Paul Shaffer talks showbiz in memoir but avoids dishing on troubled friends

TORONTO - In music and comedy, timing is everything.

Few would know that as well as late-night bandleader Paul Shaffer, whose charmed career took him from synagogue performances as a kid in northern Ontario to TV gigs backing comedy and musical greats including Bob Dylan, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Ray Charles and David Letterman.

Still, it's a lack of good timing that torpedoed two of Shaffer's biggest showbiz opportunities, the Canadian keyboardist reveals in his recent memoir, "We'll Be Here For the Rest of Our Lives."

One involved a missed phone call in which Jerry Seinfeld offered him the role of George Costanza on a new sitcom he's pitching, a little show called, "Seinfeld."

"Jerry's great, but what kind of show could he possibly have?," Shaffer writes in the sprawling, light-hearted collection of anecdotes. "So I never returned the call. Schmuck."

The other involved a botched schedule that forced Shaffer to drop out of the cast and soundtrack of "The Blues Brothers" movie, a musical packed with soul legends and personal heroes including James Brown, Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin.

Shaffer says he was in the middle of helping Radner record an album at the time, when a conflict spawned "a major feud" with Blues Brother star Belushi.

"(Belushi) released a statement to our group on 'Saturday Night Live' (saying,) 'Paul Shaffer's out, he's not a blues brother, he will never be a blues brother,' and I just felt horrible about this, and missing the movie of a band that I had so lovingly helped put together," Shaffer said in an interview during a recent stop in Toronto to promote the book.

"But I did the only thing I could do. Gilda had been such a wonderful friend to me and I just couldn't leave her in the lurch."

In true Canadian fashion, Shaffer's only significant revelations in his showbiz retrospective are of the self-deprecating sort. The amiable piano man eschews celebrity dirt while name-dropping encounters with such scandal-plagued stars as Belushi, Andy Kaufman, John and Mackenzie Phillips, Phil Spector and his own boss, Letterman.

"How could I write a tell-all? I mean, there's nothing much to tell, really," says the 59-year-old Shaffer, wearing a shimmering dark suit, lavender-rimmed glasses and a seemingly perpetual grin.

"People have picked over that history so much - I'm here to just pick up the pieces and tell you how much fun we had and of all the great stuff, especially comedy stuff that came into play on those five years of 'Saturday Night Live' when I was so fortunate to be there, (and) watching the creation of the Letterman show."

Shaffer brushes aside any talk of his boss's recent admission to affairs with female staffers, noting that his lawyer father, Bernard Shaffer, taught him to always steer clear of commenting on matters before the courts.

Of the convicted Spector, imprisoned earlier this year for killing actress Lana Clarkson, Shaffer pledges his enduring friendship.

And like most people, Shaffer says he was stunned by revelations of incest in Mackenzie Phillips' shocking biography, "High On Arrival."

His own tale with the actress involved taking a teenage Phillips to a Chinese restaurant in 1977, and her complaining about being unable to escape horrible stories people would tell her about her father.

"It was very illuminating to me and I called her before my book came out," says Shaffer, who also reveals in the book that he briefly dated a 16-year-old Valerie Bertinelli.

"I wanted to run the story by her, I didn't want to put anything in that she wouldn't want in there. I got her answering machine, I never heard back from her and now I see why. She was just proofreading her own book at the time."

Co-written with David Ritz - who's also done biographies of Don Rickles and Marvin Gaye - Shaffer's book jumps lightly from one star encounter to another, with quips including his introduction to Vegas glitz on a family vacation where he got a taste of the hipster lingo he would later adopt for his onstage persona.

As is his goal in musical and comedy endeavours, Shaffer says he wrote the book simply to entertain.

"Stuff got left out, of course," he says. "But I'm ready to go with volume two, I've got enough stories left over. If there's any action at all on this one, I'm going to come back."

"Volume two might be a little more esoteric, maybe a little bit more inside, stuff for some of the true aficionados to appreciate."

"We'll Be Here For The Rest of Our Lives" is in stores now.