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By Root 1219 0

on the performance, was intrigued to notice that the fellow was very extremely nervous—“His hands were moving down by his sides, almost like he’s playing an invisible piano, and he’s wearing a suit that looked badly shrunk. I thought it must have been an amateur night. And, in the first ten minutes of his act, half of what was originally a half-full audience got up and walked out. At first blush, I thought, Oh, this poor bastard. And then suddenly he made that swing—right from poor bastard to genius. I’d never seen anybody do a bad act on purpose before. But he was so good that he appeared to be literally summoning up beads of sweat on his forehead, drenching himself in the embarrassment and being affected emotionally by the fact that they weren’t laughing. People had their heads down, as if the guy had lost his bowels or thrown up onstage—you had to look away, but you couldn’t. It was like watching a nervous breakdown in slow motion—and it was rhythmic! It had nuance and poetry and it killed me! I had never seen anything like it before. He was like a beautiful dandelion, so fragile that he might just blow away in the wind. Then he cried and worked the crying into the conga drums—oh God! The technique, with the originality and imagination of it! He was fearless!”

Hoffman led his party backstage afterward to offer congratulations—“I remember being surprised at how big he was. When he did that character he was like the size of Woody Allen, and then you meet him and he’s a Goliath. And I remember how sweet and shy he was.” Murray Schisgal would recall, “He was very polite but also absolutely ebullient. He looked like the happiest guy in the world because Dusty came back to see him. He was really just floating.” Hoffman, in fact, was equally thrilled and began sending friends to the show and dragging others back with him and, on July 31, the syndicated columnist Earl Wilson reported, “Dustin Hoffman was at the Little Hippodrome for the fourth time to see zany comic Andy Kaufman, described by one viewer as an anti-comic.”

One of the friends Hoffman sent forth to behold the spectacle was Woody Allen himself, who would remember, “I thought he was quite good, quite amazing in certain places—the Mighty Mouse thing and the Elvis Presley come to mind. What he did, he did in a talented way, no question. He came over to me afterward and asked if he could have a chat with me one afternoon. He was awfully nice, so I had him come to [my manager] Jack Rollins’s office. And I chatted with him for a while, but most of his questions were odd because—I’ll never forget this—somewhere he had gotten the impression that I was a Transcendental Meditationist. He had heard that I pilgrimaged to India every year. And I said that nothing could be further from the truth. I have respect for it, but I have no interest in it whatsoever. And he was explaining to me that he was very, very interested in Eastern religion and Eastern philosophy. Which was, uh, nice. Then we talked about show business for a little bit and that was it. But I found him quite amusing and, you know, very unusual.”

His first impact upon popular consciousness, the moment he was born unto universal memory, would come fifteen months hence and he would then seem to have materialized from nowhere, inexplicably, like a wraith. By then, he had rehearsed his craft for twenty-six of the twenty-six years he had thus far lived. When it happened, as it happened, he did not utter a word, he was silent, the fingers would twitch at his sides and his eyes would strobe and he would sip the water and wipe his mouth, as the Terrytooners exalted the mouse by way of the phonograph and he would wait for his three opportunities to step forward and heroically move his lips and it was just as it had been since he invented this particular exercise for little birthday children, but really for himself, when he was no more than fourteen. But now it would seem to glisten like new (unless someone had viewed his club work or glimpsed the Dean Martin debut). And every other sly transgression he would attempt before