Apatow’s eye for talent fuels autograph hobby
NEW YORK — Judd Apatow has collected autographs since he was a boy. He began when he was about 9 and would write to celebrities — Jackie Gleason, Gilda Radner, Andy Kaufman — begging them to send signed photos.
In high school, he frequented autograph conventions.
“I bought Harry Truman’s,” Apatow said. “I was very impressed with myself.”
He has never stopped, although he knows it is “a very obscure dad hobby.”
“But if you’re not into clothes and you’re not into cars, there’s nothing for men to buy,” he said.
In New York to promote the third season of the HBO series “Crashing,” which he produces, Apatow, 51, walked into the Argosy Book Store in midtown Manhattan, the sanctum sanctorum for autograph hounds. He greeted Naomi Hample, an Argosy owner and autograph cicerone.
“He horrifies me sometimes,” Hample said of her loyal and occasionally relentless customer. “He combs through my desk.”
Still, she presented Apatow with a complimentary Argosy T-shirt and led him toward the rickety elevator that would hoist him to the sixth floor, where the autographs are kept. Apatow scanned the framed autographs behind Hample’s desk.
“Here’s a Maurice Sendak,” he said. “That’s pretty good.” He moved on to a Frank Sinatra and a Mark Twain. “Would I want Brigham Young’s autograph?” he asked himself. “I performed at Brigham Young University when I was 19 years old. And the audience was very polite.”
He considered an Andy Warhol and a Judd Apatow hunts for autographs at Argosy Book Store in New York.
signed Peanuts cartoon. Hample tried to interest him in a letter from Sigmund Freud, which included a reference to a “15-year-old hysterical child.” Apatow thought about hanging it in his younger daughter’s room.
But his daughters don’t share his hobby. “I’ve never found anyone who was interested in looking at any of it,” he said. He noticed a framed letter from Phil Silvers, a comedian of the 1950s. “Now you’ve got me!” he said. “I like weird letters from comedians.”
Apatow recently returned to stand-up comedy, which he had abandoned not long after that Brigham Young gig. He includes a penmanship joke in his new set (“Anything my daughter writes looks like a letter from the Zodiac killer to the police”).
“I get very mad at friends who have no autograph,” he said. “Lena Dunham, her autograph is like one twisty line. Amy Schumer, too.”
Is Apatow’s signature legible? “I do make an effort,” he said. But no one wants it. He receives maybe three autograph requests a year.
“I’ll go on ebay to see what they sell for, and no one is making any money on my autograph,” he said.
His proteges’ autographs probably sell better. Apatow is known as an ace talent spotter: Dunham,
Schumer, Seth Rogen, “Crashing” star Pete Holmes and others.
“I think it’s the same as being an autograph collector,” he said. “It’s just the part of me that hunts down interesting, funny people. Except now, I try to get them to make something with me.”
Unfortunately, most of the interesting, funny people on Argosy’s sixth floor are dead. After looking at a signed book by Steve Allen (“the first person I ever interviewed”), he started pawing at the unsorted autographs on Hample’s desk: Cole Porter, Leo Tolstoy. Did she have any Johnny Carson? Not this time.
He considered a John Ritter photo — a possible present for Holmes — and a photo signed by the Platters, a group his grandfather had briefly produced, made out to Roy Cohn.
Then he piled up his maybes (mostly comedians, including Silvers, George Jessel, Gene Wilder, Mel Brooks, along with Ray Liotta, Bing Crosby and assorted Playbills) and left the pile with Hample, who would sort through it, email him the prices and then mail him his selections.
“I need a little distance,” he said as he marched down the five flights. “I need to get away from my instinct to get too much. I go home and I think, ‘Would I really hang up an autograph of the Platters to Roy Cohn?’ Sometimes I go, ‘You know what? I would.”’