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Yorkin was born and raised in the coal-mining town of Washington, Pa., where his father, a women's wear merchant, was part of a tiny and somewhat beleaguered Jewish community. Anomalously armed with a degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie Tech, he went to New York in 1946 with the intention of becoming a theater director. A daytime job as a TV repairman supported his night classes in English literature at Columbia University. "My partner and I used to find excuses to fix sets in good restaurants so we could get free meals from the waiters," he says.
Eventually Yorkin's engineering background landed him a job as a cameraman at NBC. Zealously he sent executives a steady stream of critiques of the programs he transmitted. They were never answered. He moved up anyway, first to stage manager and then to the control booth, where producers and directors sit. There Lear spotted him and prevailed upon Martin and Lewis to make him their director.
Two Unicycles. Yorkin and Lear's flourishing careers over the next eight years defied geometry, being two parallel lines that finally intersected. In 1959, well after Lear had drifted apart from Simmons (now a script developer at Universal Studios), the new partnership of Tandem Productions was founded. The first joint venture was the movie Come Blow Your Horn, adapted from a play by former Lear Assistant Neil Simon, which everybody agreed would be a perfect vehicle for Frank Sinatra.
Everybody, that is, except Sinatra. When Sinatra failed to respond to a barrage of calls and telegrams from Yorkin and Lear, they hired a plane to fly over his house and skywrite their phone number. After eight months of such stunts, Sinatra agreed to do the picture "just to get you guys off my back."
Their wives gave Yorkin and Lear a two-seater bicycle to mark the launching of Tandem. Two unicycles would have been more appropriate. After the initial box office splash of Horn, their subsequent movies (Never Too Late, Divorce American Style) fared only soso. They decided to become parallel again, maintaining a loose, collaborative relationship and splitting their pooled earnings.
Today they kibitz freely about each other's projects, but friction is minimized because each supplies a different emphasis to the partnership. "Lear can put words in your mouth like nobody else," says Dick Van Dyke, who has starred in Yorkin and Lear efforts for both TV and movies. "Yorkin, as a director, is the ideal interpreter of Lear's writing." Lear is more preoccupied with creative matters. Yorkin, with more business acumen, is by his own admission "the heavy in financial deals."