Pauly Shore: All O'Shore

Even around Hollywood, Shore's mother, Mitzi Shore, the owner of L.A.'s The Comedy Store, is legendary: an eccentric, tough-minded entrepreneur who is, arguably, better rid of her wild ex-husband, a comic who peaked when he warmed up audiences for Elvis Presley. "My mom has gone with all comics," the son explains. "They're all guys that really don't have their shit together. She keeps them up. Like Steve Landesberg in the early years, Argus Hamilton, Danny Stone--just total fucking losers, capital fucking A. Like, this guy was into coke, that other was . . . well, you know what I mean.

The last time Shore was interviewed for Movieline, he was still living with his mother. What has moving out done for him? "One good thing about not living with her anymore is not having to listen to her say, 'Where are you going?' or, 'Why are you leaving me?' And that was just when I went out on the road. Of course, not having to sneak in when I come home--that's good, too. Also, I don't have to borrow her porno tapes anymore because now I've got my own-- although she had pretty cool ones like Behind the Green Door. See," he says, gesturing to the house, "this is my mom's place that I just bought from her. She's got a lot of different properties and instead of me just buying somewhere else, we kept it in the family."

This is just as good a time as any to get Shore to show me his bedroom and on the way upstairs, he directs my eye to the jaw-dropping carpeting that runs the hallway and stairs. As if he had to. "I call it 'porno leopard,'" Shore says of the floor covering that even Jayne Mansfield might have found outre. "You can tell bimbos have walked on it, right? We had this interior designer to help color-coordinate the house. I forget her name, but she took me to Jeff Goldblum's house because she wanted me to see her work. He was out of town and she had a key, so we went into this one room that was covered in this carpet. I said, 'That's fucking perfect.' And I got what was left over from his job."

Shore sings a little tah-dah! on entering the bedroom. And well he might: the walls are bright copper, which match the basin and tub fixtures in the adjacent bathroom. The bed-- "No, that's not a waterbed," Shore assures me -- could accommodate a threeway. "Can you believe I probably haven't had one party in this house?" he wails. Well, no, especially when he mentions that it's in this room he keeps his famous black book. "It's a book of numbers that I have of girls all over America," he explains. "Girls all over this town, too. With notes, like, 'big tits,' 'hot ass,' 'nasty,' 'hummers,' you know. Stuff like that. I can't show you, but there's no celebrities in it. I haven't shtupped any. But when it comes to Playboy Playmates and Penthouse Pets, yeah."

Oh, now I see why peeking out here and there among his trademark flowing scarves and grungy sneakers are well-thumbed copies of Penthouse and Playboy; I'm guessing that Shore uses them to order out of, sort of like I do with J. Crew catalogs. "Whenever I have a party or my friend has a party, you just go through the book and-- bam! People expect me to be this guy who drinks, takes bong hits all the time and goes out and screws everyone. And I am that guy." After a beat, he adds, "Just not today."

Pointing my attention toward a framed painting hanging on the wall, a primitively hip affair, he offers, "My sister designed that. She's into channeling aliens and shit. She just gave it to me. The rest of the decor me and my mom, you know, just kind of talked about and worked out. She's got a weird sense of humor." What was it like growing up in such a family? "My mother drove an old hearse limo that was really embarrassing," he recalls. "I had curly hair, a skateboard, and a mole right there on my cheek. I was always different, too weird. So, when I got transferred to Beverly Hills High, I told my mom, 'I want to be called Paul.' I just wanted to be normal. So I wore Top-Siders, Polo shirt sand wanted to go to bar mitzvahs and shit. I got rid of the mole, too." To prove it, he displays a framed picture of himself, just post-mole and transcendentally nerdy, pointing out the obvious: "A very sad, lonely kid, hey?"

But seeing the picture sparks a memory of a sad, lonely kid's first sexual encounter. "An old friend, Mike Messex, Donovan Leitch and I were at Florentine Gardens. Dono was like, in the corner dancing or something, but Mike was with this really hot younger girl, Sarah, or something. I was with her friend: huge, blonde, titties, slutty. Just kind of a pig, you know? We went back to Sarah's house in the Valley in Mike's Datsun and Mike, who was older than me, didn't know this was my first time. So, me and the fat girl went into the maid's room . . . well, I'd never felt a wet pussy before. It was so bizarre! The second I touched her vagina, I came, then ran, yelling to Mike, 'Dude, let's get out of here!'"

I spot another framed item, a photo of Shore hanging with Jim Carrey, who stands jaybird naked except for a sock over his willy as if he's showing he's got what it takes to be a Red Hot Chili Pepper. I can't help asking Shore how he felt seeing his pal shoot up to the heady $7 million stratosphere with just one film. Shore says, uncharacteristically choosy about his words, "That whole thing ... well, Jim is very talented and a great guy, a really nice guy. Seven million? I called my manager screaming when I read that and said, 'What the fuck is that?' But if I was getting seven million now, what would I have to look forward to?"

As we head downstairs, he tells me that he's not sure of the house's lineage prior to his mother's buying it. Having grown up a Hollywood kid, though, he knows the cachet of such trivia and offers, "The house I grew up in belonged to Dorothy Lamour. We got her mail all the time. Isn't she dead or what? Anyway, you want to know about this house. Well, this table has been here forever and these couches and stuff, too. The place was basically a crash pad for comics that didn't pay rent to my mom. It was always kind of trashed. Yakov Smirnoff lived here. Dice, too. Kinison used to do coke here and throw chairs off that balcony right there.

"It's haunted by ghosts of dead comedians," Shore adds. "We think Skip Stephenson and Ollie Joe Prater. When you're upstairs sleeping, you can hear footsteps and doors slamming and we can't put fruit out on the dining room table because something sucks the life right out of it. Rebecca Schaeffer's ghost was here playing with the other spirits, too, because she followed Grease from her old apartment that a friend of his rented. One girlfriend of mine didn't like to be alone in the house because she went downstairs to get some water and she heard footsteps on the floorboards of this room.

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