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next to those of director John Landis—who had originally wanted to do a Clifton documentary but was now filming The Blues Brothers. The offices were on a back-lot street near the hospital set. “We thought it appropriate to keep Andy close to the hospital,” said Mount. “But Andy took to the lot like a duck to water. He loved life on a movie lot—because everything was a façade, was Make-Believe, capital M, capital B, which resulted in a number of odd moments.” Clifton was apprehended one night wearing a security guard’s uniform and carrying a gun. Mount told the Universal cop who made the arrest, “He works for us. Don’t worry.” Sean Daniel had assigned a business affairs director to get Clifton membership in the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild—per Andy’s instructions. Clifton showed up at many meetings—“He’d be this burned-out, swaggering, brittle, thinly-connected-to-the-planet kind of lounge lizard Lothario with an ego the size of Texas and a bad attitude,” said Mount. Such meetings were largely unproductive. Mount also tried to integrate Andy with other comedy stars who worked on the lot—“The other comic artists had enormous respect for him and were also scared to death of him. He was going places they couldn’t even imagine going, places that were so potentially dangerous and deadly. People didn’t know what to do with him.” So he invited Andy and George to a party at his Malibu beach house—“Andy was the guy everyone was most excited to meet and hang out with. But when they would talk to him, he was in what was sort of his internally blissed-out Andy mode: ‘Hi, Andy, how are you?’ ‘Oh, hi, I’m very fine.’ He wouldn’t give anyone a way in. Halfway through the party, I saw Andy standing in a corner by himself.”

Due to the juggernaut of publicity that swarmed the Carnegie Hall event, ABC suddenly felt obliged to schedule the suppressed ninety-minute special, which would air at last on Tuesday, August 28, 1979 (twenty-six months after its completion), and he went to New York to promote it and he took Grandma Pearl onto the locally broadcast Joe Franklin Show and told Franklin, “Grandma happens to write all my material and she wrote my special that you’re gonna see August twenty-eighth. She’s very modest about it.” And Franklin asked Pearl for confirmation of this and she shrugged and said, “If he says it.” And she said of her grandson’s success, “I am very happy. This is my proudest moment.” And she told a joke about a dog going to temple and slow-danced with Andy, but no music played and Andy admitted to being forty-three years old, which was something he enjoyed telling all the reporter people lately. Pearl shrugged some more. And then he went on The Tomorrow Show, which aired on NBC after The Tonight Show, and he talked with host Tom Snyder for close to ten minutes about nothing but weather because Snyder had read the New York magazine article in which Andy expressed his dream of hosting a talk show on which nothing would be discussed except weather and so Snyder gamely (even brilliantly) indulged him by traversing the intricacies of rain and snow and sleet and slippery pavement and iced-over bridges until Snyder could take no more, although it was quite clear that Andy could have continued for another hour. And then he wrestled three women—one was a Playboy Bunny who had worked as an extra on Taxi the week before (and whom he had flown to New York) and the other two were Tomorrow staff members—and he pinned the Tomorrow women and came to a draw with the Bunny, but what was most important was that this was the first time he had wrestled a woman, much less three of them, on a television program. Pearl, meanwhile, had sat in the studio that night, out of camera range, and covered her eyes throughout the wrestling segment thank you.

Clifton returned and decimated the Dinah Shore show on September 19 and this was not a good thing for Clifton’s career, what with a movie about his life in the works and all. He had gotten separate management by this time—George had handed him off to a Shapiro/West associate named Jimmy