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time with him before the show, quickly gave away the conceit in his introduction—“It’s almost more like talking to Elvis than, frankly, talking to a fellow by the name of Andy Kaufman….” Andy had brought along piles of personal Elvis memorabilia to display on camera and wore a white tuxedo jacket and allowed his hair to be teased into a minor bouffant. What he was not allowed to do, however, was to actually sing as Elvis. Instead, he was directed to lip-synch along with Presley records and, as he did so (committing several flubs, since this was not what he really did in his act), he was half the Elvis that he had ever been. Confined as such, he still acquitted himself nicely during interview segments, employing a relaxed drawl and many sly lipcurls, while improvising his way through the mind of his hero. Only when a caller to the program asked how he maintained such a sexy body did two lives blur—“Well, ah tell-you-what—ah do yoga every day…. It’s called Transcendental Meditation. Ah started a few years ago and found it to be a verrrbig help to me…. Helps to keep me young. Makes me feel better and it’s the easiest thang in the world to do.” (Elvis Presley, for the record, was a yoga enthusiast, but had no truck with Transcendental Meditation. That, he believed, was the province of the Beatles.) Nevertheless, Andy saw the experience as a suitably untraditional local television debut.

Two other notable strides had been made in the first half of 1972: In February, he was hired—by dint of a blind referral—to actually perform as the opening act for a Temptations concert in Northampton, Massachusetts. The predominantly black audience was, according to his subsequent reports, completely offput by Foreign Man and made it vociferously known and so he wept and wept onstage and pulled out his large cap gun and walked off into the wings and fired the gun into a microphone and thudded to the floor and the room went silent and the Temptations sang extra hard that night to make up for it. Then, in late May, one of his television idols, Steve Allen, came to perform with the Boston Pops Orchestra; Allen’s comic cohort Louis Nye was also on the bill, and Andy discovered that both men were staying at the nearby Sheraton Hotel. Because Uncle Sammy had written for Steve Allen, Andy believed this entitled him to a meeting in which to seek advice from the innovative television host. So he went to the hotel and used the house phone and—“A young fellow with a teenager’s [he was, in fact, twenty-three] unsteady voice was calling,” Allen would later recount in his book, Funny People. “‘Mr. Allen,’ he said, ‘I’m Sam Denoff’s nephew … I was wondering if I could come see you.’” Allen finally relented, since he saw no way out of it, and invited him to his room, where Nye was lounging. “He impressed both Louis and me as socially awkward, incredibly ill at ease, a bit awestruck, and somewhat offbeat. To this day I don’t know whether there was the slightest element of put-on in our first conversation, though I doubt it.” He stammered out an explanation of his accomplishments and dreams and Allen, to the best of his recollection, told him to keep doing what he was doing but to try doing it in some of these new audition-style showcase nightclubs, like the Improvisation in New York or any such place in Los Angeles, so as to be closer to talent scouts. That, of course, was something he already knew and he would be doing just that within months, exhibiting relentless drive, foisting himself in deft foreign disguise upon unwitting club owners, never making the approach as a scion of Great Neck, never being who he was, always being who he wasn’t, hoping that which forced audiences to indulge him with pity would work as well on the gatekeepers of certain spotlit stages.

Steve Allen, who would come to know Foreign Man well just a few years after that urgent hotel meeting, later turned his professorial eye to the character: “There is more to Foreign Man than just a heavily accented speech pattern that sounds funny to native American ears, such as Bill Dana’s Jos