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They had started filming in early June up in the redwood groves of Santa Cruz and, on extremely hot days, his gelatin face would melt and his cheeks and jowls would droop and he would age forty years. By the second week on location, he could not stand being without a female. A thirteen-year-old girl knocked on his hotel room door very early one morning and she wanted an autograph and he took her name and phone number and told George that he planned to stay in touch so that he could date her in four years. Out of boredom, he called the National Enquirer and told funny lies about how he and Bernadette were having fights and that the director Allan Arkush had thrown him off the set many times. The unit publicist didn’t think this was a great idea. The Enquirer published the story. Arkush, however, did once wield a gun in order to get him to come out of his trailer. “Look, either you’re on the set now or you’re a dead man and we’re recasting the movie,” Arkush told him half jokingly. “Andy thought that was hysterical,” Arkush said. Andy had Clifton call Arkush to tell him to lay off. One day, he stepped out of a very dramatic scene because he saw a candy bar on the set and he wanted it. Meanwhile, everyone thought the dialogue was too slow; the dialogue, in truth, was excruciatingly slow. George thought Arkush was utilizing only ten percent of Andy’s comic abilities. By the sixth week of filming, back in Los Angeles, a Universal executive cornered George and proposed that if Andy would show up on time for two consecutive days the studio would install a hooker in his dressing room. Andy loved the idea and actually came early the first day of the challenge when the executive informed George that the studio brass couldn’t quite justify budgeting procurement of prostitutes. Andy took the news stoically. The Screen Actors Guild went on strike two days later. Andy went directly to Nevada to have sex.

He had looked at his ABC special again, in the makeup chair, on the same day the hooker thing was first mentioned. And he saw the old him on the special. And he had just read something that the critic Marvin Kitman had written about the old him being better than the new him. Marvin Kitman hated the new him. Like all those people who wrote the wrestling letters saying that he was a chauvanistic arrogant idiot asshole now. (George had told Linda to start collecting the letters because George envisioned a book of Andy Kaufman’s hate mail, which no publisher would deign to consider.) George told him that there were probably far more people who felt the same way and hadn’t sent letters. People thought that he had changed, George said. People didn’t think he was lovable anymore. He pondered this for a while and asked George, “Do you think I can still be innocent?” And he sounded a little more worried about it than usual.

Harrah’s gave him a free suite and, once he had checked in, he went straight to the Mustang and stayed until six the following morning and called George later and acknowledged, “You’re right, I am an extremist. Once I get there, I’m crazy and I don’t do anything in moderation.” He had skinny twins wrestle for him the first night. “I love skinny women,” he said, but had other kinds as well. He made Zmuda fly in the next night; they instantly fell in love with the same married hooker. He called his mother from Reno to say that he was having a wonderful time. She reported this to George and George reported this, among other Nevada updates, for posterity—She said, “I asked him if he went to that camp that he goes to,” meaning the Mustang Ranch. She said, “When I said that, Andy laughed.” He [told] her that he did go to the camp, and he told her about the twins. Andy tells his mother and father everything, or almost everything. He had six girls on the third night, made some wrestle, spent four hundred dollars (they charged thirty dollars per half hour). He says he doesn’t treat them like sex objects, he treats the girls like human beings. Sometimes