Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  It’s 2:30 P.M. and I’m sitting up here with Rhonda Young, the famous casting director, and Ginger Sax, Tony Clifton’s secretary/assistant. Ginger is a very pretty lady with blond curly hair and a very sexy green gown—just very classy, someone that Tony Clifton would approve of, obviously.

  [Clifton entered here with his flanks.] Tony is now giving out gifts to all the members of the cast. Danny DeVito has a big smile on his face as he is opening up his gift. Judd Hirsch said, “Something’s ticking in here.” Randy Carver has a big smile on his face. [Much laughter could be heard.] There are a lot of little stuffed animals running around the reading table now—there’s a little Scotty dog, a whole bunch of different dogs. They are adorable! It’s absolutely adorable. Tony came out with these two young ladies who were in the trailer with him—a blonde and another blonde. The blondes are completely breaking up; everyone is breaking up. Tony Danza has a movie camera—he’s taking pictures of all the animals. This is sensational. Clifton is walking around in his peach tuxedo with black velvet collar and blue shirt. He just said, “Let’s get back to work!” And the director Jim Burrows said, “I have to talk to Ed. Weinberger about a script change.” Clifton just said that he rented a place and invited the whole cast to a party there after filming on Friday. He’s really being very friendly right now to the cast.

  Weinberger just walked on the set—the executive producer and spokesman for the producing team. Tony just handed Weinberger a very nice gift and Ed. immediately handed it off to the executive in charge of production, Ron Frazier, who put it on the cab in the garage set. Now they are having a conference in the corner of the stage, away from everybody.

  [Weinberger would recall, “I came on the stage, which was cluttered with all these little mechanical things tottering around. Clifton actually had the same walk as these toys did, which I’ll never forget. He was taking swigs from a pint of whiskey and saying that he just rewrote the script of the show during lunch. He told me that he wrote parts for the two girls he had with him. But I had to play my role as irate producer —‘Tony, I warned you about this! You’re late! I’ve hired another actor, so get off the stage—you’re fired!’ I thought it would be over. It wasn’t. He wouldn’t leave. He waved the script in my face and said, ‘Here, read my changes!’ And I ripped the script out of his hands and threw it away. He then held out his liquor —‘Here, have a drink!’ Everybody was now watching us and I was getting slowly pissed because he was betraying our agreement. But he just walked away from me.”]

  Now Tony is walking back to center stage and he’s singing, “Let’s get this show on the road, let’s go!” He sits down at the table and tells the two girls, “Come on, sit on my lap.” Each girl is sitting on a knee in the middle of the stage. Ron Frazier went over and is talking to him and Tony said, “Getcha hands off me! Getcha hands off me! Who the hell are you?” [No one had touched him yet.] Ed. Weinberger is calling me, as [Tony’s] manager, onto the stage. I’m now walking down there to get him out. All sorts of commotion—Tony’s yelling “I’m calling the cops! Getcha hands off me! I’m calling the cops!”

  George’s tape would now capture various screams from various players and yet it could not wholly contain the breadth of emotional forensics that engulfed the stage. Voices of order implored that valuable time was being squandered and that there was an actual show to work on. Voices of exasperation huffed into corners. Rages steeped or blew. Conaway had already moved toward Clifton once—“I wanted to hit him,” he would remember. “And Jim Burrows grabbed me and said, ‘No, Jeff, you should leave now. Let Judd handle it.’ I said, ‘I’m gonna kill him!’ He said, ‘That’s why you have to leave!’”—then he retreated. Danza kept filming everything and Hirsch watched until he could watch no longer. “I felt responsible for the show,” he said later, “and I thought I better help get rid of this guy.” And Weinberger was telling Clifton to leave with George, and Clifton hollered, “Where’s the director! Let’s get to work! I am waiting for everybody!” And finally security was called and three Paramount cops arrived and they knew nothing about any theater-of-life bullshit and therefore lunged very seriously for Clifton who yelled, “I got a contract here, I got a contract!” Whereupon Hirsch announced to no one in particular, “He wants a psychodrama? I’ll give him a psychodrama!” And his eyes flared with a menace that no one had seen before and he stalked toward Clifton and bellowed, “You think you are the only one here!? I’ve got a contract with a whole lot more shows than you got! Get off this set!” And he began throttling Clifton while the guards yanked at the foul tuxedo and Clifton yelped, “Getcha hands off me!” And everyone applauded except for George who shouted, “Don’t hurt him! He’s a talented man! He’s talented!” And the guards and Hirsch dragged Clifton to the doors and he screamed, “Fuck you! I will be back one day when I play Vegas! None of you will get in when I play! I’ll be a big star! You wait and see! You wait and see! Getcha hands off me—I’m going back in there! I am not going to put up with this crap!” And he was out of the building and Knoedelseder was snapping his newspaper photographs throughout and Hirsch left the security men to complete their task outside and he would recall, “I had no idea what was going to happen after that because the true body I was shoving off the stage was Andy Kaufman. Then I started to realize that I wasn’t throwing out Andy Kaufman; I was throwing out Tony Clifton, which was a phantom, a fiction—a fiction with a real body. And how Andy Kaufman comes back and becomes Andy Kaufman again was no mystery to him—only to the rest of us.”

  And so: Guards roughed him all the way to the studio gate with George scurrying behind decrying the violence while reporter Knoedelseder endured harassment because security wanted to take his camera which he had dutifully kept shooting until Bugsy Meyer strode forth, feigning higher authority, and confiscated the camera and ran with the camera in the opposite direction to another edge of the Paramount lot and handed it off to an accomplice who sped away to safety because Andy wanted those photographs protected and later had George get copies of the negatives from Knoedelseder whose camera was quietly returned after the incident. Meanwhile, Ginger Sax had collected Clifton in the pink getaway vehicle and deposited him down the block at Nickodel’s coffee shop, where he immediately used the pay phone to call Weinberger in his office. “My secretary said Andy Kaufman was on the line, so I picked up and he said, ‘Ed., is anybody there listening?’ I said, ‘No, just you and me.’ He said, ‘I’m calling from a phone booth and I just wanted to say that you were brilliant!’ And I said thank you and he said he would see me in a couple of weeks when Latka returned and that was the end of the conversation.” Clifton, however, was banned from ever setting foot on Paramount property again which was, um, fine.

  So now I’m driving home, feeling pretty good about the day. We got away with a crazy thing. Why we did it, I don’t know. It’s Andy’s craziness. It was nourishing Andy’s insanity. And I was supporting it and so was Ed. Weinberger…. Andy called me when I got back to the office after this incredible escapade and he was totally exhilarated. He was thrilled. He said, “Wasn’t it great! Wasn’t it fantastic! I think this is fantastic! It was a part I always wanted to play! It gave realness, a validity to Tony Clifton’s character and I think this is going to be good for his career. I think he’s going to get other jobs.” And he was as high as a kite. So I allowed him to be high. I told him one thing, which I felt was very true: What he went out to accomplish, he did. He really acted out a role he wanted to play. As crazy as his goal was, he did reach it. And that’s okay with him and that’s okay with me….

  Incidentally, I was told that Andy Kaufman is scoring tremendously as the character Latka Gravas on Taxi. They have a rating system for likability and he’s going through the roof….

  The triumph was such that nobody cared except him and also Bob and, although George was happy for his client, George could live without this tsouris to be sure—and mostly everybody who witnessed it wanted to forget it (at least for the time being). Army Ar
cherd, the columnist for Variety, got wind and thought about running an item, but Ed. told him that Clifton had a serious drinking problem and the less said about it the better. And Andy wanted to take out an ad in the trades to trumpet Tony’s mistreatment at the hands of Paramount and Taxi personnel, but Ed. told George that the less said about it the better. And Danny DeVito would say, most diplomatically, “There were some bad feelings toward … Tony. We all felt it was a big waste of time. It was a very strange game.” Knoedelseder, meanwhile, met Clifton two nights later—on the very night the “Brother Rat” episode was filmed without him—for a private deposition in Clifton’s room at the Sunset 400 Motel in Hollywood. (Andy had checked in the night before to call Knoedelseder, as Clifton, and arrange the interview.) For the occasion, Clifton’s face had once again been shellacked by Ken Chase. And Knoedelseder found him in the dank smoky motel room where Sinatra music played and closed-circuit porno flickered on the television and skin magazines were splayed across the rumpled bed littered with empty whiskey bottles. (Bob was supposed to have had two more hookers there but couldn’t convince any to play along at the offering price.) Then, after visiting for a while amid the grim detritus, Knoedelseder took Clifton to a bar across the street, where Clifton drank much Jack Daniel’s—Knoedelseder tasted it to make sure it was the real thing—while abusing the female bartender and then he legitimately picked up a Hollywood waif who had wandered in and, eventually, Knoedelseder deposited the lounge singer and the girl back at the motel and fled. When his Los Angeles Times piece ran two months later—THE IDENTITY CRISES OF ANDY KAUFMAN—there would be no mention of this night with Clifton, although the Taxi imbroglio was covered in a small sidebar that featured one photograph of Clifton being thrown off the set.

  And, one week after the firing, on a flight to a college engagement in Albany, Bob let it slip to Andy that all of the actors at Taxi had been told early on that Andy was playing Clifton and were urged to just go along with it and this news crushed him and he felt betrayed and became enraged and he called Linda Mitchell to scream and then he called George who calmed him somewhat before he could scream very much. And when he returned to Paramount a week after this, Tony Danza had brought in a projector to show the movies he had shot of Clifton’s final day and everyone gathered in a room above the stage to watch—“And we’re laughing—you know, laughing at ourselves and at him and at the whole nightmare of it. And then Andy walks in and he stands there staring at the screen. And everybody sort of nervously takes this mass gulp. Finally the movie runs out—and there are a few beats of silence afterward. Maybe too many beats. And then he clears his throat and says, ‘Gee, who was that asshole?’ And with that, he turns and leaves the room. End of story.”

  He kept telling George Carnegie-Hall-Carnegie-Hall-Carnegie-Hall and George kept saying I’m-trying-I’m-trying which he was and finally, rather suddenly, definite headway was made—with the help of Marty Klein and the team of other agents at APA who found a New York concert promoter named Ron Delsener who thought it sounded like fun—and a date for the following spring was mentioned and it now looked very extremely likely … oh!

  George’s partner, Howard West, had a dream that month. He dreamt that he throttled Tony Clifton, that he took Clifton by his profane fictitious throat and shook him senseless. Andy had recently tried to teach Howard to levitate from the carpet of the Shapiro/West offices in Beverly Hills. Andy liked to waste Howard’s time like that; Howard thought Andy was cute but also fucking nuts. Whenever possible, Andy would eagerly discuss his levitation skills of which he actually possessed none but still. He told people at Taxi that he had levitated eight feet in his dressing room. They told him that if anyone could do such a thing, it would be him. A woman friend of George’s also had a dream that month and, in her dream, Clifton completely overtook Andy and there was no more Andy and Andy was gone forever. George was mostly impressed that Andy found his way into people’s subconsciouses.

  He finished a two-hour college show in Tampa and told the audience, “I want to thank each and every one of you.” Then he walked down off of the stage and shook hands with each and every one of them. It took the better part of another hour to do this. He said “Thank you” every time.

  At the end of October, George said this into his tape recorder-Andy told me that he really hates performing on Taxi. He is very frustrated by the limitations that he endures playing one character. He wants to do variety shows; he wants to create his own shows and his own characters. We agreed, he and I, that he will do only the fourteen shows contracted and no more. By now, ABC had extended the series to a full twenty-two shows per season; the producers would work around Andy’s newest disregard; they would agree to the same demands the following season—and other demands—and said they would hire a stand-in to perform his rehearsal duties during the week. He would show up only on Tuesdays for initial run-throughs and then on Fridays for final dress rehearsal and filming. “You really didn’t have to rehearse with Andy,” said Jim Burrows, who directed most episodes. “Andy knew what he did and he never once missed a line on camera—which was, of course, remarkable.”

  Friday nights after filming, the Taxi people threw great parties which he would almost never attend. “I just come in, do my job and leave,” he told the tabloid National Enquirer in a story titled andy kaufman: i’m not a part of the “taxi” team. (He had no misgivings about trucking with yellowish press because those reporters always printed exactly what he wanted them to print.) “I don’t drink or smoke. I don’t go roller-skating or do any of the things those people do. They’re very nice people, but I don’t socialize with them. I’m not a part of the team.” Then, in another interview shortly thereafter, he declared, “Taxi is just a commercial for me. It’s a means, not an end. I purposely keep my part real small. I am more interested in my books and big concerts. Taxi is good only in that it is a way of me doing those things. It advertises me to the public.”

  And, of course, they had to resent him and they also had to respect him and no one could argue that his performances were less than golden. The show, meanwhile, kept garnering serious acclaim, would go on to win the Emmy award for Outstanding Comedy Series during its first three years on the air. And he did not care in the least. “Jesus, you know, every week he got big laughs,” said Jim Brooks. “He heard an audience really laugh at him. And then there were the reviews! But he was not seducible. Because if you’re gonna get seduced, you get seduced a little by that! This was intelligentsia, the highest kind of respect. This was not slumming. And he didn’t traffic in it at all! He stood outside of it.”

  Clifton opened for Rodney Dangerfield at the Comedy Store on December 1 and 2. He was twenty minutes late on the second night because the parking attendant wouldn’t let him leave the Cordoba on the lot. Dangerfield fumed backstage—“He’s fucking with me! He’s fucking with me!” Clifton finally burst in through the backstage door hyperventilating —“You know what he did to me?! You know what he told me!? He said I’m not the star of the show and I can’t park here!” Dangerfield instantly lashed into him—“Andy, what the fuck are you doing? We gotta start the show!” And Dangerfield would recall, “So he talks to me like Tony Clifton —‘I’m sorry, Rodney, I couldn’t help it, it was that guy in the parking lot!’ And I say, ‘Oh, stop that will you, for crying out loud!’ And even though I was angry and kept hollering at him, he stayed in character, he wouldn’t break it! ‘Ehhh, don’t worry, Rodney, it’ll be all right!’” And Clifton went onstage after the no-smoking announcement and sang “You Light Up My Life” and smoked while he sang it—Rodney thought that was a terrific touch—and, after the show on both nights, he stood in the lobby selling xeroxed photographs of himself for twenty-five cents apiece and, at one point, Steve Martin approached him and requested that he sign one “to Steve” and Clifton began signing and asked, “What’s your last name, Steve?” And he was told it was Martin and he finished signing and said, “That’ll be a dollar.”

  The reviews we
re not kind. Variety noted that this had been “the first time [Clifton has] performed for someone other than his alter ego, comedian Andy Kaufman … it’s an act that is beginning to get a little stale.” And The Hollywood Reporter, meanwhile, lifted the veil further, openly referring to Clifton as Andy in disguise—“Kaufman, on for almost an hour, never got anywhere.” Andy phoned both reviewers after reading what they had written and strenuously complained about having his name linked with Clifton’s. “I treat the situation like a magician and I don’t appreciate being called Tony Clifton’s alter ego,” he told the Variety critic, who signed his review “Pollack.” Then he angrily asked the Reporter critic Don Safran, “Who told you that I was Tony Clifton?” Safran allowed that many people had averred as much. Andy told him, “I don’t mind you giving me a bad review for my work, but to put my name in a review of a Tony Clifton performance is unreasonable and unfair!” He went on to admit that he had played Clifton before at the Comedy Store, but this time it had been the real Tony Clifton onstage and, moreover, he said that the real Tony Clifton would soon appear onstage with him on December 16 and 17 at the Huntington Hartford Theater in Hollywood and that Safran should come to see for himself and Safran said he would very much like to witness that miracle and Andy felt better afterward.