Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  SM: You actually went out to deceive in a sense.

  AK: Yes, so they would all get embarrassed. And then—

  SM: That’s an interesting point of view—to embarrass the audience!

  Three years later he would elaborate on this theory to a reporter person—“People used to be embarrassed when they saw [Foreign Man]; they’d look away, and out of that embarrassment they would start laughing…. Nowadays someone would see that and say, ‘Oh, isn’t that great—a comical foreign immigrant who tells inept jokes. What a funny premise.’ They would see the outer—a ‘funny premise’—but they would miss the whole point, the whole depth of where it came from. And where it came from—the drama, the sadness—is what makes it funny.”

  Anyway, the audience in Burbank that night laughed with-Martin-at-him and, also anyway, this was as much unmasked truth as anyone needed to consider at present, if ever.

  He conceived another one whom he felt was as lovable as the one they all loved a little too much. So he and Zmuda wrote a pilot script for a series about this other sort of hapless fellow and this fellow’s friend. ABC had promised him money as part of his deal to write such a script anyway and since they didn’t like the special maybe they would consider this and so he and Zmuda wrote through most of that January and completed their final draft on February 1 for a show called Fingers and Knuckles. The episode, entitled “Easy Come, Easy Go” (also an Elvis movie) introduced this pair of good-hearted New York street performers—one of whom (Fingers, a.k.a. Zmuda) was a savvy city-hardened operator and the other (Knuckles, a.k.a. Andy) was a sympathetic idiot whom, Andy said, had “just gotten off the bus from the Midwest.” (Privately, he believed Knuckles had incurred brain damage in an auto accident, though that would not be part of the script.) But they were inseparable and often said to each other, “You can’t have fingers without knuckles,” and in the story Knuckles was sent to the store to buy groceries (and not cupcakes, his staff of life) and mistakenly received the wrong bag of groceries belonging to their neighbor lady Mrs. Willowbee and her winning lotto ticket was in the bag and a mean guy then tried to rob them but they subdued him and Mrs. Willowbee gave them a reward with which Knuckles acquired a mountain of cupcakes. ABC hated it. And Andy would lament long thereafter, “Knuckles is my prime creation. That’s one character they will not allow on nationwide TV…. When they read the script and saw the Knuckles character they said, “Look, I mean, face it—this character can’t make it from here to the elevator’ And we said, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ I mean, neither could Lou Costello or Stan Laurel, none of those guys could make it to the elevator…. But this one guy actually said to me what I think is one of the classic lines ever by a network executive. He said, ‘But this is like Laurel and Hardy or something; we want something good like Laverne and Shirley!’ I mean, do you realize what that—? In a nutshell, that’s… Boy.”

  Two nights after the visit with Steve Martin, Clifton returned for a three-night engagement as Andy’s opening act at the Comedy Store. “Mr. Clifton requests that all cigarettes and tobacco smoke be extinguished before he will perform for you tonight,” Zmuda announced to the house from backstage, whereupon customers grumbled and snuffed accordingly, whereupon the spackle-faced Clifton (eventually) stepped forth dragging fitfully on a cigarette—and fresh new hostility was minted. Four pedigreed comedy writer-producers, all former brain-trust alums of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, were present for one such performance, specifically to assess the potential of Foreign Man as part of a new ensemble situation comedy they had been given carte blanche from ABC to put directly onto the network air, no pilot script necessary. Their names were James L. Brooks, Ed. Weinberger, Stan Daniels and Dave Davis—all brainy TV golden boys of the highest order—and they watched Clifton and enjoyed Clifton, and George Shapiro, who knew exactly why they were there, whispered to Weinberger and Brooks, “You guys can’t acknowledge this to Andy, but he’s Tony Clifton.” “And that,” Brooks would recall “just blew our minds. Because we all thought of ourselves as pretty sophisticated in the realm of comedy theater—but Jesus!” “It never occurred to us,” said Weinberger, “because we were there to see Andy.” They didn’t know and now they knew—and several months later they would wish they never had, but then again … “Clifton just upped the game for us,” said Brooks. They loved all that Andy did and told him so afterward and said they would like to work Foreign Man into their yet-unwritten show as an immigrant garage mechanic for a New York taxi company and Andy looked at George and George said it sounded fantastic and that they should call with more details and Andy asked them, “Um, so you liked Tony?” And they looked at each other knowingly and said that indeed they had.

  He would headline at the rather grand proscenium which was Town Hall in New York on March 4, a booking designed to connote certain importance, since it was the first time he would give a major concert on home turf. As ever when he returned to the metropolitan area, he headquartered himself in his den on Grassfield Road and, on the evening of March 2, he played the auditorium of Great Neck North High School, the alma mater from which he had escaped eleven years earlier—and, very secretly, very privately, he saw this as his revenge and he had always dreamed of this revenge, of returning to show them because he always knew he would show them and they had always laughed at his dreams, at his declarations of destiny; they had always dismissed and punished and ostracized him and he knew they would by sorry and he would make them sorry and so that was what he was now prepared to do. Of course, only some of the teachers were left and not many of them came to the auditorium which was crammed with students who knew he was sort of famous (certainly many of them had seen him on television). He kept Clifton away and did his own bidding and the students whooped throughout, especially whenever he said tenk you veddy much; the school paper reported, “They were screaming like crazy, ‘Do it, Andy!’ or ‘You’re the greatest!’” And the girls squealed for Elvis—“One girl even ran up to kiss him and Andy replied, ‘I’ll see you after the show, honey!’” And the boy from the paper asked him afterward if he had been a loud kid in school and he replied, “Are you kidding? I was the one voted Least Likely to Turn Out This Way.” And he spoke fondly of cameras in bedroom walls and cameras in playground woods and the doppelganger boy, Alfred Samuels, and the mysterious man he had seen in Memphis when he was five who wasn’t Elvis Presley no really and he noticed that everything at the school now looked much smaller to him.

  Snow dumped on the city two nights later, which did nothing to thin the ranks of the capacity crowd at Town Hall, where Clifton slithered from the wings a half hour late and commenced the event. The Kaufman family proudly witnessed (although Stanley and Janice hated every second of Clifton’s affront); battalions of friends and industry people were there as well. Lorne Michaels brought a small contingent of Saturday Night colleagues and this was to be his first significant encounter with Clifton. “It was, of course, horrible—an indulgent conceptual joke. The bad-lounge-singer notion was not terra incognita for most of us—Jo Stafford had done it as Darlene Edwards and Chuck Grodin had done one called Huck Saxony. But Andy did his brilliantly, so everyone was patient. But it was during intermission that he pulled one of the coolest moves I’d ever seen. He had left his body-pack microphone turned on in the dressing room and suddenly you heard Tony Clifton ranting to his managers about having just performed for the worst fucking audience that he’d ever been in front of. There were no more than about twenty people still in their seats—out of the eight-hundred-plus, most of whom had gone to the lobby—and we listened to this wonderful secret harangue. It was brilliant.” Variety saw the concert as a portent of career transcendency—“This audience was way ahead of him, pleading for certain of his w.k. [well known] pieces, like ‘Mighty Mouse,’ ‘Thank you very much,’ etc…. There is no denying that some of the things he does are nothing short of comedic genius. [His Elvis Presley] is often so real as to be frightening. Kaufman may not be for everyone, but he has a strong cult now a
nd, as he hones and builds support, he could become a major comedy force.” The review mitigated its enthusiasm only in the matter of Clifton’s performance—“too long and trying.”

  Which was what Uncle Sammy Denoff tried to tell him backstage afterward-before the whole family went out for Chinese food. (“What else would Jews do?”) “So Andy said, ‘How do you think it went, Uncle Sam?’ I said, ‘I think it went pretty well. But you have to rethink this whole Tony Clifton thing, because you’re turning off the audience. They’re not laughing at the character. The idea is to make them laugh, but it’s too obnoxious.’ He said, ‘You’re absolutely right, you’re absolutely right! I’m not gonna have him back on the show. I told him he’s finished!’

  “So I said, ‘Yeah, okay, okay … but I’m serious, Andy. No kidding. Rethink it, because there’s a way to do that and make it funny.’ He said, ‘No, you’re right—he’s finished. We had a big fight and I told him he was through.’ I said, ‘Andy! What are you—come on! Look who you’re talking to here!’ And he wouldn’t back off and this went on for about ten more minutes until I finally said ‘Pass.’”

  10

  I liken what I do sometimes to a life game, an adventure in absurdity, an adult fairy tale in which I engage people emotionally and intellectually…. I like to think people will learn something from my hijinks; that they will become a little more cautious…. Because the next time around, their hoaxer might truly be diabolical and rob them of things far more important and meaningful.

  —Alan Abel,

  The Confessions of a Hoaxer

  There now awaited the imprimatur of legacy-in-shorthand. He would soon become … a name of a character in a thing. And thus, in all aftermath, he would most often be fuzzily remembered as having been … a name of a character in a thing. The name would be—give or take a letter—exactly that of a potato pancake; the character would be his but not his any longer; the thing would live on in flickers of recollection as something that had been quite good, a television series that most people had meant to watch more than they did. And this was to be his legacy-in-shorthand, that which in years to come would inform occasional blank expressions that greeted mention of his name—ohh himmmmmmm of courssssse. He would know this sooner than later and it was, um, fine and also discouraging because of all else that he was and that he would do. He sensed/feared the imminent cultural shackling of it from the get-go. So he wavered at the idea of committing himself to the enterprise. (Can’t we just put Foreign Man in a trunk for a while, like Howdy?) George, however, explained that it would be foolish not to take advantage of such a lofty opportunity —this was going to be a very classy show without doubt; these were Mary Tyler Moore guys for God’s sake—and the money he would earn would only afford him freedom to pursue other dreams. So negotiations between Ed. Weinberger and Shapiro took wing shortly after the Comedy Store encounter. The producers were to begin writing their first episode in April and they had already decided that the series would be called Taxi—inspired by a September 1975 New York magazine article, “Night-Shifting for the Hip Fleet” by Mark Jacobson, about an eccentric cab company in Greenwich Village—and among first priorities was to sign Andy to the cast. “Andy was reluctant to do the series,” Weinberger said. “I mean, he wanted to do it, but didn’t want to work every week; he had these other things he wanted to do.” Concessions were made from the start and would continue to be made over the next five years, but first they would have to deal with the initial thirteen episodes ordered by the network. He would agree to appear in no more than eight of them—and in only one of those as a featured player; he would perform in the rest as a background novelty who blithered betwixt plot points involving the other seven principal cast members.

  But there would be one more demand—“It was the deal-breaker as far as Andy was concerned,” said Shapiro. “Without this, he wanted nothing to do with the show.” Weinberger took Shapiro’s call and listened: “George said that Andy now insisted that in at least two of the five shows that he didn’t work on, we would have to hire the acting services of Tony Clifton. If we wanted Foreign Man, we had to take Clifton. I laughed. George laughed. We took Clifton. I mean, what the hell.”

  One week after Town Hall, here at last was British Man on the live Saturday Night broadcast, bedecked in effete plumage (black waistcoat and tie and tails and peach ruffled shirt), pacing behind host Art Garfunkel, who introduced Andy Kaufman. British Man then bent over his phonograph and tested the needle on the record of marching music which began to play, but he removed the needle and, in his thin and brisk accent, greeted the audience, which he complimented on the many bright smiling happy faces therein and starchily proceeded to inform—“They told me that since there were only about twenty or twenty-five minutes left in the show tonight, since I’ve been on several times before, they said that they trust me, the producers and the people who run the show said they trust me very much and that they would let me do anything I want and I could have the rest of the time, if it takes that long. So I was wondering what to do, what could I do to fill up this twenty, twenty-five minutes—could I sing a song? Do a dance? Then I thought, well, you know, before I’ve been on the show and I’ve done characters like the little foreign man, the foreign immigrant who goes tenk you veddy much I am veddy happy to be here, you know, and then I’ve done this American character —Hi, I’m Andy! and hello how are you oh the cow goes moooo…. But I thought instead of doing that, why don’t I just come out and be straight with you and be myself. Then I thought, well, what should I do, what should I do? I was at a loss. And so I saw this book … and it reminded me of when I was in school, when this literature teacher gave it to me to read, said it was the greatest American novel ever written. I take issue with that—I don’t believe that it is. But what I’d like to do tonight is to read it to you and then perhaps you could point out some subtleties that I might have missed—in case, if we have time to follow for discussion. It’s called The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and here it is—‘Chapter One …’”

  Audience coughing spasms began at outset of fourth sentence. Derision gained in surliness by last word on page, which visibly perturbed B.M.—“Now look, let’s keep it down please! Because we have a long way to go and I am pressed for time!”—then by top of second page groans of exquisite agony tore through studio—“… ‘Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt….’ Now look! If I hear one more word I’m going to close the book and forget about the whole thing!”—and they cheered, and B.M. walked off, then walked back, resumed reading as insurrection mounted, to which he responded in lecture—“I think what we need nowadays is more discipline! You know, when I was your age I used to have to walk seven miles to school! Spare the rod and spoil the child is what I say! Good half-round in the woodshed would do some of you very good!”—Lorne Michaels now approached and whispered into his ear and retreated—“What?! Well, I have been asked to leave, ladies and gentlemen! And I resent it!”—and his indignation rose and he indicated that, after the reading, he had planned to reward them by playing a music record, which the audience seemed to want now, so he said that he would play it—after he had finished reading—and he reopened the book and was met with screams and after further futile negotiation he stalked over to the phonograph and set down the needle and waited through protracted hisses and skips until the sound of his voice issued forth—“‘… Only Gatsby, who gives his name to this book, was exempt…’ ”—and he stood beside the phonograph and prissily gloated.

  These were now heady times, headier than ever, flush with the empowerment of conquest after conquest, such as they were, which were uniquely compliant to his vision, such as it was. He was gotten, was what he was. The right people understood him or believed they understood him—or at least pretended to, so as to impress their sophistication upon others. He kept hearing that word genius and also brilliant and George would hug him hard and Bob would hug him hard and everyone was rather giddy and he knew there was nothing
that he could not do. Drain the Atlantic Ocean? But of course. One day, for certain; it was something he had always wanted to oversee. Or play Carnegie Hall? Um … yes! Maybe George could make some calls. They were all likening him to these other people named Pirandello and Ernie Kovacs (“I never saw Ernie Kovacs, but I understand that’s a compliment”) and Ionesco and something called Dada (“People keep mentioning that name to me…. I’ve been told my work is Dada and I don’t want to know that it is”) and, meanwhile, George kept saying the word exciting and everything truly was exciting and the ice cream was always cold and the chocolate was always thick and the roller coasters were always fast and the women were —well …

  He wrestled one on his last birthday at the surprise party that Little Wendy threw at his apartment. (He had moved to La Cienega Towers, a high-rise just below Sunset where he rode the elevators with Elliott Gould, and Kathy Utman had become his mostly platonic roommate/housekeeper and Wendy had become his personal assistant, whose duties included ordering subscriptions to every female-wrestling magazine in existence, plus all other professional wrestling publications.) Bob, meanwhile, had arranged the birthday wrestling match because it was something Andy had always wanted to do. (Zmuda had seen his private collection of eight-millimeter films featuring bikini-clad women tangling with one another—the sheer sexual electricity of which—oh!) So it was that Gail Slobodkin—late of Has-Been Corner—and her singer friend Marilyn Rubin (on whom Andy nursed a deep crush) were called upon to wrestle each other in swimwear at the January party and he would then wrestle the victor who was Marilyn and it was all very playful except that he was very very excited by all of the rubbing between his body and hers and she stayed after the others went home that night and then he wrestled her soon thereafter onstage at an Improv event in front of people like Bette Midler and Raquel Welch and others who were appalled, none more than Marilyn herself, who lost (just barely). “A lot of people thought it was self-indulgent and terrible and everything,” he said. “But I didn’t care. It was a fantasy come true.”