CHAPTER 18

THE GROUNDLINGS

By this time, the Groundlings had moved to their current digs on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. I’d gone to see one of their shows again and was even more impressed than before. The troupe was full of brilliant comedians, but Phil Hartman as the film-noir detective Chick Hazard; John Paragon as the back-flipping Mr. Entertainment; and Paul Reubens as Jay Longtoe, a tiptoe dancing, chain-smoking Native American lounge singer, stood out. Groundlings became my new “rock stars.” I had no idea how they did what they did, but I knew I had to learn. I signed up for classes, and for the next four and a half years, ate, breathed, and slept the Groundlings. On weeknights I learned the ropes and on weekends we were expected to do everything from man the box office to scrub the toilets. There was a lot to learn: to be a good improvisor you had to listen carefully and always say yes! (Which, as you’ve probably surmised from reading my book so far, I almost always did anyway.) We learned to support the other actors onstage, not hog the limelight, and be specific—why say “car” when “Ford Pinto” is so much more interesting?

After a year of classes, I became a full-fledged Groundling. I was lucky. Back in the early ’70s the process was easy-breezy: give them your money, take the classes, and if you were halfway funny, voila! You were a Groundling. In 1975 Laraine Newman had been plucked off the stage by NBC to become a founding cast member of the new comedy show Saturday Night Live. Little by little other cast members became successful actors, writers, and producers, and the Groundlings’ reputation exploded. The show became the hottest ticket in town and, as the years went by, the process of becoming a Groundling became much more challenging. Students have been known to take classes for years, and even then there’s no guarantee they’ll make it into the main company.

It was an amazing time to be a Groundling. In addition to Phil, John, and Paul, my group included Edie McClurg, Lynne Marie Stewart, Tress MacNeille, and so many other incredible comedic actors. Everything Phil, John, and Paul did on stage was comedy magic and I idolized them. I remember a specific moment when I was still taking classes: I stood in the lobby of the theater and stared at John and Paul, who were off in a corner talking to each other, and thought to myself, “I’m going to become their best friend.” Sounds creepy, doesn’t it? But that’s what I wanted more than anything.

John and I discovered we had a lot in common. We’d both grown up in Colorado, had bedrooms in the basement, drove orange Volkswagen Bugs, and were Beatlemaniacs. In fact, we’d both learned to do perfect forgeries of the Beatles’ signatures and sold them to kids at school as the real thing. Great minds think alike!

Performing in the shows on weekends could be either fantastic or horrifying. Everyone fought for a slot in the show. There was an amazing amount of love and respect for one another but also a lot of jealousy and backbiting. Sometimes you came up with a good character or sketch and got a lot of stage time, and sometimes you didn’t. We each fought, struggled, and clawed our way into the show every weekend. For better or worse, I didn’t really worry about it much. I kept myself as far away from Groundling politics as possible. I’d fallen into the role of the Groundlings “sex symbol,” which was just fine by me. Whenever anyone needed a voluptuous girl in their scene, I was there. I kept my locker stocked with lots of wigs and provocative costumes so I was always prepared. On most nights, I showed up to the shows wearing a short skirt or a low-cut top and had to sneak past Edie McClurg, a former teacher from Kansas City, as I made my way backstage. If she happened to catch a glimpse of me in her makeup mirror, she would scold me. “You’re not going out there in that, are you?” or “I hope you’re going to wear a bra!” When it came to casting Chastity Pariah, the overbearing, self-righteous moral compass of Falwell in Mistress of the Dark, Edie was our first choice.

Paul eventually mounted The Pee-wee Herman Show at the Groundlings, based on one of his many characters, a strange man-child standup comedian. John played Jambi the Genie, a head in a box who grants wishes. Phil played the crusty old seadog, Captain Carl, and the talented Lynne Marie Stewart played Miss Yvonne, the most beautiful woman in Puppetland. I, on the other hand, dressed in a child’s gingham dress and pigtails and helped out every night as an usherette. Unfortunately, there wasn’t another part for a sexy-girl character. Deservedly, Lynne had already snagged that spot.

Strange but true, for someone who ended up making her career playing a definitive character, my weakest suit in the Groundlings was developing one. My two strongest characters, if you could even call them that, were “The Dog Lady” in a “commercial” for a dog-grooming store, and staying in my comfort zone, playing a sexy ingénue with Groundling Teresa Burton. In the sketch, we both showed up at an audition for the same part, wearing identical rainbow-striped dresses, sunglasses, and Farrah Fawcett hairstyles. The first thing we did was point at each other and squeal in unison, “I like your dress!” My character was unique in that she had a heavy “valley girl” accent, something that had only recently been made popular by Frank Zappa and his daughter, Moon Unit, in the song of the same name.

Taking a cue from Paul’s success staging a special late-night show, another Groundling, Randy Bennett, came up with an idea for a show based on a hilarious sketch he’d written about his backwoods family in Texas. He called it Waco and brought me onboard to play his sex-kitten, “white trash” daughter, Waylita (a hybrid of my “parents’” names, Waymond and Olita). Phil Hartman played my boyfriend, Dr. Red Greene, a sleazy, big-city drug dealer. We had a blast performing every weekend and the audience loved it, but unfortunately it never took off the way Pee-wee’s show had. During the play, Phil and I had to exchange a steamy kiss each night, so after the play came to an end, we decided it would be a good idea to go on a date. We went out to dinner and had a fun time, as usual, but when it came to kissing goodnight, for some reason it felt so awkward, neither of us could stop laughing. Over and over, we attempted to calm down and catch our breath, then try again, but we just kept bursting into laughter. I guess by that time we’d known each other too long and too well to make anything sizzle.

Each night, the Groundlings show included at least one group improv featuring the whole cast. If we happened to get bad suggestions from the audience or someone in the cast was having an off night, the whole evening could turn into a disaster. Bombing in front of a house full of paying customers was devastating and there were many nights when I left the theater feeling like I wanted to quit show business once and for all. The fear that gripped me during an improvisation that wasn’t working was paralyzing. Often, the harder we tried to turn it around, the deeper we dug ourselves in. But if everyone was “up,” and the audience wasn’t too tired or grumpy, we would kill! Almost nothing in the world felt better than that. We often chipped in to buy a large box of wine, and when things were going bad, that sucker was empty by the time the first show ended. Coming in for the second show only, which often happened, was a crapshoot. You could almost smell the mood as you passed down the long, dark, locker-lined hallway to the backstage area. Some nights it took every ounce of strength I had not to turn around and bolt for the door.

As my time at the Groundlings went on, I began to get more acting work. I landed small TV roles on The Sonny and Cher Show, Tony Orlando and Dawn, Fantasy Island, Happy Days, and commercials for Dodge Aspen and Axion detergent. I worked on movies like Coast to Coast starring Dyan Cannon and Robert Blake and King of the Mountain with Harry Hamlin, Joseph Bottoms, and Dennis Hopper. Cheech and Chong populated their first big bust-out film, Up in Smoke, with Groundlings and then cast me and several other members of the troupe in their next film, the appropriately titled Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie. They needed an attractive blonde, brunette, and redhead to parody Charlie’s Angels, so I was cast, along with Groundlings member Catherine Bergstrom and the future Mrs. Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson. My famous line as we fled for our lives was “Help me Wamba!” which fans love to quote and embarrass me with to this day.

All in all, the years I spent with the Groundlings were some of the best times of my life. The friendships I forged there have been among my closest and most enduring. Being “in the trenches” with so many funny and talented people created an incredible bonding experience. I credit the Groundlings with giving me the tools and the chutzpah I needed to build my career. As I’ve said many times over the years, if you can get up in front of an audience without a clue of what you’re going to say or do and with the possibility of making a total fool out of yourself hanging over your head, everything else is a piece of cake.

My odds of landing parts were becoming better all the time—and I had proof. I kept a log of my audition-to-job ratio, and instead of getting one job in every thirty auditions, I was now averaging one job in every seven. But good-paying acting gigs were still coming in so slowly I sometimes worried I wouldn’t live long enough to realize my dream of becoming a working actor. Now in my late twenties, I was getting really tired of wondering where my next paycheck was coming from.

In 1979, while still at the Groundlings, I auditioned for a small role on B. J. and the Bear, a popular TV show that capitalized on the CB radio/trucking craze. When I arrived, I was handed my “sides,” and then sat for an eternity studying my lines along with a dozen other hopefuls. When it was my turn to read for the director, producer, writers, and whoever the hell else was there, I entered the inner sanctum: an office full of white men, as usual. I introduced myself and proceeded to read my lines with the casting director.

Once I finished reading, I put the sides on my lap and waited.

“What about the action?” one of the guys asked. Oh no. Here we go again. The “action” at the end of my scene described my character hopping on a motorcycle, speeding off around a racetrack a few times, then crashing and dying.

“Um. How exactly am I supposed to do that?” I responded.

In a cranky voice, whoever-he-was said, “In case you can’t read, you’re supposed to get on your motorcycle, ride around a track, and crash!”

I stood up, my face burning, and pantomimed throwing my leg over a bike, careful not to flash the beaver—no easy feat while wearing a short, tight skirt. I then squatted down as if I were sitting on a motorcycle and with my arms straight out in front of me and my legs splayed out to either side, attempted to run in a wide-legged circle around the small room. After a couple of laps, I threw myself onto the floor and lay there for a moment with my eyes shut, pretending to be dead—actually, wishing I was dead. As I breathed in the faint odor of dirty feet that wafted up from the carpet, I heard the sound of sniggering come from one of the men. That was it—I’d had it! I jumped up, basically told them where they could stick their part, and stormed out, slamming the door behind me. I knew what I was doing—burning my bridges for this producer and possibly for the network—but I didn’t give a rat’s ass. I was getting too damned old to keep debasing myself this way!

The old story about the guy who worked in the circus shoveling elephant shit comes to mind. Someone passes by and, seeing him up to his ass in dung, asks, “How can you put up with such a demeaning job? Why not go into some other line of work?” He replies, “What? And give up show business?” This humiliating episode marked the first time the thought crossed my mind that maybe a showbiz career just wasn’t in the cards for me.

I continued to work at Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, and one night, I was sent to the Starwood Club on Santa Monica Boulevard to check out a hot new musician who was interested in doing the show. I wore a sexy little red-and-white-striped number I borrowed from fellow Groundling Phyllis Katz, and after the show, I finagled my way backstage to meet Johnny Cougar (who would later revert to his real name, John Mellencamp). Guarding the door of his dressing room was a cute young surfer dude who introduced himself to me as Mark Pierson. Although Johnny was pretty damned adorable, his music just wasn’t my cup of tea, which was always a turnoff, so when Mark invited me to go with him to the party for the band at their manager Billy Gaff’s house, I didn’t have to think twice. Shy and soft-spoken, Mark was in his early twenties, a younger man—tall, tan, and thin with longish blond hair. During the party he waited on me hand and foot, bringing me drinks, lighting my cigarettes (yes, despite Little Richard admonishing me, I still smoked! Yuck.), and fawning over me the whole evening. It’s hard to ignore a guy who shows you that much attention! We ended up back at my place for a night of passionate, drunken lovemaking. At some point, I woke up and crept out of bed to use the bathroom, trying my best not to wake him. When I returned, I stopped dead in my tracks and stifled a gasp. The light from a street lamp shone across the bed revealing his tanned, naked surfer’s body sprawled across the bed. As I stared at him it hit me like a bolt of lightning—this was the man I’d described on my wish list, the man I was going to marry.

From that day on, Mark and I never spent another night apart. Although we both kept our separate apartments, we stayed at either his place or mine for the next several months and found ourselves falling deeper and deeper in love.