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of Knuckles, his prime creation, who was a moron, and he would interact with them. He wanted the show to look like it originated from the basement den on Grassfield Road, so he flew out Stanley and Janice, who would play themselves sitting upstairs in the kitchen and they would yell down at him in the basement and tell him to come upstairs and eat. He would have his own Peanut Gallery in the den with him and everyone in the Peanut Gallery would wear Uncle Andy T-shirts. And he would show viewers a twenty-four-second clip of Grandma Lillie sleeping on her sofa in Florida—which the network hated, but he insisted that it not be removed because it added to the magic of the Fun House. George said, Andy gets locked into what he perceives as art and every inch and every second of a bit that he does, in his mind, seems to be perfect. He’s not flexible on changes. In any case, Buckshot aired and Grandma Lillie was seen sleeping on national television and Uncle Andy’s Fun House never returned.

Stanley came to George’s office in Beverly Hills to discuss drawing up Andy’s will, since Andy didn’t have a will and the accountant thought it would be a good idea to make out one. Stanley said to his son, “Why don’t you leave something to the Mustang Ranch?” Andy said, “That’s a good idea! Why can’t I do that while I’m still alive?” George said that he could. George said that he could even have a room there named in his honor. Andy asked George to look into that.

Saturday Night Live celebrated its one hundredth show and he made a tape in George’s backyard which was disguised as Andy Kaufman’s Wrestling Farm and behind him six women with whom he had recently mud-wrestled at Chippendale’s strip club could be seen grappling with each other and he apologized to the camera for not being in New York to help celebrate this momentous occasion and thanked the show for starting him off on his path to success. Unfortunately, the one hundredth show ran long and his tape, which had been a hit at dress rehearsal, was never broadcast.

The robots were ValCom-17485, which was him, and AquaCom-89045, which was Bernadette Peters, and they fell in love and he died at the end (lost battery power, really) before he could pass along life wisdom to the robot child they had made and he cried when he read the script and George told him he would get half a million dollars plus percentage points from Universal—which had now given him an overall deal because once the robot movie Heartbeeps was out of the way, they would probably start shooting the Clifton movie in the spring and also use him in other movies. George thought Heartbeeps had the makings of a classic, like The Wizard of Oz, only more deliberately artful, so he was very optimistic. The movie would take place in the futuristic world of 1995, when everyone had domestic robots tending chores in their homes. Much makeup would be required and it was designed by Stan Winston and applied in daily three-hour sessions by artist Vince Prentice and the process involved gluing pieces of a gelatinous mask (made from ground-up calves’ hooves) to the face, then adding eight coats of metallic paint, then dusting it with sparkly Pearl Essence powder (made from crushed seashells). Andy quickly bored of the ritual—he sent Linda to find tapes of Abbott and Costello and Amos ’n’ Andy and Brando and Bogart which he could watch to stem tedium—and his latenesses in the mornings became more frequent and more objectionable on top of which he said that he needed to clear his bowels before going into makeup, which meant another twenty minutes wherein an assistant director would always have to bang on the bathroom door and ask, “Is anything happening yet?” and he’d scream “Get away from me!”

He coughed—before he sat in the makeup chair and while he sat in the makeup chair. It was a small, persistent cough. “Gee, what’s the matter?” Prentice would ask. “I don’t know,” Andy said. “It seems the longer I stay in L.A., the more I cough.” Prentice figured it was the rubbing alcohol he used as a thinner. “That would irritate anybody