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By Root 1326 0

—but Jesus!” “It never occurred to us,” said Weinberger, “because we were there to see Andy.” They didn’t know and now they knew—and several months later they would wish they never had, but then again … “Clifton just upped the game for us,” said Brooks. They loved all that Andy did and told him so afterward and said they would like to work Foreign Man into their yet-unwritten show as an immigrant garage mechanic for a New York taxi company and Andy looked at George and George said it sounded fantastic and that they should call with more details and Andy asked them, “Um, so you liked Tony?” And they looked at each other knowingly and said that indeed they had.

He would headline at the rather grand proscenium which was Town Hall in New York on March 4, a booking designed to connote certain importance, since it was the first time he would give a major concert on home turf. As ever when he returned to the metropolitan area, he headquartered himself in his den on Grassfield Road and, on the evening of March 2, he played the auditorium of Great Neck North High School, the alma mater from which he had escaped eleven years earlier—and, very secretly, very privately, he saw this as his revenge and he had always dreamed of this revenge, of returning to show them because he always knew he would show them and they had always laughed at his dreams, at his declarations of destiny; they had always dismissed and punished and ostracized him and he knew they would by sorry and he would make them sorry and so that was what he was now prepared to do. Of course, only some of the teachers were left and not many of them came to the auditorium which was crammed with students who knew he was sort of famous (certainly many of them had seen him on television). He kept Clifton away and did his own bidding and the students whooped throughout, especially whenever he said tenk you veddy much; the school paper reported, “They were screaming like crazy, ‘Do it, Andy!’ or ‘You’re the greatest!’” And the girls squealed for Elvis—“One girl even ran up to kiss him and Andy replied, ‘I’ll see you after the show, honey!’” And the boy from the paper asked him afterward if he had been a loud kid in school and he replied, “Are you kidding? I was the one voted Least Likely to Turn Out This Way.” And he spoke fondly of cameras in bedroom walls and cameras in playground woods and the doppelganger boy, Alfred Samuels, and the mysterious man he had seen in Memphis when he was five who wasn’t Elvis Presley no really and he noticed that everything at the school now looked much smaller to him.

Snow dumped on the city two nights later, which did nothing to thin the ranks of the capacity crowd at Town Hall, where Clifton slithered from the wings a half hour late and commenced the event. The Kaufman family proudly witnessed (although Stanley and Janice hated every second of Clifton’s affront); battalions of friends and industry people were there as well. Lorne Michaels brought a small contingent of Saturday Night colleagues and this was to be his first significant encounter with Clifton. “It was, of course, horrible—an indulgent conceptual joke. The bad-lounge-singer notion was not terra incognita for most of us—Jo Stafford had done it as Darlene Edwards and Chuck Grodin had done one called Huck Saxony. But Andy did his brilliantly, so everyone was patient. But it was during intermission that he pulled one of the coolest moves I’d ever seen. He had left his body-pack microphone turned on in the dressing room and suddenly you heard Tony Clifton ranting to his managers about having just performed for the worst fucking audience that he’d ever been in front of. There were no more than about twenty people still in their seats—out of the eight-hundred-plus, most of whom had gone to the lobby—and we listened to this wonderful secret harangue. It was brilliant.” Variety saw the concert as a portent of career transcendency—“This audience was way ahead of him, pleading for certain of his w.k. [well known] pieces, like ‘Mighty Mouse,’ ‘Thank you very much,’ etc…. There is no denying