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By Root 1349 0

the likes of Robin Williams, Lauren Bacall, Marlo Thomas, Chita Rivera, and Sarah Jessica Parker, the twelve-year-old star of the Broadway musical Annie, who noticed (as only a twelve-year-old might) that both Williams and Andy were awkward and sweaty and skittish offstage. Of Andy, she recalled, “He didn’t seem like a confident man. And his eyes were so, you know, wet.” Gregg Sutton, who accompanied him on bass guitar that night and who would conduct the orchestra on Thursday, watched the effete theater crowd display pronounced disinterest in Andy—“They didn’t get him. It started to make us feel a little nervous about Carnegie Hall.” Meanwhile, Good Morning America correspondent Joel Siegel brought a camera crew to 21 Grassfield Road in Great Neck, where Andy led a tour of the cradle of dreams that was the Kaufman basement and introduced Janice to the camera people and the viewer people—“This is my mom. Her name’s Mommy. And she’s very embarrassed, aren’t you, Mommy?” Janice (pinkening): “Yes, I am.” Siegel: “How do you react to the things you see Andy do on television?” Janice: “I love it. I love it all. I’m one of his best fans.” (Of course, the wrestling and the Tony Clifton business she could do without, but this wasn’t the time for mentioning that.) Andy then told Siegel about the little girl in seventh grade with whom he fell in love but never met and said that everything that he had done for the last fifteen years was to earn her attention, especially Carnegie Hall—“It’s only so I can get more confident and become more famous so I can meet this girl.” Siegel: “You’re telling me the truth, right?” Andy: “Um, yeah.”

It would all be the same as before only different and bigger and more unwieldy and not as well paced and cameras would film it and the film would be broadcast in a severely truncated fashion on the cable network Showtime three months later (when it would still look unwieldy), but everyone who was in the auditorium that night would never forget what they experienced and, later, what they ate. Because this was New York, because this was Carnegie Hall, his campaign of disregard was both magnified and sanctified and was thus made instant media legend. He would always consider it to be his greatest professional triumph, edging out his two other greatest triumphs—his network special that the network still wouldn’t air and the Clifton holocaust at Taxi. (Only one other event would enter this hallowed private arena of conquest and that event would actually take place in an arena and he would be the only one who considered it a triumph since it would telegraph to the masses without ambiguity that he was not who they thought he was, not that anyone ever thought they knew anyway.) As with opening night at the Huntington Hartford, it was raining again, albeit lightly. Celebrities were there again—Andy Warhol in row one; Dick Cavett, Penny Marshall, Rob Reiner, Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara, et cetera. (Also present, down in front, were F Troop stalwarts Gil Gevins and Glenn Barrett and Ginger Petrochko.) The program would begin—as it had been eccentrically advertised—at the stroke of three minutes past eight o’clock; Zmuda in referee garb would lead the audience in a sixty-second countdown to evince such.

Ten minutes before eight-oh-three, Clifton stalked about the backstage corridors, very unhappily—he was to begin the proceedings by singing the national anthem, then recite the wife soliloquy (this time minus presence of wife or child), then sing just a little more and refuse to leave the stage. Chuck Braverman, who was producing the Showtime version of the concert, sat outside the theater in the technical truck and told his sound man to switch on Clifton’s wireless microphone to make sure it worked. “So he turned it on and we heard Tony Clifton privately telling Zmuda what an asshole Andy Kaufman was—how he couldn’t stand him and that he didn’t want to go on, that he wanted more money and more credit—just ranting and raving and screaming. And neither he nor Zmuda had any idea that I was doing a mike check at that