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By Root 1371 0

they reach the fifteen-year-old level.” And this was evident once they left New York after the Saturday Night extrapolations of British Man and flew to Columbus, Ohio, where Burt Dubrow was producing a local teen talk show called Bananaz, on which Bob was introduced as Dr. Robert Zmuda, filibustering author of a new book on the little-known science of psychogenesis, whose stiff windbaggery was interrupted by Andy’s arrival in the studio which effectively quashed any wavering interest in Dr. Zmuda, who became increasingly ruffled and eventually lunged for Andy —“Don’t you touch me! I think that you are a phony! You are not a doctor! That man is not a doctor!” And the teens in the audience sat mystified and the host was wholly bewildered and Dr. Zmuda was noisily ejected while Andy played congas and the show ended. After which, Andy and Bob were beside themselves. Dubrow, meanwhile, would answer to management.

In fun only fooling no really:

He was this other one for Mike Douglas in Philadelphia a few days later. He came out and sang the song “Confidence,” which Elvis had sung in the film Clambake, but he sang it as himself and clumsily strummed along on his guitar (With a C and an O and an N and an F and an I and a D and an ENCE! Put’em all together and what have you got …) and then he led the audience in “The Cow Goes Moo” but upon sitting down at the panel with Mike and Carol Channing and Robert Goulet (again) his articulation grew huskily middle-European with a decided arrogance and suddenly he was a new self altogether who spoke of being influenced by a children’s television host called Captain Jack and—“And I thought, This is a good man for me to do. All right, I will develop this man, this character, and so I call it my American character, Andy…. This is not something that I want to talk about, really. Because I want people to think that it’s my real voice. But because this show is interested in truth, I am talking this way. But I hope that people will just forget it, you know.” And so a program of blithe chatter fell into his stony abyss of awkwardness. Brows furrowed as he had hoped. Finally, if tentatively, Douglas asked, “Where are you from, Andy?” “What difference does it make where a man is from? I have traveled! I was raised throughout Europe, Africa, and different countries. But what difference does it make?” And the point of it all was to demonstrate that this was the real Foreign Man—that by merely pitching his voice into a higher nasal range, he could instill this haughty Euro-locution with gentle innocence, which was what people most enjoyed, which had brought him success in show business, even though he was now confessing to being an unlikable fraud.

Before he resumed his American character and moved to a set of cymbals on which he accompanied his own otherwise a cappella rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Carousel—received with muted shock—he was forced to allow Mike Douglas to disrupt his excellent flight of new disregard. Douglas, in actual sincerity, wished to pass along information that Andy had never heard before and it was perhaps the most important information that he had ever heard in any of his lives. “I wanted to tell Andy something that has nothing to do with comedy or anything,” said Douglas. “I was recently with a man named Jerry Weintraub, who handles, among others, John Denver, Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra. He also booked Elvis Presley on all of his engagements before he passed away. And he told me that Elvis told him that of all the people who did impressions of him—of Elvis—he enjoyed you the most. And I thought you’d like to know that….”

(Oh!)

And he was in the midst of being an asshole when he heard this.

And he didn’t break asshole character even as he heard this.

And he seemed to be completely unaffected by hearing this, even though the audience applauded most rousingly—they were proud of him!—and so did Carol Channing and Goulet. But he could only momentarily glaze in a fashion that no one but his intimates would recognize as a chink approximating humanness/humility/happiness