or blew. Conaway had already moved toward Clifton once—“I wanted to hit him,” he would remember. “And Jim Burrows grabbed me and said, ‘No, Jeff, you should leave now. Let Judd handle it.’ I said, ‘I’m gonna kill him!’ He said, ‘That’s why you have to leave!’”—then he retreated. Danza kept filming everything and Hirsch watched until he could watch no longer. “I felt responsible for the show,” he said later, “and I thought I better help get rid of this guy.” And Weinberger was telling Clifton to leave with George, and Clifton hollered, “Where’s the director! Let’s get to work! I am waiting for everybody!” And finally security was called and three Paramount cops arrived and they knew nothing about any theater-of-life bullshit and therefore lunged very seriously for Clifton who yelled, “I got a contract here, I got a contract!” Whereupon Hirsch announced to no one in particular, “He wants a psychodrama? I’ll give him a psychodrama!” And his eyes flared with a menace that no one had seen before and he stalked toward Clifton and bellowed, “You think you are the only one here!? I’ve got a contract with a whole lot more shows than you got! Get off this set!” And he began throttling Clifton while the guards yanked at the foul tuxedo and Clifton yelped, “Getcha hands off me!” And everyone applauded except for George who shouted, “Don’t hurt him! He’s a talented man! He’s talented!” And the guards and Hirsch dragged Clifton to the doors and he screamed, “Fuck you! I will be back one day when I play Vegas! None of you will get in when I play! I’ll be a big star! You wait and see! You wait and see! Getcha hands off me—I’m going back in there! I am not going to put up with this crap!” And he was out of the building and Knoedelseder was snapping his newspaper photographs throughout and Hirsch left the security men to complete their task outside and he would recall, “I had no idea what was going to happen after that because the true body I was shoving off the stage was Andy Kaufman. Then I started to realize that I wasn’t throwing out Andy Kaufman; I was throwing out Tony Clifton, which was a phantom, a fiction—a fiction with a real body. And how Andy Kaufman comes back and becomes Andy Kaufman again was no mystery to him—only to the rest of us.”
And so: Guards roughed him all the way to the studio gate with George scurrying behind decrying the violence while reporter Knoedelseder endured harassment because security wanted to take his camera which he had dutifully kept shooting until Bugsy Meyer strode forth, feigning higher authority, and confiscated the camera and ran with the camera in the opposite direction to another edge of the Paramount lot and handed it off to an accomplice who sped away to safety because Andy wanted those photographs protected and later had George get copies of the negatives from Knoedelseder whose camera was quietly returned after the incident. Meanwhile, Ginger Sax had collected Clifton in the pink getaway vehicle and deposited him down the block at Nickodel’s coffee shop, where he immediately used the pay phone to call Weinberger in his office. “My secretary said Andy Kaufman was on the line, so I picked up and he said, ‘Ed., is anybody there listening?’ I said, ‘No, just you and me.’ He said, ‘I’m calling from a phone booth and I just wanted to say that you were brilliant!’ And I said thank you and he said he would see me in a couple of weeks when Latka returned and that was the end of the conversation.” Clifton, however, was banned from ever setting foot on Paramount property again which was, um, fine.
So now I’m driving home, feeling pretty good about the day. We got away with a crazy thing. Why we did it, I don’t know. It’s Andy’s craziness. It was nourishing Andy’s insanity. And I was supporting it and so was Ed. Weinberger…. Andy called me when I got back to the office after this incredible escapade and he was totally exhilarated. He was thrilled. He said, “Wasn’t it great! Wasn’t it fantastic! I think this is fantastic! It was a part I always wanted to play! It gave realness, a validity to Tony Clifton