Meditation Society (SIMS) in Cambridge, where he did clerical work and dispensed mantra and initiated newcomers to enlightenment and also performed at TM parties as well as at Al’s Place and was allowed to return to Grahm to make a sample tape of Uncle Andy’s Fun House to send off to television stations but the taping was disastrous—he was disorganized and then he accidentally smeared chocolate cake on the white cyclorama studio partition, which incensed student director Marc Summers, who would later host game shows and who then threw his headset at Andy in disgust. “I told him how unprofessional he was and then I was out the door!” said Summers. “I thought this guy should probably be in a mental institution somewhere.” Jimmy Krieger of Great Neck was now Jim Krieger of Boston University, where he studied film and made student films for which he recruited his childhood friend as star and they were artful little sixteen-millimeter films smartly shot in grainy black-and-white. Among roles he essayed in the Krieger cinematic oeuvre were a flower thief loosed upon Copley Square, a hapless fellow evicted with his young wife from a tenement and forced to wander Cambridge in bathrobes, Elvis Presley musically lamenting a leak in the roof of an apartment, and a fully frocked priest engaged in passionate necking with a nun on various public park lawns as Bostonians gawked in horror. Of the young woman who wore the nun’s habit, Krieger recalled: “Andy really loved this girl, was crazy about her. But she was serious about becoming an actress and wanted nothing to do with him. And he would constantly say, ‘She’s gonna regret it. I’m gonna be very famous one day and she’s gonna regret not knowing me!’” By all accounts, he would say this about many women. He once led Parinello and a group of guys down to a bus terminal where he promised to make irresistible moves on each girl that alighted. They watched from a distance as he moved toward girl after girl, issuing strange noises from the corner of his mouth —schkk-schkk, as one might urge a horse to giddyup—then asking, “Hey, baby, you doing anything today?” Schkk-schkk. “One by one, these girls would tell him, ‘Get away from me! Get away from me!’” said Parinello. “Then he started getting hit with pocketbooks and handbags. He just looked at us and vowed, ‘Okay, I’ll get the next one!’” Later he said that these women, too, would all be sorry one day.
He was a confirmed nomad at this point, cared little where he slept, had no place of his own, crashed either with Krieger in nearby Somerville or wherever a bliss person had an empty couch—vagabondism suited him and always would, even when very or somewhat famous. As long as he could meditate for two hours per morning in complete silence—“He didn’t want a pin to drop,” said Krieger—and again at night and could prepare his newfound macrobiotic diet (brown rice and raw beans and similar flavorless purities) and could stow one daily carton of Häagen-Dazs ice cream in a freezer (could not sleep without first devouring a full pint), he was fine. Meanwhile, his professional devotions continued to burn brightly. That November, he had dragged Peter Wassyng to see Elvis perform at the Boston Garden—“We sat there in the balcony and it was like watching someone worship Jesus!”—and the following June in New York he dragged his sister to Madison Square Garden for another Elvis concert, after which he made her run with him all the way across town to the Plaza Hotel, where he mistakenly believed Elvis was staying. The very next week, he became Elvis again, albeit in a completely different fashion than ever before. Quite momentously, it was for a real television program on Chicago’s powerhouse ABC affiliate, WLS-TV, where Burt Dubrow was now producer of the talk show Kennedy-at-Nite, hosted by popular broadcaster Bob Kennedy. Elvis had just played the Chicago Stadium and, to capitalize on lingering local frenzy, Dubrow had flown in his former Grahm foil to actually be interviewed as though he were Elvis. For thirty televised minutes! Kennedy, who had spent