Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  “What’s interesting is that with those doors closed, we actually chuckled a lot, we had real laughs. Then he would step out of the office and become the quiet wide-eyed guy again. But those eyes were like the eyes of a tiger. They were always looking around for fresh prey.”

  9

  Constantly risking absurdity / and death / whenever he performs above the heads / of his audience / the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime / to a high wire of his own making….

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti,

  from the poem “Constantly Risking Absurdity”

  Rarefied wind blew west, as it will, because west is where certain sorts of dreams go to flourish or to corrupt themselves or to die. He had been west and knew he would go again but knew not when or how. And so it happpened that Carl Reiner dropped into Catch a Rising Star with his wife, Estelle, in early October, before Saturday Night and Mighty Mouse expedited matters of renown. Reiner, by this time, was understood to be a comedic Midas whose deft touch helped gild the legends of Sid Caesar, of Mel Brooks’s Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man, and of sitcom archetypes Rob and Laura Petrie (he created The Dick Van Dyke Show, about the secret life of a comedy writer, in his own image); soon he would direct the films of a former Disneyland boy-magician named Steve Martin, whose own burgeoning career in stand-up comedy had already begun to incite a national stampede among young club jokesmiths. (Martin’s unprecedented enormity made him comedy’s first rock star—further inspiring a generation of enterprising or envious wisenheimers.) And so the Reiners experienced the bafflement that was Foreign Man with keen wonder—“Seeing him for the first time and not knowing what to expect was a wonderful thing,” Reiner would recall. “It was altogether new. We didn’t know what he was getting at. But we knew he knew those jokes were bad. Nobody could be that dumb. We quickly realized we were watching something very unusual and historic in comedy theater.” Then, of course, came the Crying, then de Elveece, then Reiner took him aside out on Second Avenue and pledged to help him, told him to call next time he came to the West Coast. (Dennis Raimondi, who witnessed the encounter, remembered Andy turning to him after Reiner walked away and saying, “I never go to the Coast. What’s he talking about?”) Reiner, meanwhile, would remember nothing about that conversation other than the wavering countenance he addressed—“When I talked to him, I saw outer space all over his face. His spacey face. His eyes weren’t zeroed in; they were everywhere else, as though he was thinking, Why am I talking to this man?” And days later Reiner was back in California, lunching with his nephew/manager George Shapiro and Dick Van Dyke in the NBC Burbank commissary, where he re-created beat for beat this new act he’d seen at Catch a Rising Star. Shapiro would say of his uncle’s enthusiasm, “He has absolute ear-recall and so he became Foreign Man and did everything Andy had done, to the letter. He said, ‘This guy’s got the most unique, unusual, crazy act I’ve ever seen. George, you’ve gotta help him!’” Shapiro allowed that he wasn’t sure that he wished to manage such an odd specimen, but said he would help him as best he could. And Van Dyke, who had been engaged in early development talks with NBC to do some new kind of variety show, absorbed all this and was heard to muse, “I wonder how we could use a fella like that.”

  Confluence of fates began interlinking at an accelerated clip, for Carl Reiner’s son, Rob Reiner, then went to see this Foreign Man in New York at his father’s insistence and heard the eemetation of de Archie Bunker telling de Meathead to get out of de chair and, since Rob Reiner actually played de Meathead on the sitcom All in the Family, and since he was scheduled to host one of the first Saturday Night broadcasts, he was dutifully impressed and told Andy, who, in turn, declared that he wanted Rob Reiner to be the first person to introduce him on the show, which caused certain havoc and embarrassment in that Lorne Michaels wanted Andy on the first show and Rob Reiner was slated to host the third, on which he could then introduce him again, never mind that Andy was very upset about the whole thing. Meanwhile, there was the Uncle Sammy Denoff connection, which Carl Reiner discovered when he next began to recreate the act for Uncle Sammy, who had cowritten countless episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show and whose manager was Uncle Carl’s nephew George Shapiro, and he stopped Carl Reiner in mid-sentence and said, “I know that kid! He considers me his uncle!” Also: In New York, Carl Reiner had given George Shapiro’s phone number as well as his own to Andy and one day in early November George picked up the phone and heard, “Ummmm …” and it was Andy calling to say that he was coming out to Los Angeles after his third appearance on Saturday Night—not one installment of which George had seen, since people in his crowd had dismissed the program as “a poor imitation of Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows” (on which Carl Reiner had become famous)—and this was all getting awfully providential. Andy told him that Budd Friedman was flying him out to work at the new West Hollywood Improv. Friedman, at that time, was eager to display the wares of his New York bumper crop in order to compete with Mitzi Shore’s lock on local talent at her Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard. Shapiro agreed without hesitation to come see Andy when he hit town and hung up and none of this was news to him since Budd Friedman had called him earlier that day to say there was this strange guy from the New York club that he was bringing out and this guy needed a manager and George ought to come see him work. “All of a sudden,” said Shapiro, “there was no escaping this person named Andy Kaufman.”

  Shapiro, for his part, was new to the management business, but a veteran of the agency business, where he had risen through the ranks of the New York William Morris office, starting out in the mail-room—the William Morris mailroom being the fabled bottom-rung incubator of innumerable future sharks and moguls. From there, he floated through the company as a temporary secretary, sometimes helping out visiting agents or agency clients, which was how he found himself answering phones for Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s manager, whenever the Colonel came through town. “The Colonel always lectured to me—‘Everything is money,’ he told me. ‘Everything depends on money. It’s all money. How much money did we make today?’” He apprenticed under various agents involved in various television projects and programs, which was how he found himself backstage at The Ed Sullivan Show when Elvis made his first appearance. “Elvis was the first person to ever call me sir. No one ever called me sir. I’m from the Bronx. They don’t use that term in the Bronx.” Shapiro was then and ever an exuberant little wiry guy with quixotic ideas, a born nurturer; he climbed onward, was brought to California in 1961, handling deals for Steve Allen’s short-lived ABC-TV variety show, where he introduced Allen’s head writer Bill Dana (a.k.a. José Jimenez) to the writing team of clients Sam Denoff and Bill Persky, for whom he also got jobs on The Dick Van Dyke Show staff. He then oversaw Denoff and Persky’s creation of the sitcom That Girl, starring Marlo Thomas, discovered Jim Nabors, who became Gomer Pyle, brokered much show business in general, and—perhaps most significantly—brought into the William Morris fold a no-nonsense deal-maker named Howard West, whom Shapiro had known since the third grade at P.S. 80 in the Bronx. And in 1974, when Shapiro struck out on his own to form a management company, it was West whom he lured to become his partner, so as to form Shapiro/West and Associates—a prototypical good cop/bad cop cooperative, wherein George coddled the talent and Howard drew blood from the buyers of talent. Their small client list a year hence included Uncle Carl and comic actor Marty Feldman and comedienne Ruth Buzzi and the animator who created Scooby-Doo and Uncle Sammy and some other writers and now George went to the Improv on Melrose Avenue to see the kid from New York with the Bombing and the Crying and de Elveece and—since heavens and lineage had dictated this—he was floored. “He just totally floored me.” Then he brought Howard West to see their future client. “I knew I wanted to sign him. I told Howard, ‘This guy—I get excited just sitting and watching him!’ So Howard came—Howard is kind of a buttoned-down businessman—and he just stared at me.” West would recall: “I didn’t hate it. Some of the material was very clever, smart,
funny. But you look at some of the other material and say, Are you kidding me? That’s the reaction I had—a mixed bag. I mean, Andy had a set of balls.”

  All of which was to say that Andy landed safely in California and the oiled machinery of momentum awaited him there and it engulfed him and he took to it completely and—though he would return to New York at every opportunity and always believe New York was where he belonged—California had claimed him and California would now decide what to do with him. He would submit as best he could and it would still be nothing if not a roiling artistic struggle, which would become apparent soon enough, but not too soon because now it was time to truly start becoming famous.

  So George expressed excitement, which was exciting, and became his manager before the year was out, focusing mostly on what they could do in the new year, and George had lots of ideas and was very, um, excitably excited about how things would work. Budd Friedman, meanwhile, had put him up in a small transient-hotel bungalow a few blocks from the club, off of Melrose, because he needed to showcase his New York import for several weeks, and that was where Little Wendy found him or where he found Little Wendy, who was Wendy Polland, a comical songwriter, whom he decided to name Little Wendy because her manner was sweet and loopy and befuddled and also because she was very short and had the voice of a precocious child. Andy had gotten her phone number from a TM person because he didn’t know many people in Los Angeles and the TM person had seen Wendy perform her songs at retreats and thought she could maybe work with Andy onstage somehow. And so she came over and didn’t want to take off her coat because she thought she was fat and she kept apologizing for herself—“He just loved that I hated myself, basically. Also, he liked that I had this ‘innocence’—not that I was innocent, but I made sure to be just as light and as pure as possible around him, because that was soooooo important to him.” She sort of fell in love with him right away was what happened, but he was oblivious of course and just wanted her to hang around with him, and so he called her every day and she came over and watched him eat breakfast while he watched Father Knows Best on television—“And he would just well up with tears every single day while he watched it. He would really cry.” They drove everywhere in her Volkswagen, which he also borrowed a lot, and went to Fellini movies and Luis Buñuel movies and Charlie Chaplin movies and by then she had become an onstage accomplice for him, usually pretending that she was his little sister and she would shake maracas and sing little songs with him like “Banana Boat” and “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” and “Sioux City Sue,” thoroughly perplexing/charming Improv audiences. But that came well after her unusual debut at the club which happened the very first day they met at the bungalow where, per her memory, he asked her, “‘Have you ever had a very terrible experience?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Something really awful?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Would you like to go onstage and talk about it?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ So that night he went to Budd and told him that I would go on ahead of him and I went up and talked about how this other fellow had dumped me because he wanted a tiger in bed and then I happened to go to his house and there was this girl who was everything I should have been and I was so depressed, I went home and took a bottle of Empirin with codeine and tried to kill myself and then I had to go to the emergency room and they gave me this stuff that made me gag and gag and gag—all these pathetic details. And then I got off and Andy went up right after me and he told a pathetic story about how he had become an alcoholic and his wife and kids had left him and he was now living in the street and asked the audience for spare change and who knows what else. Then he went up to Budd afterward and said, ‘What did you think?’ And Budd said, ‘I don’t have time for this.’”

  Early on, he would also bring Wendy to a benefit for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, where Carl Reiner was being honored as Man of the Year and they did something at the dais before a room full of doctors in tuxedos and wives in evening gowns and George was there and so was Norman Lear and Rob Reiner and others and whatever they did—a song or something, nobody would remember—it was awful and the room was silent and Carl Reiner sat mortified throughout—“Nobody laughed,” he said. I don’t know what the hell it was. I wanted to crawl under the table as it was happening. I had to avert my eyes. Nobody can describe it because everyone was afraid to look. If people weren’t in tuxedos, they might have hit him.” And Andy knew that he had died at the Cedars-Sinai event, that he and Wendy had bombed most horrifically, so afterward as they were heading for the elevators among the crowd of doctors et cetera who had hated him, he told her to play along with him and they got into an elevator with the disapproving people—“And he started beaming very happily and said, ‘We were fantastic! Did you see that audience! They loved us! We really killed!’ And he kept on that way while everyone around us just glared, you know?”

  He was not always Foreign Man, he was saying without saying, by becoming other selves, trying darkness, trying surprises. But they loved the Foreign Man—these industry people in the West, they loved his newness and his freshness and his cuteness, never knowing what he knew, which was that Foreign Man was only a small part of his repertory company and he worried (just a little) that they only wanted that part.

  They only wanted that part.

  George quickly started selling Foreign Man with notable success, had right away gotten him a shot on a prime-time ABC-TV variety special hosted by game show moderator Monty Hall, which aired in mid-January, wherein Foreign Man played a doorman inviting Hall into a tiny vacant nightclub in which Foreign Man was also the head-waiter, the emcee (Ladies and gentlemen, presenting in de nightclub—Andy!), the talent (de cannonball story), and the orchestra that followed (I am walking down de Swanee River la la la….). A week later, on January 23, Foreign Man debuted on The Tonight Show, largely because Steve Allen was substituting for Johnny Carson and Allen had been to the Improv to witness with delight the career progress of this strange fellow from the Boston hotel room. By way of introduction, he cleaved carefully to the conceit that was now becoming modus operandi, that Foreign Man could not be named Andy Kaufman, that he required special explanation in order to maintain his ruse. So Allen first spoke of the Improv as a place where anyone can get stage time and—“I happened to be there recently when a fellow—not really a performer—a fellow from the kitchen—a busboy or whatever—came up onstage, and he was quite entertaining, and I thought you might like to meet him. His name is just Andy. Would you give him a warm welcome and we’ll see what happens. Here he is—from the kitchen!” And what followed was de traffic and de cooking and de little boy named Jesus and de Archie Bunker and then he lost his place and started over with de traffic and de cooking, then but right now I will like to do for you de music record and he closed with Mighty Mouse which was met with bemused good cheer but not with the frisson of discovery that had charged through Studio 8H in New York three months earlier on Saturday Night, which worried him (just a little), and yet he had now been on The Tonight Show and that was ever its own greatest reward.

  Happily, he was back in New York that February, where on the last Saturday of the month he returned to Saturday Night, appearing toward the middle of the broadcast after host Jill Clayburgh had selected four unwitting audience members to climb onstage and participate in the television debut of Old MacDonald. He wore a dark coat and tie with sneakers and a straw farmer’s hat and voicelessly (again) pushed and pulled the genuinely stagestruck/giddy foils to and from the dead microphone where they gobble-gobbled and oink-oinked and viewers connected with their helpless giggling pantomimes and his bouncy letter-perfect control and it was all very pure and exciting, a manipulation that became instantly unforgettable. (He later explained the universal response to this particular feat—“There are no punchlines in it or in anything I do. It’s more like you’re laughing at Old MacDonald because it’s a concept, because these grown people are playing a game with me, and we’re having fun together, which I gues
s is funny. But I don’t expect anyone to laugh.”) And, again, he had left an artful imprint on the upstart comedy program—again, with a birthday party bit forged in his Great Neck den—which would now have to resonate for a while, since he would not return to Saturday Night until the following January, since Foreign Man was needed in California, where the importance and impact of Saturday Night would remain in question for some time to come.