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By Root 1211 0

kind of yoga thing, or not,” said Chase. “But I was so self-confident and sort of disarming—basically I just didn’t give a shit—that I had no compunctions about simply facing the obvious with him. And I think the fact that I truly didn’t give a shit made him comfortable to just be Andy. He knew there was no foolin’ me—so we were able to talk about things. I remember engaging him in conversations about his method of preparation, his general health and well-being, his sanity, his acne. I asked him if he knew that he was funny and if he took pleasure in the responses he got to his work. Because he never really appeared to enjoy anything. And he said, yes, that he truly enjoyed the responses. He was always testing onstage, searching—is this funny or is it not funny or is it just odd? And did he care if it was funny? You know what? He did care. I once asked him, ‘Do you know how brilliant you are?’ And he turned shy again. He said he didn’t know if anyone ‘got it’—if they laughed at him or with him. But I think it meant something to him that I asked. I was sort of the cat’s pajamas at the time and he respected that. But he also looked at what I was doing as rather pedestrian, I think, considering where he was headed.

“What’s interesting is that with those doors closed, we actually chuckled a lot, we had real laughs. Then he would step out of the office and become the quiet wide-eyed guy again. But those eyes were like the eyes of a tiger. They were always looking around for fresh prey.”

9

Constantly risking absurdity / and death / whenever he performs above the heads / of his audience / the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime / to a high wire of his own making….

Lawrence Ferlinghetti,

from the poem “Constantly Risking Absurdity”

Rarefied wind blew west, as it will, because west is where certain sorts of dreams go to flourish or to corrupt themselves or to die. He had been west and knew he would go again but knew not when or how. And so it happpened that Carl Reiner dropped into Catch a Rising Star with his wife, Estelle, in early October, before Saturday Night and Mighty Mouse expedited matters of renown. Reiner, by this time, was understood to be a comedic Midas whose deft touch helped gild the legends of Sid Caesar, of Mel Brooks’s Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man, and of sitcom archetypes Rob and Laura Petrie (he created The Dick Van Dyke Show, about the secret life of a comedy writer, in his own image); soon he would direct the films of a former Disneyland boy-magician named Steve Martin, whose own burgeoning career in stand-up comedy had already begun to incite a national stampede among young club jokesmiths. (Martin’s unprecedented enormity made him comedy’s first rock star—further inspiring a generation of enterprising or envious wisenheimers.) And so the Reiners experienced the bafflement that was Foreign Man with keen wonder—“Seeing him for the first time and not knowing what to expect was a wonderful thing,” Reiner would recall. “It was altogether new. We didn’t know what he was getting at. But we knew he knew those jokes were bad. Nobody could be that dumb. We quickly realized we were watching something very unusual and historic in comedy theater.” Then, of course, came the Crying, then de Elveece, then Reiner took him aside out on Second Avenue and pledged to help him, told him to call next time he came to the West Coast. (Dennis Raimondi, who witnessed the encounter, remembered Andy turning to him after Reiner walked away and saying, “I never go to the Coast. What’s he talking about?”) Reiner, meanwhile, would remember nothing about that conversation other than the wavering countenance he addressed—“When I talked to him, I saw outer space all over his face. His spacey face. His eyes weren’t zeroed in; they were everywhere else, as though he was thinking, Why am I talking to this man?” And days later Reiner was back in California, lunching with his nephew/manager George Shapiro and Dick Van Dyke in the NBC Burbank commissary, where he re-created beat for beat this new act he’d seen at Catch a Rising Star.