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lot. Dangerfield fumed backstage—“He’s fucking with me! He’s fucking with me!” Clifton finally burst in through the backstage door hyperventilating —“You know what he did to me?! You know what he told me!? He said I’m not the star of the show and I can’t park here!” Dangerfield instantly lashed into him—“Andy, what the fuck are you doing? We gotta start the show!” And Dangerfield would recall, “So he talks to me like Tony Clifton —‘I’m sorry, Rodney, I couldn’t help it, it was that guy in the parking lot!’ And I say, ‘Oh, stop that will you, for crying out loud!’ And even though I was angry and kept hollering at him, he stayed in character, he wouldn’t break it! ‘Ehhh, don’t worry, Rodney, it’ll be all right!’” And Clifton went onstage after the no-smoking announcement and sang “You Light Up My Life” and smoked while he sang it—Rodney thought that was a terrific touch—and, after the show on both nights, he stood in the lobby selling xeroxed photographs of himself for twenty-five cents apiece and, at one point, Steve Martin approached him and requested that he sign one “to Steve” and Clifton began signing and asked, “What’s your last name, Steve?” And he was told it was Martin and he finished signing and said, “That’ll be a dollar.”

The reviews were not kind. Variety noted that this had been “the first time [Clifton has] performed for someone other than his alter ego, comedian Andy Kaufman … it’s an act that is beginning to get a little stale.” And The Hollywood Reporter, meanwhile, lifted the veil further, openly referring to Clifton as Andy in disguise—“Kaufman, on for almost an hour, never got anywhere.” Andy phoned both reviewers after reading what they had written and strenuously complained about having his name linked with Clifton’s. “I treat the situation like a magician and I don’t appreciate being called Tony Clifton’s alter ego,” he told the Variety critic, who signed his review “Pollack.” Then he angrily asked the Reporter critic Don Safran, “Who told you that I was Tony Clifton?” Safran allowed that many people had averred as much. Andy told him, “I don’t mind you giving me a bad review for my work, but to put my name in a review of a Tony Clifton performance is unreasonable and unfair!” He went on to admit that he had played Clifton before at the Comedy Store, but this time it had been the real Tony Clifton onstage and, moreover, he said that the real Tony Clifton would soon appear onstage with him on December 16 and 17 at the Huntington Hartford Theater in Hollywood and that Safran should come to see for himself and Safran said he would very much like to witness that miracle and Andy felt better afterward.

Six days before the first Huntington Hartford show, Bill Knoedelseder’s piece appeared in the Sunday Calendar section of the L.A. Times and Andy was quoted further on the matter that was plaguing him so unfairly and he couldn’t understand why people had to keep talking about this travesty—“I am not Tony Clifton,” he said. “We are two distinct personalities. I’m not like that. I never meant for it to get out of hand like this.” And his real feelings were on the mournful agitated order of try-to-help-a-guy-out-and-look-what-happens. Clifton was—well, gosh, he hated to use such words, even inside of the private whistling curved corridors of his head—but Clifton was a bastard, he was a fucking bastard, he was a motherfucking goddamned sonofabitching fucking bastard was exactly what he was. But he looked forward to working with him again soon.

The milk-and-cookies idea had possessed him since college and he used to talk about it in New York—four years earlier, he had told Jim Walsh about wanting to take the audience out for milk and cookies after he debuted at Carnegie Hall and Walsh recognized a worrisome grandiose madness in both notions—but in recent months, as various mad dreams found tether, he had been repeatedly telling George and Bob about it and Bob suggested the idea of getting school buses to transport the audience. (He did, after all, consider his audiences to be as childlike as he—and thus what