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car and sometimes he would get into Clifton character at her home before going to the club, which never thrilled her. “I couldn’t stand Tony Clifton,” she said. “He’d say, ‘Once I’m this character, I’m not going to come out of it.’ There was a tinge of scariness about that. I couldn’t find the delineation and he wouldn’t betray it. I’d threaten him—‘You either stop being Tony right now or I’m not giving you a ride or I won’t go grocery shopping with you! That’s it!’ I hated it.” She would pull his hair and once punched him in the stomach to make him stop. “He could get a lot more out of me if he’d be Elvis. His private Elvis made me melt—it just superimposed itself over him. I’d say, ‘Let Elvis try to seduce me.’” But he brought her to the club on New Year’s Eve to heckle Clifton—“Oh! And I want you to do it with your French accent,” he instructed, “and when you jump on Tony’s back, you should bite his ear”—and she did as told and shrieked from her table “in this terrible French accent” and called him a muzz-aire fuck-aire and pounced and bit and was so grotesquely shrill that the audience hated her more than they hated him. “When it was over, Budd Friedman took us aside and said, ‘Out! Both of you! Out, now!’” Shortly thereafter in New York, he enlisted her to go-go dance behind him at Catch a Rising Star while he sang “Oklahoma”—whose execution he had recently perfected by performing it while bouncing up and down and throwing his fist into the air slightly ahead of and behind the relentless beat, which elicited laughter that had/had not surprised him. Anyway, the supplementary effect of a go-go dancing television actress—“doing the jerk and the hitchhike”—seemed to overwhelm the crowd. “They were,” she said, “like, stunned.”

So they wanted Foreign Man so they got him. Van Dyke and Company was gone, but he was not and, throughout 1977, the ingratiaton crusade marshaled itself across the landscape without mercy, beginning by way of bombardment. He returned to Philadelphia to appear with Mike Douglas and cohost Bernadette Peters on January 12 and Douglas introduced him to viewers with reference to the Van Dyke show as “a visitor in our country” and he sat down, still draped in his makeup bib, and indicated that he had seen the horror film Carrie the night before—thees little girl nobody like her and at de end they make fun of her and but then she kill everybody—and he read aloud from a children’s Dick and Jane book, as Douglas helped him with difficult words like funny, then discussed his way with women, telling Peters, If I went with you I would open de door, and he performed Mighty Mouse. Three nights later, he was back at last on Saturday Night, now well into its second season, and announced after eemetations of President Carter (Hello I am Meester Carter President of de United States) and of his Aunt Esther (You come eento de house right now) that he would do de Elveece, which he had never done on the program, the mere mention of which drew approving hoots and yays from the audience, which was an altogether new phenomenon (nightclubs notwithstanding). He wore the sleek new rhinestone-studded black jumpsuit with vast white winged collar that had been designed for the Van Dyke appearances and he sang “Love Me” and “Blue Suede Shoes” and summoned to the performance an altogether taut electric precision rarely deployed in earlier outings and George said it was his best televised Elvis ever and would always maintain that opinion. And the following Monday, his second appearance on the daytime talk show Dinah! aired, wherein he was oddly introduced by Dinah Shore as Andy Kupman visitor-from-another-country (she greeted him on the first occasion by gasping, “My, you have such startling blue eyes!” to which he replied tenk you veddy much). For this appearance, taped a month earlier in Las Vegas, he unseated Marvin Hamlisch at the piano, where Dinah gathered with Bob Hope and Sammy Davis, Jr., and performed a “love song” (Give me a keess keess keess, vy do you do me like thees thees thees?) and made smooching noises into the