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him. “He always made us ride in the last car of the Cyclone because he said it provided the full-whiplash effect,” said Schultz. In November, Walsh sent him to Fort Lauderdale to open for the Supremes (minus Diana Ross) at a nightclub owned by his friend Bobby Van and, after his first set on the first night, the manager of the Supremes forbade him to step onstage again. Walsh spoke with Andy on the phone afterward and told him, “Look, Florida is the wrong audience for you, I made a mistake in letting you go down there, but—since you’re there anyhow—when that Bobby Van comes into your dressing room, I want you to do Crying Man.” (Van called Walsh forty-five minutes later and said, “Oh, Jim, I feel terrible! Poor guy’s having a nervous breakdown in his dressing room and won’t stop crying.”) There would be odd gigs in private men’s clubs and at the Continental Baths (whose largely gay male audience wore only towels or less) and at the Mr. Olympia Contest and at restaurants and niteries throughout the tristate area, in addition to dutiful nightly stops at Catch and the Improv, where the Friedmans had also hired him to emcee a weekly Sunday showcase of children performers. Silver Friedman remembered him arriving twenty-five minutes late on the second Sunday of the series and her saying to him, “Andy, next time you’re late, at least call us! We didn’t even know if you were coming!” And his eyes turned black and he countered, “Don’t yell!” “It was like my little reproach had stabbed him,” she said, “and suddenly he almost looked menacing, to the point where if I’d said another word he would have either walked out or killed me. Anger, I realized, was a very big issue for him deep down in there somewhere.”

By winter’s end, he and Walsh drifted apart as casually as they had come together, with no hard feelings, although Walsh had grown concerned over Andy’s mental well-being—“He had come up to my office on Lexington Avenue and he started talking about what he really wanted to do, which was to play Carnegie Hall and then take the audience the next day over to a deli to have milk and cookies. And then he said that when he became really successful, what he most wanted to do was to buy the Atlantic Ocean and drain it and build a city there. And this was now bordering on … I mean, if this guy’s serious we’ve got some problems here.”

Meanwhile, NBC had hired a bright young producer named Dick Ebersol from ABC Sports and saddled him with the task of creating a new live late-night comedy-variety program to replace the Saturday repeats of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. The show—whose content was still a mystery to all, including Ebersol—was to be up and running in Studio 8H of Rockefeller Center by the fall of 1975. So, in the holiday dusk of 1974, Ebersol began cruising New York clubs for talent and it was at Catch a Rising Star that he spied his first real quarry—“The first image I had of Andy will never go away—it was Mighty Mouse. I thought it was the damnedest thing I’d ever seen. It was like stepping into a whole other world—and I had no idea how many other worlds that I would ultimately go to with him.” Ebersol instantly befriended Andy, started riding regularly with him from Catch to the Improv, watched him spoon up the various parfait layers of his act, breakfasted with him and Elayne, all the while talking and talking about this new show which Andy would absolutely have to be part of. Around the same time, Ebersol convinced a young Canadian exile of rich comedic pedigree, Lorne Michaels, to come build and produce the show with him. Ebersol said of Michaels and their mission, “Our minds met in that the one thing we wanted to do was to take the language of young people and make it the language of television. We both had this philosophy that television was always at least ten years behind what was actually happening. Television was very risk aversive.” By March 1975, seven months before their debut, he informed his new partner of the first risk he wished to put forth—“I told Lorne that I had one guest booked for the first