by Bob Zmuda
We were planning a big show late in the fall at the Huntington Hartford Theater in Hollywood. We expected a house of a few thousand people. “You’re going to levitate? What, over the audience?” I asked.
“Yeah, exactly. That is, if the Maharishi lets me. It would he the first commercial application of levitation ever. It would be great for the TM movement.”
Bidding Kaufman good-bye was a relief. As much as I cared for him, baby-sitting Andy had become a full-time occupation. I was beginning to see why George Shapiro had been so relieved when I came to town. As his plane taxied away from the terminal the producer in me began to fantasize over the theatrical potential of a transcendent Andy Kaufman in concert, scrunched into a lotus position, an air of total bliss over his face as he drifted like a leaf in the wind over our open-mouthed audience. I pictured the headlines in the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and Variety, then the interviews Andy would do with David Frost and Barbara Walters. I visualized a pay-per-view deal that would leave Don King jealous. I started figuring the legal exigencies of lifting the pitch line from the Superman movies: “You will believe a man can fly.” The whole thing was a done deal in my mind before I reached the airport parking lot. Now if only the Maharishi would buy the pitch. I crossed my fingers. Then I pinched myself. Wait a second, people can’t levitate! I realized I was hanging around Kaufman too much. Then I flashed back to my psychic “summons” in San Diego and thought, But I’ll be damned if I can explain that voice.
No sooner had Andy left than a struggling young comedian named Steve Lubetkin planned some levitation of his own. What Steve Lubetkin did one night in West Hollywood inspired a change in the comedy business that would affect all working co-medians, including Andy. Steve motored to the Hyatt on Sunset, parked his car, and rode the elevator to the fourteenth floor. From there he took the stairs to the next level, the roof, and sized up his target below. Taking a run at it, he leaped and tried to will himself to land in front of the Comedy Store. Sadly, Steve missed by a few yards, landing unceremoniously in the parking lot, but his futile gesture did not go unnoticed. A note pinned to his shattered, bloody body read: “My name is Steve Lubetkin. I used to work at the Comedy Store.” That said it all.
What Steve was protesting in his stylish but rather final way became the genesis of a debate that marked the darkest days in American humor, a rising of bad blood that would come to be known as the comedy wars. The martyrdom of Steve Lubetkin served as both a rallying incident and a metaphor for the ills of working comedians everywhere. Though they were paid for television and most other appearances, up to that point comedians had never been paid for their bread-and-butter performances, those at the clubs. That 98 percent of working comics never saw a television studio or paid venue meant that most plied their trade for free. Thus the two most important clubs in the business, the Improv and the Comedy Store, became the enemy to many young comics. In no time, lines of conflict were drawn that would rival those of the Civil War in acrimony.
The top comedians of the time were involved: Robin Williams, Elayne Boosler, David Letterman, Garry Shandling, and Tom Dreesen. A young Jay Leno headed the strike committee and, to show he meant business, sported a Fidel Castro beard and menacing military fatigues. As a battle cry, “Remember Steve Lubetkin!” didn’t have quite the pith of “Remember the Maine!” or “Give me liberty or give me death!” but the sentiment was the same. And when comedians chose sides Andy fell onto the side of the club owners.
Andy didn’t want to get paid by either the Improv or the Comedy Store or any other club. His rationale was simple: as soon as they pay they can expect every set to be a killer. Andy loved to experiment with such esoteric routines as eating a bowl of potatoes on stage or curling up into a sleeping bag for a twenty-minute siesta while a perplexed audience looked on. If he started taking money his employers would in turn demand conventional entertainment, which could severely inhibit his style. Andy’s point was valid, for getting paid would have affected his freedom to investigate the bounds of comedy (and frequently audience tolerance), which was an essential part of his career tactics. But there were uncounted struggling comedians who did not have the benefit of numerous paid bookings and the promise of a television job that would yield hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
Fortunately, Andy never suffered retribution for his position; he was considered an anomaly, even in a business populated by so many free-spirited rationalists. Since Andy’s point of view was unique — he was seen as existing within his own bubble and not really as a working-class comic — his position allowed him tacit dispensation from the body politic of the cause. Deep inside, many comics realized they were just that, comics, whereas Andy was in his own league, a Copernicus of comedy who arrived on the scene spouting the outrageous concepts that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system and that as a comedian one does not always need to be funny. Interesting, yes, but funny? … not necessarily.
The comedy-club owners eventually caved and started paying their comics, but the comedy wars ended the careers of many aspiring and worthy jokesters before they really got started. It was the intrusion of the hardest aspects of serious business that killed an innocence and spontaneity that had existed until then. Some of the old animosities survive to this day.
By the early ‘80s comedy had become a legitimate career path. The next generation of comics sprouted, bloomed, and thrived from the mulch of the Steve Lubetkins — most of them unknowingly.
Eventually Andy would begin exploration of another seditious notion, that whether or not the audience liked you was unimportant. If one were to transmute the old shopkeeper’s saw, “The customer is always right,” to showbiz terms and then Kaufmanize it, Andy’s new apothegm would be “Fuck the customer.” It’s not that Andy disliked his audiences; on the contrary, he loved them, but he sought to redefine the relationship between a performer and the crowd before whom he or she stood. Andy’s goal was to foster an environment where neither the audience nor the performer had any expectations from one another. That sounds impractical, if not ridiculous — entertainers entertain — but on many occasions I saw Andy take the stage to face a happily expectant group only to leave them irritated, confused, angry, even infuriated. But never, ever bored. Even after he broomed the Improv with the full Gatsby routine, people returned to see what Kaufman was going to do next.
When Andy arrived home from Switzerland I patiently awaited his proud phone call whereupon I planned to invite him over so he could levitate around my place. I fantasized him floating from room to room with me running behind screaming, “Holy shit, Kaufman, you did it! You’re flying!” and he’d be correcting me on the fly, “No, Zmuda, I’m levitating.” But his call never came. After a few days of his avoiding my calls with abrupt “I can’t talk nows,” I went over to his house and knocked on the door. When he opened it I didn’t even say hello, I just got to the point. “Can you or can you not levitate?”
He exhaled a deep sigh and stepped back, so I entered. “Well? Can you?” I persisted.
“No,” he said, avoiding eye contact.
“See,” I exploded, “it was a bunch of bullshit!”
“No, it really isn’t,” he said calmly.
“Andy, Andy, Andy, why the hell do you give those people your money?”
“Bob, listen, it’s not bullshit. It’s true, people can really levitate. I could levitate.” What he said next stunned me because of the complete conviction with which he said it. “I could levitate, really I could, but I choose not to. It’s that simple.”
“Wait a second, you’re telling me you now choose not to? Two months ago you flew halfway around the world to learn how to levitate and now you’re saying you don’t want to? I smell bullshit.”
“No, look,” he said, “the thing is, I could do it, but the process requires you to purify yourself for a year. I choose not to purify myself that way for a year. That’s all.”
“Purify yourself? How?”
“They t
old me that to purify myself I’d have to be celibate for more than a year.”
I broke into hysterics. “Celibate!?” When I caught my breath I said, “Kaufman, you are the most gullible son of a bitch I’ve ever met! Celibate for a year? I can’t believe that shit! That’s hilarious!”
Andy shrugged, not finding the humor. “Well, it’s true,” he said, like a hurt little kid who needed the last word. “I just choose not to.” The whole thing was pure Andy: one day he’s Tony Clifton, the next day Pinocchio.
Now back from his flirtation with levitation in Switzerland, Andy had to prepare for that new aspect of his career, Taxi. After his brush with wingless flight and our antics on Bananaz, the prospect of doing something as controlled as a sitcom was as boring to Andy as Dr. Zmudee’s theory of psychogenesis was to those kids. Despite his often childlike demeanor, Andy was almost overly purposeful and couldn’t stand sitting still for any period. Consequently he had George Shapiro negotiate what amounted to an anticontract — in Hollywood terms — for his part in Taxi. Andy demanded the unprecedented: less participation.
In a town where people cut others’ throats for an extra two minutes of screen time, Andy had George work out a deal with the Taxi producers, Jim Brooks and Ed Weinberger, that actually minimized his role. Andy was required to appear in only thirteen of the twenty-two episodes that first year, and he would be available only two days a week, instead of the typical five. In a business driven by egos, his behavior before the series even began was unheard of. Asking for a smaller role? What the hell was with this Kaufman guy? the rest of the cast wondered.
Andy was to play a sweet, naive immigrant from someplace similar to Caspiar. Foreign Man, having been acquired by the producers, was born again and rechristened Latka Gravas, now the house mechanic of the Sunshine Cab Company. But if you had gone to the set in those days, most of the time you would have seen a black man in Andy’s stead, a stand-in for camera blocking. The rest of the cast, Judd Hirsch, Tony Danza, Danny De Vito, Marilu Henner, Jeff Conaway, and Randy Carver, were required to be there. Andy contracted for and devoted to Taxi exactly what he felt it required of him — no more, no less.
Being excused from most of what was perceived as the normal workload created some friction between Andy and the rest of the cast. But if you ask any of them today they will tell you that only one actor in the cast never fluffed a line: Andy Kaufman. Though he was rarely there, and when he was he often meditated off set, the moment he stepped in front of the camera he was a consummate pro. It helped having a photographic memory, a quality most never knew Andy possessed. Andy’s diminished presence was not the behavior of a prima donna, but rather was based on the precise calculation of an extremely goal-driven man of how much of his time this particular project deserved. In retrospect, it’s almost as if Andy somehow knew his clock was ticking down and had a lot less digits left than did most others.
He also considered the sitcom one of the most ignoble forms of entertainment perpetrated upon modern society. Taking a job on a sitcom and cashing the paychecks was not hypocritical of him because he did acknowledge the impact sitcoms seemed to have — personally, he was just uninterested in them. He valued Taxi because it allowed him to explore other more interesting forms of artistic expression. As far as I know, Andy never watched one episode of Taxi. Neither did I. He didn’t hate sitcoms, he just felt they were unimportant. That Taxi earned enormous popular and critical acclaim was moot to him, mainly because it wasn’t his baby.
Cindy Williams told Andy about the time she stormed into Laverne and Shirley producer Garry Marshall’s office and exploded into a distraught tirade about how the scripts were silly and didn’t deal with “real issues.” The estimable Mr. Marshall, whose sister Penny played Laverne, was calmly practicing his putting. He patiently waited until she ran out of steam and then gently looked her in the eye.
“Cindy, it’s Laverne and Shirley. Just take the money.” Then he quietly went back to honing his green game as Cindy left, having recognized the elemental truth in his words. It’s just a sitcom.
Cindy’s career trajectory was a constant reminder to Andy of what might await him if the siren song of television took him away from his spiritual roots. Before the debut of Laverne and Shirley in January 1976, Cindy had been on her way toward establishing a substantial film career. She had performed in George Cukor’s Travels with My Aunt in 1972, George Lucas’s block-buster American Graffiti in 1973, and Francis Ford Coppola’s brilliant drama The Conversation in 1974, where she received billing over Robert Duvall and Harrison Ford. Clearly she had been headed for serious stuff, but the pull of a regular gig and the larger and larger paychecks kept her imprisoned in living rooms everywhere. She hired me and another writer to flesh out an idea that she hoped would get her back into films.
Occasionally she and I would head over to Musso & Frank, Hollywood’s oldest restaurant, located right in the heart of the city, a ‘40s steak joint with brusque older waiters and generous, hand-rubbed wooden booths where you’d expect to see the ghosts of Raymond Chandler or Errol Flynn lounging. Cindy always insisted on taking my storm-tossed Rambler Rebel. She got the biggest kick out of cruising Hollywood Boulevard in that rattletrap. Her fame as Shirley caused her to be recognized everywhere, and yet she reveled in the incongruity of being seen in a fifty-dollar car. Cindy squealed with glee when people would see her, do a double take at the car, then look back at her and dismiss her as a look-alike nobody.
Like Andy, Cindy understood how fickle the public was and kept her feet firmly on the ground, holding few illusions about celebrity. That she could be so easily dismissed because her context was wrong — that couldn’t be Cindy Williams in that piece-of-shit car — intrigued her. I was learning that celebrity had its downside, primarily limiting one’s freedom. Celebs have far less flexibility than “civilians.” I remembered a bluntly funny quote from Dustin Hoffman in Time magazine back in the ‘60s when asked what he saw as some of the drawbacks of being a celebrity. His answer: “It makes it tougher to pick up hookers on Fifth Avenue.”
Unlike Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Kaufman found celebrity to be an enhancement to his sexual life by affording him hitherto unavailable opportunities to meet and date girls. Lots of girls. And as the number of his appearances on television increased, so did the number of people who recognized him and, in turn, so did the number of women who wanted to have sex with him. Once Andy had dinner with the great songwriter Sammy Cahn. Andy asked about Sammy’s illustrious career, one filled with hits and Grammys and countless accolades and, of course, lots and lots of money. “Isn’t that what it’s all about?” Andy asked. “The work? Creating all the things you have, the accomplishments?”
“The career? It’s good for one thing,” said Sammy. “You know what it all gets down to? What the notoriety and the fame are all about?”
Andy leaned in to get the meaning of life from this Yoda of twentieth-century pop music. “What?” he asked.
“Pussy!” he exclaimed. “Fame gets you better pussy, kid!”
Andy was excruciatingly shy. He just wasn’t equipped to make the small talk necessary to meet women on a normal basis. After briefly dating Cindy Williams, Andy concluded that spending time with another celebrity wasn’t going to work because he, and he alone, had to be the center of attention. Over the years I saw a host of girlfriends come and go (if you’ll forgive the pun), and generally, the most successful relationships he had were with primarily submissive women.
When Andy was around eleven or twelve his parents owned a liquor decanter in the form of a scantily clad woman striking a sexy pose. Late at night when his brother and sister and parents were asleep, Andy would remove it from its shelf and spirit it to his room, where he would slip under the bedcovers and begin furiously polishing the container with his groin. The act of sexual stimulation by rubbing against something, called frottage, was Andy’s introduction to masturbation.
Years later Andy still retained a fondness for that procedure. Various wome
n with whom Andy was intimate told me his favorite practice was to have them lie naked and completely still in bed next to him while he ground against them. One of his better-read lovers referred to the process as exhibiting all the earmarks of mild necrophilia. Also, Andy was repulsed by any form of oral sex, both giving and receiving, which was particularly odd given alter ego Tony Clifton’s almost morbid fascination with it.
My reasons for encouraging his sexual achievements were twofold. On a practical level, because Andy required a great deal of attention from me, my own relationships suffered. I felt that if he was off somewhere ticking off his hours with a woman, then I would have more time for my own relationships. The other reason I promoted his sexual buffet was out of sheer voyeurism: I was continually dazzled by the number and quality of women who attached themselves to him. As Henry Kissinger once observed, “Power is the great aphrodisiac.”
Women who never would have given Andy Kaufman, were he a Kinko’s counterman, a second look, literally threw themselves at Andy Kaufman the celebrity. Being a hopeless romantic myself, the phenomenon often left a sour taste in my mouth and considerably reduced my respect for those ladies, but despite that, I never tired of observing the mesmerizing, ongoing socio-cultural study. Andy fully understood their motives, that they were raining their affections upon him for who he was, not what he was, so he reciprocated the exploitation. If they wanted to dabble in starfucking, Andy would give them all the help they needed — he acknowledged and respected goal orientation. As a matter of fact, Andy decided to set up an assembly line procedure to make it easier for them.
Even before the first few episodes of Taxi began to create a fan base for Latka Gravas, Andy had developed his own following. Andy would comb through his fan letters, discard any sent by males, and sort those sent by female admirers. If they contained photos, the images were evaluated and categorized for desirability. If the letter bore no visual evidence, Andy would send an eight-by-ten with the request, “I’m sending you a picture, perhaps you could send me one of yourself.” He also casually requested their telephone numbers.
