Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  He waited while George hatched new plans for him, which meant much work at the Improv, where comic actor Harvey Korman became enamored of Andy and of Jay Leno and brought his friend Johnny Carson in to see them and this of course was not unlike bringing the mountain to Muhammad, if not more so, because Johnny Carson was king, unimpeachably such, and could shift the course of an entertainer’s life by dispensing one wink and pressing his thumb to forefinger which meant okay-penultimate, which meant fortune and/or sitcom would follow most certainly. (It had worked that way already for New York club alums Freddie Prinze and Gabe Kaplan, who respectively starred in hit shows Chico and the Man and Welcome Back, Kotter.) Andy, of course, knew this and was oblivious to this and having Carson there was, um, fine. And Johnny watched and laughed at both men—the one with the big jaw who would years later take his desk and the one with the foreign accent who futzed and banged drums—and told Budd Friedman, “Yes, they’re funny, but they don’t have six minutes.” Friedman would remember, “Ironically, Jay did ten minutes and Andy did like fourteen”—but what Carson meant was six isolated minutes of imperviously packaged punchlines that would work on The Tonight Show. “Johnny wanted more jokes, less attitude,” said Leno, who was dejected, but Andy was less so since he had already appeared on Carson’s program, albeit sans Carson. Anyway, George soon lured comedy writer-producers Bob Einstein and Allan Blye to the club, knowing that they were in the process of creating an inventive variety series for Dick Van Dyke to be part of NBC’s fall television schedule. They decided without pause that Foreign Man had great possibilities and envisioned him in a running gag wherein he would interrupt and annoy Van Dyke week after week with eemetations and jokes and music records and so they invited him to come perform his material for the star and writing staff and somehow he felt compelled to read aloud from The Great Gatsby at the outset of the meeting, which came at the end of a long day, which had the writers and Van Dyke shooting baleful daggers at the two producers throughout the recitation. “I thought the guys were going to kill Andy first and then kill us,” said Blye. “Dick thought we had lost our minds,” said Einstein. But nobody left (though there was some movement toward doing so) and Foreign Man set aside the reading in order to weep and to play congas and to exude innocence and Van Dyke began to laugh—“Why I laughed I don’t know,” he would remember. “He was strangely psychological. He liked to lead you one way and then suddenly turn the tables around and make you angry. And then vice versa.”

  George nailed down a deal to have him appear in all thirteen episodes the network had ordered of Van Dyke and Company, which debuted September 20 and left the air due to low ratings on December 30 and won an Emmy award in the category of variety programming nonetheless. Tapings commenced in late summer and he was introduced in the first episode as pink-jacketed Mr. Andy, finalist in a Fonzie look-alike contest, placing second behind a strapping African-American fellow, about which he protested to Van Dyke—But he don’t even look like de Fonzie! I think you don’t like me you make fun of me because I am from another country! And to appease him Van Dyke grudgingly allowed him to do a song or a joke so I can be on de television and every week thereafter he returned during moments most inopportune—but-but you said I could come back—to vex Van Dyke, who would angrily relent to each transgression, often humiliated in the presence of such guest stars as John Denver and Carl Reiner and Chevy Chase and Lucille Ball, who declared, “I know who this young man is—I’ve seen him on your show many times and I think he’s just sensational,” before she too stormed off in a mock huff. And after each prickly on-air negotiation with Van Dyke, Mr. Andy the Foreign Man proceeded to expend his complete inventory of surefire bits, performing Mighty Mouse and Old MacDonald and Pop Goes the Weasel and a record of a clucking operatic chicken and all Caspian folk songs and two numbers in which he led a faux-tribal percussion consortium called the Bay City Street Conga Band while singing the Disney anthem “It’s a Small World” and, on another week, the novelty tune “I Go Mad When I Hear a Yodel” (throughout which he yodeled to conga beats) and he also did three Elveece transformations and countless eemetations and Bombings and Cryings and all of his jokes with de punches—and he arguably became the most popular element of the show. One week guest Freddie Prinze surprised Van Dyke by donning the pink jacket and lugging out the phonograph and saying Tenk you veddy much I would like to do for you some eemetations, which further evinced the character’s happy saturation upon the audience. But he knew that he was corrupting his material by lending it to a context not of his own design, diluting the emotional comic-drama of each piece just to rankle the star who was gamely pretending to lose control of his own show. Einstein was forced to constantly assuage him—“You had to spend time with Andy to convince him to take what he did and put it in a form that made sense to the show. There had to be a reason for him to come out and interrupt Dick, rather than just introduce him as a stand-alone player. And we needed Dick to participate in some of his material, which no one had ever done before. So Andy was very concerned.”

  Therefore, most of his off-camera hours on taping days were spent in the quieter corridors of NBC’s Burbank headquarters, where he sat on a pink blanket and meditated. Van Dyke would vividly recall the instance of a heated exchange with staff members outside their studio during which “we looked down and there was Andy on his blanket in the middle of the hall meditating. We didn’t disturb him at all. He never blinked an eye or seemed to even know we were there. But he was extremely shy, very polite, very respectful. He very rarely said anything unless he was spoken to.”

  Clifton was called upon to obfuscate the sweet-chirping-tenking-dithering-whirlwind of it all which showed no sign of slowing. The little innocent fellow was once again pushing doors open, the largest doors he had ever known, and this was fine but also terrifying because he wanted to display more of his secret people and nobody wanted anything inside of him but the cute one—George said he would have to let Foreign Man establish him and keep on establishing him because not everybody watched every program on which he appeared and there were plenty of forums to repeat his bits and stars were only made on their ability to deliver and deliver with familiar consistent material—and it just didn’t feel right. But it had to be right. He meditated in the deep silences to quell the fears and really what did he have to fear? Becoming famous? But still Clifton was needed—at the Improv, at least, certainly—but Clifton was never far and had already been screaming at rude and boisterous neighbors from the veranda of the Bay Street apartment he had taken in Santa Monica with a TM friend named Andy Dickerman. “He would be yelling things like, ‘Hey, I got some chickies here and I need some quiet so put a sock in it over there already because I’m a good friend of Frank Sinatra’s and know some people you don’t wanna know if you know what I mean!’” said Dickerman. “He did it even when the situation didn’t really require it, when people weren’t all that noisy. I think he was just practicing his stuff.” And Clifton was back at the club with a vengeance while Foreign Man made hay on television, and California crowds truly loathed him. Said Budd Friedman, “I became an expert on body language from behind because I’d watch the men’s shoulders to see if they were going to attack Andy, or Tony, onstage. I’d come up behind them and go, ‘No no no, it’s only a joke!’”

  And, of course, there was no Andy when there was Clifton, which became an increasing irritant to comics who had dwelt in trenches with him long enough to feel deserving of conspiracy rights. Freddie Prinze entered the club one night, saw Clifton, said, “Hey, Andy”—and Clifton lurched for him and said, “That’s Clifton, punk! It’s Tony Clifton! It’s guys like me who made it possible for young punks like you to get on television! You should have some respect! It’s Tony Clifton!” And he poked and poked at Prinze’s chest while he harangued until Prinze grabbed Clifton’s wrist and threw him face-first against the wall and wrenched the wrist upward and upward into his vertebrae and pounded Clifton’s head against the plaster, and another voice
desperately emerged from Clifton’s mouth, screaming, “It’s Andy! It’s Andy! I’m Andy, okay?!” Jay Leno would also greet Andy every time he saw Clifton, who always sputtered back, “I don’t know who Andy is, punk!” Leno finally tried a different tack—“I decided to appeal to him in a way that would provoke any comedian: I told him that somebody stole his act. I said, ‘Hey, Tony, when you see Andy, tell him I saw a guy last night at another club doing the whole Tony Clifton bit! Same mean-spirited bad singing—everything! It was unbelievable.’ Suddenly, Tony’s eyes turned into Andy’s eyes, and they were full of panic. Then I heard Andy Kaufman say, ‘What guy? Where did you see this?’ I cracked up—‘Aha! Gotcha, Andy!’”

  Clifton found a regular Los Angeles foil—which meant someone to play poor sympathetic schlub whom he could call up onstage to insult and douse with a glass of water, thus incite audience venom—in the person of Mel Sherer, a rotund (Hey, fatso, c’mere) comedy writer for Rich Little and Jimmie Walker who shared Andy’s surrealist bent, which was established upon their first meeting at the Improv. Andy said hello and Mel said hello and Andy said hello and Mel said hello and Andy said hello and Mel said hello and Andy said more hellos and Mel paused and said more hellos and then Andy said hello? and Mel paused even longer and said goodbye and walked away and they started working together the next day, which meant Andy would go to Mel’s apartment and bounce ideas off him. One day as they worked, Mel’s phone rang and Andy answered the phone as Clifton and it was a woman friend of Mel’s from the East Coast who was coming to visit and Clifton kept her on the phone and poured on the charm (such as it was) and invited her to his place in Santa Monica and she accepted and he rushed home to greet her as Clifton, clad in a bathrobe, and told her he was taking her to the beach and he changed into a suit and tie and he grabbed some towels and they went to the beach, which was empty—all of which Andy later told Sherer—“And he said they had to find the perfect spot on the beach, so he made her move the towels at least fifty times and he was still fully dressed in his suit. Finally, they settled a spot under the lifeguard tower and he said, ‘Okay, let’s go now,’ and they left—and she just went along with it for some reason. They went back to his place and he said, ‘Do you know anything about the Belva Tessel?’ And she said no. He said, ‘Well, it’s a Swiss massage thing and you do it in the shower. You wanna see what it’s like?’ And she said okay and they took off their clothes and got in the shower and he just started making up this massage technique. Finally, of course, they ended up having sex, which was the point. The next day, she called me and said, ‘I really liked your friend Tony.’”

  And his boyhood yearnings for women and their supple flesh had grown exponentially in California (along with his early television renown) and he dated as many women he could attract with his innocence and his awkward lovability and, though he preferred being some form of himself as he won their affections, there were instances (he said) in which he spent nights or weekends of carnality without shedding the cloak of Foreign Man. He squired various TM women or actresses, taking them to see late showings of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (which he loved) and to vegetarian restaurants and to Chinese restaurants and to Duke’s coffee shop for chocolate cake and to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm to repeatedly ride the roller coasters—and, because he didn’t have a car, Little Wendy usually chaffeured obligingly. “As soon as he started going out with a woman, he would say, ‘Now, don’t get serious!’” she would recall. “Some of them got really insulted. He also liked to tell them that he was really special and that he couldn’t have a serious relationship because he had so many big plans. He once told me that this much tongue—like a half inch—makes all the difference. In other words, once he put that extra half inch into a kiss, it changed the whole dynamic of the relationship. He hated that he needed to be with women, because he didn’t like the mind games they played with him. Which I guess was sort of ironic, wasn’t it?”

  Cindy Williams, the actress who had just begun acquiring fame as Shirley in the ABC-TV sitcom Laverne and Shirley, met him at the Improv that autumn and had already been smitten with his work on Saturday Night. “From the moment I first saw him [on the program], I just wanted to be a part of whatever that mirthful wonderful magic was that he did,” she would recall. And he was not opposed to letting her peek behind his facades (because, after all, she was getting famous too and was very extremely pretty) and they began a casual mirthful affair over the course of weeks that grew into an easy friendship and she would drive him to the Improv and he would meditate in her car and sometimes he would get into Clifton character at her home before going to the club, which never thrilled her. “I couldn’t stand Tony Clifton,” she said. “He’d say, ‘Once I’m this character, I’m not going to come out of it.’ There was a tinge of scariness about that. I couldn’t find the delineation and he wouldn’t betray it. I’d threaten him—‘You either stop being Tony right now or I’m not giving you a ride or I won’t go grocery shopping with you! That’s it!’ I hated it.” She would pull his hair and once punched him in the stomach to make him stop. “He could get a lot more out of me if he’d be Elvis. His private Elvis made me melt—it just superimposed itself over him. I’d say, ‘Let Elvis try to seduce me.’” But he brought her to the club on New Year’s Eve to heckle Clifton—“Oh! And I want you to do it with your French accent,” he instructed, “and when you jump on Tony’s back, you should bite his ear”—and she did as told and shrieked from her table “in this terrible French accent” and called him a muzz-aire fuck-aire and pounced and bit and was so grotesquely shrill that the audience hated her more than they hated him. “When it was over, Budd Friedman took us aside and said, ‘Out! Both of you! Out, now!’” Shortly thereafter in New York, he enlisted her to go-go dance behind him at Catch a Rising Star while he sang “Oklahoma”—whose execution he had recently perfected by performing it while bouncing up and down and throwing his fist into the air slightly ahead of and behind the relentless beat, which elicited laughter that had/had not surprised him. Anyway, the supplementary effect of a go-go dancing television actress—“doing the jerk and the hitchhike”—seemed to overwhelm the crowd. “They were,” she said, “like, stunned.”

  So they wanted Foreign Man so they got him. Van Dyke and Company was gone, but he was not and, throughout 1977, the ingratiaton crusade marshaled itself across the landscape without mercy, beginning by way of bombardment. He returned to Philadelphia to appear with Mike Douglas and cohost Bernadette Peters on January 12 and Douglas introduced him to viewers with reference to the Van Dyke show as “a visitor in our country” and he sat down, still draped in his makeup bib, and indicated that he had seen the horror film Carrie the night before—thees little girl nobody like her and at de end they make fun of her and but then she kill everybody—and he read aloud from a children’s Dick and Jane book, as Douglas helped him with difficult words like funny, then discussed his way with women, telling Peters, If I went with you I would open de door, and he performed Mighty Mouse. Three nights later, he was back at last on Saturday Night, now well into its second season, and announced after eemetations of President Carter (Hello I am Meester Carter President of de United States) and of his Aunt Esther (You come eento de house right now) that he would do de Elveece, which he had never done on the program, the mere mention of which drew approving hoots and yays from the audience, which was an altogether new phenomenon (nightclubs notwithstanding). He wore the sleek new rhinestone-studded black jumpsuit with vast white winged collar that had been designed for the Van Dyke appearances and he sang “Love Me” and “Blue Suede Shoes” and summoned to the performance an altogether taut electric precision rarely deployed in earlier outings and George said it was his best televised Elvis ever and would always maintain that opinion. And the following Monday, his second appearance on the daytime talk show Dinah! aired, wherein he was oddly introduced by Dinah Shore as Andy Kupman visitor-from-another-country (she greeted him on the first occasion by gasping, “My, you have s
uch startling blue eyes!” to which he replied tenk you veddy much). For this appearance, taped a month earlier in Las Vegas, he unseated Marvin Hamlisch at the piano, where Dinah gathered with Bob Hope and Sammy Davis, Jr., and performed a “love song” (Give me a keess keess keess, vy do you do me like thees thees thees?) and made smooching noises into the microphone during which Dinah and Hope and Sammy exchanged wary glances before he became de Elveece, which forced Sammy to bend over, as was his inclination, to convulse gleefully.

  And that Friday—because certain walls had tumbled, thanks to Van Dyke—Johnny Carson welcomed him onto The Tonight Show, noting, “This is the first time we’ve really met,” and indulged him with a kindly measured patience usually reserved for minors or the elderly. But there he sat beside the king of the night and Grandma Pearl watched in New York and Grandma Lillie watched in Florida and Stanley and Janice watched in Great Neck and, if there had been any lingering doubt about their boy and his eccentric dreams, it vanished in this seismic moment. No showcase in America—it would be forever understood—mattered more than this showcase when Carson presided over his own program. And so he had meditated long and hard in his dressing room (with Do Not Disturb warning posted on door) before he stepped out to bask in the evanescent shimmer of great opportunity. And he was flawlessly flawed as necessity demanded. Carson asked, “Where are you from originally?”

  FM: From Caspiar. Eet’s an island.

  JC: Caspiar?

  FM: Caspiar.

  [One audience member applauds as though zealous with native pride. Carson casts a surprised withering eye toward the assemblage.]

  JC: That’s a first in show business!

  Which provoked a large laugh among all, perplexing Foreign Man, who clearly perplexed Carson, especially when he did not drop character during the commercial break, before which the geography of Caspiar was explained and after which came discussion of his quest for American citizenship and reading skills—he demonstrated again with a Dick and Jane recitation as Carson helped him with the word funny. Then he performed jokes and eemetations, losing his place with de Ed Sullivan, starting over again before chanting a cappella the Caspian harvest song and Carson said, “That’s very good, Andy. Very, very amusing. You’ll have to come back with us again sometime.” And after the taping, Carson stuck his head into Andy’s dressing room and said, “You’re very funny, kid. I don’t understand how you do it, but you’re very funny.” And Foreign Man responded tenk you veddy much. And Carson shook his head and winked anyway.