by Bill Zehme
Fred Silverman said noooooooooooooo way would ABC broadcast that thing, even in late night, and so it just sat there and this became desperately depressing to all involved but to none more than Andy, who could not understand the concerns. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not political or dirty. I tell people at the beginning to shut off their sets, but that cannot be the reason…. Everything I do is very innocent, very G-rated. My special could be shown on Saturday morning and appreciated by little kids…. Everybody tells me the Howdy Doody piece is too long. But I loved it. Howdy Doody is my friend.” But it was, they/Silverman said, too off-the-wall and too far-out and too whatever else and George eventually took it to NBC and Lorne Michaels wanted to run it in the Saturday Night Live time slot and it was all but a done deal when suddenly Fred Silverman became entertainment president of NBC and said noooooooooooooo way would NBC broadcast that thing. But by this time he was Latka on ABC and the new entertainment president there, Tony Thomopoulis, decided to just put it on the air, almost without warning, at eleven-thirty on Tuesday, August 28, 1979—and more than two years had elapsed since it was made—and it actually slightly outrated The Tonight Show on NBC. And the critics who wrote about it seemed to mostly admire it although lots of them also seemed a little worried about Andy. Janet Maslin in The New York Times called it “a generally crisp, often very funny program that in no way endangers Mr. Kaufman’s comic elusiveness. When any of the several characters Mr. Kaufman impersonates here suddenly proclaims himself ‘the real me,’ rest assured that he is lying.” But then Marvin Kitman in Newsday called the Howdy segment “embarrassingly private” and said the show was “vintage 1977 Kaufman, before he started to turn.” (Oh!) But then Kay Gardella in the New York Daily News called him “a comedian whose star is rising faster than his comedy repertoire…. You get the uneasy feeling when you’re watching him that he’s going to run out of gas before the show ends…. What he needs is more material.” But then Howard Rosenberg in the Los Angeles Times said it was “absurdity carried sometimes to the point of brilliance, sometimes to the point of tedium…. Watching this for a while, it becomes obvious … Andy Kaufman should be wearing a straitjacket.” But, of course, they were saying those things more than two years later.
Elvis would die twelve days after this—which was Andy’s August 4 appearance with Johnny Carson which would be his final appearance with Johnny Carson—which was the first time that he was the real him on The Tonight Show. Carson could not seem to connect at all with the real him. “It’s a little difficult to explain what Andy does,” Carson said by way of introduction. “He will do it when he comes out.” So he came out with eemetations and Elveece and threw pieces of the new white costume into the crowd until he got down to the I LOVE GRANDMA sweatshirt (which Pearl and Lillie separately kvelled about, Wearing it, can you imagine, in front of Johnny like this?) and then his eyes became vacant and wandered into and around the cosmos and he sat and talked (hesitantly) with Carson who mentioned the night Harvey Korman first brought him to see Andy (neglecting to share his initial appraisal) and then Carson asked if that foreign character made him feel more secure (since this real him character did not seem so secure since Carson was having to pry spontaneity and remedial discourse out of him) and Andy said, “Well, sometimes.” (Panel chatter with comedians was never so damned stymied as this was.) And, after a little more genial awkwardness, Carson seemed most eager to send him over to his conga drums for a harvest song after which he was gone. Mercifully. Carson later relayed to his producers, not in an ambiguous way, that maybe Andy would be better off visiting with guest hosts in the future.
And then Elvis died.
Kathy Utman—whose voice produced bells in Andy’s head and who was put on Earth to spread love—was ending a marriage and had moved to Los Angeles where she hovered near, as was their implicit spiritual arrangement, and she often drove him places. And on August 16 they were in her car heading to the airport because he was leaving for New York and it was a lugubrious day, thick and dark and wet, and they were taking the shortcut down La Cienga Boulevard—“It was really raining hard, which isn’t so common in L.A. Andy was driving and then we heard it over the news on the radio. First we didn’t believe it and then we were crying. It was a moment that sticks in my mind so clear and so sad. And we kept driving. And he kept looking at me through his tears and saying, ‘It’s not true. It can’t be true. It’s not true. It couldn’t be true.’ It was just so sad to him.”
And California rain kept pouring down.
The man and lady who adopted her never called her Laurel, of course, but named her Maria—Maria Bellu (kind of like Priscilla Presley’s maiden name and also kind of like Elvis’s costumer)—and she was a happy little eight-year-old who knew she had another mommy and another daddy somewhere about whom she was certainly curious and she lived not so far from Great Neck, in Roslyn, and she had large wonderous eyes, everyone thought.
The father she never knew, meanwhile, would talk about her, not terribly often, but often enough, to very few people, and some of them imagined that he was simply in character, some character, some character that required a specific paternal history, but he said that he was glad that he had brought a child into the world but wished he hadn’t made the mistake under such youthful circumstances. And he hoped she was okay. He told Mel that maybe when he got really really famous he could find a way to get in touch with her. Mel told him (or told that character) that he would have made a very interesting father.
The real him thing continued and he deployed it as almost a passive-aggressive strike against the show business pigeonholing that had been subsuming him. (The real him, of course, was not the real real him, except in voice and eye movement; the real real him was the existential puppeteer who decided what would happen whenever people were looking.) Late that summer at the Improv, he taped the Second Annual Young Comedians Special for the cable network Home Box Office and he sent the real him to the stage after the prop comic Gallagher had bludgeoned a watermelon with a sledgehammer and later on he sent Tony Clifton to the stage before a manic new improvisational artist named Robin Williams closed the show. But first, the real him enthusiastically stepped forth and said, “Thank you very much. Right now I’d like to do a comedy routine. [At the mere notion of which the audience laughed savvily.] Up to now, every time I’ve appeared someplace I always do that Foreign Man character that I do. And I’d like to branch out, you know, do myself. So … so, you know the baseball season is with us and this reminds me, last year I was in New York in the baseball season and I went to Shea Stadium one night to watch the Mets play. And these two old ladies were walking in the stadium, they were carrying their own liquor and they were drinking throughout the game. By the middle of the game they were so drunk they couldn’t see the scoreboard. So they made up their own score and this was what they came up with—bottom of the fifth and the bags were loaded. [Mild bemused laughter from crowd] But … but you know, speaking about baseball and sports …” The material, of course, got even less coherent and less amusing and his real eyes darted and he finally paused at great length and he heaved the sighs of crisis as people laughed. Then: “… Um, I don’t understand one thing … no, seriously … Why is everyone going boo when I tell some of the jokes and then when I don’t want you to laugh, you’re laughing, like right now? I don’t understand…. [Real eyes now grew wet as he became more disconsolate.] Ladies and gentlemen, thank you. I think I … it’s not working, so … I think … thank you and I’m sorry and there’s other acts and so I really shouldn’t have done this….” And, after further apology and stalking offstage in shame, he returned and Conga-Cried his way into various harvest songs (doing slick gibberish audience patter in between—as though he were Foreign Man’s more uninhibited brother, Conga Man, working the Borscht Belt) then left to exuberant applause and walked to the corridor at the rear of the club where he pushed a hand into the faces of everyone standing there.
Clifton emerged later in his black
suit and clip-on bow tie with the greasy mustache and hair waxed down and he held a cigarette and clumsily opened with “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” as though it were a gift—“What’s so funny? I’m not up here for my health, all right?”—then began his attack—“Ya know, I’m not useta playing small places like this. I’m doing it as a favor! So if you wanna be a good audience, I’ll sing for you, I’ll tell you some stories, we’ll have some fun. You wanna be a bad audience, I’ll walk right outta here!” As ever, all such threats were met with much applause and, as ever, Clifton persisted—brought up audience members, including Mel and Bob, to join him in the syncopation chestnut, “If You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands,” which fell to ruins when Zmuda got the glass of water dumped on his head and later a female heckler took bait—“What are you, women’s lib? I’ll push your face right in your drink!”—and jumped Clifton, who ended his set declaring, “I just want to say—If I could make one person happy tonight, it’s all been worth it.” (Mel and Bob waited in the corridor afterward and physically assaulted him on camera as final punctuation.)
And Robin Williams finished the event, having to follow the mayhem that was Andy, whom he had gotten to know somewhat through Elayne Boosler (the three of them had gone to see Chief Jay Strongbow wrestle at Madison Square Garden—“He loved the good-versus-evil phenomenon,” Williams recalled, “that people believed enough to hate the supposed bad guys up there”). And on this night, and the few others that he found himself following Andy to a stage, he was fascinated to encounter the condition of the crowd in aftermath. “It was like walking into a vortex. The audience all looked like deer in front of a Peterbilt semitrailer. They had that stunned expression, where the mouth drops all the way down to the table like in the Tex Avery cartoons. Andy once ate a meal onstage, saying nothing while he ate and the audience stared at him. And Clifton was the extreme—the ultimate nasty side of show business, the dark side-Jersey meets Vegas. Andy toyed and toyed with every possible facet of human reaction. Like a Fisher-Price Laser—be careful how you play with it.”
Deck shuffled accordingly, with deeper purpose. Real him was introduced October 15 by host Hugh Hefner on the Saturday Night stage (emblazoned with large Playboy rabbit symbol) and, bouncily, he stepped out to execute “Oklahoma” and sat at piano to lead audience in “The Cow Goes Moo” and stood to become Elvis—without explanation or segue—and performed “I Need Your Love Tonight,” which was his very first favorite Elvis song and this was his unspoken tribute to his dead hero and, afterward, he made sure to get the phone number of the Playboy Mansion from Hefner’s people and Hefner would remember him as being “an unusual cat.” A week later Clifton opened several shows for him at the Comedy Store—Mel had long urged the idea upon him of hiring Clifton for just this purpose. (Zmuda rudimentarily sculpted putty onto Clifton’s cheeks, jowls, nose, chin so as to better obscure certain realities that lurked beneath. Also a black roadkill toupee was thatched to his head.) And, as a second opening act, the local services of Michel Bernath’s Beginning Tap class were enlisted, which filled the stage with a dozen multiaged hoofers whose heart exceeded talent but spread good cheer in any case. (Very unusual opening act, but that is something that excites me about Andy, said Shapiro, later recalling the moment in his audio-diaries. Of course, he tries things that were never tried before.) Lily Tomlin was in one audience and, she later confessed, had worked her way through a bottle of champage, with which Clifton did not sit well, so she heckled him and Clifton told her to go to the kitchen and make the babies. She persisted during Andy’s portion of the show, protesting when he bade Little Wendy to sing “Davy Crockett” with him—“Misuse of women!” she screamed—and also hollered when he recited his Jewish-dialect version of “MacArthur Park”—“You’re a great artist; you don’t need approval!” “By which he was duly mystified,” reported Rolling Stone, whose correspondent spoke with him afterward. (Tomlin finally stormed out.) The show business bible Variety, meanwhile, most ebulliently reviewed the show, which ran across consecutive weekends into November—“The guy’s original, and he’s dynamite…. During the course of his two hours or so onstage, Kaufman assumes at least three distinct characters, segueing from one to another smoothly and believably; it’s just as though he were three or four different performers.” The review also described Clifton as “what must be the strongest example of black humor to have played the generally giggly Comedy Store; the kind of act that those who aren’t totally revolted will want to return to with unsuspecting friends in tow…. It isn’t for everybody, but what that’s hard-hitting and innovative is?”
Visibly buoyant, he took the Saturday Night stage again December 10 wearing the blue floral Hawaiian shirt of Conga Man and slapped drums while performing his bravura imaginary tribal rant—in which he essayed the parts, in spectacular profundos and squealing glissandos, of a villain casting doom upon a helpless maiden—then continued on to banter with the audience in glib-gibberish, pulled a mortified woman onstage and attempted to levitate her (finally yanking her up by the hair), and concluded with the “Aba-Dabbi” singalong that portended a dancing jag during which he feigned an abdominal seizure. And never once throughout the appearance did he utter a discernible English syllable. Back in Los Angeles on the third day of 1978, he taped the bit all over again for an ABC special celebrating the history of Variety on which host Alan King called him “a young man I happened to have discovered.” (In his kitchen?) Whereupon George, with the brokering assistance of star-agent Marty Klein of APA, dispatched him to the Pacific Northwest on his first college tour (for which Zmuda was permanently installed as road manager and F Troop musical eminence Gregg Sutton, who had also played the Comedy Store gig, came aboard as bandleader). He then appeared in Chicago with the rock-and-roll nostalgia act Sha Na Na before returning for a Tonight Show spot on Monday, February 20. Steve Martin, also a client of Marty Klein, was substituting for Carson on this night. By now sanctified as the white-suited white-headed comedic demigod of a generation—his powers were such that, in 1973, he led a college audience into a McDonald’s [oh!] requesting six hundred hamburgers, then at the last minute changed the order to a single bag of french fries—Martin had been introduced to Andy by Klein at the Comedy Store engagement. “It wasn’t the typical backstage meeting,” he would recall. “He was inpenetrable with eyes wide open, definitely in his own world. And he was allegedly being himself at the moment, so I sort of realized that he was weird.”
And so Martin introduced him to the Burbank studio audience and he went directly to his drums and reprised every beat and eebida of his Conga man transmogrification, complete with female levitation and singalong, to equal success. “I remember observing at the time,” said Martin, who beheld all of this from Carson’s desk, “that it was a classic example of anticomedy. In anticomedy, one of the most difficult things to accomplish is—once you state the premise which is funny and they laugh—you have to keep it going. That’s what he managed to do for eight minutes, maybe longer. And it was funny all the way through. To me, that was the miracle. He managed to sustain it by being funny internally after the premise was stated. Once you go out there and start with the gibberish and they go, Oh, it’s gonna be the gibberish thing, then you have to come up with the humor and the jokes to keep it going. That’s what I thought was amazing about it—sustaining that in absolute gibberish which was known only to him but accepted by us.”
But what followed when he joined Martin at the desk—where he was greeted by fellow guests Kenny Rogers, Elke Sommer and Steve Allen who proffered the word “funny” as they shook hands—was an exchange that traversed the craft of his multiplicities in an altogether new manner. Martin, upon congratulating him on the performance, began, “That character with the, uh—I don’t know what kind of character it is exactly or where it’s from.”
AK: What, which one?
SM: The one out there that you did.
AK: Oh, no—that’s really me.
SM: Ahhh. And then—
AK: The Foreign Man, you mean? That’s another character.
SM: Mmmm-hmmm. So that was really you out there. And then what are you doing right now?
AK: Right now? This is really me.
SM: Oh. [Audience laughter] And then—now, what about the Foreign Man?
AK: No, that’s not—that’s just a character I do.
SM: Oh, I see. [Laughter] So there’s two real yous, and then there’s a character.
AK: Well, there’s some others also—there’s other real mes—but Foreign Man isn’t one of ’em.
SM: I see. Where did you originate that character, the Foreign Man?
AK: In New York. [Well, who would understand de Boston?] I used to perform at a place called the Improvisation…. And I would go onstage and my act began with my Elvis Presley imitation. [Applause—tenk you, well, who would understand de Boston?] So then people would say: ‘What is this? He thinks he’s Elvis Presley!’ So I—I wanted to come up with something like, innocent, so that people would like me—and then I could imitate Elvis Presley…. because people thought it was off-the-wall to do Elvis Presley. So I made up the character for that. [Um, de Boston de Great Neck no really.] And, um, I would come onstage, I’d say, Ehh, tenk you veddy much [Laughter, applause, Vait-vait, oh they love thees character they don’t stop de clapping] I am happy to be here but, ehh, ees too much traffic today took me an hour and a half to get here. And everybody would go, ‘Oh noooo …’ Because the audience, they really believed it was true, so they would go, ‘Oh no—this guy just got off the boat, he’s gonna starve, he’s gonna starve.’ But then one person would start going [stifled giggle], you know, embarrassed. But they didn’t want me to hear them laugh. So I’d hear like one person almost laugh and I’d go Vait-vait until I fineesh and they just couldn’t help it—they had to laugh. So once they started laughing, I’d make like I thought they were laughing with me when, really, they were laughing at me. And the whole thing would—
