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Andy as “a sweet-faced, fresh and eager young man with the barest patina of post-pubescent acne around the mouth.” Christon also declared him “a master of the put-on,” then added, “One problem with the show is that the audience has gotten hip to him quickly—it seems that media burn is happening faster than ever…. Kaufman is going to have to come up with fresher material. What is at the heart of his act is the most liberating element of comedy, however: the sense of the unpredictable, even of danger.” Anyway, both Kirk and Christon seemed to enjoy the milk-and-cookies part very much. They said it reminded them of something Steve Martin had done.

One week later, on Christmas Eve, he entered Cedars-Sinai Medical Center largely because on that day Bob came over to Andy’s new little rented house at 2519 Greenvalley Road in Laurel Canyon and told him that he looked yellow and it turned out that it was infectious hepatitis which was why only three days earlier he had just barely been able to film a big Taxi episode about Alex Reiger dating Latka’s mother. Andy’s family had been there to watch and Janice could tell that he had never really recovered from what befell him before the last Huntington Hartford show which doctors now theorized might have had something to do with tainted shellfish. He stayed in the hospital through New Year’s during which time he had a horrible fight with Beverly who had been taking care of him but he turned cruel again and then she threatened to steal his car and everything out of his house and he got even more cruel and alleged that she only wanted to be near him because he was such a big star which he felt bad about later. George told Andy that he hadn’t progressed much beyond the mentality of a fifteen-year-old in his dealings with women. George also said that Howard had just closed a deal for Andy to make $75,000 for three weeks’ work playing a wild-eyed televangelist named Armageddon T. Thunderbird in the Marty (also wild-eyed) Feldman movie, In God We Tru$t (or Gimme That Prime Time Religion), a strange title nobody liked but still. Feldman had sent Andy the script just before he turned yellow and enclosed a beseeching letter which read in part, “Dear Andy: You and I have never worked together. This situation is intolerable and it must cease immediately…. You do not lack invention. I would be foolish not to profit from your invention, and so, I would welcome your (Fuck! I hate this word) input. If you do not play Armageddon T. Thunderbird, then please consider this letter a suicide note.” Except for the swear word, Andy was very touched. He recuperated at home for a couple more weeks, during which time he went through his fan mail and if the mail was from a girl and if the girl had enclosed a photograph of herself and if she looked reasonably attractive and if she had written down her phone number, he called the girl and arranged to meet her the next time he performed in her area and maybe they could wrestle. He made several dozen of these calls and hundreds more in the months and years to come and would get laid very extremely often because of this. Sometimes he would tell George to book him in areas where certain such girls especially intrigued him. Also, he turned thirty on January 17 and told George and Beverly and anyone who asked that he was not ready to be with just one woman and that he wanted to continue his houndsmanship indefinitely since now it was easier to get action and everything.

Then Jeff Conaway hit him. This was after the Golden Globe Awards ceremony which was held January 27 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and Andy came late to the ceremony even though he had been nominated for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series (as were Conaway and Danny DeVito) and, by the time he arrived, the award in his category had already been presented to Norman Fell of Three’s Company, which didn’t matter at all to Andy who showed up only to be polite. But the Taxi people—who were excited to have won the Best Comedy Series award (right in the middle of their first season, no less)—begged him to