Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  Six days before the first Huntington Hartford show, Bill Knoedelseder’s piece appeared in the Sunday Calendar section of the L.A. Times and Andy was quoted further on the matter that was plaguing him so unfairly and he couldn’t understand why people had to keep talking about this travesty—“I am not Tony Clifton,” he said. “We are two distinct personalities. I’m not like that. I never meant for it to get out of hand like this.” And his real feelings were on the mournful agitated order of try-to-help-a-guy-out-and-look-what-happens. Clifton was—well, gosh, he hated to use such words, even inside of the private whistling curved corridors of his head—but Clifton was a bastard, he was a fucking bastard, he was a motherfucking goddamned sonofabitching fucking bastard was exactly what he was. But he looked forward to working with him again soon.

  The milk-and-cookies idea had possessed him since college and he used to talk about it in New York—four years earlier, he had told Jim Walsh about wanting to take the audience out for milk and cookies after he debuted at Carnegie Hall and Walsh recognized a worrisome grandiose madness in both notions—but in recent months, as various mad dreams found tether, he had been repeatedly telling George and Bob about it and Bob suggested the idea of getting school buses to transport the audience. (He did, after all, consider his audiences to be as childlike as he—and thus what better way to move large groups of children?) He loved the school bus idea very much and eventually it was all that he could talk about because he wanted to try it out at the Huntington Hartford and even George thought that he was totally obsessed with this fairly foolish notion which would certainly be an unnecessary expenditure but probably worth exploring if only to indulge his client—I felt that we might as well do it, get it out of the way and move on to other things, he privately dictated with customary measured patience. Anyway, they secured the Olde Spaghetti Factory, an enormous theme restaurant a few blocks away from the theater on Vine, as the destination where the milk and cookies—courtesy of Adohr Farms dairy products and Famous Amos (of chocolate chip renown)—would be served and Bob commandeered ten buses to do the shuttling. And everything about this engagement was understood to be the actual precursor to the Carnegie Hall show, now scheduled for April 26, in that the Huntington Hartford was a beautiful historic legitimate theater, a jewel box of cornices and filigrees and velvety splendor with seating capacity exceeding one thousand. Both shows at the theater were sold out weeks in advance (with top single-ticket pricing set at eight dollars and fifty cents per) and, along with scores of big names and movers in the industry, his own mommy and daddy and sister and brother were going to be present for this spectacle—and it would be a spectacle because he envisioned mounting the greatest finale in the history of show business, a finale so grand that people would never believe such ideas could occur to a person and then become reality or become something sort of resembling a reality. Well, it would seem real—no really.

  So, in the week prior to opening night, he mustered renewed dedication to his stagecraft—he trained, he skipped rope, he did a hundred push-ups at a time, and, most astonishing, he never once arrived late for rehearsals. (On the road, it had become routine for him to miss his music rehearsal call-times by two hours minimum.) Now he hummed with adrenaline, he was very alive and willing to try big things, also upsetting things. Gregg Sutton, who would as ever conduct the band, watched Clifton chart darker straits than ever when it was decided to give the character newfound three-dimensionality—a wife and a daughter, who would be played by prim blond actress Patty Michaels and her own cherubic blond daughter Wendy (whose name was pure coincidence, as Little Wendy Polland remained estranged from Andy). Clifton would bring them out early in his opening segment to demonstrate that they were the reason he needed to work so hard and he would recite to his stoic wife Patty a long hoary chestnut called “This Is a Wife” (She’s magic with a dish towel in her hands / Romance running a vacuum cleaner / Charm with a smudge of cake dough on her nose / This is a wife!). Then he and daughter Wendy Clifton would sweetly sing a special song that they had always sung together at home and Wendy would mess up the lyrics and Clifton would turn on her. “Zmuda pushed Kaufman to take Clifton further,” Sutton would recall. “When the kid missed a lyric, Bob showed him how he should give her a little slap in the face and snap at her —Pay attention, dammit! Bob kept giving the girl these little example slaps and Andy was laughing this stupid mortified laugh. He said, ‘Bob, I can’t do that!’ And Zmuda said, ‘You’ve gotta, Kaufman! This is Clifton!’ And, in a way, he was right. It was hysterical. And the kid didn’t seem to mind, although she would pretend to cry onstage, which was perfect.” (Director John Landis, who attended opening night, found this piece of audacity amazing—“The audience was electric! They were horror-struck! People walked out.”) Linda Mitchell resumed the platinum role of Ginger Sax and worked the lobby before the show both nights selling fresh xeroxed photos of Clifton standing in his fetid Sunset 400 Motel room. (Knoedelseder had provided the original.) At the bottom of each picture was her handwritten message to customers—“Your very own take-home photo. P.S. This photo may also be crushed and thrown at Tony.”

  Pouring rain drenched opening night but stopped no one from coming and the seats filled and the people waited … and waited … while deafening roller-rink organ music pummeled their eardrums … and finally Clifton appeared and was eventually pelted with xerox paper and left not soon enough (even George said Clifton was on too long, strutting around, for my purposes) and Andy bounced out to “Oklahoma” and the show kept building in usual fashion—although, as with birthday party children, he showed them cartoons such as Thomas Jefferski—and he told them that if they were good he would have special treats for them later and he wrestled/rubbed a woman from the audience, pinning her one second before the three-minute bell, whereupon a bald-headed mammoth goon bounded onto the stage screaming, “Why don’t you pick on a man, you skinny little geek!” And this was professional Hollywood stuntman Jay York and he crushed Andy’s larynx in a headlock and twisted Andy’s fingers and lifted Andy by the neck and threw him all over the stage and Andy screamed, “George! George! Help!” and they had been rehearsing this all week, but Andy had neglected to mention such to his family, and suddenly Janice started screaming from her seat, “George! George! Help him! George!” And Judd Hirsch, who was sitting with Janice and Stanley and Carol, would recall, “I’m looking at his mother and his father, who are clawing the arms of their chairs, thinking that their son is going to be injured. His mother grabs my wrist—she doesn’t even know me—and says, ‘Oh my God, he’s gonna get killed!’ I’m now truly fooled because I thought she was part of the act. I’m thinking I’m in a room with another act sitting beside me playing his family. I thought, How did he find these people who look like him? He created the illusion that anything could happen in that auditorium. And, in truth, he was even fooling them!” But then Zmuda, in referee stripes, passed a large prop can of spinach to Andy, who pretended to swallow its contents and freed himself from York, and Sutton had the band strike up “Popeye the Sailor Man” and Andy smugly strutted and began to toss York around the stage until York begged for mercy.

  Then later, after Foreign Man (who told the audience “Tenk you veddy much ladies and gentlemen so far everytheeng I have done for you tonight really I am only foolink thees ees de real me”) became de Elveece, and after Andy led the audience in a singalong of “This Friendly World,” he explained that he wasn’t Clifton and demonstrated his own version of Clifton, without disguise, singing “Carolina in the Morning” and then had the real Clifton come out to sing it with him and his brother Michael stepped forth wearing Ken Chase’s makeup and Clifton’s gaudy apparel and replicated the adenoidal Clifton voice with much swagger. Then Clifton took a bow and Clifton’s wife and daughter took a bow and so did Jay York and then Andy announced, “And now direct from Radio City Music Hall in New York—the Rockettes!” And thirteen costumed high-kicking women who were not the Rockettes danced out. And then Andy said,
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir!” And the curtain lifted and one hundred fifty black gospel singers in robes who were most certainly not the Mormon Tabernacle Choir raised their voices to the heavens and the audience was ecstatic and they stood applauding endlessly and then Santa Claus, who was Mel Sherer, whom Clifton had assaulted earlier, flew down from the rafters in a sled and styrofoam snowflakes fell everywhere and Andy told the audience that ten buses were waiting in front of the theater to take everyone for cookies and milk. “When he walked us into the street and there were these buses, it was the damnedest thing I’d ever seen in my life,” said Dick Ebersol, who had put him on Saturday Night Live three years earlier and now beheld the utter scope of the absurdity that he had wrought.

  At the Olde Spaghetti Factory, Andy and his family and George and Bob and Linda Mitchell and others doled out the cookies and milk and Andy worked the room and received platitudes and promises of greater career opportunity and veiled movie offers and female entreaties galore. “Of all the times in Andy’s life,” said Ebersol, “that night was the happiest I ever saw him, wandering from table to table with a big smile on his face. You could tell that he felt that he had put one over on the world. It was a night that he didn’t want to end. When we got on the buses to go back to the theater, you could tell that he didn’t want us to leave.” And Janice told George that she was simply kvelling over her son—Janice Kaufman is just a lovely lady. Everybody that meets her says, “But you’re so normal!” When they meet Andy’s mother and father, they say the same thing, “They are regular people—what happened?” His parents are so proud of him and feel wonderful about what he’s accomplished. Janice said one thing that is really interesting and important. I mentioned that Andy had such a good time onstage tonight and she said, “One thing about that boy—he seems to always do what’s fun for him. He enjoys himself in whatever he’s been doing in show business and that’s a wonderful blessing for him.”

  He awoke the next morning feeling deathly, his brain aflame with a 105-degree fever, and he could not move—but he would not cancel the show that night and somehow got himself to the theater and George found him slumped in his dressing room wearing Clifton’s face and clothes and George helped him button the ruffled turquoise shirt and he wearily told George, “I can’t even keep my eyes open. How am I going to do it?” And George said, “I have the feeling that when you get out onstage and the spotlight hits you and you pick up the mike, you’re going to get an extra charge of energy, like an outside force coming in and giving you strength. I truly believe this. Go out there and have fun and it’s going to be okay.” And, by the time it was over, he had gotten his second standing ovation in two nights and Robin Williams had helped serve milk and cookies afterward and he had lost nearly twenty thousand dollars mounting this two-night extravaganza but George said it was worth it and he would earn it all back a hundredfold and, for days to come, George’s phone did not stop ringing with congratulations and new offers and John Landis said that he wanted to make a documentary about Tony Clifton.

  “Take this from someone who was not formerly a fan of Andy Kaufman—he’s got the hottest act going this side of the Himalayas,” wrote critic Susan Birnbaum in the lead of her Hollywood Reporter review. “An evening with Kaufman is the looniest, funniest, most wonderful way to enjoy yourself.” And this would be the only glowing published assessment of the Huntington Hartford program, because other critics were now beginning to display concern and doubt. The critic “Kirk.” began his Variety review by soberly pointing out that repeated television appearances tend to destroy the potency of otherwise foolproof comedic material—“What may have taken months or even years to perfect can be made obsolete in three minutes of airtime. Which is exactly what has happened to Andy Kaufman. In many ways, in fact, Kaufman may suffer more from TV’s appetite … [since he] creates a series of characters which depend, at least in part, on audience unfamiliarity with Kaufman as Kaufman to succeed. When the audience knows the character is only a character, and also knows the payoff, the laughter takes on a different form. It becomes participatory and anticipatory, rather than reactionary.” Which was to say, so much for Foreign Man and Elveece and Conga Man and Andy himselves and, Kirk. continued, “If TV has hurt Kaufman’s portion of the show, the print media, especially locally, has simply destroyed the effectiveness of the opening segment, when Kaufman assumes the character of obnoxious Vegas-type lounge singer Tony Clifton…. It’s time for Kaufman to come up with a new Clifton.” Lawrence Christon, in the Los Angeles Times, was a bit kinder and described Andy as “a sweet-faced, fresh and eager young man with the barest patina of post-pubescent acne around the mouth.” Christon also declared him “a master of the put-on,” then added, “One problem with the show is that the audience has gotten hip to him quickly—it seems that media burn is happening faster than ever…. Kaufman is going to have to come up with fresher material. What is at the heart of his act is the most liberating element of comedy, however: the sense of the unpredictable, even of danger.” Anyway, both Kirk and Christon seemed to enjoy the milk-and-cookies part very much. They said it reminded them of something Steve Martin had done.

  One week later, on Christmas Eve, he entered Cedars-Sinai Medical Center largely because on that day Bob came over to Andy’s new little rented house at 2519 Greenvalley Road in Laurel Canyon and told him that he looked yellow and it turned out that it was infectious hepatitis which was why only three days earlier he had just barely been able to film a big Taxi episode about Alex Reiger dating Latka’s mother. Andy’s family had been there to watch and Janice could tell that he had never really recovered from what befell him before the last Huntington Hartford show which doctors now theorized might have had something to do with tainted shellfish. He stayed in the hospital through New Year’s during which time he had a horrible fight with Beverly who had been taking care of him but he turned cruel again and then she threatened to steal his car and everything out of his house and he got even more cruel and alleged that she only wanted to be near him because he was such a big star which he felt bad about later. George told Andy that he hadn’t progressed much beyond the mentality of a fifteen-year-old in his dealings with women. George also said that Howard had just closed a deal for Andy to make $75,000 for three weeks’ work playing a wild-eyed televangelist named Armageddon T. Thunderbird in the Marty (also wild-eyed) Feldman movie, In God We Tru$t (or Gimme That Prime Time Religion), a strange title nobody liked but still. Feldman had sent Andy the script just before he turned yellow and enclosed a beseeching letter which read in part, “Dear Andy: You and I have never worked together. This situation is intolerable and it must cease immediately…. You do not lack invention. I would be foolish not to profit from your invention, and so, I would welcome your (Fuck! I hate this word) input. If you do not play Armageddon T. Thunderbird, then please consider this letter a suicide note.” Except for the swear word, Andy was very touched. He recuperated at home for a couple more weeks, during which time he went through his fan mail and if the mail was from a girl and if the girl had enclosed a photograph of herself and if she looked reasonably attractive and if she had written down her phone number, he called the girl and arranged to meet her the next time he performed in her area and maybe they could wrestle. He made several dozen of these calls and hundreds more in the months and years to come and would get laid very extremely often because of this. Sometimes he would tell George to book him in areas where certain such girls especially intrigued him. Also, he turned thirty on January 17 and told George and Beverly and anyone who asked that he was not ready to be with just one woman and that he wanted to continue his houndsmanship indefinitely since now it was easier to get action and everything.

  Then Jeff Conaway hit him. This was after the Golden Globe Awards ceremony which was held January 27 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and Andy came late to the ceremony even though he had been nominated for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series (as were Conaway and Danny DeVito) and, by the time h
e arrived, the award in his category had already been presented to Norman Fell of Three’s Company, which didn’t matter at all to Andy who showed up only to be polite. But the Taxi people—who were excited to have won the Best Comedy Series award (right in the middle of their first season, no less)—begged him to come to a private celebration afterward at Trader Vic’s, also in the hotel, but he didn’t want to go but they made him so he went. He sat at the end of the long table commandeered by the group and noticed that bits of food were landing on him as if thrown and he looked up and saw Conaway smiling devilishly and Conaway said, “How you doing, Andy?” And Andy said that he was um fine, then went over to visit with Judd Hirsch, who was sitting across from Conaway, and Conaway, who was a little drunk, decided to further engage Andy at that moment. “I thought maybe if I talked to the guy, I could break the ice and get to know him, you know?” he would recall. So, according to what Andy told George immediately afterward, Conaway said, “Andy, let me ask you a question. Do you have any respect for us?” Andy said, “Of course I do, Jeff. I respect everybody in this cast.” And Jeff said, “Well, you don’t show it. You don’t show up to rehearsals at all, you don’t come through for us, you don’t seem to give a damn about us.” And, per Conaway’s memory, Andy “got right in my face, like spitting in my face, and screamed, ‘I don’t give a fuck about any of you!’” And, according to what Andy told George, Andy said nothing of the sort but turned to walk away and when Andy started to leave, Jeff said, “Your work habits stink!” Andy then explained that there were other things in his career and Jeff said, “What career?” And Andy answered, “I’ve had a career for ten years.” And Jeff said, “What do you do in your fucking career?” Andy said he does nightclubs and concerts and Jeff Conaway said, “Your career is nothing! I’ve been in this business for nineteen years!” Andy started leaving again and Jeff actually pulled him down. Per Conaway: “I didn’t think about it, I just hit him. Boom! Square in the jaw. And I got up and hit him again. And he went down on the table and I jumped on top of him. And the drinks and food were flying everywhere. And I’m pounding him and screaming like a drunken Irishman. This was like months of frustration coming out. I figured that he dared me by saying he didn’t give a fuck about us, but in a million years I’m sure he never thought I was gonna belt him.” Per Andy, per George: He started to swing and Andy told me that Tony Danza and a few of the other guys held him back. Conaway was screaming, “I want to kill him! That goddamned guy is never at work! I want to kill him!”