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By Root 1297 0

they will just sit and talk for a while and he’ll give them rubdowns…. He ordered his parents a twenty-five-hundred-dollar Niagara adjustable bed with the cyclo-massaging-vi-brating feature—he felt that they are really wonderful parents and it gave him great pleasure to send them this gift. He tried to talk George into a new wrestling scheme—“I have an idea where it will be acceptable! Let’s start a new organization, Men for the Promotion of Women’s Equal Rights, and then they’ll know that I am pro women and won’t be angry with me when I wrestle them.” I told him it’s cockeyed … I told him that it’s destructive to his career—it’s been done, he did it already, there’s nothing new. He’s got such a fixation on it … it’s a sexual experience for him. He told George that there was a second, more modern, Mustang Ranch, which was up for sale. He said he wanted to buy it and rename it Uncle Andy’s Fun House. Bob, he said, still couldn’t keep up with him. “He just conks out very early.” The girls had begun referring to Andy as “some kind of superman” by the end of the week. He’s real proud of himself.

The SAG strike moved into its second week and he stayed on in Reno and began branching out to other bordellos in Carson City and outlying areas. George worried that all of his whoring was going to knock him out. Andy said, “Let me tell you—I’m a happy man. If I happen to die in one of those rooms, just let everyone know that I died happy. We should tell everybody not to be sad. Everyone should be happy about it.” Not that he wants to die. But that’s the way he wouldn’t mind going. After two weeks of such, he left Reno with a Mustang Ranch hooker named Joanne and, as the strike continued apace, they spent the next two weeks together romping along the California coast and he made a fracas in Sacramento trying to get them into the state fair after hours (succeeding only after he screamed that he was Latka on Taxi). All of which delayed an intended trip home to New York to visit his family. Janice told George on August 20, “He was going to come about a week ago, but he got waylaid—and I mean way laid!” Anyway, he didn’t have to be a robot again for several more weeks, during which time he would promote the release of In God We Tru$t and wrestle more women, but not on television. He liked being on strike, although he didn’t quite understand what he was striking for—something about residuals from pay television and videocassettes or something.

Merv greeted him and regarded his clothes and said, “You don’t have a wife, do you? You do your own laundry?” Mmm-hmmm, he responded. “You’re frayed all over!” Merv continued. “I mean, your pockets are ripped!” Andy said, “That’s ’cause I wear the same pants for five years.” He wasn’t trying to be funny but the people laughed anyway and anyway he was only trying to help Marty Feldman sell tickets to a movie that nobody would want to go see.

Mea culpa came that autumn. He had lost everything no really, he said, establishing a landmark in his march of passive-aggressive disregard. David Letterman, a Comedy Store alumnus whom he had known a little in California, was now the host of a new NBC morning program broadcast live from Rockefeller Center, two floors below the Saturday Night Live studios, and Letterman’s show would be canceled less than a month after Andy visited, which was mostly coincidental but still. The plot unspooled over two appearances in the course of a week or so—he had stopped shaving days before presenting his plan to the producers. “He showed up looking kind of rocky, kind of dirty,” said Gerard Mulligan, a writer-talent coordinator for the program. “He said, ‘Well, I’ve been sleeping in doorways the last couple of nights getting ready for the show and what I’d like to do is come out and just look the way I look now, but with a couple more nights under my belt. And David—’ (He always called Dave David.) ‘—will ask me what’s up. And I would say that wrestling has ruined my life and my career and I only see one way out.’ At that point he said he wanted to take out a prop gun and shoot