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By Root 1324 0

house, because he wanted to try something completely new, he wanted in fact to mount his own talk show at the Improv, in which he could do what he most desired and experiment with personae, and he convinced George to make a deal with Budd Friedman to let him take over the club for three successive Saturday nights, beginning at two-thirty in the morning, and perform a faux broadcast for club patrons only, and the show would be called Midnight Snacks (since it would be nearly midnight in Hawaii and parts of Alaska, which was the pretend target viewership). Richard Beymer, who was a fledgling filmmaker among other avocations since his acting career had somewhat stalled, agreed to videotape the shows as well as loose rehearsals at the house and Joanna agreed to be a guest on one show and Mel would direct and aspiring comedy writers Merrill Markoe and Cheryl Garn asked if they could help and were made “producers.” Said Markoe, “I certainly wasn’t writing for him—nobody could write for Andy Kaufman. You could suggest. But he had to just ad-lib and do his own thing.” Everyone would receive one dollar as payment for their participation, since George said that would compensate for all binding rights to the material just in case anything of value grew out of the exercise.

Midnight Snacks began on the last Saturday in February and concluded its run on the second Saturday in March and played to packed predawn crowds and Foreign Man would do twenty minutes at the start until Andy blinked him away and stated in his own voice, “Ladies and gentleman—so far everything I’ve done for you, really, I’m only fooling. This is really me.” And during false commercial breaks, he purposely turned monstrous and snappishly Cliftonian (minus disguise) and berated Mel Sherer—“This is Mel, our floor director. Hey, Mel, why don’t you bend down and show everybody your bald spot! Come on, get down there and kiss my feet! Get down on your knees, Mel!”—and Mel would sheepishly acquiesce until the break ended and Andy would resume blissful unctuousness at his interviewing desk, which was noticeably several inches above the guest chairs which were peopled with his revolving platoon of plants whom he either ignored or forced to wrestle with each other (Markoe and another woman grappled, much to his delight, in the second show) or humiliated or openly flirted with or instructed to take naps. “You know,” guest Joanna Frank told him onstage, “in all the time I’ve known you, this is the first time I’ve ever really been able to sit and talk with you. I just feel like you ignore me all the time. It’s like your eyes get all glazed over and you twitch your nose whenever I look at you.” (He squirmed and barely defended himself and later said that he liked this exchange a great deal.) He also introduced a segment called Has-Been Corner during which he cheerily questioned alleged show business failures so obscure as to be believable—“How did you know it was all over for you?”—the first two of which were made-up characters but, on the third show, Richard Beymer consented to withstand the embarrassment. “Well, tell me,” said Andy, “how does it feel to be up in front of lights after fifteen years of doing nothing?” And Beymer replied, “You’re really sick, you know? You come out here and do jokes at other people’s expenses! I’m not a has-been!” And as the finale of each show, Andy beckoned his cast to link arms onstage and sway to and fro and sing Fabian’s “This Friendly World” with him (just like he had envisioned as a boy) and, when the singing had stopped and business was done, he would turn nasty again and pat Mel’s stomach and say, “Hey, what are ya growin’ in there? Kiss my feet, Mel!” And it was a secret to no one who knew him (as well as he could be known) that he cherished the old Elia Kazan film, A Face in the Crowd, in which Andy Griffith played the beloved broadcast entertainer Lonesome Rhodes who shucked-and-grinned in public and was a loathsome horror in private—and he really wanted extremely badly to star in a remake of the film once he was really extremely successful.