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the same thing and she stomped away. (Such adrenaline he felt! He wondered why he liked confrontation so much.) So he sought a new assistant in his old TM friend Linda Mitchell, the classical guitarist in whose parents’ guest house he had stayed when he came to Los Angeles and tried to get Foreign Man onto The Dating Game, and as it turned out—right now, more than five years later—he was actually on his way over to do The Dating Game as Foreign Man at last, so he called Linda and told her to meet him and Beverly there. He would be Baji Kimran (which was the previously unspoken name he had created for Foreign Man four years earlier) who was Bachelor Number Three and some people in the audience recognized him and screamed for him to do Elvis but he gave no acknowledgment because the Bachelorette, whose name was Patrice Burke, who would be asking the questions of the three potential mystery dates, had no clue as to who he was, not that she saw him, because she would ask her questions from behind a separating wall with host Jim Lange presiding. And she asked him the first question—“Bachelor Number Three, it’s the holiday season and I’m Santa. You’re on my lap. Little boy, take it away.” And he said: “Vhat? Vait a minute! Vait. I don’t know vhat she look like. Could I see vhat she look like?” And Lange told him no, that was part of the game—“But I don’t know who she ees!”—then he said she didn’t sound like Santee Claus but finally said that he would ask her for “ehhh, a television and eh, eh, record player … and food.” Anyway, she finally chose Bachelor Number One over the protests of Baji Kimran—“You mean I did not vin? No, I von, I von! But I answered all de questions de right way! No! I did not lose!”—and he came out to meet her with tears in his eyes and, in truth, he was very angry about losing and Beverly was angry that he was angry and Linda would start work within the week.

New York magazine, meanwhile, had sent writer Janet Coleman out to do a major profile of him that would be published the week Taxi premiered and this article would be entitled “Don’t Laugh at Andy Kaufman.” So he invited Coleman up to the La Cienega Towers and Kathy Utman served snacks—Coleman wrote, “We were having this menu: four pints (two chocolate) of Häagen-Dazs ice cream, a box of cookies (chocolate chip), a box of cookies (chocolate-covered mint), two double boxes of Mallomars, a bag of Lidos, a jar of Ovaltine, a can of Quik, and milk.” Andy said, “I don’t usually have this much chocolate. I’m trying to cut down.” Then he told her about his life and about his dream of hosting a talk show where celebrities only discussed the weather and he showed her his novels—God and The Hollering Mangoo and the beginnings of The Huey Williams Story, which he saw being made into “a four-hour epic, like Ben Hur”—and he spoke of his influences (Fellini, whose 8 1/2 he had seen “between thirty and fifty times,” and Hubert Selby, Jr., and Kerouac and Steve Allen and Abbott and Costello on television only) and of his personal disdain for Tony Clifton. Coleman wrote that he “would ask me several times to refrain from even mentioning someone so unsavory as Tony Clifton in this piece” and that “he was sorry he had ever hired the guy” for the Comedy Store gigs. And she wrote that George Shapiro told her that Clifton “would be better and very soon advised to consider retiring from show business altogether.” But she also wrote very incisively of Andy’s work: “He manipulates the audience the way the bullfighter would taunt the bull, maddening them with artfully calculated veronicas until they boo him off the stage, then cajoling them back in for the laugh, i.e., the ‘kill’ in comedy. He is simply not afraid to die.”

The tenth episode of Taxi was the one that they agreed would feature guest actor Tony Clifton, who would play Louie DiPalma’s card-shark brother Nicky from Las Vegas. The episode was titled “Brother Rat” but would be changed to “A Full House for Christmas” by the time it was broadcast in December and, by then, all traces of Clifton would be long gone except