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By Root 1263 0

a born nurturer; he climbed onward, was brought to California in 1961, handling deals for Steve Allen’s short-lived ABC-TV variety show, where he introduced Allen’s head writer Bill Dana (a.k.a. José Jimenez) to the writing team of clients Sam Denoff and Bill Persky, for whom he also got jobs on The Dick Van Dyke Show staff. He then oversaw Denoff and Persky’s creation of the sitcom That Girl, starring Marlo Thomas, discovered Jim Nabors, who became Gomer Pyle, brokered much show business in general, and—perhaps most significantly—brought into the William Morris fold a no-nonsense deal-maker named Howard West, whom Shapiro had known since the third grade at P.S. 80 in the Bronx. And in 1974, when Shapiro struck out on his own to form a management company, it was West whom he lured to become his partner, so as to form Shapiro/West and Associates—a prototypical good cop/bad cop cooperative, wherein George coddled the talent and Howard drew blood from the buyers of talent. Their small client list a year hence included Uncle Carl and comic actor Marty Feldman and comedienne Ruth Buzzi and the animator who created Scooby-Doo and Uncle Sammy and some other writers and now George went to the Improv on Melrose Avenue to see the kid from New York with the Bombing and the Crying and de Elveece and—since heavens and lineage had dictated this—he was floored. “He just totally floored me.” Then he brought Howard West to see their future client. “I knew I wanted to sign him. I told Howard, ‘This guy—I get excited just sitting and watching him!’ So Howard came—Howard is kind of a buttoned-down businessman—and he just stared at me.” West would recall: “I didn’t hate it. Some of the material was very clever, smart, funny. But you look at some of the other material and say, Are you kidding me? That’s the reaction I had—a mixed bag. I mean, Andy had a set of balls.”

All of which was to say that Andy landed safely in California and the oiled machinery of momentum awaited him there and it engulfed him and he took to it completely and—though he would return to New York at every opportunity and always believe New York was where he belonged—California had claimed him and California would now decide what to do with him. He would submit as best he could and it would still be nothing if not a roiling artistic struggle, which would become apparent soon enough, but not too soon because now it was time to truly start becoming famous.

So George expressed excitement, which was exciting, and became his manager before the year was out, focusing mostly on what they could do in the new year, and George had lots of ideas and was very, um, excitably excited about how things would work. Budd Friedman, meanwhile, had put him up in a small transient-hotel bungalow a few blocks from the club, off of Melrose, because he needed to showcase his New York import for several weeks, and that was where Little Wendy found him or where he found Little Wendy, who was Wendy Polland, a comical songwriter, whom he decided to name Little Wendy because her manner was sweet and loopy and befuddled and also because she was very short and had the voice of a precocious child. Andy had gotten her phone number from a TM person because he didn’t know many people in Los Angeles and the TM person had seen Wendy perform her songs at retreats and thought she could maybe work with Andy onstage somehow. And so she came over and didn’t want to take off her coat because she thought she was fat and she kept apologizing for herself—“He just loved that I hated myself, basically. Also, he liked that I had this ‘innocence’—not that I was innocent, but I made sure to be just as light and as pure as possible around him, because that was soooooo important to him.” She sort of fell in love with him right away was what happened, but he was oblivious of course and just wanted her to hang around with him, and so he called her every day and she came over and watched him eat breakfast while he watched Father Knows Best on television—“And he would just well up with tears every single day while he watched