Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  Business as usual followed—an arduous draw at wrestling (his eleventh undefeated match!); the vengeful return of Jay York (thwarted again by spinach); a most powerful and arresting Elvis (who went into the audience to serenade Gil Gevins’s mother); the Andy-and-Clifton duet (his brother, Michael, again donned the veneer); the revelation of Robin Williams; the Rockettes who were not the Rockettes; the Mormon Tabernacle Choir who were the Borough of Manhattan Community College Choir (many black members, all belting “Carolina in the Morning”); Santa Claus; the prolonged standing ovation; and the announcement—“Thank you. This is the first half of my act. And for the second half … you’ve all been very good—you really have—and I’d like to take you all out for milk and cookies now!”

  And, in his terrycloth bathrobe, he led them out into the drizzle and the buses had to make repeated trips to and from the New York School of Printing, whose large cafeteria had been furnished with a sea of toddler’s tables and chairs, where mini-bags of Famous Amos and half-pints of Cream-O-Land were consumed as clowns and magicians and jugglers performed, while in the school auditorium a quintet of off-duty cops crooned soul music and were then followed by a Hindu street mystic named Man-Sun who charmed a snake and hypnotized a rabbit and reclined on broken glass. “It was P. T. Barnum meets Jung, you know?” said Robin Williams. “People who were heavily into hardcore drugs were going, ‘Oh, this is nice!’ This wasn’t party till you puke—this was milk and cookies! It was Howdy Buddha time.”

  And Andy worked the assemblage again, elated to be sure, and agreed to a rematch challenge from his wrestling partner that night, a towering comedienne named Deborah Croce whom he did not know and whom he again could not beat nor could she beat him. And amid the circus, Stanley and Janice beamed and Stanley told a reporter, “I think that behind all the frivolity and all the craziness, there is a very, very serious man.” Stanley would understand this point even more profoundly when he learned how much money it had cost his son to produce this night of debit—the union laborers alone were greased an extra ten thousand dollars in cash just to load in the equipment at Carnegie Hall. Andy would erroneously claim that the losses again hovered near twenty thousand, although Stanley knew better: “He took a bath.”

  It ended at three in the morning and he had announced to those who remained that the show would continue at one o’clock the following afternoon on the Staten Island Ferry and it did and three hundred or so people were waiting when he and Zmuda and Sutton arrived a half hour late in a cab and he bought them all ice cream cones and he wrestled Deborah Croce again to a draw and he performed “MacArthur Park” and led a singalong to “Mighty Mouse” (which was the only time in history that he sang the entire lyric) and attempted to begin a round of “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” (nobody wanted to play along) and told all present that in 1982 he hoped to have enough money to transport an audience around the world. Then, at five o’clock, he returned with seven people to the temporary offices George had set up at the Sheraton City Squire Hotel and told George, “These are the last ones.” And he gave them cookies and milk and went back to his hotel, the Lombardi, where he meditated and then spent the next two nights having sex with Anna the nice hooker.

  11

  They call me a madman now. That would be a distinct rise in my social position were it not that they still regard me as being ridiculous as ever. But that does not make me angry any more. They are all dear to me now even while they laugh at me—yes, even then they are for some reason particularly dear to me. I shouldn’t have minded laughing with them—not at myself, of course, but because I love them—had I not felt so sad as I looked at them. I feel sad because they do not know the truth, whereas I know it. Oh, how hard it is to be the only man to know the truth!

  —Fyodor Dostoyevsky,

  The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

  George called him an extremist. And he was that. And he became that even more so. He became an extremely extreme extremist. And this would cause much undoing, wherein excess would breed ruin, wherein appetite for whim would devour him. He would sate and sate himself until poison seeped inside—and, although he did not feel it there and could not know it was there, it was there. The eyeglow became red-rimmed and bloodshot and it flickered and dimmed. Fewer and fewer were fooled and fewer still would care to be. Innocence was more elusive than ever. Innocence had become a game of chase and he would have to chase harder to win and he would often bore of that chase and maybe he couldn’t win now, anyway. He had tasted conquest but there was never enough and his idea of conquest did not tend to resemble that of others. Already every one of his heartdreams and boydreams and camera-in-wall-dreams had, more or less, come true—so he had to conjure new ones and these new ones inspired other new ones, larger ones, and the larger they were, the darker they seemed to everyone but him. Now more than ever—for reasons he did not try to comprehend—speed was essential. Thus darkness fell in quick serial thuds and it was, um, fun.

  Movies had become the business of primary concern, the next logical career step—as exemplified by the successful crossovers of contemporaries like Chevy Chase (Foul Play), John Belushi (National Lampoon’s Animal House), and Steve Martin (The Jerk). And so three weeks after Carnegie Hall, he began rehearsals in Los Angeles for his role as the corrupt megalomaniacal televangelist Armageddon T. Thunderbird in the Marty Feldman religious satire In God We Tru$t. But he had actually started practicing well before that. He had worked the shimmering rants of Thunderbird into his act, slipping into a white bouffant wig during various March college and club dates, and invoked the wrath of the Lord before congregants who had come to see him do Elvis. In New York, he had stood under an umbrella in front of Carnegie Hall, disguised in the wig plus Groucho Marx nose and mustache, clutching a hotel Bible and screaming at passersby—“I know why it’s raining! It’s raining because the Lord is crying! And he wants you all to buy umbrellas!” He then pointed to a poster advertising his forthcoming concert and declared, “This man should not be allowed onstage! He has no talent; he’s an impostor! He should not be allowed in Carnegie Hall; I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I should be in Carnegie Hall!” (“Most people thought I was a crazy umbrella salesman.”) He flew to London following the concert and positioned himself every afternoon for a week on a soapbox at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park and told British pedestrians that he was God and argued to unify time zones around the world so it wouldn’t be necessary to always have to change the hands of His watch when traveling. Then he returned to the back lot of Universal Studios to complete his grandiloquent acting assignment—“He never appeared on the set as Andy,” said Feldman, who both wrote and directed the film. “He arrived fully charactered as Thunderbird and never once left him.” And during the shoot, he became friendly with Richard Pryor, who played the role of God. Pryor would sit in Andy’s trailer, where Andy often recited from his novel-in-progress (which he was inordinately fond of doing when virtually anyone was within earshot) and one day Linda Mitchell encountered Pryor stepping from the trailer—“He came up to me and he seemed a little stoned and he had tears in his eyes. He put his arms around me and said, ‘Linda, he’s a genius! He makes us all look like nothing!’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ Richard said, ‘He’s been reading his book to me.’ I said, ‘God, you are stoned!’ Then I thought, maybe I’m missing something, because I thought Richard was a genius.” (In the publicity notes Feldman prepared for the film’s release, the book would now be characterized as such: “Titled The Huey Williams Story, Andy describes it as a fictional biography of a neighbor he once had who would stand watering his lawn. That is all he knew about his neighbor. The neighbor’s name has been changed in the novel. And the fact that he watered the lawn has been eliminated lest the neighbor recognize himself.”) Feldman, who took a professorial shine to his young charge, would later mordantly note, “In Andy, there is something underneath the playfulness—a sense of danger, a kind of genial anger, as if the way we wearily come to see the world is simply
insufficient.”

  Not long thereafter, George secured an office suite at Universal for Andy and Zmuda as part of a deal made to realize The Tony Clifton Story as a major motion picture. Universal had optioned an outline written by the pair after an unpleasant altercation in February, when the idea for the film was conceived by a comedian named Ed Bluestone, who, like Andy, was a Marty Klein client at APA. Andy had loved Bluestone’s idea—in which Clifton would fall from Vegas lounge greatness, then lose his wife to another singer, whereupon Clifton would marry his own manager (a man), whom he then married many more times before he died at the end of the movie. (Andy would have played both Clifton and the unctuous performer Nathan Richards.) Bluestone pitched the story to Universal and to Paramount—with Andy and George and Zmuda and various agents in attendance—and both studios were deeply interested in having Bluestone commence writing, which displeased Zmuda, who insisted that he cowrite the film with Bluestone, which Andy believed was fair since Zmuda had certainly contributed to Clifton’s character development. But Bluestone adamantly refused to work with Zmuda and, since Clifton was Andy’s intellectual property, Bluestone was summarily removed from the project (about which he was furious), thus forcing Zmuda and Andy to invent an entirely new Clifton story, which they immediately began to brainstorm. On March 9, they were at the Playboy Hotel and Resort in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where George had flown in to listen to the story line that they had cooked up. The three of them sat around a table in Andy’s suite and George turned on his tape recorder and Andy insisted that they all smoke cigars while he and Bob enacted the story, because they had been smoking cigars throughout the writing process because that was what they thought real screenwriters did. (George said: “Suppose I tell you that Neil Simon doesn’t write with cigars.” Bob responded: “He’s a completely different kind of writer than we are. This is our way of doing it.”) Anyway, they performed the essence of the movie for George and George thought it was a little confusing but a very good start and, when the first draft was completed in August, most of the elements had remained and others had been added. This draft—which the studio executives would find too dark largely because Andy, playing himself, was the despicable villain of the script and Clifton was the good-hearted hero—would quietly circulate throughout smarter quarters of Hollywood for years to come because it was eventually understood to be something of a comic masterpiece, a mind-bending house-of-mirrors tour in which identities sublimated other identities and tricks were played upon other tricks and real life interchanged itself with fiction and vice versa. Meanwhile, the executives who had tried to shepherd the script toward workability—Thom Mount, Sean Daniel, Bruce Berman—would years later still feel varying pangs of remorse over the fact that the many rewrite demands had pushed the concept so far away from its miraculous original premise as to render it toothless and then finally dead.

  “It was completely brilliant—and unreleasable. Perfect. Just what I needed,” said Mount, who ran the film division for Universal. “It could have been a little less brilliant. We took a position that it was too dark in its ending, and it was. It had a sucker-punch, bait-and-switch sensibility that Andy loved, but would have been difficult for an audience to deal with because there was nothing in it to consistently trust.” Daniel, who was second in command, would add, “I have to say that the phrase ahead of its time genuinely applied here. I believe that had it come twenty years later Tony Clifton, as a persona and as a movie, would have been a giant hit, tapping into a much bigger culture of cynicism.” Ultimately, it was Universal president Ned Tannen who pulled the plug (after expending nearly two years of patience with the project and, in the meantime, having hired Andy to play a robot in a film that would embarrass everyone involved with it). And even Tannen would harbor chagrin in hindsight. “It’s funny that it stuck in his brain,” mused Daniel, “because in later years I was sitting with Ned when The Tony Clifton Story came up in conversation and he said, apropos of nothing, ‘You know, that’s the one we should have made.’”

  They initially wanted the film to be made in Stinkavision, so that whenever Clifton sprayed on a certain repulsive cologne to entice chickaroonies (it was called Purple Passion), theaters would be engulfed in the stench. They believed the natural antecedents to their film were King Kong and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. “You see, this man on the surface looks like a pretty abrasive guy,” Andy said of Clifton. “But in this movie you get to see his soul. He is a wonderful man. He’s the kind of guy who would see a little lost dog on the corner of a city street and would say, ‘Ahh, get out of here!’ And then, when no one’s lookin’, at midnight, he’d take the dog home.” “He’s a lovely guy,” Zmuda said, “but very stupid. And Andy becomes his manager to exploit him—like an evil version of Colonel Tom Parker.”

  To synopsize: Clifton lives in Philly, works on an assembly line screwing tops on salt shakers (George’s idea), is a forty-five-year-old virgin who talks (in his own special parlance) of having laid much pipe and making like a ham sandwich with countless females and his nonsensical bluster is barely humored by those around him. One night, he falls into a massage parlor/bordello and is finally compelled to throw around fistfuls of cash and receives a Jacuzzi bath (while wearing a pink shower cap and singing lounge standards) from four topless scarlet women who happily take his money and claim to admire his voice, telling him that he sounds just like Tony Bennett and/or Frank Sinatra. At which point, a hooker with a heart of gold named Anna (oh!) arrives to see that he is being taken advantage of and she kindly relieves him of his virginity and, thunderstruck by feelings of love for her, he summons courage to quit his job and decides to aggressively pursue a singing career. Andy, meanwhile, comes through Philadelphia on tour and he and Zmuda are accosted by Clifton in an all-night diner, where he is peddling 8-x-10 glossies of himself and repeatedly calls Andy “Mr. Belushi” and Andy is thoroughly besotted by Clifton’s idiotic bravura, especially after witnessing him perform to a Frank Sinatra record during an amateur showcase at the nearby Porterhouse Lounge. Andy decides that Clifton will be billed as his special guest/opening act at Carnegie Hall on April 26. Clifton arrives—after much confusion wherein he thinks a ticket is awaiting him at the box office—and performs with usual extravagant badness and the audience eventually storms the stage in riot and The New York Times calls Clifton the most obnoxious act in show business history and George is appalled at Andy’s lack of judgment and lectures, “Andy, they hate him! They were throwing things at him!” And there is a malevolent glint in Andy’s eye as he says, “That’s right, and they’re going to hate him more and more. They’re going to LOVE to hate him. And more important, they’re going to PAY to hate him. Gentlemen, I got myself the next Hula Hoop.”

  And this comes to pass exactly and, in short order, Clifton is on the cover of Time magazine and there is a run on peach tuxedos throughout the land and his preferred exclamation of paranoia (“Getcha hands off me!”) becomes the ubiquitous catchphrase of the moment and he performs at the White House, where he disgraces Chinese diplomats (“What time does da Chinaman go to da dentist?”) and he is given his own weekly television show on NBC at which the audience happily comes to boo him as he torments celebrity guests—asking Raquel Welch about her cosmetic surgery and terrifying the San Diego Zoo’s Joan Embery, who has brought out a baby seal, which is then chased around the stage by a club-wielding baby-seal-killer from Newfoundland. And it is Andy Kaufman who is the Svengali-producer of this vulgar sideshow and who assures Clifton that it is all meant in fun because Clifton thinks this mania has gone too far and gotten too ugly. (George feels the same way and Andy tells him to relax and to try meditating, but George insists that Andy stop the madness, so Andy fires him.) To distract Clifton from his qualms, Andy has located Anna, the nice hooker, and sends Clifton off to romp with her and she awakens him at last to the notion that he is being used and he decides to do something meaningful in his career, so he tells Andy that he wants to star in a sensitive remake of The Hunchba
ck of Notre Dame (since he feels a tragic kinship). Andy sets up the deal instantly (smelling, in fact, a comedy blockbuster) and now it is the night of the premiere and Clifton stands in the back of the theater and watches the audience scream with laughter at his Quasimodo, who has a cigarette dangling from his mouth, as per Cliftonian trademark, while being whiplashed by tormentors. Aghast that his noble dream has become a laughingstock, Clifton runs to find Andy in the theater manager’s office, where he is barking demands into a telephone (“I want the TV rights sewed up NOW, fucker!”), then, noticing Clifton, changes his telephone manner and says, “Yes, Grandma, I love you, too….”