but the network would advertise it as The Andy Kaufman Special but the advertising part would come much later because network entertainment president Fred Silverman was much too terrified to actually broadcast it any time during his term of office. (It would be, according to Silverman, “too avant-garde” with its oddball pacing and sly/dry moments of dead/awkward air and it would frighten dim-witted viewers, who were the viewers he seemed to prize most.) Many weeks earlier, and twentysomesuch years earlier, Andy had started writing the show. But Mel would now help him, too, and where was Bob? Baaab? Baaaaaaab? Back in New York, Bob Zmuda had become the preferred Clifton stooge (You’re Polish!? Hey, look at Polish here! How many Polish does it take to screw in a lightbulb, Baaaaab?), especially after the Little Hippodrome went belly-up and Zmuda hired on as a bartender at the Improv, where he was ever available for plant hijinks. (His comedy partner Chris Albrecht, meanwhile, became house manager at the Improv after Budd went west.) Andy had always told Zmuda that once he became famous he would want Zmuda to write for him because Zmuda was a prankster after his own heart and had big fanciful foolish dangerous dark ideas and was an expert, like Andy, at altering truth and embellishing truth and disregarding truth—he said “gotcha” a lot—and he was a very sweet guy and it was a shame that he didn’t meditate. “Bob is comedy personified,” Andy liked to say. But Zmuda had disappeared from New York and George finally found him that spring working as a short-order cook in San Diego, where he had fled with his girlfriend to rethink show business. “Kid,” George told him, “your ship just came in!” And so they plotted in late spring—Andy, Bob, Mel, George—and conceived a structure not unlike that of the Midnight Snacks shows in which Andy would preside at a desk even higher than before and turn Cliftonian when the cameras appeared to be off and abuse floor director Zmuda and he would reprise the Has-Been Corner with a cohort named Gail Slobodkin, who had been a child actor on Broadway in The Sound of Music (“Did you lose a lot of friends?”), and he would interview Cindy Williams, asking her if she had any hobbies or diseases or if she had ever been under the care of a psychiatrist and whether she was Laverne or Shirley and what her costar Penny Marshall was really like, then force her to sing “Mack the Knife” against her will. (Originally, she had rehearsed a monologue from Edward Albee’s Zoo Story which ended with her pulling a knife and stabbing him to death on the air—but then how would he finish the show?)
Foreign Man was, of course, required to open the show, sitting quietly in a stuffed chair near a television set on which the program was to be broadcast, and blink into the camera and welcome viewers and tell them that ABC gave him one hundred thousand dollars for the special and they told me take thees money and you can do anything you want weeth it … so I went on vacation weeth de money … I spent all de money, now I don’t have any of de money left … and that basically there was no special … eet’s not joke, I will just sit here for ninety meenutes … and softly hum to himself to kill some time before leaning forward to say now that we have lost the audience and only my friends are there, now we can watch my special. Then Foreign Man began describing the special as he watched the television set on which Foreign Man walked onto the stage and did de act and transformed into de Elveece who wore a new and most extravagant white studded jumpsuit designed at a cost of approximately $3,500 for the show by Bill Belew, who had designed most of Elvis’s costumes—and this costume was made from the very same material Belew had once used for Elvis, plus the same gems and studs, which was exciting. (“Andy asked me a million questions about Elvis,” said Belew. “You could tell there was a very pure and sincere esteem, sort of an awe.”) After singing “Treat Me Nice” and tenking the studio audience, he said everything that he had done so far had been