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NORMAN MAILER, AUTHOR
Shepherd had commented on his show that in the early days of the Village Voice, he and Mailer would sometimes converse there. He mentioned Mailer scores of times on the radio, always in a disparaging way—but I never know what had cause this, other than to suppose that he envied Mailer’s great literary successes. How to contact someone like Norman Mailer? I encountered that he associated with an arts group in Provincetown, where he had a house. I wrote to the group’s head, asking him to give my questions to Mailer, which he did. Mailer wrote his short answers on my page of questions. The response was sent from a name and address in Brooklyn—the envelope and inserts had obviously been damaged by water in transit:
At first he didn’t remember Shepherd, then “hardly” remembered him. I wonder if that slight was a response to Shepherd’s radio disparagements. At a Barnes and Noble reading, when I got to Mailer’s table where he was signing his new book, I thanked him for responding to my questions about Shepherd. He looked at me and said, “Be sure you tell the whole truth about him.” What was he suggesting?
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ANDY KAUFMAN, PERFORMANCE ARTIST
Reading the 1999 bio by Bill Zehme, Lost in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman, I came across this reference to Kaufman’s teenage years: “…his passions for Kerouac and radio humorist Jean Shepherd…”
In Julie Hecht’s 2001 book, Was This Man a Genius?: Talks with Andy Kaufman, I encountered a quote that I used in “Accolades for Shep.”:
“I don’t think any sense of humor is funny. Rarely. Jean Shepherd is Funny.”
One bit for which Andy is known is that after his performance at Carnegie Hall (April, 1979), he invited the audience out for milk and cookies. When Andy was not quite ten years old, Shepherd, after at least one performance of his theater piece “Look, Charlie,” December 1958 and February 1959) he had invited the audience out for coffee—had Andy attended this and done his own variation/tribute?
“Milk and Cookies.”
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DEE SNIDER OF TWISTED SISTER
Here is part of what I’ve previously written about my encounter with Dee Snider.
A fellow I know casually, Mark Snider, asked me what I do now that I’m retired. I responded that I’ve been obsessed by, and have written about, Jean Shepherd. Mark said that he was a big fan and that his brother, Dee Snider, was also. He said “Dee Snider” as though I should have recognized the name, but I didn’t. “Twisted Sister,” said Mark. “What’s that?” said I. Mark told me that “Twisted Sister” was a rock band and Dee was the lead singer/song-writer. I said I’d love to talk to him about Jean Shepherd. Mark gave me contact info and I invited Dee to visit me in my Shep Shrine at our house
He’d listened with his transistor radio hidden under his pillow. Snider is a very big Shepherd cuckoo and he shares some enthusiasms with Shep, including the thrill of motorcycling.
When a black Hummer pulled up outside our house, a tall, thin man dressed all in black like a motorcyclist got out and I greeted him at the door. It was Dee Snider in mufti.
Dee, with his yellow hair pulled back under a black baseball cap, the peak turned to the back hiding a good part of the protruding ponytail, now in his fifties and still performing with the band, seems neither extravagant nor berserk. He’s a regular guy offstage—at least for the three hours we spent together—so even his performance persona has its off-duty mufti.
Snider said that, “Jean totally affected my storytelling ability. I think it was by osmosis. We learn from people we listen to.” He’s gotten many accolades for his storytelling on his radio program and, he commented, “I’m known to have a pretty vast vocabulary, using words and phraseology that others don’t use, and I didn’t know exactly where that came from until I realized, upon this reexamination I’m doing now, that Jean has a massive vocabulary.” About word-usage, Snider referred to lyrics in his song “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” including, “Your life is trite and jaded, boring and confiscated.” As he put it, “Not words your average heavy metal rock song would include. I wasn’t very good in English, but I’m taken with Shepherd’s mastery of vocabulary. His mastery of the English weapon.” Dee stopped himself: “I was going to say ‘using the English language as a weapon.’ Jean used the language as a weapon, and it’s a powerful, powerful tool—offensive and defensive tool, you know–and when it’s working for you, boy, there’s nothing like it!”
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JERRY SEINFELD, COMEDIAN/HUMORIST
For several years I’d heard that Jerry Seinfeld had been quoted as saying he was a big fan of Shepherd’s. But, before I could confidently report that, I needed direct evidence. Several months after Excelsior, You Fathead! was published, one night we got a call from friends saying that in Seinfeld’s Season 6 set of his sitcom, he’d expressed the importance of Shepherd for him. The next morning I ran out and bought the set. In his special commentary for the episode, “The Gymnast,” (the one where George takes a pastry out of a kitchen garbage pail and is seen by his girlfriend’s mother—played by Lois Nettleton), Seinfeld comments that Lois had been married to Shepherd—he “formed my entire comedic sensibility. I learned how to do comedy from Jean Shepherd.”
We met when Seinfeld spoke for an hour at the Paley Center for Media
about the importance of Shepherd to his comedic mindset.
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