Andy Kaufman

by Bob Zmuda

  B: I can’t picture you drinking.

  A: I was a total drunk. Drank every day for two years straight. Dropped LSD. Smoked weed. I enjoyed it. Had a good time with my friends. But then when I got into TM, I stopped it cold.

  B: Do you ever miss it?

  A: No. Today I just focus on my career and meditate. But back then I was as close as one can get to being a wino. It was pretty scary.

  B: Jesus, just imagine—you could have ended up on a street corner reading The Great Gatsby for spare change.

  A: If I hadn’t found TM, that’s exactly what I’d be doing. But I’d be playing the congas instead. I don’t think reading Gatsby would have brought in too much.

  B: So are you admitting George is right?

  A: He is right, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop reading it.

  B: That’s the spirit!

  ***

  I remember the first time I heard the rumors. A hooker at Joe Conforte’s Mustang Ranch told me. I had “dated” her a few times. She was a petite little redhead with a killer bod. Kaufman never chose her, she said, because, “He likes the bigger, muscular girls that were better equipped for wrestling. It fulfilled his fantasy of being with a man.” “Fantasy of being with a man?” I said and laughed heartily. She said, “You mean you don’t know?” “Know what?” I asked. “He’s gay,” she said. “Don’t be ridiculous. Andy Kaufman gay? Very funny.” The redhead turned quite serious and said, “You really don’t know, do you?” I said, “Andy’s not gay. Jesus Christ, he and I have been coming to the Ranch here for years. He’s been having sex with more girls than I do. What the hell would a gay guy be coming here for?” She said, “He goes both ways. Some guys who come here do. Haven’t you heard of bisexuality?” “Of course I have. Besides, how would you know?” I asked. “You admitted you never slept with him.” “I haven’t,” she said, “but all us girls talk. We compare notes all the time. He’s an ass bandit alright, even pays extra for it. Always wants the girls to lay flat on their stomachs and not move, so he doesn’t see their breasts or vaginas that way. From the back they appear as a young boy.” The conversation, even though I didn’t believe her, was making me pretty uncomfortable. “Can we change the subject?” I asked. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to freak you out.” I said, “You’re not freaking me out ’cause I don’t believe you.” She didn’t mention another word after that, sensing not only that she did freak me out, but also that she’d killed the possibility of my choosing her to go back to.

  I had a few more drinks at the bar as I waited for Andy to come out of one of the bedrooms. When he emerged, I was pretty smashed. The girl on his arm was bigger than he was and not particularly attractive or feminine for that matter, just the type the redhead had described. Still, I couldn’t get my head around what she had told me. I guess I didn’t want to.

  As we jumped into the car and drove back toward Reno, I was quieter than usual. In a happy-go-lucky voice, Andy said, “Well, aren’t you going to ask me?” I became alarmed, but didn’t show it. “Ask you what?” I said, not sure where he was going with this. “Ask me how she was, of course,” something we always asked each other afterward. “Oh, yeah, of course. So how was she?” He smiled and in the Clifton voice said, “She was good, but I was better.” We both laughed. I thought to myself, “That redhead is full of shit.” I thought of telling Andy what she said, because I really didn’t believe it, but for some unknown reason didn’t. It was just too uncomfortable a subject even to bring up, and over the next couple of years, it disappeared completely from my psyche. Andy Kaufman gay? Give me a break.

  It wasn’t until years later that Lynne confirmed Andy’s little secret.

  ***

  Lynne

  This “secret” of Andy’s seems so last week in this day and age. The world has changed so much, but when Andy was alive his “secret” would have been a big deal and could have damaged his career even more than he already had. I don’t know that he was in fact worried about his career, but he certainly didn’t want his parents to know. In fact, his bisexuality would be so humdrum today that I considered not even mentioning it, but Bob and I agreed that we would be completely honest in this book, since it is most likely the last book we will write about Andy.

  So what made me first start wondering if maybe Andy was bisexual? It started creeping into my mind when we were living together in San Francisco and he insisted that I find an apartment in the Castro district, which as everyone knows is one of the most famous gay districts in the world. He said it was because there was a Mrs. Fields cookie store there. This was a perfectly believable reason because in Andy’s world, cookies and chocolate cake were king. He also said he wanted to be near Little Orphan Andy’s and Sparky’s, two twenty-four-hour restaurants that we frequented in the wee hours. It only dawned on me later to wonder how the heck he knew so much about the Castro in the first place.

  So I found an apartment on Collingwood Street at the top of Castro Hill. Andy used to go down the hill every day to Mrs. Fields to get his chocolate chip cookie fix. It didn’t occur to me at the time that he was going down there for anything else.

  Now that we were together for long stretches of time, I began to wonder where he disappeared to for hours at a time. He said he was at a coffee shop writing his book. This too was totally believable, but questions kept popping up in my mind and I started to put two and two together.

  Like the hooker told Bob, Andy was extremely sexually attracted to tall, muscular women. Girls who pumped iron were particularly arousing to him. It didn’t matter to him what they looked like. He gave me an example of this. He told me that he tried to get Sandra Bernhard to wrestle him because he found her sexually attractive because she was “more like a man than a woman.” (Sorry, Sandra!) He was very disappointed that she wanted nothing to do with him. (Back then, he probably didn’t know that she herself was gay.) This proclivity for “mannish” bodies got me wondering about his sexual preferences; I started to wonder if perhaps Andy was gay but couldn’t face it or admit it to himself. I didn’t say anything to him initially because I didn’t really care. But I did mention it to Bob, who I think was a little homophobic about it and just didn’t want to discuss it.

  So why did he get so aroused when he wrestled women? Was it because he couldn’t wrestle men? I’ve since looked closely at the match where Andy was given the pile driver by Jerry Lawler, and yep, he is indeed “pitching a tent” as he gets carried off on the stretcher!

  When he had sex with women, he wanted them to “play dead.” He didn’t want any moaning or physical involvement from them. He just wanted them to lie there while he humped away. I know for a fact that it wasn’t just me because I asked him if it was that way with every woman he slept with and he confirmed it. Bob told me that the hookers he talked to said the same thing.

  Years after Andy “died,” a gay friend in San Francisco said that everyone knew Andy died of AIDS because they saw him in the Castro district constantly.

  Anyway, I finally just point-blank asked him if he was gay. He looked at me for a long time as he was formulating his answer, probably trying to decide if he wanted to tell me. He finally lowered his head and said in a small voice, “Yeah.” And I just laughed and said, “Andy, I don’t care a bit! I already know that you have sex with other women, why should men bother me?” And we both started laughing. I asked if Bob knew, and Andy said, “NO!” He hadn’t told Bob, he didn’t know how he would react. I said I thought he should come clean, and he said he would think about it. It wasn’t until we were in the Philippines that he finally told Bob the truth, but by then I had already discussed it with Bob.

  ***

  Lynne prepared me that Andy was going to tell me he was gay, although he didn’t know that I already knew at the time. He was propped up in bed at the hotel he was staying in, in Baguio City in the Philippines. Lynne held his hand and said to me, “Dr. Zmudee—Andy has something to tell you.” I knew what was coming and could see he was quite conflicted
about telling me. So I made it easy on him and said, “Andy, if it’s about you being gay … I’ve known for years.” He was so relieved when I said that. “You did?” “Of course,” I said. “You couldn’t have idolized Fabian for all those years because of his singing voice!” He laughed and then said, “No, he really did have a good voice!” And that was it. Ten years of hiding in the closet with me was over in just twenty seconds. Such a burden was immediately taken off his shoulders. He soon got out of bed and we all went down to the hotel’s restaurant to have a good meal. We never mentioned it again, although he told Lynne he didn’t want his parents to know, and we shouldn’t tell anybody until both of them had passed away. His mother died soon after Andy did, but his dad, a tough old coot who was awarded three Purple Hearts, lived to be ninety and died on July 25, 2013. Lynne and I honored Andy’s wishes.

  I don’t know if Andy’s brother and sister will be shocked by this revelation or not. For all Lynne and I know, they might have known all these years. What may be shocking to them is the suggestion that he might have died of AIDS, although I’m sure they, like myself, haven’t escaped the rumors that have persisted for years. We are no longer living in the dark ages of this disease. If he had possibly contracted it from a man, as Lynne suggested, so be it. He just as easily could have picked it up from one of the countless prostitutes he had sex with, if that makes it more palatable for the family. And for all I know, the family may already know this too. Nobody is talking and that is unfortunate. Perhaps this book will get a dialogue going between Lynne, Michael, Carol, and me. I could only hope. It’s time for all the skeletons to come out of the closet.

  ***

  Over the years, my friends and I would hold occasional séances in hopes of getting in contact with Andy in case he had crossed over to the other side. We held these usually on the anniversary of his supposed death, May 16. Even though initially I did it for fun (knowing Andy was still alive), I still would bring in top respected psychics and invite some of my celebrity friends to attend. I remember one year we held the séance upstairs in the “Belly Room” of Mitzi Shore’s The Comedy Store. The place is haunted. It’s the real thing. In fact, some of Mitzi Shore’s staff simply refuses to go up there when the club’s closed.

  On one particular May 16, I brought in a top psychic and invited Bobcat Goldthwait, Bob Saget, Andy Dick, Sally Kirkland, and other friends to attend a midnight séance. It wasn’t long into the séance when the lights in the ninety-seat showroom started to blink on and off. Contact was made, but not with Andy. Instead it was the spirit of a woman. The medium said she was a showgirl who used to work in the club as a dancer back in the ’40s when the club was called “Ciro’s,” a very popular show room where big stars such as Martin and Lewis, Sophie Tucker, Jimmy Durante, and the like used to perform. It was Mafia-owned back then, and this girl got knocked up by a married celebrity patron and had a botched illegal abortion performed on her in the “Belly Room” itself, where she died.

  Now I’m usually skeptical about such things. The psychic I brought that evening knew nothing about the history of the room. Neither did I at the time and took what the psychic said with a grain of salt.

  But here’s where things get weird. Months after the séance, I was talking to the owner, Mitzi Shore. She asked how the séance went. Half jokingly, I started to tell her about what the psychic had said about this woman. Mitzi stopped me and said the psychic was good, and then she continued to tell me the whole story, which matched just what the psychic had said. I couldn’t believe my ears.

  Since then, I’ve held other séances with other psychics and not one has been able to make contact with Andy. Why? The answer is obvious: he’s not dead.

  Over the years Andy would give me and others that knew him little signs here and there that he was listening and wanted us to know. Something innocent enough such as thinking about him and the next thing you know, the song “Man on the Moon” would come on the radio. Granted, some would say that’s a mere coincidence, but if you’ve experienced it like I have countless times, just when you were thinking about him, you couldn’t help but feel something else was at play. And then, of course, there would be those times when it would be impossible to dismiss it as mere coincidence, such as the Leprechaun 2 episode.

  It all started innocently enough on one particular occasion. I, along with George Shapiro and Howard West, had a very important “pitch” meeting with an executive at NBC named Rick Ludwin. We wanted to sell him A Comedy Salute to Andy Kaufman, a one-hour retrospective of Andy’s work. This was ten years after Andy’s supposed death and a real long shot at a possible sale.

  Now the night before an important pitch, I’m usually pretty anxious and wound up and have a tendency toward insomnia. Over the years, to combat it, I’ve come up with a solution that seems to work. I’ll go to the video store and pick up two or three bad movies—real stinkers, that I’ll plop into my VCR. And I’ll have such a hard time watching that they’ll put me to sleep. On this occasion, one of the turkeys that I rented was called Leprechaun 2. Halfway through it, I was out cold, when my own loud snore woke me up. I opened my weary eyes to the TV screen and there it was: an image appeared as clear as day. It read, “Andy Kaufman died for our sins” and then it disappeared. What had just happened? Adrenaline rushed through my body trying to make sense of what I’d just seen on the screen. I rubbed my eyes. I was now wide awake. I had to be hallucinating, but rewound the tape a minute or two back. Sure enough, the image was there once again: “Andy Kaufman died for our sins.” It was graffiti on a public bathroom wall in a scene. Now I ask you, what are the odds of your going in to pitch an Andy Kaufman special the next morning, your renting a B-horror film to help you fall asleep, which you do, and it just so happens that you wake up just at the precise moment that that graffiti wall appears? Literally, if I had woken up five or six seconds later, I would have missed it.

  The next morning, right before the pitch, I told George about it. He said, “It’s a sign from Andy from the other side. It means they’re going to buy the special.” George was right. They did. That year it was actually nominated for an Emmy.

  A few years later, after my first book, Andy Kaufman Revealed!, came out, I received a letter from the director of Leprechaun 2 telling me how he enjoyed the read. I called him up and told him my “Andy died for our sins” story. At first he didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, but then remembered. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I remember that scene. We were shooting in a public bathroom. To me, the place looked too pristine. I grabbed a few magic markers and started to graffiti up the stalls, not even giving much thought to what I was writing. I quickly wrote, ‘Andy Kaufman died for our sins.’ I don’t know why. I never wrote that before or after.”

  Like I said before, George believed it was Andy signaling us from the other side. He was wrong. It wasn’t Andy signaling from the other side, but signaling us from this side. Here’s how it was explained to me by experts in the field of parapsychology and Transcendental Meditation. Since Andy was advanced in TM and practiced it twice a day every day, he was able in his alpha stage to experience OBE (out-of-body experience), or what is commonly referred to in the field as “traveling clairvoyance”—i.e., while meditating, he could send himself just about anywhere, such as influencing the director to write, “Andy Kaufman died for our sins,” and years later causing me to wake up just at the right moment to read it.

  I had been with him once before when he was OBE-ing. We were on a flight from Chicago to Indiana aboard a small Piper Cub, just Andy, the pilot, and me, when we got caught up in a massive storm. The tiny plane was being pitched around so violently that the pilot gave up the controls, completely lost his composure, and began to pray, convinced we were going to crash. I was on the verge of losing it myself until I looked across at Andy, who was deep in meditation with a pleasant, plaintive smile on his face, totally oblivious to the certain death around us. I tried shaking him awake to no avail. I even lifted one of his ey
elids and saw his eye pulsating back and forth in R.E.M. (rapid eye movement). He wasn’t there! GONE! Out of nowhere, the storm suddenly dissipated, and we landed safely. Andy came back around and told us he was able to stop the thunderstorm by transporting himself under a waterfall in Paraguay and conversing with a Hindu water goddess. The pilot believed him and kept hugging and thanking him for saving his life. I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t see it with my eyes either. Later, I learned from sources within the TM movement that Andy had learned the technique of “astral projection” from the maharishi himself.

  ***

  Serial killer/cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer is having dinner with his mother at his apartment. She says, “Jeffrey, I don’t like your friends.” Jeffrey replies, “So try the potatoes.”

  Family is the last to know what is really going on in another family member’s head. The Kaufmans were no exception. They knew nothing of Andy. Still don’t. They had compartmentalized him as an eight-year-old his whole life and never wanted him to grow up. Andy, in turn, fed into the sham. It was a lot easier for him to endure family events that way. I attended a few family affairs, such as Seders. So did Lynne. To us, everybody would be talking to him in baby talk. They had been doing it for so long I’m not even sure if they themselves were aware of it. As he grew older, he eventually moved to the West Coast. Still, when they got together, he’d immediately revert to the baby talk. It is this family dysfunction of being stuck in a childhood time warp that I feel has stunted their appreciation of his adult work. Anything outside of his childlike Mighty Mouse and Cow Goes Moo bits is met with scorn and condemnation from members of the clan.

  Even now, the family, in a futile attempt, tries to restrict the material they don’t personally approve of from ever being seen. Take the movie. If it wasn’t going to deal primarily with his childhood, they wanted nothing to do with it. They just couldn’t bring themselves to accept that Andy had grown up, because growing up meant leaving home and leaving them. So if they couldn’t be a part of it, their main mission in life would be to attack it, which they did.