by Bob Zmuda
The photos poured in, and although the bowwows went into the circular file, the more promising talents got a phone call from their hero. During the call — which all were absolutely thrilled to receive — Andy would, like any good detective or insurance investigator, ask probing questions regarding their marital or boyfriend status and their availability. Wildly flattered, all would offer him a standing invitation to visit — whether they were attached or not. The pictures became sort of a “little black book” for Andy, which he would sift through for friendly local talent when he had booked an out-of-town gig.
6
Hijinks
I’ve seen him be booed, I’ve seen him, with standing ovations, I’ve seen people hysterical, I’ve seen people in awe, I’ve seen people repulsed. I mean, he was incredible.
RICHARD BELZER
Not only was Andy’s stage act on the edge, but so was his personal life, I realized as we became closer. Andy was one of the most incorrigible behavioral scientists around and it was fascinating to watch as he applied his knowledge of human motivations to his own life and relationships. For one thing, he was a freethinker who never became a prisoner of love. None of his relationships with women (with the exception of Lynne Margulies) lasted long or went very deep. With his newfound fame he discovered an access to women he once only dreamed of. Living a life that would have made Hugh Hefner proud, Andy Kaufman was a cocksman of the first order. To merely say he was oversexed would do him a disservice. A lover of life, he thoroughly enjoyed every minute, and if it hadn’t been for his TM discipline I believe he would have become a total hedonist.
Yet psychologically Andy was one of the more sound people I ever met. He carried himself with a sense of great knowledge — those near him often felt that he harbored some great truth. He may well have been what Abraham Maslow referred to as the self-actualized individual. I don’t want to give the impression that he was constantly at peace, for he could erupt anytime into an uncontrollable rage at even the smallest thing. But he thoroughly enjoyed himself during those eruptions. As a matter of fact, he felt tantrums were something one should experience more of, and he encouraged others to engage in them. He could have been the poster boy for primal-scream therapy.
And if Andy couldn’t get an entire audience to walk out on him, he certainly could get a girlfriend to walk out, and on many occasions did, but not before he would provoke a screaming match between them. Screaming match or wrestling match, he loved them both and would have a hearty laugh when the fighting stopped. Andy thrived on confrontation. For a while, Andy dated a girl named Jennifer. He really knew how to push her buttons, which he did with relish. They had a number of fights that were monumental, a few of which ended in Andy calling the police to have Jennifer removed from his premises. He took great glee in recording those battles on audiotape and playing them back for others. More lessons from Mr. X?
Andy was a paradox. He could be the quintessential in-your-face guy one moment, then flip the switch and become the ultimate gentleman a moment later. He believed that to excel at the art of living a person should experience all aspects of behavior, good and bad. Once he got into a hypothetical but graphic discussion with me about what it would feel like to kill someone with your own hands. Not that Andy would have been capable of such a thing, even in self-defense, but he loved to imagine.
Andy couldn’t wait to get out of Los Angeles because the town was beginning to remind him of one thing: his growing responsibilities, which directly translated to the insidious word “work.” Just like Maynard G. Krebs from the old sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Andy’s philosophy was akin to my own, that the true job in life was to have fun, and to do so required perpetual vigilance. To both of us, showbiz was nothing more than a hobby that paid well. Andy was on a sitcom that hadn’t even aired yet, but all its demanding job requirements made him feel that he might as well have been actually driving a taxi. Andy barely tolerated being the star of a sitcom, and that stemmed from a combination of many things.
First of all, the idea that someone else would put words in his mouth was foreign and uncomfortable to him. To that point, I was one of a tiny group of people ever allowed that privilege. Additionally, Foreign Man’s co-option began to stick in Andy’s craw, as if you had sold your baby into white slavery and were suddenly having second thoughts. Though Andy loved regularity, the schedule imposed on him by Taxi— by other people — cramped his style.
Creating the college tours was a break from the grind of churning out a sitcom every week. Andy could go to new towns, have sex with new girls, and do his act without the pressures of directors and producers and managers and the rest of the hovering horde who were now making his life their business. To Andy it was a vacation, but for me as the writer, and now producer, it turned into a hell of a lot of work.
As the producer of our road shows I had myriad duties. Aside from getting Andy to the airport on time, which was often a full-time job itself, I checked us into hotels, organized rehearsals, dicked with props (that again), went over lighting cues, planned scene and costume changes, rehearsed the band, and then conducted any last-minute radio or television interviews if we needed to enhance ticket sales. On top of that I often had to hold the promoter’s hand, and then made sure we got our check when it was all over.
Though Andy’s TM regimentation strictly forbade the use of alcohol, drugs, or even coffee, he did have one major vice: the ladies. All shapes and all sizes, all the time. As his producer, I had the job of producing them too, which I did happily. Making sure Andy had fun was my paramount consideration. I can confidently guess that in Andy’s short life he bedded at least a hundred times more women than the average male who lives to be seventy-five, thanks largely to the wrestling portion of the show.
The wrestling segments were advertised in advance with the offer “Win $500 if you can pin Andy Kaufman.” The posters or ads always stated in bold italics that all contestants must wear loose clothing. When the time for the wrestling portion of Andy’s show arrived, the band would clear the stage and the stage crew would haul out a huge wrestling mat (usually borrowed from the school’s athletic department). Next, I would come out on stage dressed as a referee, holding five crisp one-hundred-dollar bills in my hand, fanned out. I wouldn’t have to explain much as the prepublicity had always done its job. On average, fifteen to twenty girls would volunteer and come up on stage. To prove that the chosen girl wasn’t a plant, I would have the audience select the winner by applauding loudly for their favorite. Nine times out of ten they would select both the biggest and the sexiest, one as the winner and one as the runner-up.
At that point, Andy would enter the stage dressed in his ridiculous wrestling attire, which consisted of full-length thermal underwear beneath a baggy black swimsuit and his father’s robe. Sporting black socks and old gym shoes, he would taunt the audience and they would boo appropriately. If the winner of the audience selection was the big girl, Kaufman would decide to wrestle two women so he could get the beefy one out of the way, allowing him to focus on the runner-up, the sexy one. I always made sure the girls signed a release form to ensure that Andy wouldn’t get sued if one of them was injured. No one ever was.
Once the show was put to bed, I had to make sure Andy got laid and then went to sleep at a reasonable hour so we could start the whole thing over the next day. Though I was technically the producer, the reality was I was there to be Andy’s playmate.
One night we played a college near Chicago and, as usual, Andy offered to take on all female comers as the Intergender Wrestling Champion. That was a title we had invented, along with the elaborate tide belt, and it was the shtick that gave Andy license to wrestle girls. His main foe that night was a very cute buffed blonde who exuded loads of confidence and felt she as much as had our five-hundred-dollar prize in her pocket. She and Andy approached each other in the ring and began to tangle. She was feisty, a good fighter, exactly the type of opponent he liked. She darted left, reached in, and Andy counte
red. They slammed to the mat. As I leaned in looking for the pin, I over-heard Andy.
“Can you believe all these people are watching us do this?” he said in her ear. “Must be five thousand.” As the ref, I’d heard him do this rap many times — his idea of foreplay.
“Huh?” said the foxy grappler, not yet understanding they weren’t really antagonists.
Andy purred in her ear. “What are you doing after the show?”
The poor girl couldn’t take it and flipped him over. Andy rolled her back, straddled her briefly, rubbing against her, then leaped to his feet. “Why don’t you go back to the kitchen where you belong, baby!” he yelled for the crowd’s benefit. “I got the bruins,” he screamed, pointing at his head, “and you’re just a girl!” Andy loved punching that hot button of vicious sexism.
Hopping mad, she leaped at him, going for the takedown. Just before they crashed to the mat I could see he was now sporting a raging woody. They rolled around for a few minutes, but unfortunately for her, Andy really knew his moves, and in a flash he spun, pinned her shoulders, and I flew to the canvas and began banging my open palm. “One! Two! Three!” I jumped up. “Kaufman wins!” The crowd went wild, half booing, half screaming in delight. Realizing Kaufman was pitching up quite a tent, I rushed to swaddle him in a robe lest the people in the first few rows get the true idea about the nature of the match. As the crowd roared I heard Andy make another plea to the blonde. “C’mon, meet me backstage.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding,” she spat. “Not in your dreams!”
The next morning I got up and pondered our schedule. We had a gig at another college about two hundred miles away and our plane departed at two o’clock. We were supposed to check out around noon and a limo would whisk us to O’Hare in time to make our flight. We would arrive by three so we could have a four o’clock rehearsal with a band we’d never met, then run through all the lighting and music cues for an eight o’clock show with an audience of five thousand.
Though I was too busy to check on Andy all morning, I figured he’d stroll out when he was ready, as usual. At twelve-thirty the limo arrived and no Kaufman. I went to his room and found a handwritten note taped to the door (the Do Not Disturb sign was not good enough): “Under fear of death do not disturb — I am MEDITATING.” Typical Kaufman melodrama. I knew his meditation took only twenty minutes, so in case he had just put the sign out I gave him exactly that long and then returned. I knocked and then entered. (I had learned by then to secure my own key to his room.) He knew it was me, for no one else would have dared go in, given the written threat. Andy was lolling on the bed in a bathrobe, enjoying some room-service fare and watching cartoons. I heard the rush of the shower.
“We gotta go,” I said. “The limo’s waiting.”
The whooshing water stopped and a moment later the bathroom room door opened. A rush of steam heralded the entrance of a lovely young thing clad only in a towel. A blonde. The “not-in-your-dreams” blonde.
“Kelly?” Andy said between bites of Cap’n Crunch. “Zmuda. Zmuda? Kelly.”
“Kelly.”
“Zmuda.”
Kelly casually dropped her towel and dressed as I tried to avert my eyes and Andy focused on the story line from a Felix the Cat episode. I was impressed with Andy’s resolve. He had overcome serious objections to ultimately make the sale with Kelly. I felt pride. “Let’s roll,” I urged, as Kelly slid into her clothes.
Andy roused very slowly, so I applied the lash. “Ten minutes, Kaufman, I mean it. We’re gonna miss the flight.”
“Don’t worry, I haven’t missed a show yet, have I?”
I stepped into the lee of the door and paused, lowering my voice to the sternest pitch that would convey the seriousness of the situation. “I’ll be waiting downstairs in the limo. Ten minutes.”
I left him to dress and went to the lobby to fret about the growing likelihood of missing our plane. Sure enough, ten minutes later Andy appeared but with Kelly in tow. “We’ve got to drop her off,” he said. It was now one-thirty, thirty minutes to departure time. Andy’s chivalry was going to cost us a gig. And on top of that it had started to rain. Hard. My tension level went through the roof.
After delivering Kelly we made it to the airport — at two-thirty. I assumed we were screwed, but to my complete surprise, when we got to the gate the plane was still there. Luck was with us, as it often seemed to be when I was with Andy. Then the tables turned.
“All flights are canceled,” said the sprightly young airline employee. “Rain,” she said simply. And she was right. The midafter-noon sun had been erased as low-flying clouds arrived and unloaded their cargo with a vengeance. According to the airline all flights were delayed until the next day. Tomorrow!? Impossible! We have a show tonight! I felt like Edmond O’Brien in the movie D.O.A. when he’s been told he’S already dead from the poison.
I panicked and called George Shapiro. He calmed me down and told me not to worry. “I’ll take care of it. Stick by the phone, I’ll call you back.” Before I could tell him the airport was closed he hung up. Ten minutes later he called back.
“Get to the limo,” he said. “I got a plane for you.”
As we hung up again I was thinking, Holy shit, nobody has connections like a Hollywood manager.
The limo took us to another section of the airport. Now the rain was coming down so hard I barely made out the tiny Piper Cub with a lone man standing in front of it clutching an umbrella. The man beckoned, so we stopped and raced over to him.
“Hi,” he said between the gusts of wind, “I’m Wes, your pilot. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Kaufman.”
Wes was allegedly a pilot and sported a uniform of indistinct origin. I thought of Mr. X’s nondenominational military attire. I later discovered Wes’s wife had fashioned the costume for him.
“I thought the airport was closed,” I said, ever the nagging pragmatist.
“Oh, it is,” said Wes confidently, “for commercials, but we’re private, we can go.”
I looked at his flying machine, all of fifteen hundred pounds soaking wet, and wondered about the logic of us going up in it while hundred-and-fifty-ton machines sat idle. Sometimes you just gotta say What the fuck. Like idiots, Kaufman and I climbed aboard.
Andy wanted to meditate, so he crawled into the back of the plane and assumed his position. I figured that was good because if we actually made it to our destination alive he would have gotten the meditation out of the way and could go right to rehearsal. The plane was so small the three of us were required to sit single file. I was directly behind Wes — close enough to put my hand on his shoulder if the need arose — as he went through his short preflight checklist.
He punched the start button, and the engine coughed a few times and then sputtered out. He made several attempts to bring our plucky little engine to life, and each time it died so did I. Finally he lit it and we taxied to the runway. Though it was not even four o’clock the heavy weather had damn near rendered the day to night. As the rain hammered the cracker-thin aluminum shell Wes began a conversation with the tower.
“Control, this is Echo Alpha five seven nine, requesting clearance for takeoff.”
The tower shot back, “The airport is closed. You are not cleared for takeoff.”
Wes knew where that dialogue was going, so he switched off the radio. I suddenly thought of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and the ever-young Ritchie Valens. Was that a rainstorm or wing icing? I didn’t have time to decide, because my concentration shifted when Wes gave us some steam and we barreled down the runway, bound for either a small Illinois college or oblivion.
The sky was now black, and startling forks of lightning stabbed around us. If not for the courage of the fearless crew the Minnow would be lost … the Minnow would be lost … The wind shear was so violent that Wes had the plane crawling sideways half the time. The tiny motor strained. I looked back five minutes into the flight to see Andy calmly meditating.
Fifteen minutes later t
he weather thickened and the wind began hurling us up and down like a roller coaster that could very easily end our lives. The four little cylinders groaned like a lawn mower encountering heavy, wet grass … I think I can, I think I can … We were doomed.
Wes reached up and drew a small curtain between us. This was ludicrous, as the shroud nearly touched my nose and did nothing but obscure my view of the instruments and the blackness ahead. The death grip I had on my seat was possibly the only thing holding us aloft, so I felt that my losing sight of the instruments might somehow bring us ruin. Then I heard Wes whispering to himself. Assuming he was trying to figure out how to get us out of this mess, I concentrated hard and listened in, curious about what procedures a highly trained pilot goes through at a time like this.
“Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come …”
Oh, fuck. Instantly, my terror-gripped mind spun out a newspaper, like one of those old movies, and the headline read: “Andy Kaufman, Taxi Star, Dies in Crash with Pilot, Other.” My death would be merely a tiny footnote in the history of American popular culture. I comforted myself with the knowledge that at least Andy and I would have company to chill with up there, others with whom we could relate: Buddy, Ritchie, the Big … I made a mental note to kill George Shapiro in the off chance we survived.
Again I turned to check on Andy, and the son of a bitch had his eyes closed and the sweetest expression of calm I’d ever seen. I made a mental note to kill him, too. Now Wes had advanced to his Hail Marys and I lost my shit. Remember The Mummy with Boris Karloff? In one of its best scenes an archeologist is all alone in the tomb one night, going over some scrolls, when the Mummy comes alive. As the hapless scholar sees the undead king coming toward him he becomes so frightened he loses his marbles and begins to cackle madly and laugh uncontrollably. That was me in that plane.
