NOTE: The following article was posted earlier today but since then, I've received some additional information so I've revised it a bit.
In what I wrote about Budd here the other day, I mentioned the firebombing of his club, The Improv. On the club's website, there's this history of the place that's worth your time and it includes the following paragraph…
In 1979, a talent strike was organized against Mitzi Shore and her Comedy Store for failing to pay non-headlining comedians. The Improv was set to reap the benefits of the influx of comedians working only our stage until a massive fire nearly burned the entire building down. Arson was the cause and rumors ran rampant, from a competitor of Budd's (there was only one) to a disgruntled comedian who bombed on stage. The mystery was never solved, but the fire did close the showroom. To help Budd quickly rebuild, Improv favorites Robin Williams and Andy Kaufman organized fundraising shows, just one of many examples of legendary comedians showing their support throughout the years to the place that started their careers.
Two slight corrections to that. First: The fire didn't burn the entire building down…more like half. I walked up there a day or so after the blaze to see if I could volunteer some manpower or help organize the benefits I already heard were being assembled. There turned out to be nothing I could contribute but I saw the place. The showroom looked like it had been charbroiled on a big Hibachi but the restaurant and bar in the front were fine. So was the kitchen. So were the bathrooms.
And workers — some of whom I recognized as comics I'd seen on the Improv stage — were putting up temp walls to section off the rear and to convert the restaurant into a small performing area. Within a day or two, comics would actually be performing there again to bring in money.
It was a contrast that has stayed with me to this day: There was that lovely little showroom where so many careers had already been made and so many people had been so entertained. It was very, very sad. But then there were all these volunteers up front working like mad to save the business and to get it up and functioning. The new stage was partially-erected and Robin Williams jumped up on it and yelled, like he was in a Civil War drama, "The Mouth shall rise again!"
And I think, something like 48 hours later, he was on that stage, performing for as many people as could be crammed into the new, smaller temporary Improv. Something very inspirational there.
Second correction: The part about "The mystery was never solved" was probably true as far as Budd was concerned when that website went up but as of a few years ago, he considered the whodunnit at least half-solved. Here's a quote from this book I highly recommend on the history of The Improv. It included interviews of many of the performers who worked there and it also included this from Budd himself…
…even after the fire marshal ruled later that day that the cause had been arson — and that the blaze had originated in the rear of the building, where our alley's easy access and quick escape was practically an open invitation for anyone to strike a match — none of us, the more we all thought about it, believed that Mitzi could be that vindictive when it came right down to it. We were a lot less confident when it came to two wannabe comics who were among her biggest supporters, Biff Maynard and Ollie Joe Prater, each of whom had well-known substance abuse problems and were just unstable and impressionable enough to maybe do it. We wouldn't know for certain until 2014, nearly thirty years after the incident, when Ollie Joe confessed to setting the fire on his deathbed in a Los Angeles hospital. But, of course, nobody could prove anything definitively at the time.
For years, I heard rumors that Biff Manard and Ollie Joe Prater had been the firebombers. William Knoedelseder even suggested them by name as the culprits in his fine 2010 book on the Comedy Store strike, I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Standup Comedy's Golden Age. Ollie Joe Prater died in 1991, which is when he presumably made his deathbed confession but Manard was still alive when Knoedelseder's book was published and I wondered how the publisher's lawyers, who presumably vetted the text before publication, had allowed that in.
And now that I think of it, how did Budd not hear about Prater's "confession" until 2014? 2014 was when Biff Manard died. (And by the way, no one is misspelling his last name. He spelled it both ways.)
The rumors that Biff and Ollie Joe dunnit never included any actual information about how anyone knew that for sure. It sounded like a lot of people had just asked themselves, "Who might have thought they could benefit from the Improv going away and was a low-enough creature to do such a thing?" Manard and Prater seemed to be the most obvious answers to that question but that wasn't proof.
I did not know Ollie but I sure knew Biff. He was one of the writers on that variety show I worked on, Pink Lady. Among the eight thousand things that went wrong on that show was Biff. He didn't contribute much because he was too busy trying to knife everyone else in the spinal cord.
I have sometimes been accused of being too nice on this blog to certain people who did not deserve kindness or even the benefit of any doubts. In fact, one comedian friend called over the weekend to scold me for not writing about what a horrible person Gallagher was…and it's true that late in life, Gallagher turned into a pretty hateful onstage presence, bashing every minority group in sight and every comedian who was more successful at the moment than he was. But I was writing about the earlier Gallagher, the one who I felt hadn't received his due as a good comic…which he was then.
Still, if you waterboarded me, I couldn't think of anything good to say about Biff Manard or Maynard or whatever he was calling himself. And apparently, he died with no deathbed confession to having co-firebombed with his pal Ollie Joe. I asked Budd if Prater had implicated Manard in the crime and Budd's reply was, "I'm not sure but if one of those guys did it, the other one did it." Again, not hard evidence. The more I think about it, the more I'm not sure what to think.