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By Root 1325 0

and turban and black socks and brown walking shoes and nothing else, he wordlessly dances forth and ripples his stomach muscles and his pectoral muscles in syncopation with the beat of conga drums (somebody else plays them) and performs a horizontal handstand (yogic coordination) and then stands to swallow a sword (presented by Zmuda in butler’s togs) and then fixes a felt mustache above his lip and straps on a guitar and imitates the falsetto of Slim Whitman singing “Rosemarie.” (“I’m bringing romance back,” he liked to say now.) He had always been a fakir. But he had never worn a diaper and a turban onstage before. He practiced in L.A. at the Improv. He wanted to do it on tour, but George couldn’t really line up a decent tour for him anymore, so on September 25, he went on a ten-city bus tour of California to campaign for Governor Jerry Brown, who was running for the U.S. Senate, performing in college and high school auditoriums with musicians Kris Kristofferson and Billy Swan. He did not care much about the senatorial race; he did not care much about politics in general. But it was good to tour again. Mostly, he meditated in the back of the bus in between stops.

The fakir would debut for television on Saturday Night Live, where he knew it would remind people of what he had done long ago before making such a racket. The date was set for October 23 and he was advertised as that week’s special guest star and he arrived early in the week to begin rehearsal. On Saturday evening, he performed at dress rehearsal as well, after which Stanley and Janice came to Rockefeller Center to watch the live broadcast and they were about to be seated in the studio audience when Andy was told that he had been cut from the show due to time constraints and due to the fact that Dick Ebersol was not thrilled with the fakir. “It was fifteen minutes before show time,” said Stanley. “He was devastated. And I was seething. I’m quick to blow my stack. If I had seen Dick Ebersol that night, I probably would have smacked him.” Said writer Bob Tischler, “Andy had never been bumped from the show before. He was legitimately pissed.” Tischler had followed him back to the Berkshire Place Hotel to assess the damage and attend to reparations. They went to Ebersol the next week with a plan writhed from the mire. He wanted to be scheduled to appear the following Saturday, October 30—“He told me to bill him at the top of the show as a guest but then he wanted me to cut him again,” said Ebersol. “He said, ‘While the show’s on the air, you’ll send somebody to the dressing room to tell me there’s not enough time and I’m not going to get on. It’ll be a totally normal thing. Then we’ll stage a fight out in the hallway after the show finishes.’”

The premise of the appearance he would not make was to be an explanation of why he had been bumped from the previous week’s show and a personal attack on Ebersol—and because it was such a straightforward piece, a monologue, he would not have to be part of the pre-broadcast dress rehearsal that evening, which was a good thing because he would actually be in Gainesville, Florida, at that time, performing an actual concert—a makeup date, really—at the University of Florida. To accommodate the Saturday Night Live scheme, the concert had been moved up two hours, after which he would speed to the airport and fly directly to New York so as to be present when he was cut from the show and therefore assault Ebersol outside the studio as the audience filed toward the elevators after one A.M. and thus ignite gossip and scandal. None of this would be known to anyone except Ebersol and Tischler and writers Blaustein and Sheffield and director Davey Wilson. Later, Ebersol would tell Kay Gardella of the New York Daily News why he had bumped Andy and his monologue—“He handed me three handwritten pages he planned to do that [were] not only unfunny but also belligerent. Frankly, I felt betrayed. I made my mind up that he was not going on.”

And so they fought because he had been cut twice in a row; and so they fought in the hallway by the