by Bob Zmuda
One time Andy showed me his high school yearbook. Under his photo, next to the legend “career goal,” was written “kids’ performer.” That was how he saw himself; that the kids had grown up was of no consequence to him whatsoever. Andy was always playing, no matter what his character or routine: The first time you saw Andy, you didn’t know what to make of him. After that, you knew he was playing with you. Sometimes even seasoned Kaufman audiences got a surprise: Andy would make them think they knew what was coming, then purposely self-destruct in front of them just to show them who was in control.
During those early years Andy developed what he called his bombing routine. This was Andy at his darkest, when he would go onstage and cause to happen what every comic who’s ever lived fears most: the complete failure to get a laugh. There is an unwritten rule between comedians and audiences: the comedian is supposed to make the audience laugh. Andy had been mislabeled a comedian because he got his start in comedy clubs, so audiences were often perplexed and even irritated when he did not come through with the laughs. But Andy would thrive on that conflict he created, feeling the tension rise in a room and feeding off it like some comic-book superhero who ate negative energy. This was payback for calling him a comic. You think I’m funny? I’ll show you …
Andy’s fame had spread, and he got a gig opening for Sonny and Cher, superstars even then, at a club called Bachelors Three. The club manager was an asshole and immediately rubbed Andy the wrong way. I don’t even remember what the altercation was about, but when the guy walked away, Andy muttered, “Okay, if that’s how you want it …”
That evening, Andy went on before a packed house and started in with his usual Foreign Man routine. At the turning point in the act, when he’d become Elvis, Andy kept going — as Foreign Man. The bad impressions and jokes eventually got the audience mumbling angrily, and finally, because he wouldn’t change direction to please the house, they brought the curtain down right in the middle of his act.
Andy said nothing, he just walked over and began gathering his props. I knew it was a very good booking for him, and to blow it out of the water took either insanity or real courage. Andy’s two homes were the Improv and (Catch, and venturing outside them took him beyond his familiar bounds. That he had settled into those two clubs was comforting to him, but at the same time he knew if he was to grow as a performer he needed to leave the nest. He may have seen the Bachelors Three gig as a warm-up to that severing of ties. He also may have felt the early tugs of rebellion that grew almost exponentially as his career blossomed. Catch and the Improv not only were home turf but also allowed him great flexibility as Andy Kaufman the artist. Bachelors Three was just a job and made him feel like Andy Kaufman, the assembly-line comedian. His reaction that night was probably twofold: one, You can’t talk to me like that so take this job and shove it; and two, You think I’m funny? Well, I’ll show you.
In the early months of 1975, two men, NBC’s director of late-night television, Dick Ebersol, and Lome Michaels, a twenty-nine-year-old Canadian who had been producing shows for Lily Tomlin, were charged with the task of filling the network’s void on Saturday evenings while seizing that potentially lucrative youth market. Saturday Night Live was their solution to the problem. They assembled a cast of talented unknowns, such as John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, Dan Aykroyd, and Chevy Chase. The show’s sketch format was subversive, but only in comparison with the safe shows of the time. In reality it seemed radical only because it was fresh, with the first season exuding an edgy sensibility that was funnier than it was risky. The National Lampoon Radio Hour, one of the progenitors of SNL, was far more vicious and acid than SNL ever was. But SNL was television, not radio, and offered something no one had ever seen. It soon found a berth in the viewing habits of that new, young demographic. And Andy figured prominently in its early success.
In the summer before SNL went on the air, Dick Ebersol caught Andy’s act. Ironically, though Andy had cut his teeth at New York’s Improv, where Ebersol’s show was going to be produced, Andy came to Ebersol’s attention at the Los Angeles version of Budd’s club. Budd had recently opened the Improv on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood and needed some horsepower on stage, so he brought Andy out — one of his top acts from New York — to help build a following.
Ebersol went back to NBC’s headquarters at Thirty Rockefeller Plaza and told Lorne Michaels about this strange and wonderful talent he had seen, and soon Andy was invited to appear on the debut episode of NBC’s new late-night, youth-oriented variety show. As the “live” aspect of the name implied, the show was to hark back to the early days of television with a live broadcast (at least to the eastern time zone) and was to offer hip, cutting-edge comedy, a hot guest host, and musical guests at the forefront of their industry.
On October 11, 1975, at 11:30 P.M., eastern standard time, from the ninth-floor studio at Thirty Rock, Saturday Night Live went out over the airwaves helmed by guest host George Carlin, a slyly sharp observational comedian who had elevated drug humor to thought-provoking existential musings. Following the opening sketches, Andy stepped out into a lone spotlight, smiled, set the tone arm of a small phonograph onto a record, and a scratchy rendition of the theme song from the Mighty Mouse cartoon series began. Saying nothing, he bobbed along to the music until the refrain “Here I come to save the day!” which, while flourishing his hands, he lip-synched. He then fell mute until it appeared again. When the song finished, he removed the tone arm and bowed. ‘Nuff said. It brought down the house.
It was by no accident that Andy selected “Mighty Mouse” as a way to introduce himself to Saturday Night Live’s audience. After all, “Mighty Mouse” had been Andy’s opener for years in his nightclub act. It worked on so many levels. It was highly original, yet at the same time childlike. But more important, it told us absolutely nothing about the person performing it, as Andy didn’t utter one sound, but merely lip-synched to a child’s record.
Of that performance, Lorne Michaels observed, years later, “It wasn’t that he was lip-synching to ‘Mighty Mouse.’ It was that he was only doing one part in it. It was the standing and waiting beside the record player for his cue that was such an original move. There was something so … confident …in the comedy.”
Andy was invited to return to the show, so two weeks later, on October 25, he did a reprise of his lip-synching routine, this time with “Pop Goes the Weasel.” It was the same act he’d done as a twelve year-old, the same act he’d been doing at Catch and at the Improv, and it killed on national television. People were now talking about Saturday Night Live, but many were saying’, “And did you see the guy who sang ‘Mighty Mouse’? What was that all about?” Andy Kaufman was becoming a television star.
Though I was not on the writing staff of the show, I was Andy’s writer and frequently hung out with him at SNL. One day, a few months into the first season, while passing through the nearly deserted ninth-floor lobby, Andy and I ran into Gilda Radner. She looked like a fragile little China doll in pigtails, and she shared with Andy a childlike sense of wonderment. She had taken a liking to him and rushed over and gave him a big hug. Then softly, so only he could hear (though I overheard), like an eight-year-old girl on a playground talking to one of her playmates, she said, “Can you believe it? We’re becoming famous.” They reveled in that awe for a moment, as only they could experience it and begin to understand it. It was a precious moment, for indeed they were becoming famous, yet they were still very sweetly naive.
As Andy’s star began ascending, I continued schlepping at the Improv. I needed to eat, and though Andy was a guest on SNL every few weeks, he was still doing his club act and neither needed new material nor made enough money to justify paying me. So when he told me in early 1976 that he was moving to Hollywood, I was both excited and terrified. I knew Hollywood offered unfathomable opportunities to him and that he’d be an idiot not to explore them. But I feared his ship pulling out of the harbor and never coming back to pluck me off the island
of my dismal existence.
“Look, you’re still going to be my writer,” he reiterated. “But I just need to go out and get settled in. Once I’ve got the place figured out, you’ll come out.”
“How long?” I wondered out loud.
Andy shrugged. “I don’t know. A few weeks, a month or two maybe. I’m not sure.”
This open-ended situation left me uneasy, but I had no choice. Andy was the point man, the guy who was taking the chance, and I was the rear guard.
“Well, then, knock ‘em dead, Kaufman,” I said cheerfully.
Andy’s move to Hollywood was long overdue, as was his recent stardom. He had been a hit for years on the New York nightclub stage, and the who’s who of New York’s chic artistic community knew him well, even if middle America was just learning his name. In Andy’s head, this new interest in him only magnified the fact that he had been passed over for so long. That his act was so far above those of his peers, and that most of his compatriots were already on the West Coast doing their second or third Carson shots, only pushed him harder to make the move. Besides, patience was never one of Andy’s virtues. Hadn’t he told Elvis years before that he was going to be famous? What was taking so long?
I always had the feeling that he was reliving his career, as if it were some extended déjà vu. Andy had taught me a meditation technique of projecting one’s wants into the future. While in a relaxed state, one visualizes something one wants to achieve and then locks it in as if it has already happened. The fact that Andy practiced this technique religiously for more than twelve years could account for much of his frustration with the concept of time as we know it. His predictions of what was to come were often uncanny.
My relationship with him, both personal and professional, mirrored this technique. Andy and I were very seldom in the moment. Our times together were often lived in sheer fantasy. Together we played out hundreds of television and movie scenarios, casting ourselves as various characters and then performing the roles. Andy was no longer alone in his room with an imaginary friend — that imaginary friend was now real. The only problem was that Andy was moving his room to the West Coast without me. And just when I was really getting to know him.
Once out in Hollywood, Andy quickly got attention through the efforts of his managers, George Shapiro and Howard West of Shapiro/West and Associates. They were admired within the industry not only as top handlers of talent but also for their rebelliousness. George and Howard, with their exodus from the William Morris Agency, had spawned the defections of Michael Ovitz and some other young agents who left to found the legendary Creative Artists Agency, or CAA. George and Howard’s function was to advise their clients, make introductions, and weigh all career (and sometimes personal) decisions performers must make to obtain and secure their position.
With his heat as a talent building, Andy acquired an agent, the Agency for the Performing Arts, or APA. Now with his team of spirit guides in place, he was ready to take on the exceptionally complex task of becoming a star. In addition to his performances at the Improv and junkets to New York for an occasional SNL stint, Andy’s managers and agents started getting him more television time in Hollywood. He made appearances on Monty Hall’s Variety Hour and did whatever could get him exposure.
Andy got his first series, a role on comedian Dick Van Dyke’s show, a variety/comedy show that first aired on NBC on September 20, 1976. He did about ten shows. On December 30, 1976, Van Dyke and Company aired for the last time. But by then Andy had made an impression not only with the youth market of SNL but also with the mainstream.
Andy made acquaintances in his new town. One of them was Steve Allen. Andy did his first Tonight Show in late ‘76 with guest host Allen, who took a liking to the young entertainer. Andy had always appreciated Steve Allen, a multifaceted talent who had carved a niche for himself as a sort of Renaissance Man of Hollywood. Andy admired Steve for his many accomplishments, which included being the original host of The Tonight Show as well as the first guy in television to take a camera out on the street to pull pranks. So when Steve invited Andy to his home for dinner one night, Andy leaped at the opportunity. Upon arriving at the Allen residence, Andy was met at the door by Steve, who whisked him inside, then promptly lowered his voice.
“Jayne,” he said, referring to his wife, actress Jayne Meadows, “has had a long day and got home and didn’t know you were coming.”
Andy was confused. “Should I leave?”
“No, no,” said Steve, “it’s just that she took off her makeup, and she doesn’t ever let anyone see her without it.”
Now Andy was really confused. “And …?”
“And so when we eat,” Steve continued, “I’m going to seal you so you can’t see her. She’ll be sitting sort of behind you. Okay?”
Andy nodded. “Sure, okay.” This was quite weird, even for Andy Kaufman.
Steve and Andy chatted before dinner, and when the time finally came, sure enough, Andy was positioned at the table so he couldn’t see Jayne, who was sitting somewhere behind him. Like the warning to Lot’s wife, Steve’s instruction to Andy was not to look back. During dinner Andy and Jayne conversed, but Andy had to fight the urge to turn, and Steve’s eyes would occasionally widen to remind Andy of the warning. Andy was uncomfortable the entire evening. As time wore on, he began to fear the consequences of looking at Jayne/Medusa. When he finally left, he drove quickly away and never returned.
Two weeks before the Van Dyke show tanked, Andy as Foreign Man (though introduced as Andy Kaufman) performed on Dinah Shore’s daytime variety show. On the bill that day were Marvin Hamlisch, Bob Hope, and Sammy Davis Jr. The camera kept cutting to the old pros, who were perplexed and obviously struggling to understand how this yokel had gotten on the show. But when Andy metamorphosed into Elvis, he brought down the house and received instant respect from the legends watching him from one side of the stage.
Another big break came with a second invitation to The Tonight Show, this time for a meeting with the King of Late-Night Television, Johnny Carson. Though Andy had done The Tonight Show with Steve Allen, it wasn’t quite the same as having Johnny laughing at you. On January 21, 1977, Andy was introduced by Johnny himself and proceeded to charm people with his stories of his native “Caspiar,” a country “somewhere” in the Mediterranean. Though some knew Foreign Man by now, after a little more than a year of SNL, even those who did not still loved this googly-eyed little immigrant and his silly “emetations.”
Andy read from Dick and Jane to demonstrate his facility with English, and Johnny “helped” him through the tough parts. Carson was clearly charmed by Andy, despite knowing the act was a put-on. Then Andy sang a harvest song from Caspiar in his native tongue — carefully contrived gibberish — that had the audience dazzled and in stitches, with most probably thinking he was for real. The other guest, Florence Henderson, didn’t seem so sure. Johnny loved Andy because Andy stayed in character, which gave Carson myriad opportunities to make his trademark mugging asides to the camera. Andy’s pop-eyed, innocent Foreign Man was a hit, not only with Johnny but also with the audience. From New York, I watched my friend steal The Tonight Show and thought about his promise to take me along on the ride.
On March 3, 1977, Andy was invited back to The Tonight Show. This time he started out as Foreign Man and then did his centerpiece act, Elvis. The Foreign-Man-becomes-Elvis-becomes-Foreign-Man transformation was still his showstopper, but Andy knew he needed more material for the mainstream to consume. His childhood act was a hit, but he was secretly concerned he was going to become a one-note performer. Andy’s portfolio of material was pretty eclectic and wildly inventive, but the national television market wanted Foreign Man, and that was that. He could see his characters becoming co-opted and didn’t know how to stop it. Andy was a growing television presence, not yet a star but getting there, yet he knew that his television history and the gilded cage that had pigeonholed acts like Pat Harrington’s Guido Panzini and Bill Dana’s Jose Jimen
ez were closing on Foreign Man, and it worried him.
Five months later Andy returned to The Tonight Show, but on that night he did Foreign Man, told a story, did Elvis, and then took a step that killed his chances with Carson for the future — he dropped out of character. The real Andy Kaufman just chatted with Johnny, but it wasn’t as much fun for the master host. Andy did make another appearance on The Tonight Show, but it was with guest host Steve Martin, never again with Carson.
I was always excited to see Andy in his appearances, but each time I felt us getting further and further apart. I was still working the Improv, but my wages kept me trapped in New York, barely ahead of the wolves each month. I wanted to get out to Hollywood to be with Andy, to get in on some of what he had going, but I was stuck. Then one day the gods smiled upon me. I was living in the Village, and as I walked home I saw a guy sitting inside a car at a red light and throwing a complete fit — punching the visor and the ceiling, screaming, the whole nine yards. I honestly thought he was going to have a heart attack, so I walked over and lapped on the window. “You okay?” I asked.
“Okay? Okay?” he repeated rhetorically as he punched the dash repeatedly. “Am I okay? I’ve been trying for two fucking hours to find a fucking parking place for this piece of shit and I’ve fucking had it! I’d sell this shitheap for fifty bucks if I could!”
Half thinking he was kidding, I quickly looked the car over and said, “Sold!”
“I’m not kidding,” he said. “It’s yours. You got the fifty?”
I lived two blocks away. He drove me there, I got my money, paid him, and he climbed out. “It’s all yours.” He signed over the pink slip and shook my hand. “One last thing. Do you mind?” he asked, pointing at his enemy of late.
Seeing that I’d paid fifty bucks, I didn’t care. “Knock yourself out,” I offered.
For the next few minutes he proceeded to kick the car a few dozen times. When he’d finished, one side of the car featured a kind of accordion texture to the sheet metal, and most of the nameplate had fallen off. He took a deep breath. “Whew, thanks, I needed that!” And he walked away. My new prize was a ‘67 Rambler Rebel 550, a vehicle that was considered junk fresh off the assembly line, yet this one had significant body cancer through and through due to its road-salt intolerance.
