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Therefore, most of his off-camera hours on taping days were spent in the quieter corridors of NBC’s Burbank headquarters, where he sat on a pink blanket and meditated. Van Dyke would vividly recall the instance of a heated exchange with staff members outside their studio during which “we looked down and there was Andy on his blanket in the middle of the hall meditating. We didn’t disturb him at all. He never blinked an eye or seemed to even know we were there. But he was extremely shy, very polite, very respectful. He very rarely said anything unless he was spoken to.”

Clifton was called upon to obfuscate the sweet-chirping-tenking-dithering-whirlwind of it all which showed no sign of slowing. The little innocent fellow was once again pushing doors open, the largest doors he had ever known, and this was fine but also terrifying because he wanted to display more of his secret people and nobody wanted anything inside of him but the cute one—George said he would have to let Foreign Man establish him and keep on establishing him because not everybody watched every program on which he appeared and there were plenty of forums to repeat his bits and stars were only made on their ability to deliver and deliver with familiar consistent material—and it just didn’t feel right. But it had to be right. He meditated in the deep silences to quell the fears and really what did he have to fear? Becoming famous? But still Clifton was needed—at the Improv, at least, certainly—but Clifton was never far and had already been screaming at rude and boisterous neighbors from the veranda of the Bay Street apartment he had taken in Santa Monica with a TM friend named Andy Dickerman. “He would be yelling things like, ‘Hey, I got some chickies here and I need some quiet so put a sock in it over there already because I’m a good friend of Frank Sinatra’s and know some people you don’t wanna know if you know what I mean!’” said Dickerman. “He did it even when the situation didn’t really require it, when people weren’t all that noisy. I think he was just practicing his stuff.” And Clifton was back at the club with a vengeance while Foreign Man made hay on television, and California crowds truly loathed him. Said Budd Friedman, “I became an expert on body language from behind because I’d watch the men’s shoulders to see if they were going to attack Andy, or Tony, onstage. I’d come up behind them and go, ‘No no no, it’s only a joke!’”

And, of course, there was no Andy when there was Clifton, which became an increasing irritant to comics who had dwelt in trenches with him long enough to feel deserving of conspiracy rights. Freddie Prinze entered the club one night, saw Clifton, said, “Hey, Andy”—and Clifton lurched for him and said, “That’s Clifton, punk! It’s Tony Clifton! It’s guys like me who made it possible for young punks like you to get on television! You should have some respect! It’s Tony Clifton!” And he poked and poked at Prinze’s chest while he harangued until Prinze grabbed Clifton’s wrist and threw him face-first against the wall and wrenched the wrist upward and upward into his vertebrae and pounded Clifton’s head against the plaster, and another voice desperately emerged from Clifton’s mouth, screaming, “It’s Andy! It’s Andy! I’m Andy, okay?!” Jay Leno would also greet Andy every time he saw Clifton, who always sputtered back, “I don’t know who Andy is, punk!” Leno finally tried a different tack—“I decided to appeal to him in a way that would provoke any comedian: I told him that somebody stole his act. I said, ‘Hey, Tony, when you see Andy, tell him I saw a guy last night at another club doing the whole Tony Clifton bit! Same mean-spirited bad singing—everything! It was unbelievable.’ Suddenly, Tony’s eyes turned into Andy’s eyes, and they were full of panic. Then I heard Andy Kaufman say, ‘What guy? Where did you see this?’ I cracked up—‘Aha! Gotcha, Andy!’”

Clifton found a regular Los Angeles foil—which meant someone to play poor sympathetic schlub whom he could call up onstage