and cynical in their approach to performing. Having something original to say, or just being funny, is much less important than creating a sitcom-ready “character.” (College grad Jeff Foxworthy built his entire routine around a stereotyped-redneck persona, which he parlayed into two hit recordings and a series on ABC. Many comics seem not to have noticed that the show was cancelled after one season, then picked up by NBC, which also gave it the ax.)

Between the Seinfeld wannabes and the Clay clones, the middle ground has narrowed, almost to the point of nonexistence. It’s almost as if we are back in the ‘50s, when anyone who ventured outside the standard joke-punchline-joke model was sneeringly dismissed as a “chi-chi” comic.

Which is especially tough on people like Blakeman. Unlike some of his peers, he isn’t just in it for the money, or fame, or sex. For him, comedy is not only about being funny, but also getting people to think, to reconsider their assumptions about their world, their society, their lives. To be a stand-up satirist in the tradition of Bruce, or Carlin, or Klein. He’d much rather talk about the Pentagon budget than what his girlfriend said in bed – not that (as a good liberal) he objects to other comics doing raunch or Seinfeldisms, but why isn’t there room for something deeper?

Because few people in the clubs want to hear it. The main audiences now are tourists, collegians, bridge-and-tunnelers – people who come to get drunk and make noise; the comedy itself is incidental. Club owners who want to stay in business have to cater to them. Manny Dworman of the Comedy Cellar put it bluntly to an interviewer: “There are people who might not be as good as other comics, but who are more predictable in terms of pleasing the audience, and that’s what’s more important to me.” But that keeps the smarter audiences away, perpetuating the vicious cycle.

Still, there is hope. Every once in a while, a new kid comes in with all the essentials – talent, energy, originality – and the chops to stay in the business for the long haul. Some of them are working the “alternative comedy” circuit, a new development of the past few years. It’s a strange hybrid, mixing stand-up with straight acting and so- called performance art; it is controversial in some circles, and often doesn’t work. But it is, at the very least, a much-needed transfusion of new ideas and energy.

Blakeman himself picks up a steady income by teaching a class at The New School for aspiring stand-ups. They deliver their material, he critiques it, and at the end of six weeks, their graduation ceremony is the chance to perform unpaid for one night at the Strip. Most of the students wind up going back to their day jobs, but Blakeman speaks fondly of a young man who took the class in the late ‘80s – a fellow named Jon Stewart Liebowitz, who later dropped “Liebowitz.”

The success of “The Daily Show” – not to mention Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect” and the breakout stardom of Chris Rock – is clear evidence that political humor is not dead. Certainly, it makes Blakeman feel less isolated. But he knows he is still in the minority.

As he prepares for the second show, uncertainty is the watchword of his existence. There is no way to predict what direction the business will take in the future – any more than he can foretell whether he’ll wind up a middle-aged success, like Dangerfield or Jackie Mason, or an old hack playing bar mitzvahs and senior-living condos. “If I could predict anything for sure,” Blakeman says with a shrug, “I could make a lot more money.”

And he turns and walks down the hall toward the room, and the noise, and the darkness.

Originally written for Playboy magazine, 1996.

Download PDF

By P.H.I.Berroll

“We do seem to be, for lack of a better term, strange bedfellows,” says Benjamin (Rusty) Magee.

Mr. Magee is talking about his collaboration with Charles Busch on a new musical, The Green Heart, which opens April 1 at the Variety Arts Theatre under the auspices of Manhattan Theatre Club.  Theirs is, indeed, an unlikely partnership.

On the surface, the two men appear to have only two things in common: both are in their early 40s (they refuse to be more specific) and are veterans of more than a dozen years in New York theatre, as creators and performers.  But while Mr. Magee, in his stage appearances, usually sits at a piano in semi-formal attire, Mr. Busch’s costumes are a bit more striking — colorful dresses and wigs, fake breasts, and high heels.

Mr. Busch is probably New York’s best-known drag performer, the author and star of such camp extravaganzas as Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, Psycho Beach Party, and Red Scare on Sunset.  Mr. Magee, a pianist and composer, is a regular on the comedy-club circuit, where he plays and sings his own topical, satirical tunes.  Where Mr. Busch, in performance, is wildly flamboyant, Mr. Magee is low-key; where Mr. Magee often lampoons political targets, Mr. Busch says flatly, “My humor is not political.”

Even in person, they are a study in contrasts.  The shaven-headed Mr. Busch tends to measure his words carefully before committing himself to a firm statement, while Mr. Magee, his thinning red hair covered by a baseball cap, often speaks in fully formed sentences, even small paragraphs.

Yet they have been able to find common ground on The Green Heart, subtitled “a musical/black comedy/romance/thriller,” for which Mr. Busch has written the book and Mr. Magee the music and lyrics.  Based on a short story by Jack Ritchie (on which Elaine May’s 1970 film comedy A New Leaf was based), The Green Heart follows the rocky romance of William Graham, a dissolute playboy, and Henrietta Lowell, a gawky heiress and botany professor more comfortable with plants than people.  It’s especially rocky because William intends, after marrying Henrietta, to murder her for her money.  The story “is somewhat broadly comic, satirical,” says Mr. Busch, “but ultimately, it’s a story of redemption — about a man who goes from selfishness to perhaps having the capacity to love.”

The history of The Green Heart begins with the off-stage partnership of Mr. Magee and his actress wife, Alison Fraser, a Tony nominee for her roles in Romance Romance and The Secret Garden.  (The couple met fourteen years ago while appearing in a production of Pump Boys and Dinettes in Indianapolis; they have a six-year-old son, Nathaniel.)  In 1992, they were looking for new projects, and hit on the idea of adapting the Ritchie story for the stage.  After seeing Red Scare on Sunset at the WPA Theatre and subsequently reading Mr. Busch’s other plays, they decided that he would be perfect for the job.

The prospect appealed to Mr. Busch.  “I’ve been asked a lot of times to collaborate on a musical,” he says, “but it’s always been something campy — you know, ‘Cycle Sluts From Babylon,’ like that.  I wanted something with strong characters who I could relate to.  I think that’s what we have here… and also, a contemporary twist on the traditional musical comedy.  It’s almost like a big intimate musical comedy, if that makes any sense.”

By himself, Mr. Busch was used to working quickly.  His collaborationwith Mr. Magee, however, stretched out over four years, including a six-month period when they put it aside to work on other projects.  Mr. Busch jokes that it began to seem as if they’d been working together “since Dick (Rodgers) and Oscar (Hammerstein) started on Allegro.”  Not that they were hampered by a clash of egos.  Both men speak admiringly of each other’s talents; indeed, according to Mr. Busch, it was the originality of his partner’s musical mind that helped to draw out the writing process.  “I’d get an idea for a song that I couldn’t possibly develop myself,” he recalls, “and Rusty would come up with something that I could never in a million years have dreamed of.”

The songs in The Green Heart are a crazily eclectic mix:  old-fashioned ballads and duets, comic ensemble numbers, dark tunes reminiscent of Kurt Weill.  They reflect the varied background of Mr. Magee, a former musical consultant to the Yale Drama School.  “I really am an odd hybrid,” he agrees, “influenced by rock ‘n’ roll and pop music, as well as the intellectual study of classical music and theory.”

Once they had completed and cast the show, the rehearsal period began, bringing with it a new possibility for conflict:  the director is Mr. Busch’s longtime collaborator, Kenneth Elliott.

But Mr. Magee insists that he never felt excluded by the other two men.  “I had worked with Ken before, when I wrote some songs for Harry Kondeleon’s play Zero Positive at the Public Theater,” he says.  “So I was familiar with him.  It could have been a disaster this time, because we both had strong feelings about the material …but thank God, it was not.”

Nor did the composer have any problem working with Ms. Fraser, who was cast as William’s scheming Eurotrash mistress.  (The leads are Karen Trott, last seen in the one-woman show The Springhill Singing Disaster, and David Andrew MacDonald.)  “There’s give and take,” says Mr. Magee.  “Sometimes she’ll say, ‘Rusty, you might want to take a look at these words, think about that’ — and you can’t be an egotist about it, because sometimes she’s right on the nose.”  He laughs.  “And sometimes she’s not.”

If The Green Heart has a successful run, there are tentative plans to take it to Broadway, where it would be a rarity — an American musical with a small (13-member) cast, and without big stars or special effects.  But Mr. Busch, for one, is undaunted:  “Even Andrew Lloyd Webber has said that the era of the mega-musical may soon be over.  And now you have successful shows like Rent and Bring on Da Noise…, which are more ‘human’ and intimate.”

Both men speak frankly of their hopes that The Green Heart will give a boost to their own careers — to move beyond their loyal but small followings to a wider audience.  Mr. Magee has had one previous brush with the mainstream:  last year, he and a partner were commissioned to write a song for Jackie Mason’s show, Love Thy Neighbor.  But the pair had a dispute with Mr. Mason and his producers over payment and writing credit, and the deal fell through.

“It was tough for me,” says Mr. Magee, “because I would have loved to have had a song in a Broadway show.”  However, Mr. Magee got some measure of revenge:  in his comedy act, he sings the disputed song … in an imitation of Mr. Mason’s distinctive voice.

Whatever the fate of their current show, Mr. Busch and Mr. Magee intend to continue their performing careers.  Both admit that one of their few real frustrations while working on The Green Heart was having to sit on the sidelines while others performed their work.  “It looked like it was going to be so glamorous,” says Mr. Busch, “that I wanted to be up there.”

But did they ever feel that they could have done a better job with the material than the members of the cast?

Mr. Magee laughs nervously.  “It was more like, ‘I think I could have done it differently.'”

Originally written for Our Town weekly newspaper, 1999.

Download PDF

Pierre Lehu is a polite, low-key fellow — not someone you’d expect to be giving advice about, say, the erotic use of onion rings.

But he does. The 48-year-old Bay Ridge resident is all-around “minister of communications” for the mother of pop sexology, Dr. Ruth Westheimer – on whose latest book, Dr. Ruth Talks About Grandparents (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Lehu is listed as co-author. “It was her idea,” he says. “I didn’t twist her arm.”

Their relationship began in 1981, when Lehu’s p.r. firm took on Westheimer as a client. “She had a 15-minute, Sunday night radio show,” Lehu recalls. “I said, ‘Send her to me – I can get p.r. for a sex therapist!’” (He’d already represented a surgeon who “redesigned women’s genitalia.”)

As Westheimer’s career took off, Lehu’s duties expanded to include working on her newspaper column – finding “the best (letters) for her to answer,” he explains. “Then I’d pull everything together as a column — give titles to the letters, like that.”

Lehu performed similar work on two of her books, Dr. Ruth’s Encyclopedia of Sex and Sex for Dummies, but didn’t get co-author credit until the current project, which he describes as “sort of a how-to manual for children, on how best to (relate to) grandparents.”

Lehu, whose wife, attorney Joanne Seminara, ran unsuccessfully for City Council last year (they have two children), also continues to work on the column — dealing with relationship issues and what he calls “plumbing questions.”

“There are four basic problems,” he says, sounding rather blasé. “Men with premature ejaculation; women who can’t have orgasms; couples where the husband wants more than the wife; and where the wife wants more than the husband.”

But occasionally he gets something more exotic, like the onion rings bit (during foreplay, the man’s partner tosses the rings onto his, er, target). “That was a real story that Ruth got on the radio. She repeated it on ‘Letterman,’ and it cracked everybody up. I think they even brought in some onion rings from this little coffee shop at 30 Rock… Onion rings became the ‘theme’ of the show.”

– Philip Berroll

Originally published in Brooklyn Bridge magazine, 1993.

Download PDF