Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  And then came that which he could not escape, that which were he to have done it all over again he would have run like hell the other way from. But he did what he did, which he came to hate: He went to work for his father. The war was over and jobs were precious and fate was done. The company, located smack in the middle of Manhattan’s jewelry district, was called KARU, for the partnership Kaufman and Ruderman, which was a mostly fractious partnership forged in the twenties but sufficiently profitable enough, no matter the ever squabbling egos therein, to keep from dissolving. Stanley had worked there, if briefly, before going to war, odd-jobbing in the shipping department, making cartons, sweeping floors. But now, in January of 1946, resigned and not too thrilled about it either, he officially began the only career he would ever know. He started in sales, with the understanding that one day he would rise up through the ranks, such as they were. He drove around New York, no real assigned territory, lugging samples in the car trunk, calling on any store he found that carried costume jewelry. “I would take an order here, an order there.” He turned out to be a colorful performer—not quite the mammoth ham that his father was, but a warm and engaging and funny pitch artist. He got 10 percent commission on whatever sold. That first year he made about $8,500; within three years, he was making $12,500 per, which could maybe support a family. He and Janice were living in a sweet but small one-bedroom apartment in a nice building called The Fresh Meadows, in Queens. There they awaited the stork, coming close a few times with unhappy results, before the egg properly took and grew and grew inside Janice’s belly. She would have to stay in bed most of this time to prevent another loss and was thrilled to feel the strengthening thump-thump-thumps within, like a little conga drum. Sometimes she played her records, listening to the music, feeling the bouncy little thumps beating along, sometimes (she thought) kind of in a rhythm all its own.

  “I am from Caspiar. Eet ees an island. Eet’s in the Mediterranean Sea and eet’s a small island maybe many miles north of Tripoli, you know, in Africa. I know Tripoli because I know you have to go to Tripoli to get to Caspiar. We always get food from Tripoli so we always send to Tripoli. So you know eet’s a small island not on the map. And we live, you know, not very many people. Mostly we fish. Just to eat. And food. And trees. I don’t mean eat trees—but what grow on trees! People think I am eating trees! No, fruit and de vegetables! And we have bread, yah. But I wanted to be in show business, but I was going to stay on my island, but one day I go fishing and I go come back and my island ees not there. My island sink. Because eet’s not there, I row de boat to Tripoli to go to United States to New York. Citizen I want to be. I want to be in show business.”

  Mommy and Daddy bought a little portable Victrola (well, they called it that) and put it on the dresser next to the crib to make music to soothe the baby. Grandpa Paul had gotten him plastic records, brightly colored ones, that played happy songs about Henry’s wagon and about chick-chicks here and oink-oinks there and the monkey chasing the weasel and, through the bars of the crib, he would watch the colors spin and see how the needle went from one edge to the other edge to make the sounds come out. “Whenever it was on, he was totally content,” Mommy recalled. She would later tell him that when he was nine months old, he could pull himself up in the crib and reach through the bars and push the needle down on the records and start the music all by himself. She would come into the room and find him laughing and jumping and the music playing. Sometimes—or so he eventually convinced himself-he would move his mouth along with the words on those records, “lip-synching” (he said) before he knew what such a thing was. “And all the relatives would come around into the room,” he would boast, based on what he was told, “and watch and clap and laugh and everything.” Anyway, he loved that story always and made Mommy tell it to new friends throughout his whole life. He saw this, quite proudly, as his first significant act on earth.

  Daddy remained both impressed and incredulous whenever conjuring the memory of this small feat of dexterity and purpose: “He could play his own records. He was independent.”

  Channel 5 was purchased by Stanley early in the first year of his son’s life. This would be where much invaluable laboratory work was completed, where the beginnings of the material would take shape. All performances were to be televised via unseen imaginary cameras installed beneath painted plaster drywall in the small bedroom where the infant would grow into his seventh year. Rehearsals began with the delightful phonograph exhibition, but the station would not be fully operational until the boy became familiar with actual television programming, still in its own technical nascency, as broadcast locally and nationally and viewed in the flickering snow-fuzzed black-white-blue glow of the family console, a wood-paneled Dumont.

  It was no coincidence that Channel 5 was located at 5 Robin Way in the relatively modest Saddle Rock Estates section of Great Neck, Long Island. The closing price was $24,000, give or take, for which Stanley assumed the mortgage on this handsome two-story red-brick home, tall and narrow, fashioned in the colonial style with white columns flanking the front door. There were three bedrooms and deep lawns fore and aft dotted with trees—an altogether suitable step toward upward mobility, a suburban family dwelling whose monthly nut worked out to be roughly ten dollars more than what renting a bigger apartment would have cost in The Fresh Meadows building. Not that Stanley wasn’t nervous about the move: By this time, the company had handed him a major sales region in the South, encompassing Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, which forced him out onto the road more than he liked (six miserable weeks at a time!) and now there was much more at stake.

  Great Neck itself had long represented the flush life. A century earlier, New York barons had begun building shrines to their great fortunes on these peninsular shores of the Long Island Sound. Formidable mansions owned by Vanderbilts and Chryslers and Annenbergs and the like hulked on manicured greens in privileged pockets of town. Swells had made much merry, especially during the Jazz Age, thusly inspiring F. Scott Fitzgerald, who in the summer of 1923 began to write The Great Gatsby while briefly ensconced with his wife Zelda in their Great Neck Estates home at 6 Gateway Drive—less than a mile from Stanley Kaufman’s new source of debt. Show people had once swarmed Great Neck as well—from George M. Cohan to Florenz Ziegfeld to Fanny Brice to Groucho Marx. Mostly, however, it came to be understood that here was where upper-middle-class Jews went to live and raise families, a very safe thirty minutes removed from urban grit. Paul and Lillie Kaufman had settled into a house of their own on Wensley Drive five years before Stanley and Janice and the baby took up residence. That their little grandson would now be so close caused much kvelling, to be sure. And Janice’s parents in Belle Harbor—Papu Cy and Grandma Pearl Bernstein—were no more than forty minutes away, for which what could be better?

  Baby Andrew loved company and play. Daddy was away often—when he was home there was always commotion, sometimes happy, sometimes not so happy, mostly because of work stories. (He wanted to quit, to move his family to California, to do anything else though he knew not what—but his parents would hear none of it.) Anyway, the grandmas came around constantly to help Mommy with her musical Pussycat boy. And Grandpa Paul popped in regularly and made a wonderful ruckus, like a human carnival of noises and horseplay. But Papu Cy simply entranced him. Stanley would eventually call his father-in-law the love of his son’s life. Papu dandled the boy and spoke sweetly and quietly sang to him. The child was mesmerized and would imprint and store these moments in his secret psyche and speak of them later: “I was just a real infant, you know, but I remember it. He was a real gentle man—he was always gentle, never yelled. He wasn’t just that way with me, but with everybody. He loved me very, very much and I loved him. And he used to sit with me in the living room at night and sing this one song that he taught me, which was our song that the two of us had together. It was ‘The Grandfather’s Clock’ … ‘The grandfather’s clock stood ninety years on the wall, but it stopped short never to go again
when the old man died….’ You know that song?”

  And so he would sing and he would laugh, unless he wept, as babies will (although hardly ever if Papu Cy was around); and when he wept, he held his breath, nobody knew why, he just held it until he turned the color of a grape, until his eyes protruded from their sockets, scaring the bejesus out of everyone. “You stop your crying!” Stanley would order him, sitting in a chair by the crib. “I would try to stare him down,” he later recalled. “And I would take him and put him down. He’d get right up. And then he’d cry and hold his breath, a real good tantrum, and he’d turn blue and black from not breathing. Finally, I’d give him a couple of smacks so he’d open his mouth. Within the year, we noticed that when he howled and cried like that, there was a bulge in his groin. That was the first indication that Andy had a hernia.”

  Lots of whiteness, fingers poking down there, he was brave, a little soldier, barely one year old. “We were probably more frightened than he was. He was fine. There was no evidence of his being frightened,” Daddy says. They went inside and fixed him up and he came home from the hospital after a few nights during which he never squawked and right away Mommy took him down to Florida where both grandmas and both grandpas were staying together in a big hotel-what great friends the grandmas and grandpas had become! Daddy put him and Mommy on the train. “I remember saying goodbye to them at the station, and he was absolutely the most beautiful little boy, very handsome, very very handsome, in his beautiful little outfit with a little cap to match.” The tonsils came out next, just months later. “He had a lot of colds. We promised him ice cream.” Ice cream! He liked to mush it so it went down smoothly in his throat, which felt scratchy. Mush and smush it with his spoon. He would always want it just like that. “I wonder if it all started with the tonsils. … His ice cream was a ritual all his life. He never ate the ice cream while it was hard. He took a spoon—it was like making butter. He’d get a tremendous bowl and he’d mix the chocolate with the vanilla. You would hear him stirring and stirring.” Then Mommy went away because there was another baby inside of her and this baby would be his brother, his little brother, and it was the day after New Year’s Day—just before he would turn two—that Michael, Michael Alan Kaufman, came out. Mommy and Daddy and the bundle returned home from the hospital and everybody was happy but he wasn’t very happy, or so it seemed to the grown-ups, and now there was another crib in the room and somebody else in it. “When I was born, he would look out the window,” Michael says. “This is what I was told. He was like normal before I was born, but then he started looking out the window.” Through the living room window, he would stare out at the grass and the trees and into the—where? “When my brother was born,” he would say, because Mommy told him this, “I started standing in the living room and I would stare out the window—just stare—and I would be very sad. Just sad.” He looked and looked for something, out that window. Maybe for Dhrupick to come play with him. Or Papu Cy. Papu made him feel better after Michael came to the family but then Papu stopped coming very much and Mommy said Papu wasn’t feeling well and had to be in the hospital for a while. “I remember he was in the hospital and I would see him less and less. And I would think, Oh! I was getting sad because I wasn’t seeing him.” Papu had stomach cancer which was not good and he didn’t come over anymore at all and then that November Mommy and Grandma Pearl and everybody looked very very sad, which made him even sadder. “When he died, they didn’t tell me-because I didn’t know anything about death. So they told me that he went away. And I said, ‘Well, when’s he coming back?’ And I kept waiting for him to come back and he never did.” He stood and stood in the window watching. “I would just keep asking every once in a while, ‘When’s he coming back, when’s he coming back?’ And they said, ‘Well, he’s never coming back. He went on a long trip and he’s never coming back.’ “Very lost very empty, big tears big eyes, almost three years old, so confusing-how? “When I got older, my mother said that they realized that it was a mistake for them to tell me that. Because I kept saying, ‘Well, why didn’t he take me with him-if he was my friend, you know?’ And then they said that God-who I just thought was this other guy-that God took him away with Him. God wanted him. So I pictured him driving along, that he had gone on a vacation and all of a sudden God lifted him up out of the car and He wasn’t letting him come back. At first, I think I resented the fact that he didn’t take me with him. But when they explained to me about God lifting him up and stuff, then it was all right.” …. And the clock stopped short never to go again when the old man died. … He watched the window less and stayed in front of the television set and began watching the people and the cartoons inside the glass very very closely.

  2

  Out of the blue, in the middle of the action, an extremely clever comic began counting, very slowly, and with great concentration: one, two, three, four … enunciating each of the numbers with the utmost deliberation, as if they had gotten away from him and he was gathering them up again: five, six, seven, eight. … When he reached fifteen, the audience began to laugh, and by the time he had slowly, and with greater and greater concentration, made his way up to a hundred, people were falling off their seats…

  Yes, cross the border and you hear that fateful laughter. And if you go farther, beyond laughter?

  —Milan Kundera,

  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  Kiddie City, recording booth, Little Neck, New York, father, son, 1954:

  “It’s the Andy Kaufman Jamboree! And here’s the great old troubadour himself with his guitar, Andy Kaufman! Good evening, Andy, how are you tonight?”

  “Fine.”

  “How ’bout a little song for us. You got anything in mind that you’d like to sing? Maybe some original piece that you’ve written?”

  “Yep!”

  “What’s the name of it, Andy?”

  “‘Playin’ on Me Ol’ Guitar!’”

  “Okay, Andy, let’s see how it sounds! Introducing Andy Kaufman with an original piece just written and being heard for the first time on radio and television—Andy Troubadour Kaufman!”

  “O-lay-ee-oh, o-lay-ee-oh, o-lay-ee-oh, brrr-um-bum, brrr-um-bum, brrr-um-bum, brrr-um-bum, brrr-um-bum; Playin’ on the ol’ guitar, Playin’ on the ol’ guitar, gotta keep it old but I don’t know how, playin’ on the ol’ guitar, bumbadumbum, bee-hee bee-hee bee-hee, brrr-um-bum; look at that man over there, he’s wearin’ no underwear, gotta keep it old but I don’t know how, playin’ on me ol’ guitar, bee-hee bee-hee bee-hee….”

  “That was a terrific number, Andy. I’m sure that before very long, you’re gonna be hearing that number from coast to coast and it’ll be on top of the hit parade! Andy, is there one more number you have in mind?”

  “I have—‘What Time Is It.’”

  “Is that another original composition?”

  “Yep!”

  “Okay, Andy, I guess all the folks would like to hear that number. Take it away!”

  “What time is it? What is the time? It’s only one o’clock. What time is it? What time is it? It’s only one-thirty, it’s only one-thirty. What time is it? What time is it? It’s only two o’clock, it’s only two o’clock. What time is it? What time is it? It’s only two-thirty, it’s only two-thirty. What time is it? What time is—”

  “It’s time to stop this song right now! Thank you, Andy, that was terrific! By the way, Andy, what time would you have ended that song?”

  “Twelve-thirty.”

  “You mean you would have gone all the way up to twelve-thirty? My goodness, Andy! You know this program goes off the air in exactly one minute, and I don’t think we would have made it. What do you think?”

  “Wellll, that’s not quite a long song!”

  “I thought it was going to be a verrry long song….”

  Time was amorphous, meant very little. Hours passed, usually in solitude, though he was never alone, though he was mostly alone. (He and/or Dhrupick became many characters and now the cha
racters were working regularly. They made noises that burst out of him; he was a crowd; he was a spectacle; nobody saw or was supposed to.) Channel 5, of 5 Robin Way, upstairs bedroom, beamed daily telecasts beginning in 1953: “I really thought there was a camera in the wall and that there were millions of people watching me somewhere out in TVland. I don’t know where—but somewhere—and I really believed this.” No one was in the room with him. “No one was in the room with me.” Little Michael would be gone, maybe downstairs or somewhere with the housekeeper, Margaret E. English, of Denmark, South Carolina—a shy and kindly young black domestic who had come to work for and live with the family the year before. Upstairs, Andy made his rumpus. Margaret saw him as a peripheral blur: “He would jump around, always on the go.” Concentration was focused on the afternoon block of programming: “I had about four hours of programming every day,” he would soberly recount to a television psychologist thirty years in the future. “Ohhh, I had all kinds of different shows—adventure shows, horror shows, old-time movies, cartoons. I would just run around the room playing all the parts.” Eventually, he would break the afternoon down into eight half-hour shows. He would sing and dance, play heroes and apes, judges and defendants, villains and monsters, damsels and dogs, cowboys and … “I don’t remember much of them. I remember one that was like an old-time silent movie show—’cause in those days on television they showed a lot of silent movies instead of cartoons. I didn’t understand what was going on in these movies—all I knew was that these people were walking around faster than usual, with music playing. So when I was re-creating them for myself, there wasn’t any plot. It was just me for a half hour walking around fast and doing all kinds of faces and falling down and stuff like that….