In his unpublished memoir, Mr. Newman said that he was originally thinking of calling his club Off Off Broadway or the Talent Scout, but fate and a radio station intervened.
“Driving on my way home to Queens, the song ‘Catch a Falling Star’ by Perry Como came on the radio,” he wrote, “and like a lightning bolt hitting me, I said to myself, ‘That’s it.’”
He sold the original club — which was sometimes promoted with the name Rick Newman’s Catch a Rising Star — in 1986. Catch a Rising Star then became a franchise with locations throughout the country, but the original club closed in 1993. In 1996, Mr. Newman revived the name in New York with a club on West 28th Street, but that venue lasted only two years.
He was also involved in other enterprises, including, in the 1980s, the restaurant Columbus on the Upper West Side, whose partners included Regis Philbin and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
“He had enormous culturally influential success in three different industries — comedy with Catch, music with Pat Benatar and restaurants with Columbus,” Mr. Martin, his business partner in the Triad, said by email. “By putting his name in front of the Catch a Rising Star title, he created his own brand that made him famous, yet he remained humble, likable and supportive.”
Krysi Newman, his wife of 27 years, survives him.
Mr. Belzer, Catch’s longtime M.C., died the day before Mr. Newman did.
“Their encouragement and belief in me gave me the confidence I needed, and I was one of many with the same feelings,” Mr. Crystal said. “As hard as it is for me, their losses a day apart seem kind of poetic now.”
Jason Zinoman contributed reporting.
