Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  LOST IN THE

  FUNHOUSE

  THE LIFE AND MIND OF ANDY KAUFMAN

  “Comprehensive … if you want the facts, this is the

  only [book] you need.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “If I had lost the Andy Kaufman I first met in 1975, I found him again in Lost in the Funhouse.”

  —Lorne Michaels, Saturday Night Live

  “Fascinating and frequently hilarious.”

  —Kansas City Star

  “Insightful.”

  —The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

  “Nobody, not his family or his ‘best friend,’ got as close to the truth about Andy as did Bill Zehme in Lost in the Funhouse. His six years of research unmasks the distortions and allows the reader to meet the real Andy.”

  —Stanley L. Kaufman (Andy’s father)

  “Entertaining … comprehensive … [Zehme] interviewed more than 200 people who had known or worked with Kaufman; had full access to Kaufman’s family as well as the comic performer’s personal papers; utilizes his manager’s diaries; and did some diligent reporting. … Zehme’s a pro.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “What a gift … to have a book that helps you enjoy once again Andy Kaufman’s wild and wondrous mind. It’s brilliant!”

  —Carl Reiner

  “Excellent.”

  —Esquire (England)

  “Bill Zehme’s bio of Andy Kaufman gets a firm grasp on the slippery master. … Zehme’s book hasn’t a dull page.”

  —Artforum

  “Bill Zehme was dedicated to revealing the true Andy Kaufman story and I’m so grateful for that. This book is the interesting, funny, sad, unique and-finally and completely-true story of a very special life!”

  —George Shapiro, Andy Kaufman’s manager and co-executive producer of Man on the Moon

  “Ingenious … the best possible guess of what this singular comedian was all about.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “Zehme writes with a verve that is rare among biographers, sometimes letting the prose go into a voice reminiscent of Kaufman’s own speech patterns.”

  —Ft. Worth Star-Telegram

  For Lucy Ellen,

  with love very extremely

  1

  Everyone lives in his own fantasy world, but most people don’t understand that. No one perceives the real world. Each person simply calls his private, personal fantasies the Truth.

  —Federico Fellini

  Um. Ummm….

  He came late. Mommy and Daddy tried to make him three times and each time they got a new baby started something bad happened to Mommy and she cried. He was made the fourth time, finally, and so was his invisible twin brother, Dhrupick, but nobody cared about Dhrupick, although Dhrupick would later help him do special things. No, really. He had to name Dhrupick himself, because nobody else ever saw Dhrupick, or they didn’t know that they saw him even when they saw him. And also, since Dhrupick was his exact replicate, he could be Dhrupick when he wasn’t himself, which was often, eventually more and more so. Anyway, Dhrupick made being somebody else easy, he learned. Of what was mathematically considered to be his childhood (just yearwise), he would later tell some person, “Every once in a while, every week or two, I would wake up in the morning and I would say, ‘I think I’ll be Dhrupick.’ D-h-r-u, I think, p-i-c-k. I chose that name for a logical reason, but I forget what it was.”

  And so his eyes opened thirty-five years and four months before they stopped seeing anything anymore ever again. Once opened, they were stroboscopic! They were two very big bright blue dancers! They spun and spun inside white orbs even bigger! They said come-here-and-help-me-play-and-please-just-help-me-and-here-I-am-and-I’m-not-here-at-all-and-oh-yes-I-am-no-really. He was seven pounds eleven ounces (a craps-table baby!) and Daddy later joked that his eyes had weighed four pounds alone. Daddy proudly designed his birth announcement with a picture of a baby rolling dice, come seven and eleven; pounds, ounces, natch. He (and Dhrupick) came out of Mommy just after two o’clock on the afternoon of January 17, 1949, in a bed in Kew Gardens Hospital in Queens, New York. Mommy started calling him Pussycat almost right away. He purred for her most always, but he learned to yell sometimes, too. That came a bit later.

  He got his own name from maternal favor: Mommy had a grandmother named Ann and an uncle named George, and so he became Andrew Geoffrey Kaufman—firstborn child of a frustrated-dreamer second-generation costume jewelry salesman who would manage to do well for himself in a very tough racket and his pretty wife who was a former teen fashion model with piercing green eyes. He was adored most thoroughly, for he was also the first grandchild of both grandmas and both grandpas, each of whom bestowed assorted legacies of color and character and individuality upon the small pink boy. To them, he was delicious, this fine grandson whose cheeks they pinched, whose head they nestled, a sweet bubelah who could have anything he wanted, whom they indulged in ways he never knew he wanted but came to require when grown. It was the grandmas and the grandpas, more than anyone, who made him special, and for this he would love them and credit them always. Being special would be his singular excuse; not that he ever really tried to be that way or decided that specialness was his intention; he just was; and he was mostly glad about it—no matter that Daddy often hollered at him, no matter that other kids called him crazy, no matter that everyone thought he was crazy. Everyone did think he was crazy—either a little or a lot. He was crazy. He was crazy like everyone never knew. But he knew just precisely how to be crazy. He knew everything he wanted to know.

  Hello, this is George Shapiro. These are my personal notes to myself regarding Andy Kaufman. Today is Friday, September 1, 1978, and I’m about to go over to see Andy as he’s taping a new television series called Taxi for ABC-TV.

  I’ve been Andy’s personal manager for approximately two years. He came to my attention through my darling uncle and client, Carl Reiner, who saw Andy in a nightclub in New York called Catch a Rising Star, and Carl told me how unusual and different he was. Well, that may be one of the greatest understatements in the history of mankind. He is very close to being from another planet.

  I am, for the most part, greatly enjoying working with Andy, because he has great creativity and spontaneity and it’s very interesting being around him. There are some very positive aspects of his nature and some very negative ones. One of the biggest shortcomings to his professionalism is his need to come late to every situation that he is in. Including being late to performances in major arenas such as Town Hall in New York. He was scheduled for an eight-thirty curtain, normal for Broadway, and he probably went on at five minutes to nine. Kept a very restless audience waiting. It was a sellout crowd and he opened his show as Tony Clifton, which is in Andy’s mind a secret, but many, many people in the industry and in the audience were aware that he was portraying another person, in makeup, in full makeup. He had a chin piece, a nose piece, his eyes were made up to be puffy, and he had a huge black wig covering his hair. His main line of patter, as you may know, is insulting the audience. He says, “I don’t have to be here—you’re lucky to have me!” That nature of thing.

  Anyway, he did quite well in his opening of the show as Tony Clifton, then went backstage to take off his makeup. There was a scheduled twenty-minute intermission and it took close to forty minutes, and he came back and he actually killed the crowd, ending with a standing ovation. It was a very exciting evening. In fact, I would say it was the most exciting evening that I spent with Andy thus far. Of course, it was New York City, a sellout crowd, there was snow on the ground, people were coming in the snow and being turned away. So it was extremely exciting.

  Andy’s major television work thus far has been on S
aturday Night Live, where he’s done about six or seven appearances, and I think this show has made a tremendous impact on the college-age students. The youth of America watch this show and he became their favorite, above many of them. He still is not known in many areas of the country and his star is rising right now. He also appeared about five or six times on The Tonight Show; his first appearance was with Steve Allen, who filled in for Johnny Carson; Steve Allen has a great appreciation of Andy’s talent. He was one of the first people to discover him. Other people who have discovered him besides the aforementioned Carl Reiner, who was very quiet about his discovery, are Alan King and Dick Ebersol, who is truly way up front in discovering him. Dick Ebersol is an NBC executive at this time; by the time anyone listens to this tape, I don’t know where he will be—you know how it is with network executives. They go from one network to another network to independent productions to a third network, then starting all over at the first network again. Dick Ebersol brought him to the attention of Lorne Michaels, who is the producer of Saturday Night Live. And that started that part of his career. He also appeared about four times on The Midnight Special. Soon after I met Andy, I brought him to the Dick Van Dyke series, which I think was a quality series that was short-lived. The producers were Allan Blye and Bob Einstein and they truly appreciated Andy’s talent and used him to great advantage on the show. He did only the Foreign Man characterization on the Dick Van Dyke show, from which he sprung into his imitations. He did Elvis Presley to great success on that show.

  Following the Van Dyke series, he did a pilot for ABC, a half-hour situation comedy entitled Stick Around, in which he played a humanoid, a domestic robot, who did the chores and maid services around the house. Andy scored quite well on it, but the pilot did not sell. And as a tie-in to the deal, on his behalf, I received a payment of $25,000 for him to write a pilot script, which he later did with his friend Bob Zmuda. This was called Fingers and Knuckles and was presented to ABC, whose executives felt that the character Andy portrayed, Knuckles (short for Knucklehead), was a little bit too slow, too retarded, for a television series. They said that a man who couldn’t find his way to an elevator is a little slow for our network and turned down the pilot script, which was written quite well by Andy and Bob. I have to admit this character was quite slow, but he had a certain appeal. Well, we’ll see. I predict that somewhere in the future we will hear from Knuckles.

  In addition to the guarantee of the pilot script, I had also negotiated for Andy six guest appearances on ABC within one year at $5,000 each, for a total of $30,000. He ended up doing only one appearance, on the Redd Foxx variety show, and he ended up earning $30,000. That was very nice for Andy. I also negotiated on Andy’s behalf a ninety-minute late night special for ABC. He received $110,000 for the production and we formed a production company called KSW Productions, for Kaufman, Shapiro, and my partner Howard West. We did the special, although it looked like we were going to go way over budget, but we were able to bring it in so that we didn’t go into a loss position. ABC didn’t react real hot for this special. As a matter of fact, they refuse to telecast it. It was a little bit unusual. Andy did part of his act, which was very powerful, at the opening of the show, and he also had Cindy Williams on the show. Her spot was rather controversial because he had her come on pretending that she didn’t know a song she was going to sing and Andy sort of pushed her on the stage to do the song anyway. Not what you would call one of your “commercial” spots … My opinion of the special was that it was very different and there were some things redeeming about it and some things that were a little slow. Hopefully this special will be telecast someday….

  Anyway, the last time Andy appeared in the Main Room of the Comedy Store, Ed. Weinberger came in with his associates who were about to write a script for a new series entitled Taxi. Ed. Weinberger’s associates were Jim Brooks and Dave Davis and Stan Daniels. They asked Andy if he would go into the series. My feeling was it would be a nice boost for his career because it was a guaranteed “on-the-air” series and he would be playing a character that he knew very well, the Foreign Man—this particular character speaks no English in Taxi and his name is Latka Gravas. At this point, we do not know the reaction to the show, because it will not be telecast until September 12 and today is September 1.I think he will get great recognition and I feel this would bolster his career and personal appearances and will put him more in demand. He will receive more money, which will enable him to spend more money on his act and do the things that he wants to do. And when he has money, he wants to do outrageous things. I think this should prove very, very interesting.

  He would never care much about money because Daddy seemed to care about it so intensely. He would see Daddy become angry about it, and about many other things, too, but down deep it was money matters that roiled most all aggravations that spewed forth onto the family. Daddy yelled a lot. Upon reflection, in fact, Daddy would sometimes lament that he really didn’t feel alive unless he was angry.

  Daddy came with a story, about which his son also cared little, but with which the son would become familiar enough, although never so much as to expend much empathy or acknowledgment. That, of course, is the province of fathers and sons before sons become their fathers. Nevertheless, here was Stanley Lawrence Kaufman, born of Flatbush, thus of Brooklyn, on August 31, 1922. Later, he would blame his birth sign, Virgo, for his passionate need to order the life in which he lived: “Gotta have control, gotta have control,” he would tell intimates. He would also say, “I start my day writing a list and the best part of my day is when I check that list off at night.” He was produced by people less meticulous and very boisterous, origin German-Jewish, though American-born: His father, Paul, especially, was nothing if not a (barely) repressed showman whose youthful antics on the Lower East Side caught the fancy of a vaudeville producer who had sent Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson into the world. It was Paul’s formidable young wife, the former Lillie Goldberg, who told him to oy knock it off with even thinking about such fun and games and to get a decent job thank you, which turned out to be hawking cheap baubles and beads, which grew into a costume jewelry business that served better department stores throughout North America. They had two sons, six years apart, Stanley first, Jackie second, both of whom were to be good boys who followed in their father’s jaunty, bejeweled footsteps.

  So, young Stanley was thus: a street-savvy hail-fellow-well-met; a dashing and wiry little guy from a girth-endowed gene pool—these life-loving Kaufmans packed poundage!—and also he was fast; they called him Speedy Stanley on the track teams at school; he was quick with numbers, too, and took a business degree at Penn before the Army got him in ’44 and sent him over to Normandy five days after D-Day. In one year of fight, of blood and chaos, he went down thrice, three Purple Hearts attendant. He received some minor German shrapnel first, was mended; then a prisoner he was escorting back from the lines of the Black Forest stepped on a land mine, killing the prisoner and searing Stanley’s face and nose and neck (marks forever carried, though obscured), but he was mended again; then, out along the French-German border, a Nazi shell loaded with nails and tacks exploded in his chest, which sent him home, elated, with at least one tack lodged so deeply that it showed up in X rays for all time thereafter. He went home to the little girl he left behind, in whom he had found his first and only soul mate, whom he had vowed and yearned to marry immediately upon his return, so long as the Nazis hadn’t killed him.

  This love—which would come to bear a boy with big eyes—had struck him four springs earlier, in 1941. He had a fraternity brother at Penn who had a beautiful cousin on Long Island, in Belle Harbor, with whom he wanted to set Stanley up. Her name was Janice Terry Bernstein, a mere fifteen and a half years old, but so very poised, the only child of a menswear manufacturer named Cyril and his plucky wife, Pearl. Stanley was eighteen, shy with girls, dated hardly at all. But he agreed to meet this lovely thing who modeled in New York under the name Janice Terry for the tony John Robert Powe
rs and Conover agencies. (Her specs, per professional data sheet: size 9 to 12; height five foot five, but really five-three; weight 104; eyes green; hair light brown; contours 32-23-321/2.) She had already appeared, most prominently, in a Parade magazine photo spread as a glamorous urchin called The Runaway Girl. On a weekend home from school, Stanley and the frat brother whisked Janice and another girl off on a blind double-date in the city, a night of dancing and laughter during which hours flew and suddenly he was driving her home at four in the morning as her father paced the sidewalk in a bathrobe waiting and fuming. The blame fell upon Stanley’s friend, Janice’s cousin, for which he thanked God, and he himself didn’t get back to Brooklyn until five, whereupon his mother lit into him and he stopped her with the proclamation, “Mom, I want you to know that this is the girl I’m gonna marry!” To which she responded most wearily, “Yeah yeah yeah.” But he knew what he knew, which was that no one had ever made him so happy, so comfortable in his own skin. They went out again the very next night and his attentions from then on simply overwhelmed her. He doted tenaciously, as was his wont—a gift-giver like she had never known—thereby cementing his future and theirs.

  They wed June 5, 1945. This was just ten days after he had returned stateside, where—as one of the walking wounded-he was kept as an outpatient at the Camp Edwards army base hospital on Cape Cod. Janice was ordered by Stanley to cease her wavering liberal studies at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, so as to take his hand and make a life with him already. She complied, because what else could she do? He would have it no other way. Her mother—the gregarious Pearl—plotted the ceremony with great haste, pulling together three hundred celebrants, an officiating rabbi, and a matrimonial canopy for the event, which was held at a swank Long Island hotel. The groom was twenty-three, the bride was twenty; they took a brief honeymoon at Grossinger’s Resort in the Borscht Belt before he had to return to Camp Edwards to complete his recuperation. A second honeymoon came immediately thereafter, for Stanley wanted to see the United States, so for three unforgettable months they drove thirteen thousand miles across the nation, plus up into Canada, plus down into Mexico, in an old Plymouth convertible with both of their mothers along for the ride—a screwball touch that gave him cocktail party patter forevermore.