STOP SMILING
#17
THE COMEDY ISSUE:
Improvisational comedians have called Del Close the guru, the creative spark that helped launch the careers of Bill Murray, John Candy, and John Belushi, to name only a few. When he wasn’t institutionalized by his Second City colleagues, Del spent his quiet time musing in the potsmoke of his legendary Chicago apartment. Find out the real story from someone who was right alongside him.
by
Richard O'DONNELL
Once, Chicago was good for comedy. Once, they were sloppy drunk in love. A funky flaming affair where comedy was ravished and left wanting, recklessly thrust into the faces of any audience willing to sit in a makeshift theater stuck inside a seedy bar. Crosscurrents was the rendezvous. A gloomy cabaret on the corner of Belmont and Wilton that at one time or another housed steamy liaisons between The Annoyance Theater, New Age Vaudeville, The Improv Olympic, and Del Close.
Owned and operated by Thomas L. Goodman, Crosscurrents was where comedy screwed its brains out. Remember "The Friday Night Show," Aaron Freeman's "Council Wars," "The Legend of Lily Overstreet," Paul Krassner, "On the Edge," and the all-girl sketch group Somebody's Daughters? This was an orgy of political satire, improvisation, variety, vaudeville, and theater screwing endlessly under stage lights. It was stripping in the theater, walking naked through the bar, lap-dances in the cabaret, and hand jobs in the hall. Every nook and cranny, anywhere they could, in this old Swedish meeting hall—Chicago and comedy couldn’t get enough. This was where the perverts and junkies, the wannabes and the pros hung out. A comedy bordello, a red-light district where humor was pimping itself, was charging cheap admission to all peeping Toms.
Here the talent was adolescent, seriously pissed-off, and brilliant, etching quotable graffiti on the walls. Here they drank, smoked, took mind-altering anything-they-could-get-their-hands-on, and danced wildly from room to room. Out of this lustful tarantella, more Comedy was born. There were the screaming infants “Splatter Theater,” “Honor Finnegan vs. the Brain of the Galaxy,” and the “TV Dinner Hour.” This was 1987.
But nothing lasts forever. Sticky, faded love letters penned by journalists Rick Kogan, Jack Helbig, and Lawrence Bommer were placed in shoeboxes, forgotten. Chicago and comedy didn't give a shit about each other anymore, abandoning their bastard children. They survived, of course. The kiddies all did good; they looked and acted like their parents. They gave us “The Brady Bunch Live,” “Twisted,” “Coed Prison Sluts,” “Upright Citizen's Brigade,” and the “R. Rated” TV show.
But who threw the party when the surly couple met? Who decided to ignite their robust passion, put acid in their drinks, and invite everyone to toast? Del Close did. Scruffy bastard. (I can see him laugh, and half say outta the corner of his mouth, “Y’goddam right I did.”) Yeah, this dark and aging cherub, the stand-up comic that conspired with the likes of Severn Darden and later Charna Halpern, he’s the asshole that decided Chicago and comedy would be good for one another. And then? He even took care of all their deserted offspring… Scruffy, funny bastard.
Del Close: greasy hair, twisted metal-rimmed glasses, and a pilot’s coat, brown, fading piece o’ shit. (He'd kicked the chemicals, since John Belushi died.) Yeah, Del Close had chiseled off 20, 30 years by living hard and liking it. His fingers were rusty from tobacco, his teeth severely stained, and his posture crooked like a villain.
You would swear he was a movie star.
“That’s alright,” Del would say, “Charna’s on it.” Anything about his partner, and he was instantly defensive. “We’re friends,” he would say. They watched each other’s back. They understood each other. Don’t you get between them. I’m serious now. I’m serious.
When Crosscurrents crashed and burned, the heated passion over, and with Goodman holding all the bills, the aftermath just gasped and fizzled. Little sparks here and there made small media appearances, but these were lean and mean, and shitty all around.
Finally the Fall, the changing of the guard, and there was a cooling down, chilly weather, Chicago-easy-does-it… which was fine. Del was abusing comics with his latest "Wasteland" for DC, landing movie roles as the Reverend Meeker in the remake of "The Blob" with Kevin Dillon, and as the Alderman in Brian De Palma’s "The Fugitive" with Kevin Costner… so he was doing fine.
“All I wanted was to work in film,” said Del. “I’ve done alright. I’ve done a couple of features this year.”
Yeah, he was all humble, sitting in his kitchen that looked almost boarded up. After showing off his “Blob” in a jar above the fridge, Del and I read comic books. They were his second private stash. He had them everywhere, several drugstore display racks stuffed in all the blind spots and dark shadows. It was nice not to deal with furniture. One overgrown kid’s filthy bedroom. No parents, and lots and lots of toys.
“I got a haircut,” Del said.
“Looks good,” I say, not noticing a difference.
“It’s easier to manage.”
“You had it long?”
“I went through that… mad professor, hippie type.”
“Didn’t stick?”
“Better short.”
“Yeah, better.”
This wasn’t brilliant banter. This wasn’t wisdom from the master or worldly insights. This was boring, no-nothing conversation from a couple of shmoes just hanging out. That’s all. But locked inside this gibberish was the man in all his unsophisticated splendor, this was simply Del.
I visited the instigator, not once, but throughout an entire summer I took the gamble, and walked up to the guru’s lair—uninvited—knocking on his door. The funny bastard answered. Go figure. And we’d get high and talk.
His cannabis was nurtured, sweet-talked, maybe even massaged when no one watched, because it loved to turn you on. Del would ever-so-coolly pull this trapdoor down from up inside his closet. His bedroom looked all prisoner-of-war, gray the central color, and in this hideout, he produced the biggest stash of pot. Oh-my-stinking-lord!
I was so trashed, baked, wasted, stoned… going, going, gone. I’m a lightweight, and I hate to lose control. (Now I stick to coffee, thank you.) Suddenly this gothic grimy playground was effervescent, flies dancing on the walls, furniture melting into floorboards, and Del looked just like the devil, swear t’god. Paranoia sat beside me, whispered in my ear, “He can read your mind.”
But Del wasn’t hosting fear, wasn’t trying to freak me out at all. He hadn’t even noticed I was fighting for my sanity, playing mental tug-of-war.
I tried to speak, but my lips just stuck together as I said something all marshmallow-y and stupid, “My hair is breathing.”
“Cool,” I think he said.
He didn’t really care. He was content, happy to be sitting in his kitchen; happy to be alive.
“I can’t feel my legs,” I told him.
“You’ll get over it,” he said.
Del wasn’t spewing insights, wasn’t a bit pretentious, not at all. He just wanted easy conversation. Didn’t want to think much. Hush the mind a bit.
It’s something we don’t consider until we’re old, the way a person just wants a trouble-free existence. Fame and fortune’s always hungry, and lots of work to feed. It doesn’t soothe the spirit. Doesn’t fill the holes. Friends do that and, according to Del, all his pals were dying. This was what he was muttering in his kitchen... all his goddam friends were gone.
“I’ve had good friends,” he kept saying, “Very good friends.” Then he'd get all quite, look at the floor, and just sit there, maybe have a coughing fit. (Cigarettes punched him in the chest, bruised his lungs—he never quite recovered. Nasty little cancer sticks… god how much we love 'em.)
There was a cat, I think, but I don’t remember seeing it. Maybe sleeping on the futon pushed into the corner of his bedroom. Maybe it was there, this black cat, stretched out among the crumbled mountain of covers, but I really don’t recall. I couldn’t imagine him taking care of anything. He had enough just taking care of Del.
He would show me clippings, obituaries. Some recently torn from local papers; others faded, nasty brown. This was what occupied his brilliance. Aging, spinning with the Earth, Del was reminiscing. He was sharing feelings with a stranger. Which probably made it easier, talking with a no-one-in-particular. Spilling your guts to someone that can walk away, close the door behind them, never to return … that’s a poor man’s therapy.
Or maybe he really liked me, felt a kinship, but I doubt it. He just needed an ear to burn. To confess that he was scared just like the rest of us: Of being all alone.
“Sheila died over the weekend,” Del would tell me, obituary in hand. (I think her name was Sheila.) “She really wasn’t old. Sheila… a very talented actor from San Francisco. We use to work together.” Then he’d tape her obit to the dirty kitchen window. There were quite a few, taped there, and then forgotten.
The pot and I ask him all kinds of stupid shit. “How do you approach auditions? You go in a crazed, all worked up?” He’d just stared at me, answer with a growl of sorts, “You show up, do whatever the director wants, be professional. That’s all.”
“Do you go in with an agenda?”
“Yeah… get the fucking job.”
The first time I met Del he was playing Polonius in "Hamlet" at Wisdom Bridge Theatre. It was 1985. I knew the legend that was Del Close, but not this man in front of me, sweating under the stage lights. He’s giving this killer performance and I’m racking my brain, I know this guy! He’s? He’s? Someone, somebody goddam it. Damn, I know this guy…
That night, Del hitched a ride with us. He sat next to me and we talked a bit. He was gracious, very warm. Nothing suggested he was a comedy legend, Joseph Jefferson Award winner, one of the founders of Second City, the Improv Olympic, regular on "My Mother the Car" and "Get Smart," co-author of Truth in Comedy, yadda, yadda, yadda… he just seemed content, happy to get a ride, save the cab fare. That was it. No big shakes. Simple was the man.
My next encounter with the guru was at Crosscurrents. Thom Goodman was upstairs in his grubby office on the phone, trying to manipulate the media, sell more tickets, pay the bills, while all around him the orgy continued. It was shameful really: Chicago and comedy making-out. Tonguing one another anywhere they could. High school is what it felt like. In addition, there were all these improv students hanging out, watching, taking notes.
Behind the bar was the versatile Bridget Murphy. She’d go on to create "Milly’s Orchard Show." She tended bar but at night, hit the main stage doing a sort of burlesque whereby she dressed up as a greasy fat man telling raunchy jokes, and then stripped to reveal a sexy Playboy Bunny. Somebody’s Daughters were running around half crazed, rehearsing "Bards, Broads and Sacrifice.” Mick Napier was sitting at a table with his allies, talking Metraform, while Andy Dick was jumping up and down, begging to be noticed. There was this slaphappy kid named Christopher Farley playing pinball in the hall. He was the most endearing clown that no one wanted to play with.
Del… he was sitting at the end of the bar, smoking, coughing, lurking in the shadows. He shook my hand, offered me a cigarette. I took it, lit it, and drank a beer that tasted good.
“I saw your show, 'Elmore and Gwen',” he said, never looking up.
I was waiting to get my assed kicked. I was a writer from New York, came here looking for the comedy scene, and landed in the hornet’s nest. I wasn’t one of them. I scripted everything. I was going to get stung. So, I faked I didn’t give a rat’s ass. What else to do?
He cleared his throat to mumble, “It was consistent.”
“Uh huh,” was all I said.
“It stayed the course. All your jokes were consistent with the genre. It was vaudeville… very animated. I liked it.”
Panic was dripping down the crack of my ass. I think they call that 'flop-sweat'. I told him, “Thanks, appreciated.”
“Can you write me something next time?”
“Yeah.”
Del was in my second review, "The TV Dinner Hour." To be honest, he got angry, had a fit about the gig. He wanted to be in a play, have a straight acting job. Del didn’t realize I used improv for the bones of everything I worked on. The words came after I knew whom I was writing for, the glove that fits the hand.
“Where’s the script?” he asked me, standing all crooked, smoking under the Crosscurrents’ logo.
“No script. You’re the improv guru. I’m going to use video. Just create a TV character, improvise your ass off. You’ll run on a monitor above the stage. It’ll be cool, you’ll dig it.”
“Jesus Christ… I wanted words.”
“Just video and improv.”
“Video? You’ll destroy the medium.”
He stormed off mumbling “bastard” and “Nazi” something-or-other. The sign above my head was swaying. Winter was coming. It was getting cold. A wino from across the street was pissing on the sidewalk. He looked up, gave me the finger. Thanks, I smiled back.
A week later Del cornered me in the bar, asking, “Can I do it stoned?”
“Anyway you want, man.”
We shook hands. That was it. Done.
Peter Neville, videographer, took care of all the rest. Stoned and coughing up a fit, Del committed to video one of his best-recorded improvs: The Very Reverend Thing of the First Generic Church of What’s-his-name. It played on monitors overhead that channel-surfed until it landed on his bulbous face. Scruffy talented bastard, he almost stole the show.
The "TV Dinner Hour," directed by Amy McKenzie and featuring Megan Cavanagh, (now the voice of Jimmy Neutron’s mom,) did alright, and pushed us into the arms of the sultry mistress, screwing like all the rest.
Sitting in his kitchen, I reminded him, “You called me a Nazi once.”
He laughed, saying, “I meant it as a compliment.”
Sure he did.
I showed up again, uninvited, but this time he didn’t answer. I stood there waiting. I felt his eyes peeking from between the crusty curtains. He didn’t want to talk. A squirrel was chewing on the railing that was rotting around his porch. Standing there was useless; the wizard wasn’t coming out.
I walked across the street to Charna’s place. I knocked and waited. She answered, let me in. Up the stairs to the second floor, I sat in her living room while she offered me a Coke. Her shaggy little dog just laid there on the floor. Goofy puppy had the life. It ate and slept better than most of Charna's students.
“Thanks for introducing me to Stephen,” she said. An eccentric friend, Kastner was a magnificent painter, and they were getting it on. Funky, dirty love. Everybody’s doing it.
“Sure…” I said back at her, sipping from my soda can.
“We’ve got a development deal in California, the Improv Olympic on network television. It might happen.”
“Cool.”
She looked really tan and radiant. Striking. Younger than before. She was a happy Jewish girl.
A few weeks later, I was sitting in the guru’s kitchen once again. When he greeted me at the door, he smiled, seemed pleased that I stopped in. Before I entered, I noticed that squirrel’s drying carcass near the front porch. I think it should’ve munched on someone else’s railing. The spirit of the house reached out and got him, or that cat I never saw.
In the kitchen, Del filled a jelly jar up with soda. He still lived like college. Actually, he lived as most of his students did: like characters out of “Animal House.” This was what I was thinking as I sipped my Orange Crush, talked a little more.
“I’m losing weight,” he told me. “Stopped eating a big breakfast. I’m feeling pretty good.”
“Cutting out a breakfast?”
“Stop the bacon and eggs.”
“No shit?”
“My face is looking thinner. Better for the movie roles.”
He looked better, healthier, but the hard life wouldn’t stop punching him in the face. That’s were you saw the swelling. In the eyes, you saw the scars, the battles, the spirit drifting to the surface, flipping him the bird… shouldn’t have partied all the time. Yeah whatever. Nazi bastards.
Del loved sporting Wasteland, a somewhat autobiographical hodgepodge of stories for DC comics that he penned with John Ostrander. It was really twisted, folks. All messed up and psychedelic. Fun to look at while turning pages that almost got you high. I half expected my mother to walk in, scream at me for reading "trash." As a kid, it was something I would’ve discovered, hidden under the bed for late night reading. You know, it would’ve scared the boogeyman.
“We have something in common,” he said, broke the silence.
“Oh yeah?”
“We both ran away with traveling shows.”
“Sells and Grey,” I told him.
“Dr. Dracula's Magic Horror Show,” he countered.
“They had an elephant that still put up the big top.”
“I was a fire-eater.”
“Ventriloquist.”
“That’s awful. I hate puppets.”
“You and everybody else.”
“I was only fifteen or so.”
“Seventeen.”
Then all you could hear was the constant ruffling of paper until he blurted out, chuckled, “Could’ve been worse.”
“How’s that?”
“Could’ve been a mime.”
“Jesus, that’ll get you killed.”
“You bet.”
He sighed, I sighed and we both went back to reading for a while.
The last time I saw Del was when his theater opened up on Clark Street. It was packed with all his students, friends, and other showbiz types. I pointed to the monitors high above the stage and said, “That’ll destroy the medium.”
Del didn’t recall the conversation, and there wasn’t time to remind him. But he was glad to see me, surprised me with this goofy smile. It’s a look I’ll carry with me, the final fading image, because I never talked to him again.
I was living in New York when Del got sick and died. March 4, 1999. He was only 64. I tore his obituary from the paper, taped it to my kitchen window. I wanted to say something, but there were other people much closer to the man.
When I returned to Chicago, I went by Del’s house, saw another squirrel chewing on the railing. I picked a stone up and hurled it at the shabby thing. It wasn’t fazed at all. It just stood up, looked at me sideways, as if saying, Piss-off, the guru doesn’t live here anymore.
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