In 1998, he made a glorious return to Montreal. His headlining set — a hilarious 10-minute ramble — left a theater of more than 2,000 people weeping with laughter, and as soon as the festival was over, he had a $500,000 sitcom deal with Fox. Mary and Arne Hedberg danced in their kitchen with joy when they heard the news. Hedberg just smiled his sheepish grin and cashed the check.
Nothing would ever come of the sitcom deal. It wasn't for lack of trying — it's just no one could find anything that would work on Fox for Hedberg. But now he had some serious money. That, and a new friend named Lynn Shawcroft. The two had been briefly introduced back in 1996 at the New Faces showcase. By the fall of 1998 they were close, and soon Mitch moved out of Johnson's apartment and into the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. ''We were together nine years,'' Johnson says. ''We tried, but that October we broke it off completely.''
Hedberg had fallen in love. Shawcroft was adoring and a little wild — the perfect match for his brilliant, insecure, and sweet temperament. They married a few months later. ''It happened in February of 1999. We found out in November,'' says Mary Hedberg. ''I found out in an e-mail from another friend. She said, 'Well, now that Mitch is married...' I was at my desk and tears, lots of tears, just came flying and I said, 'Married? Mitch is married?' He didn't want to tell us. They told us later that they didn't want us to be hurt for Jana.''
The new couple hit the road. Whereas Johnson had kept a job at home, Shawcroft was more than happy to live out of rental cars and airport terminals with her new husband. They started traveling and didn't stop. Watching horror movies in hotel rooms. Ordering chicken burritos. Doing shows and then swiftly sneaking out the door. Shawcroft's job was to have the exit route planned and the car already started by the time Hedberg finished his set. They fancied themselves American outlaws, comedy's answer to Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. ''He was into that whole romantic rock & roll Jim Morrison/Kurt Cobain thing,'' says Johnson. ''It was who he was.''
The duo became famous for flaky behavior, stuff like deciding to drive cross-country to gigs on a whim and leaving a van at the Phoenix airport for seven months at $16 a day. (''By the time we got it out,'' she laughs, ''the bill cost more than the van.'') ''Mitch and Lynn were together all the time,'' says Hedberg's longtime manager, Dave Becky. ''They lived in their own little world.'' And that world included drugs.
No one is quite sure when Hedberg started seriously using heroin, but Shawcroft says he had tried the drug before they met. From the outside, it was hard to tell what was going on. Hedberg and Shawcroft's relationship was startlingly opaque — Mary Hedberg estimates she and Arne spent a total of 24 hours with the couple over their six years of marriage — and the stand-up scene is filled with high-functioning drug users. Against that backdrop, he was the picture of professionalism. Despite rumors of heavy drug use, Hedberg would arrive, perform, and leave audiences happy.
''Mitch was a live-and-let-live guy,'' says Becky. ''When we would talk about [the drug gossip] he would always say, 'I'm fine, man. I'm writing jokes. I'm selling tickets. My fans love me.' He never would say, 'I have a problem. I'm in trouble. I'm unhappy.' We always tried to get to the bottom of what he was doing and he kept saying 'I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine.'''
But the rumors were becoming too pervasive, too worrying. In the summer of 2002, Mary and Arne tracked down the couple in Texas and confronted him about substance abuse. The conversation did not go well. ''Lo and behold, they talked us out of it,'' says Arne, with a shake of the head. '''This is all just a big myth. Here's why and blah blah blah.' They teamed up on us. The truth is, they snookered us.''
Any pretense that the comedian was clean was shattered a year later. Hedberg had just wrapped up a series of shows at an Austin comedy club when he and Lynn were stopped at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. A federal officer opened up a red bag covered with white flowers that had Hedberg's name on it. Inside was a Red Bull can with three syringes and a smudge of heroin on the bottom. When the officer searched Hedberg's backpack he found a fistful of pills — Valium and Xanax, as it turned out — that the comedian said he'd gotten from someone downtown. (He later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor drug charge.)
Hedberg spent two nights in jail, where a routine examination showed that an infection had been festering in his right leg for months. He was shipped to a county hospital, and while he was there, doctors told Shawcroft the leg was in alarmingly bad shape. Mary and Arne arranged to have Mitch transported to a Houston hospital, where surgeons operated for 13 hours. The leg was saved — though Hedberg would limp for the rest of his life. But after that nobody had any illusions that Hedberg was actually okay. In fact, everyone was scared to death. Everyone except Shawcroft. ''To me it was a relief,'' she says quietly. ''I mean, when he got arrested it was very scary. But it got us to stop working for a couple of months and almost back to health. For a while.''
Lynn Shawcroft sits in a hotel in Beverly Hills. The red paint on her nails is flaked and chewed. Her face is puffed and her eyes are hidden by dark sunglasses. Ripped jeans dangle over dirty sneakers. She looks a wreck.
''I'm scared,'' she says in a thin, watery voice. ''I don't know if I can do this.''
''Here's the thing you really need to know,'' says Kagan, who spent significant time with both Shawcroft and Hedberg. ''The story of Mitch Hedberg is a love story. A great love story.'' Today, Shawcroft just looks at her shoes and says, ''It is a love story. It is, it is, it is.''
The time since Hedberg's death has been tough on Shawcroft. There was the funeral. The endless condolence cards to answer. In fact, since her husband's passing, she has become extremely hard to reach, refusing interview requests and avoiding most friends' telephone calls. Now, as she opens up for the first time, it's clear that the little moments hurt the most. ''I opened one of his journals after he died,'' she says, ''and there was a line, 'Do you believe in Gosh?''' She grins. ''The f---er could write. I'd turn around and he'd have five new jokes.''
She starts shaking a bit as she remembers the end. ''We were going to Baltimore [that last night]]. We had been in New York for all these days, and we had kept jumping hotels.... It was the most confusing night of my life. I was in the bedroom, and then I went in the bathroom. And when I came out he didn't look right. So I grabbed him and tried to give him mouth-to-mouth and called 911.''
''It's so hard. How am I going to do this? He was beyond even a best friend. He loved monster movies.'' She looks up as if to say Betcha didn't know that. ''He did. He couldn't watch them on his own, though. He'd make me watch them with him.''
She stops, gulps air, and takes off her sunglasses. Her eyes are wet with tears.
Back in 2003, after he was released from the hospital, Hedberg fought his way back to performing, playing 54 cities around the country with Dave Attell and Lewis Black. He missed only one show on that tour, in Phoenix. He had gotten stuck in traffic.
But as the money grew better and better — a Comedy Central special and a CD had sent his price tag as high as $25,000 for a night's work — his health was getting worse and worse. It didn't help that he had been on the road for six years straight. There was never a vacation. He and Shawcroft rarely made it to their home in the mountains outside of L.A., and then it was just a quick stop to collect piles of mail. They traveled so much that Mitch laid out $84,000 for a motor home, the only way he could see to drive from gig to gig. ''He was working too hard,'' Shawcroft says. ''He partied hard, too, but I think everyone attributed everything to drugs without realizing that he was burning out as well. Now I look back and wish when we were in Texas I had just said, 'No more.' No more.''
His last tour — with singing comedian Stephen Lynch — was tough. For the first time in Hedberg's 19-year career, there were reports of bad shows, sets where he would show up obviously drunk or stoned and lie on his back in the middle of the stage and burble nonsense. ''That happened toward the end,'' says Clear Channel's Geof Wills, who booked his last two tours. ''Sometimes [he was] brilliant. Other times I thought, 'Hey, Mitch, that wasn't the greatest thing in the world.' He was clearly compromised.''
The final six shows at Carolines in March of this year were typical. About half of them were bad. Not awful. Just bad. Mitch would look at his notes and fret when the jokes didn't sing, or just speed through his set. The rest were phenomenal, though, glorious 60-minute blocks that left people crying into their two-drink minimums.
the police, etc.
