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By Root 1352 0

April and his evening flight had been delayed at O’Hare in Chicago, so he decided to take a morning flight instead, because the girl was very sick. He had called her in the hospital weeks earlier because a friend of hers got word to him about how much she loved what he did on television. Her name was Mary Jean Burden of DeMotte, Indiana, age twenty-one, and she had cystic fibrosis and so he called from the airport and rented a car and drove forty miles to the hospital in Crown Point, arriving at midnight. A small crowd gathered in the lounge and he visited and performed for two hours and was Foreign Man and was Elvis—he serenaded Mary Jean on bended knee with “Love Me Tender”—and she would tell a local reporter, “He can really talk with his eyes.” He also wrestled two women and let them win. He invited Mary Jean to come visit the Taxi set when she felt better and he gave her a kiss and kept waving goodbye as the elevator doors closed. Her mother wrote to thank him after Mary Jean died six weeks later. “Words could never say enough,” Mrs. Burden wrote. “You’ll never realize how much you helped her.”

He had lately been toying with the idea of reviving the Clifton movie by giving Foreign Man a co-starring role. Well, it was just an idea. Anyway, George was encouraged.

Linda made call after call after call until she found Fabian for him. She finally arranged a lunch at Jerry’s Deli because Fabian Forte lived in nearby Toluca Lake, never mind that he was most wary about the assignation, fearing put-on, knowing what he knew about the one who wished to meet him so desperately. He had heard how his song “This Friendly World” had become Andy’s signature closing number in concert performances—and he never knew quite how to take that. Andy was late, which angered Fabian, who had been prompt, and then Andy arrived. “He looked at me like—I hate to use this word—like he was in awe,” Fabian would recall. “And I’m still thinking, maybe he’s playing with me and that this was a big hoax. Like, if he was having this filmed or something, I was going to tear him limb from limb.” But Andy, he noticed, was nervous—“almost like wringing his hands”—and barely ate his lunch while reciting infinitesimal details about every one of Fabian’s records and Fabian laughingly asked him, “Why the fuck do you do ‘This Friendly World? Are you putting me down?” Andy said, “No, you have to understand. That song means everything to me. I wish the world really was that way.” And Fabian would always be pleased that he surprised Andy with a bearish Italian hug when they parted that day and would remain touched by the image of the unusual boy in the basement who had sung along with him. “You could see in his eyes that he wasn’t kidding,” he said.

P-l-o-t-s—there would now be nothing but plots; he pursued old ones and hatched new ones and slipped in and out of view, in and out of towns, in and out of countries; he was mercury and he moved as such….

April: Andy was in New York, which Merv announced (suspiciously), when Clifton taped his first appearance on Merv’s program in Los Angeles; Clifton was suddenly fatter and shorter and less nasal and more stupid and slightly nicer; he sang “I Will Survive” and pronounced it surveeve; Merv said he looked nothing like Andy Kaufman and Clifton said, “I am not Andy Kaufman! I want to have nothing to do with Andy Kaufman!” … In New York, meanwhile, Andy spent days wandering into clubs and onto various public access cable programs in the persona of a pompous cigar-smoking monosyllabic Russian who also happened to be himself (“I am Hollywood, I am television star on Taxi and I hate when I do not get respect I deserve! I am champion! Champion wrestling, champion many things!”). At the Improv, he burst in on an improvisational class taught by Martin Harvey Friedberg, himself an esteemed madman of performance theory, whom Andy antagonized relentlessly, waving his cigar in Friedberg’s face—“Smoke is bother you? Why is bother you?” Friedberg: “You enjoying all that poison that’s going down into your system? You’re enjoying all