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it. He would really cry.” They drove everywhere in her Volkswagen, which he also borrowed a lot, and went to Fellini movies and Luis Buñuel movies and Charlie Chaplin movies and by then she had become an onstage accomplice for him, usually pretending that she was his little sister and she would shake maracas and sing little songs with him like “Banana Boat” and “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” and “Sioux City Sue,” thoroughly perplexing/charming Improv audiences. But that came well after her unusual debut at the club which happened the very first day they met at the bungalow where, per her memory, he asked her, “‘Have you ever had a very terrible experience?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Something really awful?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Would you like to go onstage and talk about it?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ So that night he went to Budd and told him that I would go on ahead of him and I went up and talked about how this other fellow had dumped me because he wanted a tiger in bed and then I happened to go to his house and there was this girl who was everything I should have been and I was so depressed, I went home and took a bottle of Empirin with codeine and tried to kill myself and then I had to go to the emergency room and they gave me this stuff that made me gag and gag and gag—all these pathetic details. And then I got off and Andy went up right after me and he told a pathetic story about how he had become an alcoholic and his wife and kids had left him and he was now living in the street and asked the audience for spare change and who knows what else. Then he went up to Budd afterward and said, ‘What did you think?’ And Budd said, ‘I don’t have time for this.’”

Early on, he would also bring Wendy to a benefit for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, where Carl Reiner was being honored as Man of the Year and they did something at the dais before a room full of doctors in tuxedos and wives in evening gowns and George was there and so was Norman Lear and Rob Reiner and others and whatever they did—a song or something, nobody would remember—it was awful and the room was silent and Carl Reiner sat mortified throughout—“Nobody laughed,” he said. I don’t know what the hell it was. I wanted to crawl under the table as it was happening. I had to avert my eyes. Nobody can describe it because everyone was afraid to look. If people weren’t in tuxedos, they might have hit him.” And Andy knew that he had died at the Cedars-Sinai event, that he and Wendy had bombed most horrifically, so afterward as they were heading for the elevators among the crowd of doctors et cetera who had hated him, he told her to play along with him and they got into an elevator with the disapproving people—“And he started beaming very happily and said, ‘We were fantastic! Did you see that audience! They loved us! We really killed!’ And he kept on that way while everyone around us just glared, you know?”

He was not always Foreign Man, he was saying without saying, by becoming other selves, trying darkness, trying surprises. But they loved the Foreign Man—these industry people in the West, they loved his newness and his freshness and his cuteness, never knowing what he knew, which was that Foreign Man was only a small part of his repertory company and he worried (just a little) that they only wanted that part.

They only wanted that part.

George quickly started selling Foreign Man with notable success, had right away gotten him a shot on a prime-time ABC-TV variety special hosted by game show moderator Monty Hall, which aired in mid-January, wherein Foreign Man played a doorman inviting Hall into a tiny vacant nightclub in which Foreign Man was also the head-waiter, the emcee (Ladies and gentlemen, presenting in de nightclub—Andy!), the talent (de cannonball story), and the orchestra that followed (I am walking down de Swanee River la la la….). A week later, on January 23, Foreign Man debuted on The Tonight Show, largely because Steve Allen was substituting for Johnny Carson and Allen had been to the Improv to witness with delight