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didn’t have a cork,” said Sutton.) Then, Andy showed a forties-vintage Hopalong Cassidy one-reeler that Grandpa Paul had given him long ago, wherein dancing girls wearing horse heads affixed to their waists gamboled to the tune of “I’ve Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle”—after which he brought out the only surviving dancer no really named Eleanor Cody Gould with whom he chatted for a while. (Her: “I knew Tom Mix!” Him: “Did you know Will Rogers?” Her: “Oh, no—and I always wanted to!” Him: “How did you feel when his plane crashed?”) Then he made her ride a stick pony as he borrowed Sutton’s baton and led the orchestra in a dizzying rendition of the song from the film, whose tempo he accelerated until she collapsed of a heart attack and was pronounced dead and was covered with a jacket and she lay in state … for a long disturbing silent interlude … until Andy returned wearing an Indian headdress and performed a sacred tribal dance and she snapped back to life—and it worked just as they had rehearsed earlier in the hotel suite. A couple of people walked out, George reported. Two people in front of me walked out during that segment. They didn’t appreciate that type of humor. But most of the audience enjoyed it.

Business as usual followed—an arduous draw at wrestling (his eleventh undefeated match!); the vengeful return of Jay York (thwarted again by spinach); a most powerful and arresting Elvis (who went into the audience to serenade Gil Gevins’s mother); the Andy-and-Clifton duet (his brother, Michael, again donned the veneer); the revelation of Robin Williams; the Rockettes who were not the Rockettes; the Mormon Tabernacle Choir who were the Borough of Manhattan Community College Choir (many black members, all belting “Carolina in the Morning”); Santa Claus; the prolonged standing ovation; and the announcement—“Thank you. This is the first half of my act. And for the second half … you’ve all been very good—you really have—and I’d like to take you all out for milk and cookies now!”

And, in his terrycloth bathrobe, he led them out into the drizzle and the buses had to make repeated trips to and from the New York School of Printing, whose large cafeteria had been furnished with a sea of toddler’s tables and chairs, where mini-bags of Famous Amos and half-pints of Cream-O-Land were consumed as clowns and magicians and jugglers performed, while in the school auditorium a quintet of off-duty cops crooned soul music and were then followed by a Hindu street mystic named Man-Sun who charmed a snake and hypnotized a rabbit and reclined on broken glass. “It was P. T. Barnum meets Jung, you know?” said Robin Williams. “People who were heavily into hardcore drugs were going, ‘Oh, this is nice!’ This wasn’t party till you puke—this was milk and cookies! It was Howdy Buddha time.”

And Andy worked the assemblage again, elated to be sure, and agreed to a rematch challenge from his wrestling partner that night, a towering comedienne named Deborah Croce whom he did not know and whom he again could not beat nor could she beat him. And amid the circus, Stanley and Janice beamed and Stanley told a reporter, “I think that behind all the frivolity and all the craziness, there is a very, very serious man.” Stanley would understand this point even more profoundly when he learned how much money it had cost his son to produce this night of debit—the union laborers alone were greased an extra ten thousand dollars in cash just to load in the equipment at Carnegie Hall. Andy would erroneously claim that the losses again hovered near twenty thousand, although Stanley knew better: “He took a bath.”

It ended at three in the morning and he had announced to those who remained that the show would continue at one o’clock the following afternoon on the Staten Island Ferry and it did and three hundred or so people were waiting when he and Zmuda and Sutton arrived a half hour late in a cab and he bought them all ice cream cones and he wrestled Deborah Croce again to a draw and he performed “MacArthur Park” and led a singalong to “Mighty Mouse” (which was