"That's the one thing nobody would expect, to turn [my cable TV show] on and see somebody famous! Ya know, who would ever come on a piece of crap like this? Well, you know, Andy Kaufman."
Bob Pagani on Alan Abel and Andy Kaufman Part 1, Page 1.
ME: Do you want to give a little background about yourself?
BP: Yeah, well, I grew up in the Bronx. Um, I went to Catholic school for like twelve years.
ME: Did that ruin you? Did it save you?
BP: Oh man. That's an atheist factory. (laughter)
BP: I'm telling you. You either come out a religious fanatic or nearly an atheist...My dad was sort of a character in that, you know, he would just try stuff. You know those signs that say authorized personnel only? Well, "how do you know if you're authorized unless you open the door and see what happens? Maybe they just forgot to tell ya, ya know?' (laughter) Yeah, he just kind of liked to, break the rules occasionally.
ME: A provacateur, huh?
BP: Yeah, I'm going to catholic school I'm telling ya, and my dad's saying, "ah, fuck it. Let's see what happens!",ya know? I was talking to a pet shop owner at a trade show one time...because I wanted to use the bathroom...Midtown, right across from Madison Square Garden. So we notice these guys with yellow badges and they were obviously pet shop owners for the trade show up in the ballroom. My dad says, "ya wanna go? I said, "We can't go. We don't own a pet shop." And he said, "Well, let's see." We just grabbed some yellow cards off the counter, off the desk, and they looked like the badges, and we just stuck them in our pockets and it looked like we just took our name tags off. We got in the elevator and went up to the fifth floor or whatever it was and just walked right pass the guard and said, "hey, how you doing?", and walked right in.
ME: Wow, that's cool.
BP: He just did it to be, you know, he wanted to; because we weren't supposed to, you know?
ME: Where do you think he got that from? His dad?
BP: Yeah...my grandfather, okay, when I worked for the Yankees, in the seventies, as a security guard, my grandfather was my shop steward. Um, and you know, you're in that union, ya kind of never had to pay to go to any events in New York because, you know, mostly the union worked it and even if you weren't working that night, you could usually just go to the door and go "hey", ya know, and they'd let you in. You'd know somebody working the door and they'd just go "go right on in". I went to a Frank Zappa concert one time and I bought tickets because I wanted a seat, and I saw one of the guys I worked with and he's like, "you bought a ticket?", he was almost, offended. And I was like, "yeah, because I wanted to sit down?", ya know? I didn't want to stand in the corner by the fire door? Yeah, it was like a shock, that I actually paid to go to a show. It was kind of a tradition, that we didn't; we kinda didn't have to. We just didn't. So I guess it comes from that.
ME: Interesting...
BP: Yeah, but, when I was a kid, I knew about Alan Abel -- I heard about him from S.I.N.A., the Society of Indecency of Naked Animals.
ME: So your first exposure [to Alan Abel], you read something about that?
BP: Yeah, that was the first time I'd ever heard of him. And that was the early sixties, so I was like ten, eleven. I just laughed; I thought it was pretty funny, you know, this guys makes up stuff and people write stories about him. I thought it was pretty cool! And I always wanted to meet him and I eventually did, like in my late twenties. I did meet him.
ME: And how did that happen?
BP: Do you know the New School?
ME: No.
BP: It's called the New School for Social Research. Have you ever seen The Actor's Studio? Inside the Actor's Studio?
ME: Yeah.
BP: It's affiliated with the New School. It's like a radical, progressive college...So I was taking this adult education course about comedy or something, I just felt like taking it. And the guy was kind of cool, he was this old guy would teach, but he would bring in people to speak. One of them was um...one of the woman writer's from SNL came in. And this was in the late seventies so the show was still pretty new. So that was kinda cool. I got to talk to her a little bit, and then he announced that in a week Alan Abel was coming in. And I was like, "Oh man! Great! Wild! I've been wanting to meet him forever."
ME: Wow.
BP: So he came in to talk, and I caught up with him after the class or whatever and I said, "I've been following your career for years" and he said, "You should come down to the office and we can talk". So I did. He had an office at 507 5th Avenue, which is at 42nd street, sort of diagonally across from the library, the main branch of the public library. And on the floor, literally it had been, like a janitor's closet at one point. Alan rented it as an office. If two people were standing in it, the third person would have to be outside the door. (laughter) He had a desk and he had shelves and stuff. And I met him there and I was talking to him and he said, "What do you do?" and I told him I worked for the Yankees and at Madison Square Garden as a security guard. And he's like, "So you have a cop uniform?", and I was, "uh, yeah." And he's like uh, "You know what Omar is?" And I'm like, "yeah, the thing with the panhandling and stuff." And he goes, "right. So, uh, you wanna be Omar's body guard?" And I was like, "sure."
ME: Wowww.
BP: Yeah.
ME: So, what year was that? That was late seventies, right?
BP: Oh, uh, '78, '79. Yeah, right in there somewhere. Uh, next thing I knew I'm doing Omar. Omar was the thing where Alan was pretending to be the guy who taught people how to panhandle.
ME: Right.
BP: And he wore a hood over his head and he claimed that he didn't want his neighbor's to know what he really did for work. Of course the real reason was because he didn't want the press to recognize it was him. And he would rent a rehearsal hall just off Times Square, like literally two doors off Times Square. Anybody can rent them; they rent them for auditions and rehearsals for broadway shows. And he'd rent it and he'd call up all his out of work actor friends and he'd say, "you wanna make a couple twenty bucks? okay, come on down" and with Omar, they'd pretend to be the students in the class and Alan would give them a lecture about how to panhandle. People would come in thinking it was legitimate, you know.
ME: Uh huh.
BP: So I was just the body guard. They wanted to know why he needed a body guard. I was like, "well, a lot of people don't like the line of work he's in, and he carries cash and I walk with him to the night deposit", you know.
ME: So basically you met him in an improv class, or something like it.
BP: It was comedy writing supposedly. Yeah.
ME: Well, give me a little background on the public access show you were doing and, you wrote the letter to Andy, right?
BP: Yeah, um, my friend Alben, that's with a 'b', not a 'v'. He and I had kinda like, I had saw an ad in the Village Voice and somebody wanted to do a cable show and they were looking for performers and writers and I answered this thing and this guy named Larry Chandler had an apartment on 45th st. and a bunch of people came to the apartment for the meeting for the show and I met this guy named Alben who was going to be a writer and performer on the show and he had this kinda of a vague, half-assed idea for the show about products made by this fake company, and we got to talking and basically had some similar ideas and...you know, cheesy public access show and it never really went anywhere and we kinda gave up on it after a while. We just kind of continued on our own stuff. But there was this studio on 53rd st., 110 E. 53rd...inner city law says that cable companies have to have public access studios.
ME: Right.
BP: They have to put anybody on, regardless of content...What they forgot to do was to make them have studios. It was just that they were required to; they had zero interest in public access. [portion missing] This guy realized, "hey, there might be a market for this. I could run this studio. I could have the studio charge people a couple of bucks, you know, interns and stuff and it wouldn't have a big payroll and...so that's what he did. He opened this studio called, E.T.C., Experimental Television Cooperative and a friend of mine uh, who has since gone on to win a couple of Peabody awards in radio; she's on public radio in Philadelphia now, Kathy O'Donald; she does a kid's show; she was doing some kind of goofy public access show and she finally got bored with it, right?
ME: Um hmm.
BP: So she said, "do you want my time slot?", and I said, "yeah, that might be fun.", and she goes, "just leave my name on it as the producer and as far as they know, it doesn't matter how you change the content, it's the same show. You'll get to keep the time slot." So we did that, yeah, we just left her name on the credits, you know? The premise of the show was that we worked at this company called Slycraft. That's what -- we headquartered from this imaginary town in Ohio and they had sent us to New York to like, make inroads and stuff in the New York market. We would go on demonstrating these ridiculous products and act as though it was all very straight, you know. We'd take fake phone calls and make it up as we went along. And one week I was talking to Alben and I was like, "it would be great if we could get somebody famous on this time.", because it was so cheap, black and white and it was just the worst. That's the one thing nobody would expect, to turn it on and see somebody famous! Ya know, who would ever come on a piece of crap like this? Well, I mean, you know, Andy Kaufman. I was a fan anyway, and I mean, he might do it just to do it. So I wrote a letter. I didn't know the name of his manager or anything. I just sent it to ABC in L.A. -- the only address I could think of. He was still doing TAXI at the time. So um, I wrote this letter and just explained the show and "if you're ever in New York look me up, blah, blah, blah", and I sent it on a Wednesday.
ME: Um hmm.
BP: And so we go down the next night to do the show, and, the show was 11:00 to 11:30. So it's about 10:15 ... the premise was that they were members of this group called Americans for Moral Decency and I don't know how this was supposed to work but they were supposed to come up and play miniature golf. We had little clubs and we were going to actually play miniature golf in the studio.
ME: Uh huh. Very cool.
BP: Yeah, just have the camera follow us and I don't know...and we get there about 10:15, and it's only flight up, but we take the elevator up and as we were taking the elevator up Rick turns to me and says, "did you see who was getting out of the cab out front?", and I said, "who?", and he said, "Andy Kaufman", and I said, "oh, bullshit", and he said, "what are you talking about?", and I said, "yeah, right.", and he said, "what do you mean?" and I said, "well, obviously you know about the letter I sent", and I thought that Alben had told him about the letter and he was just pulling my leg, right?"
ME: Yeah.
BP: He says, "I don't know anything about a letter." And Alben goes, "I didn't tell him about any letter.", and I went, "well, why would he be here?" Then Rick says, "well if that ain't Andy Kaufman that guy looks just like him." So I said, "Okay, wait here." I got the elevator, went down to the first floor, the door opened and there's Andy Kaufman with his parents...