Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  He was a confirmed nomad at this point, cared little where he slept, had no place of his own, crashed either with Krieger in nearby Somerville or wherever a bliss person had an empty couch—vagabondism suited him and always would, even when very or somewhat famous. As long as he could meditate for two hours per morning in complete silence—“He didn’t want a pin to drop,” said Krieger—and again at night and could prepare his newfound macrobiotic diet (brown rice and raw beans and similar flavorless purities) and could stow one daily carton of Häagen-Dazs ice cream in a freezer (could not sleep without first devouring a full pint), he was fine. Meanwhile, his professional devotions continued to burn brightly. That November, he had dragged Peter Wassyng to see Elvis perform at the Boston Garden—“We sat there in the balcony and it was like watching someone worship Jesus!”—and the following June in New York he dragged his sister to Madison Square Garden for another Elvis concert, after which he made her run with him all the way across town to the Plaza Hotel, where he mistakenly believed Elvis was staying. The very next week, he became Elvis again, albeit in a completely different fashion than ever before. Quite momentously, it was for a real television program on Chicago’s powerhouse ABC affiliate, WLS-TV, where Burt Dubrow was now producer of the talk show Kennedy-at-Nite, hosted by popular broadcaster Bob Kennedy. Elvis had just played the Chicago Stadium and, to capitalize on lingering local frenzy, Dubrow had flown in his former Grahm foil to actually be interviewed as though he were Elvis. For thirty televised minutes! Kennedy, who had spent time with him before the show, quickly gave away the conceit in his introduction—“It’s almost more like talking to Elvis than, frankly, talking to a fellow by the name of Andy Kaufman….” Andy had brought along piles of personal Elvis memorabilia to display on camera and wore a white tuxedo jacket and allowed his hair to be teased into a minor bouffant. What he was not allowed to do, however, was to actually sing as Elvis. Instead, he was directed to lip-synch along with Presley records and, as he did so (committing several flubs, since this was not what he really did in his act), he was half the Elvis that he had ever been. Confined as such, he still acquitted himself nicely during interview segments, employing a relaxed drawl and many sly lipcurls, while improvising his way through the mind of his hero. Only when a caller to the program asked how he maintained such a sexy body did two lives blur—“Well, ah tell-you-what—ah do yoga every day…. It’s called Transcendental Meditation. Ah started a few years ago and found it to be a verrrbig help to me…. Helps to keep me young. Makes me feel better and it’s the easiest thang in the world to do.” (Elvis Presley, for the record, was a yoga enthusiast, but had no truck with Transcendental Meditation. That, he believed, was the province of the Beatles.) Nevertheless, Andy saw the experience as a suitably untraditional local television debut.

  Two other notable strides had been made in the first half of 1972: In February, he was hired—by dint of a blind referral—to actually perform as the opening act for a Temptations concert in Northampton, Massachusetts. The predominantly black audience was, according to his subsequent reports, completely offput by Foreign Man and made it vociferously known and so he wept and wept onstage and pulled out his large cap gun and walked off into the wings and fired the gun into a microphone and thudded to the floor and the room went silent and the Temptations sang extra hard that night to make up for it. Then, in late May, one of his television idols, Steve Allen, came to perform with the Boston Pops Orchestra; Allen’s comic cohort Louis Nye was also on the bill, and Andy discovered that both men were staying at the nearby Sheraton Hotel. Because Uncle Sammy had written for Steve Allen, Andy believed this entitled him to a meeting in which to seek advice from the innovative television host. So he went to the hotel and used the house phone and—“A young fellow with a teenager’s [he was, in fact, twenty-three] unsteady voice was calling,” Allen would later recount in his book, Funny People. “‘Mr. Allen,’ he said, ‘I’m Sam Denoff’s nephew … I was wondering if I could come see you.’” Allen finally relented, since he saw no way out of it, and invited him to his room, where Nye was lounging. “He impressed both Louis and me as socially awkward, incredibly ill at ease, a bit awestruck, and somewhat offbeat. To this day I don’t know whether there was the slightest element of put-on in our first conversation, though I doubt it.” He stammered out an explanation of his accomplishments and dreams and Allen, to the best of his recollection, told him to keep doing what he was doing but to try doing it in some of these new audition-style showcase nightclubs, like the Improvisation in New York or any such place in Los Angeles, so as to be closer to talent scouts. That, of course, was something he already knew and he would be doing just that within months, exhibiting relentless drive, foisting himself in deft foreign disguise upon unwitting club owners, never making the approach as a scion of Great Neck, never being who he was, always being who he wasn’t, hoping that which forced audiences to indulge him with pity would work as well on the gatekeepers of certain spotlit stages.

  Steve Allen, who would come to know Foreign Man well just a few years after that urgent hotel meeting, later turned his professorial eye to the character: “There is more to Foreign Man than just a heavily accented speech pattern that sounds funny to native American ears, such as Bill Dana’s José Jimenez,” he would write. “Foreign Man is also a creature suffering from cultural shock, future shock. His attitudes are hopelessly out of synchronization with those common in the time and place in which he has landed. He simply does not understand the American sense of humor, but thinks he does. He is so confident in this regard, in fact, that he’s willing to get up in front of nightclub audiences and try to do what Henny Youngman, Milton Berle, or Bob Hope does.” Indeed, Foreign Man was designed to brim with oblivious bravado. He was both tool and secret weapon, the irresistible career emissary dispatched to do the bidding of Andy Kaufman. He would be the foot in every important doorway. And, one way or another, he would always shove Andy Kaufman across every threshold.

  He left Boston and returned home and, by September, the foreign kid began turning up on curbs outside of clubs, starting with clubs on Long Island, and the first sort of club there that permitted him onstage was a strip joint and he fumbled his way through eemetations before introducing the next naked dancing lady, then came back out to complain about his wife’s cooking before another naked lady shimmied forth—and he was not well received but the ladies felt sorry for him and were very nice, which was exciting, but ultimately not very helpful. Then he auditioned for a popular Roslyn music club not adverse to comical acts, called My Father’s Place and, as with Al’s Place, his material glistened from the start and there was a standing ovation after his first set. “I felt like a comedian,” he later said, as though the notion had not previously occurred to him. “It was coming in rhythms, this laughter.” He returned again and again and became a dependable mainstay (give or take more than a few nights of wavering reception, the apogee of which was the night a hurled beer bottle bounced off his forehead) and frequently emceed for songwriter showcase nights. He began to experiment further and to perfect the complete arc of Foreign Man’s transformation into Elvis—“Anytime there was an Elvis Presley movie on television, day or night, he ran to the nearest TV set in the place,” said Eppie Epstein, who owned the club. Whenever possible, he led audiences into old and new coves of whimsy or deceit. At the congas, he would invoke the room to repeat the following nonsensical sounds —oh-wah and ta-ta and foooo and lie-am—and have them keep repeating with him as he quickened the conga beats until everyone realized they were shouting Oh what a fool I am! Richard Hersh, who helped manage My Father’s Place, would recall, “The audience loved it because they were fooled, they played right into his hands—and then he had their attention.” To quell serious stagefright—“He was very nervous before going onstage. It was like being bar mitzvahed every night, okay?” said Hersh—Andy began requesting time to meditate in silence for fifteen-minute periods before and after performing. “It was a very significant part of his
theatrical presentation, almost to the point of mystique,” said Epstein. “He would come offstage and become a monk. You [couldn’t] see him—he’d be meditating. [Afterward he’d blankly say], ‘Um, hi … how are you? Oh, thank you …’ Like a different person.”

  He made occasional forays into the city, got onstage downtown during amateur nights at the Bitter End, continuing his rounds until late December, when he returned to California for another long advanced-training TM retreat in Santa Barbara. There, he entertained meditators as Elvis and put out word that he was looking for a place to stay for a few weeks afterward down in Los Angeles. A young TM teacher named Linda Mitchell, who aspired to classical guitar virtuosity (which was kind of like show business), offered her parents’ guest house in Encino, where many transient bliss people had been welcome. His two primary orders of business were to see if he could (a) get onstage at a new club on Sunset Boulevard called the Comedy Store, which he’d been hearing much about, and (b) get a chance to appear on the television quiz show The Dating Game, not necessarily to meet girls (although he enjoyed that possibility) but to insert Foreign Man into a very different cultural reality. “He wanted to do the show as Foreign Man,” Mitchell recalled, “and they just didn’t want Foreign Man.” Day after day, however, he stormed the production office unwilling to accept defeat and was finally auditioned on camera and was amusing enough to secure an okay-we’ll-think-about-it, which he took less lightly than the producers may have. (He called them every day for the remainder of his visit, just to see if a decision had been reached, which it had not.) Uncle Sammy, meanwhile, knew the veteran comic Sammy Shore and his wife Mitzi Shore, who owned the Comedy Store, where every nascent American purveyor of stand-up entertainment had begun to make pilgrimage in hopes of being discovered. Sam Denoff would remember: “I called Mitzi and said, ‘Listen, I have this guy, I’m not sure what he does.’ She told us to come over and we hung around backstage and then he went out and started to do one of his crazy foreign things with the audience. And, Jesus Christ, the people went whaaaa? And I couldn’t even look over at Mitzi, because I didn’t know what the hell she would think. He was unpolished, but he had this idea that he was gonna send the world up.” Mitzi Shore wasn’t sure what she thought either, but she noted that he held some unusual sway over the crowd, which was not the easiest thing to do in West Hollywood, where the rather jaded clientele generally resisted such silliness as chanting gibberish along with a boy beating a drum.

  Back in Great Neck that February, the mission escalated. Fortified by chutzpah tested in Los Angeles, he would now audition in places that had previously only intimidated him. On his behalf, Eppie Epstein put in a call to Budd Friedman, the powerful starmaking owner of the Improvisation. Friedman’s memory: “Eppie said, ‘You’ve got to see this guy!’ And that’s all he said. And for some reason I believed him.” Friedman told Epstein to send him in for open-mike night the following Monday, the twelfth. Meanwhile, Andy knew that regular Thursday afternoon auditions were held at a brand-new Upper East Side showcase club called Catch a Rising Star. So he loaded his various prop cases into his father’s car on February 8 and drove to the club, where he schlepped everything through the door, mystifying the talent coordinator Conan Berkeley and the house pianist Eddie Rabin. Then Rabin encountered him primping alone in the men’s room—“This strange guy asked me, ‘Are you de piano player? I will be singing de Elveece? You know de Elveece?’ And I thought, well, I guess he’s the real thing. I mean, there was no reason to put on a foreign accent for me alone in the men’s room. Then he went out and did the act and I realized I’d been had.” At which point, Berkeley, who was greatly impressed by the audition, would remember saying to him, “Can you come back and perform tonight?” And he went back into the Foreign Man and said, “Oh! Yesss, I will be back yesss!” Berkeley told Catch owner Rick Newman to specifically watch for this immigrant person that night, so Newman and his friend, the prominent young comic David Brenner, stood in the back of the room and witnessed Bombing as they had never understood bombing before. “He started speaking in a language that I’d never heard, that David had never heard,” said Newman. “Then he began crying.” And the conga-crying—“He never said a word of English for his first eight minutes!” said Newman—moved toward eemetations toward Elveece—“and then we lost it, just fell off our chairs!” The audience, meanwhile, was either ecstatic (per memories of Newman and Berkeley) or enraged (per Brenner); afterward he tottered to the rear, where Newman professed glee and gave insightful praise, inviting him back all weekend and whenever he wished to be seen, and where Brenner counseled him after such a dismal showing—“I said, ‘You know, you can’t go by what that audience did to you tonight. Don’t listen to them. Not only are you funny, you’ve got something no one else has.’ I mean, he was a comedic con artist and that night he was breaking down barriers that nobody knew ever existed!”

  He jubilantly drove back to Grassfield Road sometime before dawn and wrote a note to his family while preparing his ice cream: Feb. 8 [really 9], 1973, Dear Mommy, Daddy, and Carol [Michael was now a Business major at Penn], I had a very prosperous day today. I auditioned at a niteclub of the type which I attended with Uncle Sammy in L.A. and was asked to perform tonite. The man who runs the show really understood my act much more than anyone else I’ve met in this business … and I’ve been asked to return this Friday and Saturday nites. Tonite’s show went well and Jackie Mason was in the audience. So it was a good day. And Mon. nite I am at the Improvisation and Wed. nite I audition at Dangerfield’s. So everything is going well. Thank you very much. (He had now begun closing all family correspondence with Foreign Man’s signature stamp of gratitude.) And that morning, while he slept, his parents scrawled at the bottom of the note, “Great! There’s nothing we like better than to see you have things go your way—Loads of good luck.” They also told him to use the car as he needed it, which he did. The note that he left them the following night reported further onstage prosperity and news that people from The Dating Game had called and wanted him to be on the program in two weeks, but he had told them that that probably wouldn’t work out, so they had suggested he call them collect before his next trip—So I made it after all! On Sunday, he performed again at Catch and wrote afterward, Boy, tonite was exciting. I met Doc Pomus, who wrote many many Elvis Presley songs and some Fabian songs and many more. He liked my act very much. It was almost as though Elvis had been watching him, he thought. He also reported that both Rodney Dangerfield (whose nearby Upper East Side club would audition him on Wednesday) and Jackie Mason were there watching him as well.

  Then, on Monday night, he walked into the all-important Improv, where Greg Garrison would find him fourteen months hence and put him on the Dean Martin summer comedy show, which would be the break that preceded all other breaks that propelled him to where he needed to go. And Silver Friedman, wife of Budd Friedman, and possessor of certain mystical visionary powers, would remember his first steps into the club—“He was in a total state of discovery always. Everything he would look at, it was just as though he was seeing it for the first time. And so he stood there in the doorway, looking all around him—I mean, I don’t want to seem like too much of a witch—but I remember seeing a basement ceiling over his head, a low ceiling, and I saw carpeting and drums and him in this rec room … a den. He gave off a very strong energy. Then later we found out about him practicing in his Long Island basement all those years and I went oooooo!” And Budd Friedman would remember greeting him—“I said, ‘Where you from, kid?’ ‘An island in the Caspian Sea.’ Okay. So he went onstage and the people were sort of laughing—I didn’t know what to make of him. Until he did his Elvis and I just fell on the floor. Who knew there were no islands in the Caspian Sea?” And that night he wrote—Dear Mommy, Daddy, and Carol. They liked me at the Improvisation and I can come back, so I’ll probably be doing two shows a night—one at the Improvisation, and one at Catch a Rising Star. Thank you verr-rry much.