Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  And he was very very extremely very very pleased with the compliments that he had received from Elvis Presley Greatest Performer Who Ever Lived who had seen his book and shaken his hand and this was a most extremely buoyant moment for Andrew G. Kaufman who decided that heavenly benediction had been bestowed and that nothing would ever stop him—“And the next day I was all over Las Vegas playing slot machines. All I had was five dollars, but I put in pennies and nickels, trying to win money. Just twenty dollars was all I wanted, so I could go see Elvis Presley again. To make a long story short, I lost the five dollars.”

  7

  He who hesitates is sometimes saved.

  —James Thurber,

  Fables for Our Time

  Ever so enthused by wondrous occurrence, somewhat familiarized with places he had not known before but would know well later—the conquering hero returned home long enough to face that which he had missed while away. Gloria had him meet her at a girlfriend’s house (neutral territory) and she showed him the photographs from the lawn of the church where Laurel—well, the baby … well, their baby … but not really theirs anymore—had lain and cooed for the camera. “He just looked at the pictures and his eyes got really big and he said something like, ‘Wow, that’s her? God, it’s really hard to believe….’ He asked me all about it, what had happened, how I was. And, I mean, I was still in crisis over it. But he knew that.” He really knew not what to say to her, but was as tender as he had ever been, if not more so. He had reveled for so long in creating awkwardnesses of his own merry design and this awkwardness was his as well but it was also hers and it was profound and there was nothing really to revel in and nothing really to say. All that he could do was hold her hand and hold her and then, sweetly as could be, say goodbye and then go back to Boston and focus attention elsewhere and he did just that.

  Big movement now. No time to be wasted. Momentum was all and all would now have to come quickly and blur into wild masses of experience and accomplishment so that he could get to where he needed to go. Already, he had shorn the facial hair because it just got in the way of destiny and also incited acne. So he picked up where he left off. He left off in the spring with ideas flying and mechanisms in position. Al’s Place was a coffeehouse in a basement—he was very keen on basements—in a dormitory right across Beacon Street and Al was Al Parinello, an enterprising student who ran the casual venue and booked the talent, and Al had withstood repeated entreaties from Andy, who begged and begged for stage time. Finally if warily, Al allowed an opportunity for this peculiar relentless fellow whose only claim to craft were birthday routines and funny accents and an Elvis impression. There was an available night on the schedule and Al told him, “Okay we can make something happen this Friday. I can pay you five dollars.” And Al would recall that Andy said, “Oh!” “He didn’t expect the money part. But the result of all this made for one of those rare moments in life—because, from the minute he went up onto that stage, Andy was literally a star. I believe he opened with his Foreign Man character, hopeless and inept, all pidgin English, and there was nervous tittering in the audience. And he did Mighty Mouse with the phonograph—and I was astonished by his timing, absolutely impeccable. Then he had the conga, which he started banging in sync with this crying jag—he had started crying as the Foreign Man because he lost his place and said he was ashamed, but he turned this into a conga symphony banging to the beat of these big gulping sobs. The audience was going crazy. And then the way he closed was absolutely sensational because it was Elvis—and it was incredible because the coeds were screaming! I’m saying they were emotionally involved with this impression to the point of screaming! I can still hear the screams. I remember looking around, thinking to myself, Something very important is happening here….”

  Elsewhere, Uncle Andy’s Fun House was happening and this was his dream culmination of all birthday acumen and sensibility and he had already gotten class credit for it in April when it was first written up as a prospectus for a fifteen-minute television show that was then shot with Grahm cameras with Uncle Andy himself producing and starring as a manchild leading children played by other students—“dopeheads who sat on the studio floor while he read to them from a rocking chair,” one dour witness recalled—through a wonderworld of happily didactic tomfoolery. Oh, but the Fun House had great promise—he often envisioned spending his entire future there, or someplace like it, with children, with puppets, with games and songs, like Buffalo Bob. Even the theme song he wrote for the show borrowed the melody of “It’s Howdy Doody Time”—

  It’s Uncle Andy Time

  It’s Uncle Andy Time

  An-dy and Bee Bop, too

  say Boo-Bee-Doo to you;

  Let’s give a rousing cheer

  ’Cause Uncle Andy’s here

  It’s time to start the show

  So kids let’s go!

  That fall, he convinced the Grahm faculty to let him broadcast the show semiweekly in living color over the campus closed-circuit station, WCSB-TV (for Cambridge School of Business), and he foraged through Boston day schools to recruit wee peanut-gallery members and designed a set with big happy faces slapped on the walls and inflated many balloons and set up a puppet theater where Mr. Bee Bop, a beatnik puppet, dispensed with cool proverbs. Al Parinello came aboard as puppeteer and occasional sideshow barker (there were freak puppets) and also played the role of Mr. Pumpkin, who wore an orange slightly crushed cardboard refrigerator box—“my head was the stem”—and did as he was told. (For a public relations course project, Parinello designed an Uncle Andy’s Fun House press kit which included a two-page biography of the star—“ANDY KAUFMAN, CHILD IDOL: The name Andy Kaufman may not mean much to you, but to some lucky kids who have had the pleasure of seeing him perform, the name Andy Kaufman is Godlike….”) Uncle Andy, meanwhile, had greatly benefited from studying with the meditating bliss people because on camera he was very very blissful and very innocent as he urged children to “dance crazy” and drink vast quantities of chocolate milk and brush teeth in rhythm to songs like “That’s Amore” and “T-R-O-U-B-L-E” and “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes” and peers and instructors alike could barely believe that he had not ingested various pharmaceuticals in order to perform as such. Said Don Erickson, “We just didn’t think anybody normal could be this abnormal.”

  Another weekly WCSB-TV program of note was The Grahm Spotlight, whose host and creator, a student named Burt Dubrow, fancied his forum as a wisenheimer Tonight Show wherein guests paraded through while Dubrow wryly presided behind a desk and skewered school administration. “One day I got a knock on my door and it’s Andy,” Dubrow would remember. “He said, ‘I’ve been watching what you’re doing and I’d love to come on.’ He was very—I wouldn’t say shy, but … innocent.” He was also purposeful and Dubrow needed to fill air time and it soon became their routine to meet in Dubrow’s dorm room the night before each Thursday Spotlight broadcast and work out just what Andy would do next to unhinge Dubrow on live closed-circuit television. Elvis came first and then the meek wide-eyed Foreign fellow turned up as a regular foil and began to say tenk you veddy much so often that it became his signature and there was also the Mighty Mouse lip-synching phonograph bit plus “Old MacDonald,” and “Pop Goes the Weasel” (he assumed the voice of a stentorian father singing the song in nonsense rhymes with a precocious daughter, as the record spun and scratched beside him). “One week we worked out the following: Andy would come out after I introduced him as Andy, which was kind of rare. He was usually somebody else. And he would do a terrible stand-up comedy routine, just horrible unfunny jokes like ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ So he did this and, of course, nobody in the studio audience was laughing. One joke was worse than the next. Finally, Andy looked up with those eyes and got very upset with the audience—‘Look, all I’m trying to do is make a living while going to college and help pay for my tuition and you people don’t have the decency to laugh at me! I don’t know what you want, but I’m
trying and trying here, but you!—you don’t care if you ruin everything for me!’ And he began to cry and get hysterical and there was this question in everyone’s mind—Was he or was he not sincere? Finally, after crying crying crying, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a gun! Then he put the gun to his head and just as he was going to shoot himself, I ran over and tackled him to the ground and—commercial! And then when the show returned, we just sat at the desk talking as though the gun incident never happened—we never mentioned it in any way. Which was the whole idea. People asked me for days afterward if I knew he was going to try to kill himself on live television. And I just said, ‘Of course not!’ He saw this as a remarkable triumph.”

  And so the Grahm Junior College experience continued apace in just this fashion, with performances coming whenever and wherever possible, as he seized any spotlight afforded him: He worked regularly at Al’s Place honing his material and also tried other local coffeehouses and meanwhile kept producing the Fun House even though it was often difficult to get children to come to the studio (milk and cookies and chocolate cake always helped) and he remained a fixture on Dubrow’s program and then, after the first reading of God in the women’s dormitory, there were more and more readings of God and his parents and sister attended one such reading and claimed to like it very much even though it made no sense and then a group of black performance students asked him to do Elvis in their Soul Time Review, which was an interracial first—“They said I would be the, uh, comedy relief and the token white buffoon. They thought it was really gonna bomb. But then they liked it!” So he moved forward and maybe it was because things had been going so well that he began to expect another downturn because the downturns always came about a month after his birthday during such productive periods whereupon he would plunge and lose his way again. It was a curse that he believed in, so he meditated hard to stave off the plunge, then learned not long after his twenty-first birthday that he would not have enough credit hours to graduate on time because he had been so consumed with building his future in show business that classwork had fallen aside. To complete his associate’s degree in broadcasting he would have to stay in Boston through the summer and fall of 1970—about which he felt disconsolate and his father felt bitterly disappointed, what with tuition squandered due to apparent lack of academic diligence (“plain laziness,” said Stanley), all of which meant that his show business career would have to wait a bit longer.

  Fortunately, the Transcendental Meditation people were there to stoke his confidence and help him maintain his innocence and provide evenings of enlightened discourse. It was after one such evening—which had buoyed him somewhat—that he led a group of fellow bliss devotees to a Harvard Square ice cream parlor and, as they waited on line, which was very long, he was no longer him but became the other one with the vague Mediterranean heritage and the hopeless demeanor and at last it was his turn to place his order and it began—Ehhh … I would like to have de ice cream but you have so many of de ice cream kinds how do I know vich vun ees good? Can you tell me vich vun ees good to order? Maybe I try taste each of de ice cream please? “The people behind the counter were trying to be very nice because they thought this foreign person needed help,” said Phil Goldberg, a TM friend who watched with astonishment. “Then they started getting impatient because he wouldn’t make up his mind. He began to taste every flavor, one after the other, and the line was getting longer and longer, and people were starting to say things and getting more exasperated. I’m thinking, Enough, Andy-cool it or someone’s gonna hit you or something. But at the same time I was amazed by his persistence and conviction.” I know! I will have de mocha cheep, with de mocha and de cheep! “Mocha chip was, of course, the only flavor they didn’t have.” No, but-but I vant de mocha cheep! You know? De mochacheep? “And he never stopped, for twenty minutes, took it to the absolute brink where someone was about to jump on him, and then finally—” Ehh, all right … I will have … ehhhhhhhh … de vaneella! Tenk you veddy much. “—he chose vanilla. That was it. We left and laughed. And that was the first time a lot of us realized that he was serious about becoming a comedian.” That July, he met the Maharishi at last—and, apparently, in the nick of time. He had gone to Poland Springs, Maine, on what would be the first of many many TM course retreats that he required himself to attend. His dedication to the replenishing deep silences and the quest for enlightenment/innocence had, of course, fully overtaken him. (It kept his eyes from taking on the hard glint of cynicism, he thought, which he disliked in other eyes, especially in the eyes of certain show business people on television; it kept his eyes lolling in space, which felt right, felt like who he thought he was. He knew all about his eyes.) At this particular retreat, as was custom, His Holiness had come to share his divine wisdom with followers who had convened to absorb his teachings and step forth to ask questions at a microphone set before them. Andy sat among the flock with a question burning in his gut, but could not bring himself to ask it because it was a complicated question and a personal one and it wasn’t even really a question but a confession all about the plunge he felt enveloping him and so he went back to his room and began composing a letter to the Maharishi on some Grahm stationery he had brought along on the retreat.

  Dear Maharishi,

  I realize that you are a busy man and probably don’t think about people’s personal problems very much, but I have one which I would like to tell you about. Please listen…. I will have to begin with a short “life story”: My life has been going in definite 4 year cycles…. It seems that every 4 years, a few months are lived happily, then in around February things begin to drop and get worse and in that summer things are terrible and remain so for a few years until the good part comes around again in another 4 years. Things start picking up around the year before the good year…. The good part of the good year lasts only a few months. (I am referring to things in my mind and feelings.) … I began meditating in December 1968 and was due for a “good frame of mind” period in fall 1969. Things started climbing and the summer of 1969 was very nice and the fall and early winter were very good and I kept remembering that according to the pattern, things would go bad, but I didn’t think it would happen this time because I was meditating. However, in February, everything fell apart and things got progressively worse…. Now I feel terrible. I think I’m more unsociable now than when I didn’t meditate.

  He stopped there and never finished the letter and never said anything to anyone about the things-in-his-mind-and-feelings, possibly because when he read the pathetic nature of what he had written he may have realized that it was his job—not that of Maharishi or anyone else—to address that which dogged him and to take responsibility and get on with it. Maharishi, who sat there waving his flower as he issued positive profundities, would have certainly told him as much. The point of life was, after all, to be happy and light and therefore success would follow. There was, as all meditators knew, no room for dark thinking. His father had told him that he would be heard —You shall be heard!—and Elvis Presley had admired his mind and there was nothing to do but to clear it of bad things-and-feelings. And so he got through his summer and through his autumn and stopped eating red meat (interfered with destiny, he felt) and completed his curriculum and performed stagecraft with renewed conviction to his future. (In November, he wrote a letter to his family and added in a postscript, “Dad, thanks for the advice about keeping a stiff upper lip. Afterwards I wrote a story about a guy who kept a stiff upper lip. The advice made me feel good.” He also wrote that his mother’s sweet potato recipe had turned out well.) Boston felt more and more like home to him, largely because of the tether of TM; he had grown so proficient at meditation principles that he was now invited to become an instructor, which was very exciting. Teacher training and indoctrination would be overseen by the Maharishi in Majorca, Spain, beginning in February and continuing through May. He would go—at some expense—because it was what he needed to do and, by this time, no one except him could fat
hom the paths of his dreams.

  Jan. 12/13, 1971

  Dear Dad,

  Tonite I worked unloading a truck full of boxes filled with books. I made $5.00 for 45 minutes of work. It really felt good doing real labor like that. It reminded me of when I used to work for Grady. I kind of forgot what work like that was like, all these years at Grahm.

  The reason I’m writing you this letter is because there are a few things I’ve been wanting to tell you but I’ve found it hard to say them. I’ve been meaning to say thank you for quite a while but I guess it sounds awkward. Anyway, I really do appreciate all the things that you’ve done for me and I want you to know it. I’m aware that I’ve put you through many hard times.

  I want you to know that in all seriousness I do plan to become a very accomplished performer. Ever since I was very small I’ve fantasized about it. Do you remember the “shows” I used to put on in my room? This is a very definite goal of mine. After all, look at the actual experience I’ve had: 12 years of entertaining at children’s parties. The first step, Grahm Junior College, is finished. I apologize for it taking so long and don’t blame you for being a little bothered about it. As far as procrastinating, you’re right. I’ve always been lazy and a procrastinator. My methods for attaining my goal might seem a little unusual to you. I consider myself an unusual performer. I must, if I am to make it. My next step (going to Majorca) may seem wrong, like another procrastination. Meditation has helped me a great deal. I am extremely pleased with it and sincerely feel that I would have not been able to do as well in my performing without it. The next step toward pursuing my goal is to go to this meditation course. Please rest assured that it is not another procrastination. It is an essential part of my career. One day, I shall be an extremely accomplished performer.