Concholla, who became Jimmy C. when dealing on Clifton’s behalf and Jimmy C. had a separate telephone line and took on a separate persona to accomplish such dealings. (Clifton liked Jimmy C. to wear black shirts with pastel ties and sunglasses in his presence.) So Jimmy C. and Zmuda, who didn’t bother to become Bugsy Meyer, and Linda Mitchell, who didn’t bother to become Ginger Sax, and three chickaroonies with whom Andy and Zmuda had recently been dawdling accompanied Clifton (only forty-five minutes late) to the KTLA studios to tape Dinah! and Clifton caused a stink during rehearsal of his number, “On the Street Where You Live,” which delayed matters further. (He had attributed his lateness to a mix-up at the gate, where his name hadn’t been left with security, whereas that-asshole-Kaufman’s name was on the drive-on list.) Because Dinah had a cold, her producers told Clifton that she would be unable to sing the duet that he had planned—“Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)”—which rankled him more and delayed matters even further, until he had to be shooed from the stage. Finally, the taping began—before a live audience of five hundred elderly people—and Dinah introduced him. “With us today is a special guest. His charm, charisma, his voice, his song stylings—well, let me put it this way: He is beyond description …” And he wandered through the audience as he sang what Dinah called “his big hit” and greeted frightened women with the hand that did not hold the microphone and cigarette. (When the show aired about one month later, words would be superimposed below him—THIS IS A PUT-ON and RECOGNIZE HIM YET?) Then he joined Dinah and co-host Charles Nelson Reilly, who stood at Dinah’s cooking counter, where he pointed out his three nubile companions in the front row (“Get a shot of the chickies here! Okay, those are my chickies!”) and then he took umbrage when Dinah inferred that he had many big-selling records (“I haven’t made any records! What kind of crap are you trying to put over on the people here? You’re full of crap!”) and he implored that Dinah sing their canceled duet and produced a sheet of lyrics for her to follow, which she did, with kindly patience, after which he was to demonstrate his recipe for bacon and eggs—but this segment would never see light of airwaves.
What followed: He dropped a pound of butter into a hot frying pan, then proceeded to crack a dozen eggs, one at a time, then pressed the broken eggshells into Dinah’s hands (erroneous tales would later circulate that he cracked the eggs on her head, because she had pushed away a lock of hair wherein a bit of shell stuck) and, at this point, producers wanted to eject him but feared what he would do with the pan of sizzling grease. Dinah, whose eyes belied panic, tried to go to a commercial and he threw a fit and flicked drops of water at her and began inviting the audience down onto the stage to watch his eggs fry, but now the tape had been stopped in the control booth and producer Fred Tatashore and Dinah’s business manager rushed down to quell his remonstrations and each man grabbed a Clifton arm—“He was yelling, ‘Hey, you guys, what do you think you’re doin’! Do you know who I am?! I’m a big star!’” Tatashore would recall, “So we said, ‘Okay, big star, you’re out of here!’ And we literally tossed him out of the building, where security guys took him away. He was out there still screaming. I was laughing by then. I said to Dinah, ‘I guess we got rid of that!’ And I told the audience, ‘Well, that’s the way it goes with some of these singers!’”
The producers were actually more rattled than was Dinah—one called George immediately to complain and he woefully reported the incident to his tape recorder—They said that in all the years that Dinah has done her show, nobody treated her as badly as Tony Clifton did. There really was fear of this man. He was insane and unapproachable. He was not funny. He was embarrassing, unprofessional, and insane. He had no respect for the people over there. Everyone was upset. Jean Stapleton, who was one of the guests, was