Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  Certain people inside him had been showing up in clubs by now—not with him or anywhere near him, because he wasn’t there when they were, which came to be understood when they did not respond to conspiratorial winks or hey Andys. Tony Clifton was making himself known, as was British Man, whose clipped accent faltered as often as his starched readings of The Great Gatsby—British Man was, for reasons unknown, a proponent of Great American Literature. “He would start by reading all the copyright information and small print in the front of the book,” said Rick Newman. “The crowd would seem amused at first, then as he kept reading and got two pages into the first chapter, some people would get up to leave. But he wanted that.” A protracted negotiation with the audience ever ensued, during which a rattled British Man always tried to press on through the indignation—“Everyone would go booooo boooooo,” he later explained. “And I’d say, ‘Now, look! If you’re not quiet, I will have to close the book and forget about the whole thing!’ And there would be cheers. Um, you know, I would just do it for their reactions.” (Years afterward, a false legend circulated that he had read the entire book to an audience in Fairfield, Iowa—home of Maharishi International University—because the Midwestern bliss people were simply too polite to leave. In fact, he rarely finished the first chapter anywhere, much less two pages. But he liked telling that story.) Sometimes, if he disliked an audience—“like when they would be so terrible and rude and I felt no satisfaction performing my regular act for them”—he would open the book and begin reading in his own voice. At Catch, he once sent Sleeping Man forth to try it—“He took the book, the microphone and a flashlight with him into his sleeping bag,” said Newman, “then read it while zipped up inside. It looked like a talking sandbag onstage.”

  Meanwhile, he had begun cross-breeding Laughing Man with Bliss Ninny (adding a dash of Clifton) to create Nathan Richards, perhaps the happiest and most unctuous entertainer ever to tread boards. Dennis Raimondi, a TM follower who had become a close friend through Kathy Utman, observed Richards in early club development—“He was the kind of guy who bounced onto the stage and just gushed: ‘Hey, ho ho ho how ya doin’ it’s great to be here you’re such a beautiful audience you are beautiful people and I’d like to sing for you because you’re just so special to me….’ He would just be, you know, a little bit too blissful. And he’d wander through the audience and sing to them —‘I have often walked down this street beforrre thank you thank you’—and kiss the women, most of whom just pushed him away. And he’d say, ‘Come on, you love it and you know it, baby!’ Then after the song he’d say, ‘Gosh, I’d love to stay and sing for you all night, but I have another gig.’ Then he’d run offstage to no actual applause, then come back and say, ‘All right, I’ll do another song just because—’ He would do that like ten times. Some people were ready to throw dynamite at him. Then again, other people actually believed he was for real and enjoyed him. Once, we were out in front of Catch a Rising Star afterward and a lady came up to tell him, ‘Nathan, you really have a beautiful voice!’ And Andy looked at me after she left and said, ‘Sometimes I think they’ll never understand what I’m doing.’”

  There were those who did and some of them would provide new avenues of pursuit. A New York businessman named Jim Walsh, who had launched various entrepreneurial ventures with football star Joe Namath, took a particular shine to him one night at Catch—“I thought what he was doing was creative genius and told him so”—then informally offered himself up as a quasi-manager. They had brainstormed frequently since early winter (usually in macrobiotic restaurants as dictated by Andy) and Walsh placed calls that eventually led to little bookings at little events around town and thereabouts, including a quick stint refereeing a hamburger-eating contest at a midtown Burger King, all of which meant a couple hundred dollars here and there—plus Eppie Epstein always found ways to throw him small change at My Father’s Place. So he was amassing some meager proof for his family that he was making headway. Then, as the airing of his Dean Martin shots approached (for which he received two five-hundred-dollar checks), he met the comedy team of Albrecht and Zmuda, who were Chris Albrecht and Bob Zmuda, a pair of young out-of-work actors fresh from Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh who had come to the big city to starve. They had been scraping by on the fringes of outer Off-Off-Broadway before hooking up with the owner of a failing mid-town dinner-theater called the Little Hippodrome, where they initially hired on to do carpenter labor and waiter work. As business grew more dire, Albrecht was made a floor manager and Zmuda became a chef and, as their paychecks bounced regularly, they were given license to live on the premises and, whenever opportune, pass themselves off as co-owners of the place. And so, that May, when Zmuda quite accidentally stumbled into the Improv—and experienced the epiphany of stand-up comedy, which he instantly saw as the future—he let it be known that he and his partner were not only theatrical impresarios but also budding comedians (neglecting to mention that they had no act). “I figured this was our only shot at becoming real operators, if you know what I mean,” he would recall. So he fed Budd Friedman this enterprising line of canard and somehow secured stage time for their new act—Albrecht and Zmuda, Comedy from A to Z—which boasted much visual hokum, as written up with great haste by Zmuda. Among their bits was a sideshow lampoon: “I would swallow a sword onstage and bleed everywhere—people thought I was actually bleeding. It was pure gross-out kind of material.” Andy saw and liked this gag very much, as did Foreign Man, whom Zmuda enthusiastically approached after the first time he watched Foreign Man work, whereupon Foreign Man complained about haffing a bad back and asked Zmuda if he would please-tenk-you load his props back into his car for him—which was the first of hundreds of times Zmuda would do just that—and then, according to Zmuda, as the car pulled away, Andy (not Foreign Man) was heard to holler into the night, “Sucker!” Thus was begat a most significant bond of brotherly humbug.

  Zmuda, for his part, was a keen student of grandiose imposterism and artful fakery. An affable native of Chicago’s Northwest Side Polish community, he had cut his teeth as part of a local guerrilla street theater troupe whose finest stunt had ensemble members positioned along a Chicago Transit Authority bus route, where they would board a bus in small clusters at each stop, then begin gagging and wheezing along the way until the bus was full of passengers complaining of toxic fumes, forcing the driver to abandon his route and call for emergency assistance. They did this repeatedly. He enthralled Andy with such tales and other ones from his brief tour of duty as assistant to the legendary renegade screenwriter Norman Wexler (Joe, Serpico), whose supposed eccentric furies and quixotic adventures had makings of further inspiration for Tony Clifton. “Andy’s eyes would just bug out when I told him this crazy stuff,” he recalled. Zmuda and Albrecht had, meanwhile, instituted a cabaret policy at the Little Hippodrome and began recruiting acts from the Improv. By mid-June, Jim Walsh had hatched a deal through them to stake Andy as the headliner of a nightly showcase to run the length of summer—with handbills hailing him thusly: FROM THE DEAN MARTIN COMEDY HOUR, NEW YORK’S MOST HILARIOUS ENTERTAINER. The late night showcase—which followed a musical revue staged earlier in the evening—also featured several complementary acts, including Walsh’s only other client, a chanteuse named Tina Kaplan, and the antic stylings of Comedy from A to Z. “Sometimes there’d be no more than twenty people in the audience,” said Walsh, “but they were wonderful people like Marlo Thomas and the playwright Herb Gardner. And they would bring their friends to see Andy over and over again.”

  And then The New York Times, in the person of critic Richard F. Shepard, came to witness both ends of the bill and, on July 11, a review was published under the headline SONGS AND A NEW COMEDIAN MAKE LIVELY CABARET. Praising the entire evening of entertainment, Shepard singled out “a new and brilliantly funny comic performer named Andy Kaufman,” declaring him “the star here,” whose work “defies categorization. He is more in the Sid Caesar tradition of prepared material rather than in t
he stand-up mode. He gives you no quotable lines, very few describable schticks, yet he leaves you laughing, loud and hard. He enters, speaking with a peculiar accent that could be Spanish, Greek, whatever, but it’s none of them…. He imitates Elvis Presley, does a bravura performance with vocal of a ‘folk song’ from an island in the Caspian Sea; it’s hilarious…. His manner is one of complete non-self-confidence. He falters, retraces his steps, and it is in this facade of uneasiness, marked by awkward yet eloquent gestures, that his talent for the comic shines.”

  And then, one night shortly thereafter, Dustin Hoffman with his friend Murray Schisgal, the writer, and their wives happened to wander down East Fifty-sixth Street and into the doors of the Hippodrome just as a fellow with a peculiar accent walked onto the stage, and Hoffman, focusing an unparalleled actor’s eagle eye on the performance, was intrigued to notice that the fellow was very extremely nervous—“His hands were moving down by his sides, almost like he’s playing an invisible piano, and he’s wearing a suit that looked badly shrunk. I thought it must have been an amateur night. And, in the first ten minutes of his act, half of what was originally a half-full audience got up and walked out. At first blush, I thought, Oh, this poor bastard. And then suddenly he made that swing—right from poor bastard to genius. I’d never seen anybody do a bad act on purpose before. But he was so good that he appeared to be literally summoning up beads of sweat on his forehead, drenching himself in the embarrassment and being affected emotionally by the fact that they weren’t laughing. People had their heads down, as if the guy had lost his bowels or thrown up onstage—you had to look away, but you couldn’t. It was like watching a nervous breakdown in slow motion—and it was rhythmic! It had nuance and poetry and it killed me! I had never seen anything like it before. He was like a beautiful dandelion, so fragile that he might just blow away in the wind. Then he cried and worked the crying into the conga drums—oh God! The technique, with the originality and imagination of it! He was fearless!”

  Hoffman led his party backstage afterward to offer congratulations—“I remember being surprised at how big he was. When he did that character he was like the size of Woody Allen, and then you meet him and he’s a Goliath. And I remember how sweet and shy he was.” Murray Schisgal would recall, “He was very polite but also absolutely ebullient. He looked like the happiest guy in the world because Dusty came back to see him. He was really just floating.” Hoffman, in fact, was equally thrilled and began sending friends to the show and dragging others back with him and, on July 31, the syndicated columnist Earl Wilson reported, “Dustin Hoffman was at the Little Hippodrome for the fourth time to see zany comic Andy Kaufman, described by one viewer as an anti-comic.”

  One of the friends Hoffman sent forth to behold the spectacle was Woody Allen himself, who would remember, “I thought he was quite good, quite amazing in certain places—the Mighty Mouse thing and the Elvis Presley come to mind. What he did, he did in a talented way, no question. He came over to me afterward and asked if he could have a chat with me one afternoon. He was awfully nice, so I had him come to [my manager] Jack Rollins’s office. And I chatted with him for a while, but most of his questions were odd because—I’ll never forget this—somewhere he had gotten the impression that I was a Transcendental Meditationist. He had heard that I pilgrimaged to India every year. And I said that nothing could be further from the truth. I have respect for it, but I have no interest in it whatsoever. And he was explaining to me that he was very, very interested in Eastern religion and Eastern philosophy. Which was, uh, nice. Then we talked about show business for a little bit and that was it. But I found him quite amusing and, you know, very unusual.”

  His first impact upon popular consciousness, the moment he was born unto universal memory, would come fifteen months hence and he would then seem to have materialized from nowhere, inexplicably, like a wraith. By then, he had rehearsed his craft for twenty-six of the twenty-six years he had thus far lived. When it happened, as it happened, he did not utter a word, he was silent, the fingers would twitch at his sides and his eyes would strobe and he would sip the water and wipe his mouth, as the Terrytooners exalted the mouse by way of the phonograph and he would wait for his three opportunities to step forward and heroically move his lips and it was just as it had been since he invented this particular exercise for little birthday children, but really for himself, when he was no more than fourteen. But now it would seem to glisten like new (unless someone had viewed his club work or glimpsed the Dean Martin debut). And every other sly transgression he would attempt before cameras from that point forward would seem equally new, when in fact not much of it was, because the ideas had gestated in adolescence, then grew as he grew. And so the birth on record would be remembered as October 11, 1975—which was a Saturday night, which was the first Saturday night that NBC broadcast a radical live ninety-minute comedy and music insurrection that would change the way comedy and music would thereafter be experienced on television. Especially comedy. Saturday Night, unforgivingly beamed live as it unfolded from Rockefeller Center in New York (same building where Howdy Doody had worked), would come to be known as Saturday Night Live and it was designed for a new generation—edgily produced-written-and-performed by young turks for an audience of same—and its first years would become hallowed in retrospect, would be remembered as golden and culturally important and unmatchable in quality. Thus, all that transpired in its inaugural broadcast would be the stuff of time capsules, although no one could have guessed this when it happened. But there it was, all fairly indelible—the opening moments in which John Belushi played a befuddled immigrant (oh!) learning to speak English from writer Michael O’Donoghue by repeating, “I would like to feed yur fingerteeps to de wolverines,” before both collapsed in death; Chevy Chase’s first mock “Weekend Update” newscast; the first sketch involving costumed Killer Bees; guest host George Carlin’s first monologue (of three that he delivered during the show); fake commercials for Tryopenin aspirin and superabsorbant Mini-Pads; the short film by Albert Brooks; the offbeat playlet featuring new mutant Muppets created by Jim Henson; songs from Billy Preston and Janis Ian; the filmed drive-around-New-York segment in which pedestrians were bade to “Show Us Your Guns” and did; the nascent and grungily irreverent ensemble work of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, who were Belushi, Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Garrett Morris, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, and Laraine Newman; and the novelty act, as it was called, which appeared toward the latter moments of the show’s first half hour, in which a nervous man dropped a needle onto a phonograph and stood there waiting and received much laughter and applause and left.

  To get to that night, more people had to keep discovering him and he would keep doing what he did and had done—all of which happened as haphazardly as fate would decree. Quirky events along the path would accrue the heft of legend. Foreign Man would ditheringly appear on local television, making his hometown debut on The Joe Franklin Show, and the venerable Franklin would be rendered more disoriented than even Foreign Man. Not long thereafter, he was bumped at the last minute from Midday Live with Bill Boggs due to breaking news, then turned Cliftonian in his indignation and ranted at producers and refused to leave the studio premises until security came to handcuff him and escort him to pavement, about which he was inordinately pleased. On Columbus Day 1974, he gave Foreign Man a name—he wrote in his daybook my name: Baji Kimran—not that he ever told anyone, because he obviously needed to be Andy Kaufman in order to become famous. Later that month, Walsh booked him for a week at the Bijou in Philadelphia, where he opened for a young songwriter named Barry Manilow who was building heat around a new record called “Mandy” and Manilow would take the stage each night to find it strewn with debris which the audience had hurled at the opening act—“They just hated his guts,” Manilow said. “My whole job that week was to try to bring them back from the edge of revolution.” Andy also began a long association with a club called Pips in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, where he was actually paid
and additionally got to consume all the ice cream he wished (preferably hot fudge sundaes in beer mugs for better mixology)—and where he regularly dragged the waitresses and Seth Schultz, son of the owner George Schultz, to Coney Island at two in the morning so they could ride the Cyclone with him. “He always made us ride in the last car of the Cyclone because he said it provided the full-whiplash effect,” said Schultz. In November, Walsh sent him to Fort Lauderdale to open for the Supremes (minus Diana Ross) at a nightclub owned by his friend Bobby Van and, after his first set on the first night, the manager of the Supremes forbade him to step onstage again. Walsh spoke with Andy on the phone afterward and told him, “Look, Florida is the wrong audience for you, I made a mistake in letting you go down there, but—since you’re there anyhow—when that Bobby Van comes into your dressing room, I want you to do Crying Man.” (Van called Walsh forty-five minutes later and said, “Oh, Jim, I feel terrible! Poor guy’s having a nervous breakdown in his dressing room and won’t stop crying.”) There would be odd gigs in private men’s clubs and at the Continental Baths (whose largely gay male audience wore only towels or less) and at the Mr. Olympia Contest and at restaurants and niteries throughout the tristate area, in addition to dutiful nightly stops at Catch and the Improv, where the Friedmans had also hired him to emcee a weekly Sunday showcase of children performers. Silver Friedman remembered him arriving twenty-five minutes late on the second Sunday of the series and her saying to him, “Andy, next time you’re late, at least call us! We didn’t even know if you were coming!” And his eyes turned black and he countered, “Don’t yell!” “It was like my little reproach had stabbed him,” she said, “and suddenly he almost looked menacing, to the point where if I’d said another word he would have either walked out or killed me. Anger, I realized, was a very big issue for him deep down in there somewhere.”