by Bob Zmuda
Just that balmy summer weekend forced me, along with thousands of other good, law-abiding, conservative kids, to deal with the shattered myth that the government was looking out for our best interests. Suddenly the words of Abbie and Jerry and Huey and Stokely were starting to ring true. Was the government the enemy? I’d seen it firsthand.
My thinking changed. I started hanging out in the old town area, a bastion of radical thought, and eventually, for all practical purposes, moved in. My new friends weren’t greasers but rather members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). I gave up drive-ins for coffeehouses, and though I still smoked dope I began to trade ideas, philosophies, with my new comrades. Though we were all middle-class kids we had just discovered that “that man behind the curtain” was not benevolent but instead was pretty scary. I joined a radical guerilla theater group. I traded my sharkskins for bell-bottoms and grew my hair long. I started saying “far-out” and “outtasight.” I swore off Vitalis for good.
Every weekend, I would sneak into Second City, the famed satirical improv troupe, to catch their latest biting political shots. As time passed, the scales fell from my eyes and I began to realize that this was my country and it had to be saved from the conservative, corrupt fat cats who had sent us into a war merely to profit the “military industrial complex.” It was those men who had subverted the “system” to satisfy their own cravings for power, and, worse, it was those people who had given orders to someone who had whacked my girlfriend-for-the-day across the kisser.
I was pissed. Mayor Daley had created not a “programmed” good kid in a short-sleeved white shirt with a pocket protector and a slide rule, ready to become a “productive” citizen, but rather a warrior, a radical commando, prepared to topple a system that had become irreparably corrupt. But in my case, instead of a gun or a bomb, my weapon was between my ears: my wits and a rapidly developing sense of humor. And I was ready for war.
Andy Kaufman, meanwhile, had become a drunk. Falling into a spiral of party after party in his hometown of Great Neck, New York, a small upscale town on Long Island just over the border from northeast Queens, in Nassau County, Andy spent more time in the local park than at home. Getting hammered day and night with some of the less desirable residents of Great Neck, Andy would often be cajoled into doing his Elvis Presley impression, which he labored to perfect despite the disorientation of his lifestyle. Andy had been doing a dead-on impression of his hero many years before it was hip.
Around this time he took a job as an errand boy and found himself making deliveries for the local butcher shop to comedian Alan King’s luxurious home. Andy would occasionally corner King in his house and do five minutes of his routine. Though King admired Andy’s tenacity, the day he discovered Andy taking an unauthorized dip in his pool he asked the butcher to send a different delivery boy. What impressed Andy most about King’s lifestyle was his fully equipped bar featuring a functioning beer tap. The link between King’s career in entertainment and the fact that he had his own beer dispenser made a huge impression on Andy. He soon began to inform people that he would one day have his own draft-beer delivery system.
Eventually Andy’s constant partying led to a pregnancy. The girl’s parents put the child, a girl, up for adoption. That event gave Andy pause, and he abandoned the parties in the park for the coffeehouses in Greenwich Village, an environment that stimulated his wildly active mind. Soon he was writing poetry and attending read-ins at the various hangouts where post-beat-generation devotees flocked. He grew a beard and let his hair grow, adopting the look of his clique. More important, Andy found the inspiration to begin serious contemplation of his future, the role he might play in the drama of life. With Alan King’s beer tap in mind, as well as the attendant modus vivendi that came from a big-time career in showbiz, Andy decided television was going to be his road to riches.
With high school grades indicating he was barely above a moron, a powerhouse university was not in Andy’s cards. But Grahm Junior College, in Boston, was. Possessed of a modest television department and sympathetic to Andy’s less-than-sterling high school scholastic record, Grahm welcomed him with open arms. It was during this time that two things changed Andy’s course of life permanently. The first was his introduction to transcendental meditation.
Founded in 1957 by His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, transcendental meditation, or TM, was a movement that was sweeping the country. Represented by practitioners as the way to unlock the extraordinary powers within oneself through deep meditation, those in the know liken its effects on the mind and body to drawing a bow: pull back the arrow two feet, and it will fly two hundred yards. Supposedly able to bring one enhanced mental powers in addition to a well-being exceeding the effects of half a dozen draft beers, it was perfect for Andy. He jumped in with both feet and soon embraced the life of a devotee: no more booze or drugs, and two hours a day given over to alpha bliss.
It has been said that chance favors the prepared mind, so perhaps TM had a large role in what happened next. One day Andy was approached by a fellow Grahm student and asked to perform in the campus talent show. Andy had performed as a child in his own room in front of an imaginary camera, putting on lavish specials with famous guests while surrounded by spectacular sets. His shows set records for audiences worldwide. Of course the audiences were only in his mind. His experience with real audiences started around the time he was nine with little shows for neighborhood kids, always with the condition that adults were expressly forbidden to attend.
Now he was being asked to do his thing in front of an audience over whom he had no control. His knee-jerk reaction was to decline, but TM had been altering his thought processes, allaying his fears and shyness, showing him that his concerns about others’ scrutiny of him were groundless. His mental placidity gave him a new confidence he had never before experienced. He agreed to do it.
Using his TM discipline to wash away the terror and jittery nerves, Andy charged himself with a million volts of electricity and went before that audience at Grahm Junior College and performed some of the same routines he had done for his friends as a child. The juxtaposition of his children’s material with an adult audience was lightning in a bottle uncorked. The crowd’s extraordinary reaction, coupled with his new mind-set from TM, proved to Andy that his fears were no longer part of his luggage, so he set them down and never looked back.
Perhaps he had been working up to that point of demarcation all his life. He had always lived in his own mind, but his meditation somehow allowed him to turn inside out and see outside reality as no more dangerous than had been his make-believe world as a child. Andy Kaufman had reinvented himself. It was mid-1969 and he was now ready to take the next step. Emboldened by his formal debut as an entertainer, Andy knew his next move was a necessity for his ascendancy as a performer to the great heights he envisioned. If that was to be his path, his direction in life, he required an audience with the most influential person he knew of. But meeting this person would be harder than getting to the Pope or the president, mainly because this person was bigger than either of them. Andy didn’t know how he was going to do it, but he knew he had to.
He had to meet Elvis.
Andy had written a book about Elvis. Having authored several other unfinished manuscripts, Andy felt his work in progress about Elvis was worthy of passing on to the King for approval. Somewhere around two hundred pages in length, the book was more a hand-scrawled tribute than a biography, and Andy felt it was a perfect calling card for an audience with this great man. Andy’s daily forays into meditation had given him the courage and resolve to meet Elvis. Almost completely broke and without a car, Andy visualized the gulf between himself and the King and saw them meeting. Now he just needed to, as they say, actualize the whole thing.
At this point in his career, Elvis was in the throes of a comeback. Overwhelmed by his success in the late ’50s and early ’60s, Elvis had lost some of his bearings and had become to many almost a parody of his former self. One of
his strategies to pull himself out of his tailspin was to return to live entertaining, and Las Vegas was the Mecca for live performing. Having already failed once at a comeback, this time Elvis took notice of the successes of Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck and created a power-packed, glitzy show with capes and flair and flash. Thus re armed, he rode hack in triumph as the “new Elvis,” now transformed into the white-clad, sequined, high-collared stage denizen with whom we are so familiar through myriad emulators.
Andy discovered that Elvis was to do a series of shows at the Las Vegas Hilton, then the flagship of the chain and one of the biggest houses in Vegas. Having formulated the outline of a plan, and inspired by Jack Kerouac’s classic, On the Road, Andy gathered up his looseleaf Elvis opus and hit the asphalt. On foot. From Great Neck, Long Island, twenty-year-old Andy Kaufman began hitchhiking the twenty-five-hundred-some miles to his destiny with the greatest entertainer in the history of the world. Within a week he was entering the outskirts of America’s Gomorrah. By that time, Andy didn’t even have money for food, let alone a ticket to Elvis’s show. So he improvised.
The Vegas Hilton was a huge scurrying anthill, and within a few hours of arriving, Andy had ingratiated himself with the staff and determined that Elvis was indeed going to perform that evening, and that when he did he would pass through the kitchen on the way to the stage. A service elevator that opened directly to Elvis’s penthouse came down to the kitchen, and by using it he would avoid his fans and achieve the quickest access to the stage.
Andy found a small, rarely used walk-in storage cupboard and decided it would be his command center. After scrounging a few leftovers and an empty coffee can for disposal of his bodily excretions, he slipped into the closet and left the door cracked just enough to spot Elvis, or at least to hear any commotion. Like a wild animal burrowing into a den to await its prey, Andy hunkered down and mentally prepared himself for his close encounter. More than eight hours would pass while Andy sat patiently, the Book of Elvis clutched to his chest, his eyes wide in expectation.
Finally it happened. Across the vast kitchen Andy was jarred from a transcendental reverie by an event: Elvis had left the penthouse … and was entering the kitchen. Andy leaped to his feet and prepared himself like a trap-door spider. Peering through the cracked door, suddenly he saw him, in the flesh: the man, the god, that son of Mississippi, Elvis Aaron Presley. Despite his TM discipline, Andy’s heart raced as Elvis advanced on his position, flanked by the preeminent members of the Memphis Mafia, his bodyguards Red and Sonny, the burly West brothers.
Just as E and his coterie reached ground zero, the cupboard door flew open, and this wild-eyed, bush-haired kid popped out, thrusting what looked like a very thick subpoena at Elvis. Red and Sonny instinctively moved to shield their monarch and overwhelm the threat, but something about Andy caused Elvis to stop them.
“Whoa, whoa, boys,” E said, staying any mayhem to the kid — after all, he looked harmless, and this was before stalkers turned pro … and psychotic.
His manuscript held out in supplication, Andy summoned the guts to speak to his bespangled deity. “Elvis, I’m your biggest fan. I wrote this book about you.”
Elvis nodded approvingly. “That’s good, that’s very good.”
As he now seemed to have Elvis’s attention, however fleeting, Andy was pumped up enough to impart to Elvis the sentence he had traveled across the country to utter. “I’m going to be famous, too,” he said confidently.
The King paused to regard him for a second, then uttered the blessing Andy so desperately sought: “I’m sure you will.” And with that, Elvis reached out and gently patted Andy on the shoulder.
Then E continued on, a great white shark surrounded by pilot fish. The encounter had lasted all of twenty seconds, but for Andy it was timeless. Though it was over, he just stood there, still in the grip of its implications, his eyes wide, his feet unmoving. Elvis had already ascended the stage before Andy shuffled away, his book undelivered. But that was unimportant. Andy had received The Blessing. All other considerations were secondary. The moment had been perfect, with Andy saying exactly what he wanted to say, and with the King responding exactly as Andy had imagined he would. It was a defining moment for Andy, perhaps the single most motivating one of his life. He was now ready to become something, and though he wasn’t sure what, it didn’t matter: the King had looked into his eyes and acknowledged him and had transferred a seed of greatness to Andy. Now Andy needed only to cultivate it.
While Andy began developing his stage presentation back in New York, I enrolled at Chicago’s Northeastern Illinois University. Imbued with the defiance I had inherited through experiences with fellow radicals and battles with the police, my scholastic career was oriented toward learning and protest, with the accent on the latter. While taking a literature test one day, I borrowed from my encounter with Abbie Hoffman and adapted a quote I had gleaned from his book Steal This Book. In keeping with the spirit of Abbie’s command, I had actually stolen the book and then proceeded to read and practice his writings. When the professor innocently asked the question “What is art?” I audaciously penned, “Art is anything you can get away with, for example, ‘fuck you’ is art if I say it is.”
My cynicism and zeal to emulate Mr. Hoffman, coupled with previous antisocial offenses, gave me two choices: leave the school permanently, or volunteer for a work-study program in the bosom of Appalachia. Quitting would have been a cop-out, so with the blessing of my school I journeyed to Pikeville, Kentucky.
Dubbed the All-American city by the local chamber of commerce, Pikeville was a sleepy little town surrounded by even sleepier little towns such as Raccoon, Hi-Hat, and Beaver. A stronghold for “Christian” values, it was a place where men called each other “neighbor” and women often referred to their cousins as “my husband.” Pikeville had not yet made it into the ’60s, even though it was almost 1970, and when I arrived at Pikeville College, to my horror I was told that when a few professors had protested “the war” the students had had them bodily removed. I had entered a place where the mind-set was One thought fits all. … Stepford with inbreeding.
I settled into life in Pikeville, and, for a while, all went well. I submerged the rebel and searched for my inner Barney Fife. Though my volunteer work at the college was only tolerable, I received new inspiration when I met a beautiful brunette, a fellow volunteer named Brenda Oyer, and we began dating. I took a part-time job at a local radio station, and Brenda and I started discussing a future together, outside Pikeville. Our best options were to head back to Chicago or to go on to Brenda’s hometown of Pittsburgh, but Brenda was unsure when we should actually leave Pikeville. I’d determined that Pikeville was no longer in my game plan, so I hatched a plot to hasten her decision.
Christmas was just around the corner, and the people at the local radio station had dropped their guard and begun letting me do live spots. I had created a character named Winny the elf who, in consort with my blustering Santa Claus, exhorted children to patronize the local toy store. But I became sick of constantly deceiving the children of Pikeville in order to induce them to mindlessly line the pockets of our sponsor. So one day I arrived ready to free Winny, Santa, and the youth of eastern Kentucky from the shackles of rampant consumerism. I opened my microphone and, instead of sweetly heralding the arrival of Santa, Winny the elf shrieked, “Boys and girls, bad news! This is terrible! Santa’s dead!” I was halfway out the door as the switch-board lit up like a Christmas tree.
Later that day, on the way to Chicago, I proposed to Brenda.
In Chicago I went back to school. After a year or so, Brenda and I decided to head to Pittsburgh. Once we settled in, Brenda’s sister Janet sized up my subversive attitude and suggested an outlet for my energy: the drama department at Carnegie-Mellon University, one of the most prestigious acting schools in the country. I auditioned, was accepted, and soon the acting bug had seriously infected me. Rubbing elbows with fellow students Ted Danson and Judith Light, I th
oroughly enjoyed the experience and began visualizing an acting career. Responding to a bulletin-board flyer announcing a summer-stock gig in Mansfield, Pennsylvania, I auditioned for and got the part of the villain in The Drunkard.
After a particularly artistic rendering one evening, another cast member, a guy I didn’t know all that well named Chris Albrecht, approached me with the tip that a very cute girl in the audience had been particularly taken with my performance. Despite the fact that I was married, I was an actor first and foremost, so I approached her at the after-show party, empowered with the knowledge that I was doing my duty to my public. When she vigorously blew me off I knew I’d been had. Given the choice between punching Albrecht’s lights out and laughing with him, I chose the latter. It was a good decision, as we became very close friends.
Chris and I talked a lot about acting. Eventually the subject all real actors discuss in their careers came up: when do we move to New York? Brenda would not endure the chaos of the Big Apple, so she and I parted, at least temporarily. It was a tough decision, but I knew that my destiny lay in New York, so I reluctantly said good-bye and rendezvoused with Chris in New York to assault the acting world.
By late 1972, Andy had become the cause célêbre of the New York comedy-club scene as the vanguard of new comics arrived. The year before, Andy’s uncle Sam Denoff, a very successful television writer and producer, had introduced Andy to Carl Reiner. Thoroughly impressed, Reiner recommended Andy to his nephew and manager, George Shapiro. George saw Andy’s potential and helped him gain a foothold in the burgeoning world of club comedy. Though the clubs didn’t pay back then, they were great places to receive exposure if one hoped to move up to paying gigs or even television. Every night, Andy would borrow his dad’s car and shuttle between the two main venues, Budd Friedman’s the Improv and Rick Newman’s Catch a Rising Star. Andy’s act was impossible to categorize. Though agents and managers all desperately wanted him, they just didn’t know what to do with him. Imagine a man coming out on stage, eating a bowl of potatoes, then climbing into a sleeping bag and snoozing while an alarm clock ticks down. No one had ever seen such an act, and incredulous audiences laughed constantly for the twenty minutes until the bell rang.
