It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when Cresthill really became Sam Kinison’s fiefdom. Even before his career took flight in the mid-’80s, Kinison’s charisma drew people to him, but LaBove was Kinison’s best friend. They’d moved to L.A. together and actively stoked a kind of mystical aura around themselves and whatever comics were in Kinison’s inner circle at a given moment. Rumors swirled that the two always carried guns. Mitzi had a rule that the house was for single comics — no girlfriends or wives allowed — but once LaBove moved in, his fiancé, Christy, and Kinison both surreptitiously followed.



Not everyone was thrilled with this arrangement. Wilson and, in particular, Dice, quickly grew weary of the drug-fueled, late-night, rock ’n’ roll circus–soap opera that trailed Kinison wherever he went. “Sam was someone whose natural state was chaos,” says Dan Barton, one of the Houston comics. “Dice was more orderly.”

By 1985, Kinison’s career was in the ascendency — his breakout performance on HBO’s Young Comedians Special had led to Carson and Letterman bookings, theater tours, and eventually a spot hosting Saturday Night Live the following year — but the rest of his life was a mess. His daily routine was to stay up all night, then sneak into LaBove’s room during the day to crash. (This unusual arrangement was even more unusual than it sounds: The year after Kinison’s death in 1992, LaBove discovered his and Christy’s daughter had actually been fathered by Kinison.)

After LaBove and Christy got married in 1985, they celebrated at Cresthill. “We had one of those blowouts that went to the following day,” says LaBove. “Everybody came: C.C. DeVille from Poison, Tommy Lee, all these guys. Dice wasn’t into drugs. Dice wanted to sleep. He just got tired of it. He got tired of the fact that we kind of controlled the house.”

Shortly after, LaBove got word that Mitzi wanted to see him. She’d heard Christy and Kinison were living in his room. All three would have to move out. Today. LaBove knew immediately who’d told her. “I was walking back up the hill. I’d made up my mind that I was going to kill Dice.”

While storming back toward Cresthill, he ran into Kinison, who talked him down. He had his own plan to get even. “Sam went to Dice and said, ‘I want you to know that we know it was you, and if I make it, I’m going to make sure I stick it up your ass every opportunity I get,’” he says. “This is the story that started the whole argument between Sam and Dice.”

Dice declined repeated entreaties to tell his side of it. But Jimmy Shubert, a comic who was tight with both Kinison and Dice, told me a version that mostly squares with LaBove’s. “Dice ratted Sam out,” says Shubert.

It can be hard to remember exactly how huge Dice and Kinison became in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and how much their feud defined stand-up during those years. Kinison broke first, scoring a memorable part in Rodney Dangerfield’s hit 1986 film, Back to School, making music videos and palling around with a debauched troupe of rock stars, porn stars, actors, comics, and whoever you'd consider Jessica Hahn to be. Dice became even bigger, appearing as a version of himself in a series of films (Making the Grade, Casual Sex?, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane) and selling out arenas. Their respective acts — heavy on testosterone-fueled bravado and ample doses of homophobia and misogyny — engendered controversy wherever they went.

Their bad blood spilled publicly. They’d badmouth each other on talk shows. Kinison would devote stage time to running Dice down. The adult film star Ron Jeremy was part of Kinison’s crew of misfits around this time and had known Dice from back in New York. “Right in the midst of their animosity, Sam comes up to me and says, ‘I just found out Dice is Jewish,’" says Jeremy. “‘I’m not going to call him Dice any longer. I’m going to call him Dreidel.’ So Sam called him Dreidel, and Dice told him to go fuck himself.”