Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [85]
Confluence of fates began interlinking at an accelerated clip, for Carl Reiner’s son, Rob Reiner, then went to see this Foreign Man in New York at his father’s insistence and heard the eemetation of de Archie Bunker telling de Meathead to get out of de chair and, since Rob Reiner actually played de Meathead on the sitcom All in the Family, and since he was scheduled to host one of the first Saturday Night broadcasts, he was dutifully impressed and told Andy, who, in turn, declared that he wanted Rob Reiner to be the first person to introduce him on the show, which caused certain havoc and embarrassment in that Lorne Michaels wanted Andy on the first show and Rob Reiner was slated to host the third, on which he could then introduce him again, never mind that Andy was very upset about the whole thing. Meanwhile, there was the Uncle Sammy Denoff connection, which Carl Reiner discovered when he next began to recreate the act for Uncle Sammy, who had cowritten countless episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show and whose manager was Uncle Carl’s nephew George Shapiro, and he stopped Carl Reiner in mid-sentence and said, “I know that kid! He considers me his uncle!” Also: In New York, Carl Reiner had given George Shapiro’s phone number as well as his own to Andy and one day in early November George picked up the phone and heard, “Ummmm …” and it was Andy calling to say that he was coming out to Los Angeles after his third appearance on Saturday Night—not one installment of which George had seen, since people in his crowd had dismissed the program as “a poor imitation of Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows” (on which Carl Reiner had become famous)—and this was all getting awfully providential. Andy told him that Budd Friedman was flying him out to work at the new West Hollywood Improv. Friedman, at that time, was eager to display the wares of his New York bumper crop in order to compete with Mitzi Shore’s lock on local talent at her Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard. Shapiro agreed without hesitation to come see Andy when he hit town and hung up and none of this was news to him since Budd Friedman had called him earlier that day to say there was this strange guy from the New York club that he was bringing out and this guy needed a manager and George ought to come see him work. “All of a sudden,” said Shapiro, “there was no escaping this person named Andy Kaufman.”
Shapiro, for his part, was new to the management business, but a veteran of the agency business, where he had risen through the ranks of the New York William Morris office, starting out in the mail-room—the William Morris mailroom being the fabled bottom-rung incubator of innumerable future sharks and moguls. From there, he floated through the company as a temporary secretary, sometimes helping out visiting agents or agency clients, which was how he found himself answering phones for Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s manager, whenever the Colonel came through town. “The Colonel always lectured to me—‘Everything is money,’ he told me. ‘Everything depends on money. It’s all money. How much money did we make today?’” He apprenticed under various agents involved in various television projects and programs, which was how he found himself backstage at The Ed Sullivan Show when Elvis made his first appearance. “Elvis was the first person to ever call me sir. No one ever called me sir. I’m from the Bronx. They don’t use that term in the Bronx.” Shapiro was then and ever an exuberant little wiry guy with quixotic ideas,