Neal Rubin

Book reunites us with 'Tim & Tom'

Ron Rapoport didn't have to clean this story up, but he was writing a book. For this audience, let's say Tim Reid and the newfound friend in his cheap hotel room were playing Monopoly.

We're talking the early 1970s, when America's first and still only significant interracial comedy team was trying to make the big time. The road led through the 20 Grand, a legendary nightclub at 14th Street and Warren Avenue in Detroit.

Reid would go on to become an actor, a producer and a Hollywood conscience. Tom Dreesen would become one of the hardest-working standup comics in the business, a talk-show regular who spent a decade opening for Frank Sinatra.

They did the living, struggling and recollecting for "Tim & Tom: An American Comedy in Black and White" (University of Chicago Press, $24). Rapoport, a native Detroiter, did the writing.

He'd never visited the 20 Grand, but he recognized the story as a natural for an account of race relations at the most fundamental level.

Back then, Reid and Dreesen were broke enough that they had to share a room, and Reid was using it for an extended Monopoly session. That left Dreesen wandering in the rain in a part of the city where -- in the words of the two police officers who snatched him off the street -- any white man was presumed to be looking for drugs or hookers.

That night, the two of them squabbled at the lounge, and Reid said, "That's the racist part of you talking there."

Dreesen went off. Wait a minute, he said. I'm wandering around soaking wet in a neighborhood where I'm so out of place the cops grab me, and I'm doing it so you can play Monopoly in our room with a white girl, and I'm a racist?

Reid pondered for a moment. "Well," he finally said, "maybe I was a little hasty."

The comedians

They're still laughing about that more than 30 years later, Rapoport says. They're still laughing so hard about so many things that it was hard to interview them together.

"There were times I had to say, 'Stop!' " he says. One of them would be howling while the other was talking, and the transcriptionist he'd hired would be ready to change careers, and Rapoport would be on the floor, which is not a recommended position for taking notes.

What makes the book so good, though, is that a lot of it isn't funny at all.

Dreesen grew up desperately poor in Chicago. Reid grew up in a cathouse and then an unofficial tavern in Virginia. They elevated themselves from nothing and then volunteered to go back, giving up middle-class comfort to try to make it in comedy.

They never did, at least not together.

Race riots were still breaking out in 1969, when they became a team. Maybe the country wasn't ready for them, they say. Or maybe, they admit, they just weren't funny enough. Maybe they needed more polish or better material.

When Dreesen finally reached comedy nirvana, a spot on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show," he was a solo act. He'd been bumped three times, and Rapoport's recounting of those days is better than "Rocky," or at least the sequels.

Reid watched in misery. He'd get his break later, crafting Venus Flytrap on "WKRP in Cincinnati" after dressing down the producers for creating another pimp role for a black man. What he didn't know was that Dreesen was sobbing -- and still sobs when he tells the story today -- because they were supposed to reach that peak together.

The writer

At its heart, "Tim & Tom" is a book about two guys chasing a dream written by someone who caught his.

Rapoport, 68, grew up in Detroit and Oak Park and first wrote for the newspaper at a school in Ferndale, Lincoln High, that doesn't exist anymore.

He went on to long tours as a sports columnist in Chicago and Los Angeles, wrote a stack of sports and showbiz books on the side and took on "Tim & Tom" after he retired in Southern California.

"Tim & Tom" came out a few months ago, but Reid and Dreesen are still flogging it wherever they can find a microphone. One or both have chatted with Jay Leno, David Letterman, Tavis Smiley and everyone else short of Oprah, who said no.

Rapoport has kept a lower profile. "They're professional entertainers. I know when I'm overmatched," he says. But in his field, he's the artist, and that trip back to the 20 Grand wouldn't have been the same without him.

Reach Neal Rubin at (313) 222-1874 or nrubin@detnews.com.