The house juts its chest out of the Hollywood Hills, flexing more bravado than actual confidence, looking a little unsteady as if one more misstep, one more bad night, could send it tumbling onto Sunset Boulevard. Sure, it’s got flair — the Spanish tile roof, the massive double balconies lording over West Hollywood — but, really, this house is peacocking, begging you to pay attention to it.
Stand on one of those back balconies, look down on the Comedy Store, the Sunset Strip, the Los Angeles Basin, and, on a clear day, maybe even out to the Pacific, and you’ll succumb to the illusion that this town is just out there waiting for you, that it wants you, even needs you. But this house was built on the hopes and dreams of the people who forgot that. It nurtured them — with shelter, camaraderie, laughs, sex, drugs — until it didn’t.
Stand-up comedy has been born and died a thousand times within a few hundred yards of 8420 Cresthill Road. Some of these deaths have been literal: In 1979, Steve Lubetkin, a struggling stand-up, dove off the roof of the Continental Hyatt House hotel and landed in the Comedy Store parking lot. Three years later, John Belushi died in Bungalow 3 of the Chateau Marmont, just up the road, after capping off a night of partying with a toxic speedball. Many more births and deaths have been figurative, onstage at the Store: Comics like David Letterman, Jay Leno, Sam Kinison, Andrew Dice Clay, Jim Carrey, Roseanne Barr, and Marc Maron found their voices here; many more, whose names have been mostly lost to history, shouted into the darkness of the Original Room and heard no reply.
In 1976, when Mitzi Shore, the Comedy Store’s owner and enigmatic doyen (and mother of Pauly), bought the club, Cresthill, as it came to be known, was rolled into the deal. From the front, the house looks kind of small, almost humble. The two largest bedrooms are on the street level, and it isn’t until you descend the staircase and walk toward the back of the house that the three-story, nearly 5,000-square-foot abode begins to reveal itself. The space widens and draws you toward its oddly placed alcoves, its nooks and crannies, toward those sweeping balconies, toward its secrets. Built in the 1920s, the place has a shadowy history dating to the days when the mob and the Rat Pack prowled the Strip. At the time when Mitzi bought it, the house — which sits on a cul-de-sac of pretty, older homes elbowing each other for space — was vacant, and at first, Mitzi did little with it. Then, around the time of Lubetkin’s suicide, she essentially gave the place over to the comedians who worked at the Store.
For about a decade, comics inhabited Cresthill. Inhabit is the best way to put it, really: Some had their own rooms, some of those actually paid some token rent, but many, many more were just kind of there — to hang out, to drink, to do drugs, to talk shit, to crash on a couch, or a floor, wherever. There were three bedrooms, maybe four, depending on what you’d call a bedroom, but that had little relation to how many people might be sleeping there at any given moment. No one can remember ever signing a lease.
"COMICS WERE ALL OF A SUDDEN GETTING RESPECT, SO WE COULD GET AWAY WITH MURDER. AND WE DID."
The catalog of names is impressive: Dice, Kinison, Carrey, Maron, Robin Williams, Richard Pryor, Yakov Smirnoff, and Bill Hicks all either lived there or hung out there between 1979 and 1989. Some — like Dice and Kinison — were around for more of those years than they weren’t. Allan Stephan, a comic who was part of Kinison’s “Outlaws of Comedy” crew and later the showrunner for Roseanne, never lived in Cresthill but spent countless hours there in the late ’70s and early ’80s. “Comics were all of a sudden getting respect, so we could get away with murder," Stephan says. "And we did.” Mitzi saw the Store as a place for comics to work out and improve, essentially comedy college. “Cresthill,” Stephan says, “was the frat house.”
The place is more than an interesting footnote in comedy history: Cresthill’s glory years coincided with a massive stand-up boom across the country. In the mid-’70s, you could count the number of comedy clubs nationwide on one hand; by the late ’80s, there were hundreds. This group of comics, haunting Cresthill, working the Store, helped to create the stand-up business as we know it. In that house, these comics forged a style and, more important, a bold, anarchic attitude that still pervades comedy today. But this came at a cost: Maron, who showed up around 1987 and lasted eight months living in a small room Dice had recently vacated, described his time there to me as a “big, dark baptism.”
Unsurprisingly, specifics can be a bit murky when it comes to piecing together Cresthill's history. Want to know how long Bill Hicks crashed there or whether Eric Clapton really jammed up there one night? Ask five comics and you’ll likely get five different answers. It’s not that people are lying — though, sure, some may be — so much as time and the fog of booze and drugs tends to obscure some details. Still, that haze — a hybrid of truths, best guesses, misremembered recollections, and outright tall tales — adds up to a stew of memory and myth that’s no less real than a notarized legal document.
In the early ’70s, what little stand-up business there was revolved around two cities: Las Vegas and New York. But in April 1972, an old-school comic named Sammy Shore opened the Comedy Store in a 99-seat room in a building on Sunset Boulevard that had once housed the venerable Hollywood nightclub Ciro’s. In May, Johnny Carson decided to move The Tonight Show from New York to Burbank, California.
In its early days, the Comedy Store was more a clubhouse for Sammy and fellow comics like Shecky Greene and Jackie Vernon. But The Tonight Show’s move west brought in a newer generation — Robert Klein, George Carlin, David Brenner. When, in 1973, a set at the Store by young then-unknown Freddie Prinze won him a spot on The Tonight Show, it was a signal of comedy’s tectonic shift from New York to L.A. — and of the beginning of the Store’s rise.
The Store earned cachet on Sammy’s watch, but he was a comic with little interest in running a business. There were no set schedules; he and his friends got stage time whenever they wanted. He was frequently on the road, and when he was, his wife Mitzi took over. She wrote out a lineup every night. She instituted an open-mic night for amateurs looking to take their shot. She rebuilt the room to focus everyone’s attention on the stage, took out the bar, and made customers order drinks from the waitresses, establishing the two-drink minimum that became de rigeur in clubs nationwide. Essentially, she invented the modern comedy club.
Mitzi Shore
NBCU Photo Bank / Getty Images
When she and Sammy divorced in 1974, he gave her the club to lower his alimony payments; two years later, after being briefly evicted (and opening a new Comedy Store location in Westwood), she negotiated a deal to buy the entire building — plus Cresthill. In her words, Mitzi grew up as, “the only Jew in Green Bay,” Wisconsin. Nobody who knows her, it seems, can talk about her without lapsing into an impression of her thin, perpetually unimpressed, nasally whine of a voice. (Shore, 85, has Parkinson’s disease and other neurological issues and was unavailable to be interviewed.) Somehow, running the Comedy Store suited Mitzi’s oddball personality.
The club became ground zero for stand-up in the late ’70s: Leno, Letterman, Pryor, Williams, Michael Keaton, Jimmie Walker, Richard Lewis, Richard Belzer, Elayne Boosler, Paul Mooney, Garry Shandling, and Marsha Warfield all considered the place something of a home base, and others like Carlin, Steve Martin, Billy Crystal, and Gabe Kaplan were consistent visitors. Hollywood talent scouts lurked: The prizes weren’t only shots on Carson; networks were signing comics to develop sitcoms.
Mitzi saw herself as the scene’s munificent den mother. She made calls on behalf of comedians she thought deserved a look. She loaned them money. She took some on vacations with her. One person I spoke to who worked at the Store during this era tells me he was ferrying $20,000 in cash back to her house to put in her safe every night.
Robin Williams outside the Comedy Store, 1978.
Wynn Miller / The LIFE Images Collection / Getty Images
But if there’s one truism about Hollywood, it’s that behind every big success are dozens of people feeling aggrieved about it. Which isn’t to say that the comics who went on strike at the Store in 1979 didn’t have a legitimate gripe. Mitzi was making money by the satchel, and the regulars who performed at the Store weren’t getting paid. She considered the club a “showcase” room, an opportunity for comics to develop their acts and get discovered. That’s the way it worked. This wasn’t totally self-serving: Prinze got Chico and the Man. Walker got Good Times. Williams got Mork and Mindy. But it was a little self-serving: Paying customers would hardly be lining the sidewalks waiting to get in without comics onstage.
Nobody, least of all Mitzi, figured the rabble of comedians could organize a real work stoppage, but for about six weeks in the spring of 1979, they did. Guys like Letterman and Leno, already flush with their first successes, picketed alongside their less well-known colleagues. Mitzi felt betrayed. A handful of comics crossed the picket lines, simultaneously earning her enduring affection and the barbed scorn of their fellow comics.
The strike would be settled by June. Mitzi caved — a little — setting up a payment scheme so performers would get 50% of the door in the Main Room or $25 a set in the smaller Original Room. Some bad vibes certainly endured, but for most of the comics, there seemed to be palpable relief that the strike was over. The change in payment policy, however, was not the only by-product of the conflict.
A long time ago, Argus Hamilton was the future of stand-up comedy. Some — including Hamilton himself — thought the former University of Oklahoma frat boy was going to be the next Carson, and he appeared on The Tonight Show more than 20 times before his career was derailed in the ’80s by a crippling fondness for cocaine and booze.
Hamilton was the first comic to move into Cresthill in the summer of 1979, along with a young comedian from Detroit named Mike Binder, whom everyone called “Kid Comedy,” and John Medley, an actor and bartender Hamilton knew from Oklahoma. Hamilton lived there until 1982 and then returned for a few months in 1986. Much of the time he wasn’t at Cresthill he was either in rehab or staying with Mitzi, who was his on-again, off-again girlfriend for many years and with whom he’s still close. He’s seen among the former Cresthill gang as the unofficial keeper of the flame. In interview after interview, whenever the thread of a story got lost, I was advised to “ask Argus.”
Argus Hamilton
Courtesy Argus Hamilton
I meet him on a Sunday afternoon in the parking lot behind the Comedy Store, where Hamilton, who has been sober for 29 years, still performs regularly. We’d planned to talk inside the club, but after banging on the doors and getting no reply, we cross the parking lot and sit in the lobby of the Andaz West Hollywood, the hotel formerly known as the infamous Hyatt House. Cresthill, says Hamilton, wasn’t a reaction to Lubetkin’s suicide; it was a physical manifestation of the “postwar relief” that Mitzi and Store regulars felt after the strike. Mitzi wanted to do something to help the comics, particularly those like Hamilton and Binder, who’d crossed the picket lines. “She suggested that a few comics could live up there but she didn’t want it to turn into a flophouse,” Hamilton tells me.
The comedy landscape was changing then. “All these comedy clubs are popping up all over the country,” says Hamilton. "They’re paying Comedy Store guys $5,000 a week to go to Atlanta, to Houston. When rent is $200 a month, the phone bill is $15 a month, gas is 78 cents a gallon, and you make over $100,000 a year, you’ve got a lot of disposable income.” Much of which started going up people’s noses.
Binder, who later became best known as a writer/director/actor of films like The Upside of Anger and HBO's The Mind of the Married Man, says that while he lived there, the house and the Store felt like the center of the entertainment universe. “Robin had Mork and Mindy, Letterman started [guest-]hosting the Tonight Show, Michael Keaton and David were on Mary Tyler Moore’s variety show, Jimmie Walker had a series, I got this Norman Lear show called Apple Pie,” he says. “People magazine did a story, What’s Going on at the Comedy Store? So people started to come down. After we’d shut the club down, we’d be hanging with Willie Nelson, Burt Reynolds, Ringo Starr, Sugar Ray Leonard and partying. We couldn’t believe it. A lot of it took place after-hours in the Main Room, but most of the time, we’d shift it all up to Cresthill.”
Future Full House star Dave Coulier moved in for a few months in late 1979 or early 1980, and also recalls a somewhat mysterious housemate named Jack Leonpacher, who worked as a runner for Mitzi. “Jack stole all my clothes while I was on the road one week,” says Coulier. “He denied it and then showed up at the Westwood Comedy Store one night wearing one of my shirts.”
Yakov Smirnoff, circa 1985.
Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images
The next arrival at Cresthill was Russian comic Yakov Smirnoff. In the ’80s, at the height of Cold War paranoia, Smirnoff’s aw-shucks, “America, what a country!” shtick reassured a nation that its Reaganite vision of itself was righteous — and deflated the mighty Evil Empire of the Soviets into a laughable facade. He had his own TV show (What a Country), starred in films (Moscow on the Hudson, Brewster’s Millions, Heartburn) and was one of the country’s biggest stand-ups. But when he first showed up at the Store, he was just an émigré from the Ukraine with a shaky command of English. Mitzi liked him though and offered him spots onstage, work as a handyman, and a tiny room upstairs at Cresthill.
“Yakov was a master carpenter and plumber,” says Jimmie Walker, who didn’t really hang out at Cresthill but knew about it from performing at the Store. “Yakov fixed a lot of shit around the house. He did all the building around there.”
A few weeks after Smirnoff’s arrival, the house got another new initiate, a brash Brooklynite who performed as Andrew Clay. Smirnoff had met him already — they’d each done their first paid gig the same night at Rodney Dangerfield’s club in New York.
“He scared the shit out of me in Dangerfield’s,” Smirnoff tells me. “His persona was so big. Shortly after, I went to L.A. thinking I’ll never see him again. I was fine with that. Then, all of a sudden, I opened the door” — and with this Smirnoff slips into a pretty solid Dice impression, albeit still with traces of his Russian accent — “My man! Come ’ere! Gimme a hug! I’m gonna be yer roommate!”
Andrew Dice Clay, 1989.
Time Life Pictures / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty
Dice moved into the maid’s quarters, a small room off the kitchen with fire-engine red walls, red carpet, red furniture, and a window with bars on it that he once got a blow job through. Also crashing at Cresthill — though likely not paying rent — was Ollie Joe Prater, a 300-plus-pound, bearded Midwesterner whom Dice describes in his memoir, The Filthy Truth, as both “a party animal” and one of the “great comics you never heard of.”
At the time, despite his larger-than-life attitude, Dice onstage wasn’t quite yet Dice. He mostly did impressions of guys like John Travolta, Sylvester Stallone, and Elvis. “We all thought he was an idiot,” says Binder. “I mean, he was a sweet guy but he was just kind of a big doofus. We thought his act was like a fuckin’ circus act. Dice was just one of the characters he did.”
The house’s gravitational center and late-night gathering spot of choice was the massive oak table in the dining room. Two different comics compared it to the famed Algonquin Round Table, albeit with slightly more emphasis on strippers, drugs, and dick jokes. “We’d snort, smoke pot, drink beer, and talk comedy,” says Hamilton. “It was early enough in our disease where we shared our coke. Dice never drank or did drugs but loved to stay up and talk.”
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