first favorite Elvis song and this was his unspoken tribute to his dead hero and, afterward, he made sure to get the phone number of the Playboy Mansion from Hefner’s people and Hefner would remember him as being “an unusual cat.” A week later Clifton opened several shows for him at the Comedy Store—Mel had long urged the idea upon him of hiring Clifton for just this purpose. (Zmuda rudimentarily sculpted putty onto Clifton’s cheeks, jowls, nose, chin so as to better obscure certain realities that lurked beneath. Also a black roadkill toupee was thatched to his head.) And, as a second opening act, the local services of Michel Bernath’s Beginning Tap class were enlisted, which filled the stage with a dozen multiaged hoofers whose heart exceeded talent but spread good cheer in any case. (Very unusual opening act, but that is something that excites me about Andy, said Shapiro, later recalling the moment in his audio-diaries. Of course, he tries things that were never tried before.) Lily Tomlin was in one audience and, she later confessed, had worked her way through a bottle of champage, with which Clifton did not sit well, so she heckled him and Clifton told her to go to the kitchen and make the babies. She persisted during Andy’s portion of the show, protesting when he bade Little Wendy to sing “Davy Crockett” with him—“Misuse of women!” she screamed—and also hollered when he recited his Jewish-dialect version of “MacArthur Park”—“You’re a great artist; you don’t need approval!” “By which he was duly mystified,” reported Rolling Stone, whose correspondent spoke with him afterward. (Tomlin finally stormed out.) The show business bible Variety, meanwhile, most ebulliently reviewed the show, which ran across consecutive weekends into November—“The guy’s original, and he’s dynamite…. During the course of his two hours or so onstage, Kaufman assumes at least three distinct characters, segueing from one to another smoothly and believably; it’s just as though he were three or four different performers.” The review also described Clifton as “what must be the strongest example of black humor to have played the generally giggly Comedy Store; the kind of act that those who aren’t totally revolted will want to return to with unsuspecting friends in tow…. It isn’t for everybody, but what that’s hard-hitting and innovative is?”
Visibly buoyant, he took the Saturday Night stage again December 10 wearing the blue floral Hawaiian shirt of Conga Man and slapped drums while performing his bravura imaginary tribal rant—in which he essayed the parts, in spectacular profundos and squealing glissandos, of a villain casting doom upon a helpless maiden—then continued on to banter with the audience in glib-gibberish, pulled a mortified woman onstage and attempted to levitate her (finally yanking her up by the hair), and concluded with the “Aba-Dabbi” singalong that portended a dancing jag during which he feigned an abdominal seizure. And never once throughout the appearance did he utter a discernible English syllable. Back in Los Angeles on the third day of 1978, he taped the bit all over again for an ABC special celebrating the history of Variety on which host Alan King called him “a young man I happened to have discovered.” (In his kitchen?) Whereupon George, with the brokering assistance of star-agent Marty Klein of APA, dispatched him to the Pacific Northwest on his first college tour (for which Zmuda was permanently installed as road manager and F Troop musical eminence Gregg Sutton, who had also played the Comedy Store gig, came aboard as bandleader). He then appeared in Chicago with the rock-and-roll nostalgia act Sha Na Na before returning for a Tonight Show spot on Monday, February 20. Steve Martin, also a client of Marty Klein, was substituting for Carson on this night. By now sanctified as the white-suited white-headed comedic demigod of a generation—his powers were such that, in 1973, he led a college audience into a McDonald’s [oh!] requesting six hundred hamburgers, then at the last minute changed the order to a single bag of french