Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  By winter’s end, he and Walsh drifted apart as casually as they had come together, with no hard feelings, although Walsh had grown concerned over Andy’s mental well-being—“He had come up to my office on Lexington Avenue and he started talking about what he really wanted to do, which was to play Carnegie Hall and then take the audience the next day over to a deli to have milk and cookies. And then he said that when he became really successful, what he most wanted to do was to buy the Atlantic Ocean and drain it and build a city there. And this was now bordering on … I mean, if this guy’s serious we’ve got some problems here.”

  Meanwhile, NBC had hired a bright young producer named Dick Ebersol from ABC Sports and saddled him with the task of creating a new live late-night comedy-variety program to replace the Saturday repeats of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. The show—whose content was still a mystery to all, including Ebersol—was to be up and running in Studio 8H of Rockefeller Center by the fall of 1975. So, in the holiday dusk of 1974, Ebersol began cruising New York clubs for talent and it was at Catch a Rising Star that he spied his first real quarry—“The first image I had of Andy will never go away—it was Mighty Mouse. I thought it was the damnedest thing I’d ever seen. It was like stepping into a whole other world—and I had no idea how many other worlds that I would ultimately go to with him.” Ebersol instantly befriended Andy, started riding regularly with him from Catch to the Improv, watched him spoon up the various parfait layers of his act, breakfasted with him and Elayne, all the while talking and talking about this new show which Andy would absolutely have to be part of. Around the same time, Ebersol convinced a young Canadian exile of rich comedic pedigree, Lorne Michaels, to come build and produce the show with him. Ebersol said of Michaels and their mission, “Our minds met in that the one thing we wanted to do was to take the language of young people and make it the language of television. We both had this philosophy that television was always at least ten years behind what was actually happening. Television was very risk aversive.” By March 1975, seven months before their debut, he informed his new partner of the first risk he wished to put forth—“I told Lorne that I had one guest booked for the first show—Andy Kaufman. Lorne had no idea who he was.” Michaels then went to Catch with talent scout John Head to see for himself, then went ten or fifteen times more, and was ever mesmerized—“It was as beautiful a thing as you could witness,” he would recall. “Aside from being funny, he wasn’t enmeshed in the show business of it—show business being that it was simply an act. There seemed to be some other commitment, something very pure and more personal about what he was doing. And it was simply arresting.”

  Also that March, a wily filmmaker named Larry Cohen came to the Improv in search of someone with a “certain crazy look” who could infiltrate the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day Parade in police uniform—marching in line with actual NYPD cops, as though he were a member of the force—then appear to go berserk firing a phony gun at random, then pretend to be shot down, then fall to the ground, mouthing the words “God told me to,” and play dead. He quickly spotted a worthy candidate onstage and Andy said he would very much like to do it. He had, he said, some experience at wielding fake guns and pretending to die. Cohen’s project was to be a made-for-television detective movie called God Told Me To, wherein various New Yorkers believe they hear the voice of God asking for bloodshed and they comply in accordance. (“Strangely enough,” Cohen would say, “this was before the Son of Sam murders, but Andy bore an amazing likeness to David Berkowitz, the real guy who heard voices and killed people.”) Cohen told him where to show up on the day of the parade, whereupon a police uniform would be provided for him. Cohen asked, “So, what size jacket do you wear?” “I don’t know.” “Well, what size shirt do you wear?” “Um, I don’t know.” “Shoe size?” “I don’t know.” Cohen said, “You’re a grown man. How can you not know what size clothes you wear?” Andy said, “I wear my father’s old clothes.”

  A uniform awaited in any case on St. Patrick’s Day and he donned it—“And we left him alone for a few minutes while I went to organize the crew and then I came back to find him walking around as a policeman and he was goading all these Irishmen behind barricades on the sidewalk, all of them half drunk already. He had his police cap on backwards and he was making faces at them, deliberately provoking everybody. They wanted to jump over the barricades and just beat the shit out of him. So I start pulling them away, shouting, ‘Get back! He’s an actor! He’s not a cop!’” Anyway, he stepped into the parade and fell in with marching cops who knew nothing of what was happening (since Cohen had gotten no permit to film) and he pantomimed his killing spree and dropped dead as though riddled with bullets as cameras rolled and police marched onward. “The funny part,” said Cohen, “was that there must have been five thousand cops on the street and yet nobody bothered us because they just assumed that if we were doing this, we must have had permission from somebody. Otherwise, who would go out in the middle of five thousand police officers and start firing a weapon? It was an exercise in sheer audacity. Andy, of course, thought this was absolutely the greatest thing he’d ever done!”

  Having secured his first professional acting credit—which would amount to four minutes of eventual screen time—he was summoned in April to Philadelphia, where his Grahm cohort Burt Dubrow now worked on the staff of the nationally syndicated Mike Douglas Show. Just as with the Elvis scheme in Chicago, Dubrow had cooked up another plot. The show’s producers had made a running gag of tormenting Robert Goulet whenever he guested with Douglas and now Goulet was set to appear again and Dubrow believed that Laughing Man, posed as a boom-microphone operator, would properly devastate the singer. So Laughing Man was in position as Goulet was asked to sing “The Nearness of You” to the wives of four hockey players and so he began to sing and Laughing Man could be heard shrieking in hyena fashion and Goulet stopped and said “What is he laughing at?” and Mike Douglas approached Laughing Man who gulpingly indicated that someone in the control booth was saying funny things into his headset and Douglas scolded him and Goulet started singing again and the shrieking also started again as viewers now watched the boom operator convulse in seizures, then sprawl across the stage gasping idiotically, ruining the song, forcing a commercial break, pleasing everyone except Robert Goulet fans and four hockey wives. Certain redemption came in the final segment of the show, however, which had Douglas and guests—Goulet and the blind guitarist José Feliciano and David Brenner—perched on a line of stools and there, on the farthest stool, was Laughing Man. Douglas and Feliciano and Goulet casually sang a couple of songs and everyone swayed to the music and then Douglas said, “We’re gonna hear from Andy Kaufman, who was our Laugher earlier in the show—Andy, what are you going to do?” And Foreign Man said he would eemetate, ehh, de Elveece Presley, then got up with back to cameras, combed hair, sneered over shoulder, turned and performed “Jailhouse Rock” while Feliciano sang backup and Goulet’s jaw dropped and Brenner snapped fingers proudly (knowing what he already knew) and Douglas sputtered at finish, “That’s incredible!” And it had been as though no one else was really there except him, as though these actual famous entertainer people who writhed happily on stools were invisible to him. It had been as though he was playing to old bedroom walls where only the cameras really mattered.

  Deep silence was necessary before what was to come and that summer he went to Switzerland, to a tiny resort town called Thyon-sur-Sion, and he would meditate there for two months with the others, then wander parts of Bavaria with Dennis Raimondi before what was to come. Maharishi would not be in attendance until later, which was fine, because there would be endless hours to pass with good bliss buddies Dennis and Phil Goldberg and Dean Sluyter, who would listen to him talk about his passions in his inimitably innocent way. They heard about wrestling—Elayne would send him wrestling magazines so as to keep him informed—and about his Huey Williams book, which was still forming itself in notes and drafts. “His favorite topics,” Sluyt
er said, however, “were how many Swiss chocolate candy bars he’d eaten each day and how many times he had masturbated. In both cases, if he was to be believed, it counted out to be about a dozen.” Then Maharishi finally showed up and Andy—who had been hearing a great deal about the value of celibacy and how expending sexual energy outside of marriage was depleting to good meditators, which was alarming since he liked sex very extremely much—decided to go to the microphone and ask His Holiness once and for all, in no uncertain terms, if this was true. And he used words like semen and sperm and spilling and penis and ejaculation and Maharishi had previously preferred to skirt this indelicate issue and he tried now to change the subject but Andy did not relent. Said Goldberg, “No one had ever been impertinent enough to persist in this line of questioning, but Andy was truly curious and meant no harm. And he was forcing Maharishi into a yes-or-no circumstance. A lot of people were muttering for him to stop and others of us thought, Go ahead! Someone’s finally got the balls to ask about it!” And so Maharishi sighed lengthily and, as there was no way out, traversed the subject more didactically than he had ever before and basically said that, yes, once the energy in the semen was wasted it was gone forever, which was not great news for Andy, who knew he would have to make up for such drainage in other ways. But everyone would remember this exchange every bit as vividly as the crazyman inquisition. And Foreign Man, meanwhile, took daily walks to the village, where he taught little Swiss children the language of Caspiar and he would lead them around in their lederhosen and they would chant eee-bi-da eee-bi-da yak-ta-bay eee-bi-da and sing “Aba-Dabbi.” Then they would all eat chocolate. And when it was time to fly home, his suitcase was too heavy, which meant paying a tariff, so he stood at the ticket counter in Zurich and began taking clothes out of his suitcase as airline people and Dennis Raimondi watched. “He put on three pairs of pants, four sweaters, and three jackets to wear on the flight,” said Raimondi. “And he never broke a sweat all the way home.”

  Lorne Michaels put him on camera and taped an obligatory audition, not that it mattered, because he was firmly understood to be part of the birth-march of Saturday Night, but everyone else had to do it as well, so he recited “MacArthur Park” not as an old Jew but as himself, which wasn’t really very funny which he never tried to be anyway. He sat with a forearm propped on a desktop at 30 Rockefeller Center and spoke the lyrics twice, pouring it on just a tad in the second rendering (with dramatic closing-of-eyes in anguished places), and Lorne thanked him and said, “You want to do something else?” And he said, “Um, okay,” then looked down, then looked up and became dew-dripping mushmouthed hillbilly and drawled, “Fasterna-speedn-bullet-mo-pahrfulna-loc’motive-abletuh-leap-tawl-buildnsna-sanglebown—Look upna sky, it’sa birrrd, it’sa playyyun, nope, it’s Suprmayn, yeeppppp, Suuuprmayn-strayunge-vizzter-frum-enuthr-planet-who-cameta-Earth-withpahrsnabilitiesfarbeeyon’thoza-mortal-meyen—” And when he was finished a smattering of applause echoed in the room and he smiled shyly and got up and left.

  He became a fixture around the show’s seventeenth-floor production offices in the weeks before the October premiere. He did not fraternize as much as lurk. Relatively few staff or cast members knew who he was or what he was or what he was supposed to do—although John Belushi had become an early true believer after having seen the conga-crying in clubs. Anne Beatts, a newly recruited writer, first encountered him slumping in Lorne’s antechamber—“I thought, Oh, man, is this the kind of person they’re hiring? I don’t know if I want to be a part of this! He was so twitchy and weird and had bad skin. He looked very nerdy and geeky. I had severe doubts about the show from the beginning and my initial impression of Andy was the first of them.” Very late on the Friday night before the broadcast, however, her opinion changed when she saw him rehearse, which he almost didn’t because the rehearsals dragged on interminably and he had yet to perform a run-through of Mighty Mouse for the crew and finally he said he had to leave. “And it was like—‘Wait, you can’t leave!’” Beatts would recall. “And he said, ‘No, I have to go if I’m going to make the last train back to Great Neck.’ Lorne told him, ‘No, Andy, we need you here.’ So he said, ‘Well, I guess I could get my mother to come pick me up….’”

  On October 11, he meditated twice, locking himself in the office of head writer Herb Sargent—once before dress rehearsal and again before the live broadcast. Both times he taped a note on the door —Please do not disturb me while I meditate, Andy Kaufman. All around him, panic and mayhem swirled as would become customary Saturday Night crucible. Then all panic escalated after the dress rehearsal, which went desperately over the ninety-minute limit. “There was a lot of weeping and wailing and fierce argument,” Michaels would recall. “We had to make cuts and one of the choices was to cut Andy. And that was the one thing I wasn’t going to do. Andy was sacrosanct. More than any one thing in that first show, he represented the spirit of what we were trying to do. Not only was it—in the language of the time—a hip act, but the very hippest aspect was that he only lip-synched the part of Mighty Mouse. That was the essence of avant-garde.” Said Ebersol, “We put him on in the first half hour because we felt it was a killer. And it killed. The audience went nuts. When the show was over, the commercial parodies and Andy were the only things that people talked about. And he knew at that moment that that was it for the piece. Mighty Mouse had killed night after night for years in the clubs—but now television had eaten it up and it wasn’t going to be a surprise anymore.” Nevertheless, he was pleased enough with himself that night to consume as much ice cream as could be found in midtown Manhattan.

  The following week’s show was built around the reunion of singers Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, which left little room for much more than cursory sketches. But he was brought back most purposefully for the third and fourth broadcasts to lend presence and continuity. On October 25, again in the first half hour, guest host Rob Reiner introduced him (whereas stentorian announcer Don Pardo had done so in voice-over the first time) and he wore exactly what he had worn before—Foreign Man’s checked sport coat, white jeans, black dickie, pink shirt—and he stood next to the phonograph again and moved his mouth to “Pop Goes the Weasel,” mirthfully evincing the larger vocal role of playful father to antic daughter. But his own voice, once again, was never heard. Then, on November 3, Candice Bergen—who had beheld his act more than once at the Improv—announced, “Boys and girls, this is a man I love very much. The word genius comes to mind, but I’ll let you decide for yourselves.” And here was Foreign Man at last, more tentative than ever, as pitch-perfect Bombing began with the cannonball story moving into his eemetation of de Archie Bunker —Ehh, you stupid you are so stupid everybody ees stupid, ehh, get out of my chair, Meathead, de dingbat get into de kitchen making de food, ehh everybody is so stupid, tenk you veddy much—at which point he lost his place and fell into a chasm of silent squirming, then in feeble effort to cover he offered to dance and sing and did (la-la-laaa!). Next, most historically in the realm of live television, he uttered the words ehh could we stop de tape? Then—I think we should turn off de TV…. I don’t know if you are laughing at me or weeth me … but I am trying to do my best but I forgot what I was going to do…. And so, of course, he blithered and wept, emitting the rhythmic yelping breaths that brought his hands to the conga which he beat into manna which was, um, exquisite.

  And within that four-week span of live broadcast reckoning, he had become more dependable than most anything else on the program and he remained a mystery but was also now a mystery of burgeoning fame, which was the plan all along. “I got to know him in the way that I get to know pretty much everyone I worked with on the show,” Michaels said. “Because of the pressure, there’s a kind of unavoidable intimacy. He had this real enthusiasm for what he was doing and he was very gentle. We never really talked at length—he’d just sort of tell me what he would do. Even before the show went on the air, we’d gotten to a place of trust. If he was enthusiastic about something he wanted to d
o, I didn’t have to know much more. Within the club of the world I lived in, he was the edge—probably more than anybody else I can think of in comedy. There were lots of people doing variations on Lenny Bruce or doing what Richard Pryor had done, but here was a guy coming out of a completely original place. And you had to stand back and simply respect that.”

  And it was during those weeks and then in the months to come (then years thereafter) that he dwelt transparently amongst Saturday Night Live rabble, a separate and benign entity who came and did and scored and left—without sharing the secret of himself with more than a few of them. “I probably never spoke more than two words to him,” said Beatts, and the same was true throughout the ranks. But there was one notable exception toward the beginning and that was Chevy Chase, the first breakout star in the cast, who projected something akin to likable smugness (“I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not!”) and prep school suavity, which were traits diametrically opposite to any possessed by Andy. But Chase, who also became a head writer, had moved into Herb Sargent’s seventeenth-floor office, which had a couch, and with the couch came the meditator who had already claimed the room as his deep-silence sanctum. “There were times when I’d walk in and he’d just be lying on the couch or doing some kind of yoga thing, or not,” said Chase. “But I was so self-confident and sort of disarming—basically I just didn’t give a shit—that I had no compunctions about simply facing the obvious with him. And I think the fact that I truly didn’t give a shit made him comfortable to just be Andy. He knew there was no foolin’ me—so we were able to talk about things. I remember engaging him in conversations about his method of preparation, his general health and well-being, his sanity, his acne. I asked him if he knew that he was funny and if he took pleasure in the responses he got to his work. Because he never really appeared to enjoy anything. And he said, yes, that he truly enjoyed the responses. He was always testing onstage, searching—is this funny or is it not funny or is it just odd? And did he care if it was funny? You know what? He did care. I once asked him, ‘Do you know how brilliant you are?’ And he turned shy again. He said he didn’t know if anyone ‘got it’—if they laughed at him or with him. But I think it meant something to him that I asked. I was sort of the cat’s pajamas at the time and he respected that. But he also looked at what I was doing as rather pedestrian, I think, considering where he was headed.