Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  August ended and Little Wendy quit because she was sick of being Little, of being diminutive in his eyes, thus patronized, and of having to go along with his weird whims at weird hours and withstand his erratic cruelties, so they had this big eruption in front of a restaurant in Chinatown, and they shoved each other back and forth and she told him to go fuck himself in a new voice that wasn’t at all Little and he told her the same thing and she stomped away. (Such adrenaline he felt! He wondered why he liked confrontation so much.) So he sought a new assistant in his old TM friend Linda Mitchell, the classical guitarist in whose parents’ guest house he had stayed when he came to Los Angeles and tried to get Foreign Man onto The Dating Game, and as it turned out—right now, more than five years later—he was actually on his way over to do The Dating Game as Foreign Man at last, so he called Linda and told her to meet him and Beverly there. He would be Baji Kimran (which was the previously unspoken name he had created for Foreign Man four years earlier) who was Bachelor Number Three and some people in the audience recognized him and screamed for him to do Elvis but he gave no acknowledgment because the Bachelorette, whose name was Patrice Burke, who would be asking the questions of the three potential mystery dates, had no clue as to who he was, not that she saw him, because she would ask her questions from behind a separating wall with host Jim Lange presiding. And she asked him the first question—“Bachelor Number Three, it’s the holiday season and I’m Santa. You’re on my lap. Little boy, take it away.” And he said: “Vhat? Vait a minute! Vait. I don’t know vhat she look like. Could I see vhat she look like?” And Lange told him no, that was part of the game—“But I don’t know who she ees!”—then he said she didn’t sound like Santee Claus but finally said that he would ask her for “ehhh, a television and eh, eh, record player … and food.” Anyway, she finally chose Bachelor Number One over the protests of Baji Kimran—“You mean I did not vin? No, I von, I von! But I answered all de questions de right way! No! I did not lose!”—and he came out to meet her with tears in his eyes and, in truth, he was very angry about losing and Beverly was angry that he was angry and Linda would start work within the week.

  New York magazine, meanwhile, had sent writer Janet Coleman out to do a major profile of him that would be published the week Taxi premiered and this article would be entitled “Don’t Laugh at Andy Kaufman.” So he invited Coleman up to the La Cienega Towers and Kathy Utman served snacks—Coleman wrote, “We were having this menu: four pints (two chocolate) of Häagen-Dazs ice cream, a box of cookies (chocolate chip), a box of cookies (chocolate-covered mint), two double boxes of Mallomars, a bag of Lidos, a jar of Ovaltine, a can of Quik, and milk.” Andy said, “I don’t usually have this much chocolate. I’m trying to cut down.” Then he told her about his life and about his dream of hosting a talk show where celebrities only discussed the weather and he showed her his novels—God and The Hollering Mangoo and the beginnings of The Huey Williams Story, which he saw being made into “a four-hour epic, like Ben Hur”—and he spoke of his influences (Fellini, whose 8 1/2 he had seen “between thirty and fifty times,” and Hubert Selby, Jr., and Kerouac and Steve Allen and Abbott and Costello on television only) and of his personal disdain for Tony Clifton. Coleman wrote that he “would ask me several times to refrain from even mentioning someone so unsavory as Tony Clifton in this piece” and that “he was sorry he had ever hired the guy” for the Comedy Store gigs. And she wrote that George Shapiro told her that Clifton “would be better and very soon advised to consider retiring from show business altogether.” But she also wrote very incisively of Andy’s work: “He manipulates the audience the way the bullfighter would taunt the bull, maddening them with artfully calculated veronicas until they boo him off the stage, then cajoling them back in for the laugh, i.e., the ‘kill’ in comedy. He is simply not afraid to die.”

  The tenth episode of Taxi was the one that they agreed would feature guest actor Tony Clifton, who would play Louie DiPalma’s card-shark brother Nicky from Las Vegas. The episode was titled “Brother Rat” but would be changed to “A Full House for Christmas” by the time it was broadcast in December and, by then, all traces of Clifton would be long gone except in the memories of those who had witnessed the debacle of its genesis. Rehearsals would commence Monday, October 2—three weeks after Taxi had debuted to glowing notices from critics who reveled in the program’s emotional texture and intelligence. “There has never before been a sitcom written with the dramatic depth of this one,” Frank Rich declared in Time, adding that “Saturday Night Live Regular Andy Kaufman brings a saving sweetness to the garage mechanic who speaks his own variety of fractured English.” Dean of TV critics Marvin Kitman enthused in Newsday, “What an inspiration it was to make Andy Kaufman a regular on a sitcom. It’s something to look forward to every Tuesday night. The whole country will be doing their Latka Gravas imitations by next month.” After the series premiere, Andy had briefly returned to the road, performing a college engagement in Macomb, Illinois (his contract now carried a new rider stipulating that he would/must wrestle female audience members no matter what anyone said or thought), followed by two shows at the Park West Theater in Chicago. While away, he had Michael oversee the purchase of a brand-new Chrysler Cordoba and this would be his first new car ever, a big-sprawling-cabin-cruiser-of-a-car—long and wide and white with sunroof and blue interiors including, certainly, the fine Corinthian leather upholstery. Andy did ask me through his brother if I felt it was too ostentatious, George reported in the taped diaries of his special client’s career progress which he began privately recording two weeks earlier. It’s a nice car, it’s sporty, and it’s not like driving a Rolls-Royce or a Mercedes or a Cadillac. I think he should have a car that he is going to enjoy. He’s worked hard, he’s paid his dues, he earned it. So why not, right? Anyway, before Clifton befell Taxi, Andy returned to Paramount Stage 25 to film two more episodes, including his first prominently featured show, “Paper Marriage,” in which Latka foils immigration officials seeking to deport him by marrying, in name only, a prostitute (oh!) whom Alex Rieger hired to save him. (Upon learning there would be no conjugal wedding night after the ceremony, Latka laments, “Boy, America ees a tough town.”)

  On Thursday, September 28, scripts of the “Brother Rat” show—which had been written solely to facilitate the Tony Clifton contract—were distributed among the cast and all of them wondered who this Tony Clifton was and why he was playing this role. George had gotten a call later that day, he reported, from Taxi casting director Rhonda Young, who was on the set when the questions first arose: The full cast was sitting around the table and Judd Hirsch asked, “Who is Tony Clifton?” And Rhonda said, “He’s a good actor, he’s like Danny DeVito’s character—he’s a mean and coarse kind of a guy, a real rat. That’s why he got the role.” After the meeting was over, Rhonda went over to nudge Andy and said, “Hey, I did good, didn’t I?” As if to say, “I covered up pretty good, didn’t I?” And Andy said to Rhonda, “Oh, no, the real Tony Clifton is going to be here. I only imitated Tony Clifton. I know you came into the Comedy Store and saw that performance, but I’m not going to be here. I’m going away for three weeks. Next week, the real Tony Clifton is going to be here to play that part.” And no one would be especially fooled because Ed. Weinberger—who had been sworn to secrecy by Shapiro—soon began taking the actors aside, according to Randall Carver (who played yokel cabbie John Burns), to tell each of them “that Andy wasn’t going to be in the next episode, but this lounge singer from Las Vegas who might resemble Andy, but wasn’t Andy, would be there instead. And we all kind of scratched our heads.” Thus the word spread and the concerns simmered. Danza: “‘Don’t talk to him as if he’s Andy’—that’s what we were told—‘buy in!’” Henner: “We heard, ‘It’s Andy but it isn’t Andy—just play along.’” Conaway: “I said, ‘You gotta be kidding! Everything’s always revolving around this guy, because he’s always making us wait for him! And now you’re saying we have to talk to him as somebody else?�
� I was the last one to agree to go along with it.” (Weinberger would recall telling them nothing more than a new actor had been hired to appear in the next show and their patience would be most appreciated.)

  Clifton, meanwhile, required greater measures of obfuscation. Now, more than ever, Andy could be nowhere in plain sight. Zmuda arranged to employ the talents of makeup artist Ken Chase, who had done memorable work for the television mini-series Roots, and Chase would design new and appalling facial prosthetics contoured to transform one enigma into another. They went the week before—Andy and Bob and Linda Mitchell—to Chase’s home studio in Tarzana, where a cast was made of Andy’s head. “He meditated in his car for one hour before he came in to let me take the cast,” Chase said. “Then the girl would hold his hand and count out loud while the impression cream was hardening. He was very eccentric.” Foam-latex applications were then created to approximate ruddy cheeks and fleshy jowls and bulbous nose—“Our intent,” said Chase, “was to make him as physically obnoxious as possible. The cleft in the chin was my idea. Something about a cleft on a guy like that seemed particularly repulsive.” Chase also supplied ungainly sideburns and a cheap toupee (“purposefully obvious”) and a big “Burt Reynolds” mustache and Linda had gotten the unspeakable salmon-hued embroidered tuxedo with black lapels and piping (“That was a find,” she said, having plucked it from the racks of “a cheesy men’s store on Sunset”) and also the turquoise ruffled shirt which was to be worn over padding to barrel out the gut. And so they would report to Chase’s home each morning before Clifton and entourage headed for the set and the application process would take just over two hours—“Before he would let me make him up, he’d blow his nose twenty, thirty, forty times. Very kooky. And the minute the makeup was completed, his personality changed. Andy didn’t exist anymore.”

  Because Clifton refused to occupy Andy’s dressing room, an enormous Winnebago trailer (with fully stocked bar) had been procured by Weinberger and, by most accounts, two bona fide call girls—very tall and blond and accommodating—were separately hired to dawdle with Clifton for the length of the week. (Weinberger maintained that they were extras, not pros.) Also, Linda Mitchell, a brunette, would become Clifton’s brassy blond-wigged secretary Ginger Sax; Zmuda would be his zoot-suited handler Bugsy Meyer. They would arrive at the Paramount gates in a rented pink Cadillac. Monday was to be the first table-reading of the script—in which the brothers DiPalma stage a poker game to decide which of them would entertain their mother for the holidays—and that morning the actors all gathered to begin business. Tony Clifton came to work five minutes early, Shapiro reported, and he complained about the other people when they came in late. (Which was meant to further divert suspicion away from Andy.) And so there they all sat, gawking at him, stifling laughter, stifling irritation, as he hid behind sunglasses and below latex and they saw that the orangey-spongey makeup stopped at his ears and it was Conaway sitting beside him who first smelled the remarkable B.O.—or was it cologne? or urine? or whiskey? or all?—and Clifton lit up his Camels and swigged from his pint of Jack Daniel’s and they knew Andy never drank or smoked. But Clifton actually tried to be congenial and made much reference to Las Vegas and bleated his dialogue as abrasively as possible (“Louie, you know Ma—sometimes she’s saaaaad, sometimes she’s glaaaaaad!”), altering it beyond anything recognizably written on the page. Mostly, however, he smelled really really awful. “You wanted to take a bath after you’d been in the room with him,” Henner said. “He was just sickening, always going ‘Hey, pretty lady, how ya doin’, baby!’ He kept coming on to me, which Andy never did.” In fact, he chased whatever “chickaroonies” materialized before him, offering free trips to Vegas and intimate tours of his Winnebago and it was soon eminently clear that Clifton was in no way capable of acting any part other than that of himself.

  “His reading was terrible,” said Weinberger. “And the cast was looking at me and I just saw that this was gonna be a bitch. Then Tuesday we had a run-through and that was a disaster. This was not acting. He did not mesh, not even remotely. So I realized that I had to get rid of him. It was too early in the life of the show to make an episode you couldn’t air. So at the end of the day I called George and said, ‘Look, I have to fire him.’ He said, ‘Well, you know, Andy’s gonna be devastated.’ I said, ‘I have no choice, you know?’ So he said, ‘Well, you have to explain it to him.’ He told me Andy could walk, might leave the show and take both Tony Clifton and Latka with him. So I called Tony in his Winnebago and asked if Andy could come up to the office and I think it was Andy who then came up and sat on my couch and I was very tentative because I didn’t want to offend or lose Andy. But I said, ‘I have to tell you: Tony Clifton is not an actor. You know, he’s a lounge performer. He is just too big for this room; he overpowers this whole episode. He doesn’t fit the way we need him to fit. He can’t do it.’

  “And I was very relieved and surprised when he very quickly said, ‘I agree with you. But what’re you gonna do?’ And I said, ‘Well, I have to fire him.’ I’m very careful to say him and not you. And Andy agreed—as always, he was very deferential and polite and soft-spoken, but he said, ‘Okay, but would you do me a favor? Would you fire him tomorrow, but not because he’s a bad actor? Could you fire him because he’s late and comes in drunk or something? I’ll have Tony come in late after lunch and then you fire him in front of everybody and say you had to hire another actor because he didn’t show up.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I could do that.’ And I saw that this would be theater for him. He was already putting his little script together.”

  Ed. Weinberger called me just now to tell me how he’s going to fire Tony Clifton. From what I understand, he’s going to do this in front of the entire cast and crew tomorrow. And it’s going to be part of—let’s say—“theatre of life,” which is what Andy loves. They are going to put on a total scene and a reporter from the Los Angeles Times, Bill Knoedelseder, will also be there tomorrow [because he has been writing a piece about Andy] This whole situation is one of the most bizarre things I have ever witnessed. Really very bizarre. And exciting and interesting and crazy. I’m going to be there tomorrow for the firing.

  Today is October 4—it’s Wednesday morning. I found out through the casting director Rhonda Young that they have already hired an actor to take over Tony Clifton’s part today. His name is Richard Foranjy. And he was told to report at 2:30. I think I have the Times reporter who was supposed to interview Tony coming at 2:30 and the rest of the cast is also coming at 2:30. And I’ll be there at 2:30.

  Ginger Sax was dispatched to buy gifts for the cast and producers which would be personally distributed by Clifton and his two blond hookers after lunch on Wednesday. Cards would be attached bearing uncommonly warm sentiments—“It’s a pleasure working with you. I’m proud to be a member of the cast of Taxi. P.S. Let’s all break a leg on Friday. Love, Tony ‘Nick’ Clifton.” The gifts were little remote-control battery-operated toy dogs that walked and barked and wagged their tails and each actor would receive one and begin to play with his/her dog which Ginger had already installed with batteries and they all seemed sort of touched by the gesture and certainly amused except for Conaway who would take his yapping dog and smash it against a wall and, meanwhile, they would all wonder why there were at least fifty people sitting in the bleachers after lunch since this was just a Wednesday rehearsal and usually only crew and staff members were present for such routine business. Tony Danza, however, knew something was going to happen because he brought a home-movie camera with him and told the technicians to light the stage when Clifton walked in. And George, of course, sensing history, brought his portable tape recorder so that he might describe the action beheld from his seat in the bleachers. And he had urged the L.A. Times reporter Bill Knoedelseder to bring a camera in case any photo opportunities arose. And Weinberger—quite aware of his role in the imminent mayhem—had instructed crew members to call his office the minute Clifton arrived on Stage 25.

 
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