Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  Clifton wants the movie stopped and Andy—[Well, here was how Andy himself improvised the scene for George back in Lake Geneva, making illustrative use of his writing cigar: “Then Kaufman says, ‘Tony, sit down.’ ‘No, I think I’ll stand if you don’t mind.’ ‘Tony, let me explain to you the facts of life. Remember tenk you veddy much? You think I like doing that, baby? You think I like that —oh, he’s so cuuuute! I do it for two reasons, baby! For the moolah and the chickaroos! That’s why I do tenk you veddy much! You got a gimmick here, Tony. You gotta play it up! The public is stupid! The public eats it up! Listen to them—they’re laughing at you! They love you! Take the money!’ ‘Waitaminute! Lemme get this straight …’ ‘Tony, you have been played for a buffoon jerkoff! You think you could sing? You think you could act? You think people wanna look at you playing the hunchback of Notre Dame serious? Look at you! You’re a buffoon jerkoff! That’s all you are and that’s all you’ll ever gonna be! I made you! I made you! You think you’re gonna give me a hard time and blow it for me? I’m making a lot of money on you, pal. I’m not going to have some stupid buffoon jerkoff blow it for me!’” And here Zmuda reminded George: “This, you know, is Andy Kaufman actually talking to himself onscreen.” And Andy corrected him—“But you don’t know that. It has to be done very well. No one is going to think that I’m Tony Clifton.”]

  And Clifton is reduced to tears and he runs back into the theater and leaps in front of the screen and tells the audience that they’ve all been duped and the audience believes this to be yet another Clifton act of comic obliviousness and they begin cheerfully pelting him with rotten tomatoes (supplied by Andy) and he drips with tomato guts and tells them, “I feel sorry for you people … I don’t think you even know why you did this….” And he pitifully leaves the stage declaring that he will never return and the stage remains empty and then the picture freezes—and the camera pulls back so that the frozen frame is seen on a film-editing console, where Andy sits and now addresses the camera to introduce himself as Andy Kaufman, maker of The Tony Clifton Story, and he goes on to say that on July 18, 1980, with three scenes left to be completed in the film, Tony Clifton, age forty-seven, died of lung cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and two weeks later it was decided by Universal MCA Pictures that, in honor of Tony Clifton’s memory, he would play the role of Clifton for the remainder of the movie. [So Andy said to George in Lake Geneva: “And now for the rest of the film, I play Tony Clifton, but the makeup looks like shit—putty on the nose, the wig, no belly, it’s very crappy looking. You can see right through it. Like that horrible makeup I wore in the Home Box Office show. And now the film takes a completely different turn; it’s going to change from realistic into a complete comedy. Kaufman is taking total liberties with the character. So this is what happens—”]

  Andy/Clifton leaves the theater and jumps in a cab and heads for the airport, where he steals a small plane which crashes in a distant jungle where Andy/Clifton emerges unharmed and becomes a tribal god among natives who are impressed with his Sinatraesque chant-do be do be doooo—until he gets word via the jungle paperboy [“Now the film has taken a new turn, like an Abbott and Costello comedy—Clifton asks what the paperboy is doing in the middle of the jungle and the paperboy says, ‘Can I help it if they gave me a bad corner?’”] that Kaufman is staging an elaborate memorial service at Forest Lawn cemetery and selling thousands of admission tickets and various other Clifton paraphernalia, because Clifton was believed to be lost at sea after stealing the plane. So Andy/Clifton charges into the memorial service, riding an elephant, with his tribe of savages in tow, and he clobbers Kaufman (“I’ve been waitin’ to do this for a long time!”) who falls into an empty grave and then Andy/Clifton sees Anna, the nice hooker, and grabs her lustfully and then the offscreen voice of the real Tony Clifton says, “Getcha hands off her!” And then the real Clifton steps into frame and says to Andy/Clifton, “Where do you get off tellin’ people I died a cancer?” And the startled Andy/Clifton gives panicked instructions to his film crew—because this is obviously a movie set—“Keep the camera going! This is gold!” And the real Clifton proceeds to lambast his exploiter for making mockery of the real Clifton life and the “total fabrication” of truths implied therein (including, and especially, loss of virginity at age forty-five!), and then he walks over to “the girl playing Anna” and professes his undying love and the cemetery transforms itself into the set of a magical Busby Berkeley-style leg-kicking musical finale at the close of which the real Clifton announces to the camera that if he has made just one person happy, then it’s all been worth it.

  By the time all the rewrites were completed, an evil Andy had been replaced by an evil manager named Norman, who would commit both Andy and Clifton to a sanitarium. But nobody would really care much anymore.

  Thom Mount gave them offices next to those of director John Landis—who had originally wanted to do a Clifton documentary but was now filming The Blues Brothers. The offices were on a back-lot street near the hospital set. “We thought it appropriate to keep Andy close to the hospital,” said Mount. “But Andy took to the lot like a duck to water. He loved life on a movie lot—because everything was a façade, was Make-Believe, capital M, capital B, which resulted in a number of odd moments.” Clifton was apprehended one night wearing a security guard’s uniform and carrying a gun. Mount told the Universal cop who made the arrest, “He works for us. Don’t worry.” Sean Daniel had assigned a business affairs director to get Clifton membership in the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild—per Andy’s instructions. Clifton showed up at many meetings—“He’d be this burned-out, swaggering, brittle, thinly-connected-to-the-planet kind of lounge lizard Lothario with an ego the size of Texas and a bad attitude,” said Mount. Such meetings were largely unproductive. Mount also tried to integrate Andy with other comedy stars who worked on the lot—“The other comic artists had enormous respect for him and were also scared to death of him. He was going places they couldn’t even imagine going, places that were so potentially dangerous and deadly. People didn’t know what to do with him.” So he invited Andy and George to a party at his Malibu beach house—“Andy was the guy everyone was most excited to meet and hang out with. But when they would talk to him, he was in what was sort of his internally blissed-out Andy mode: ‘Hi, Andy, how are you?’ ‘Oh, hi, I’m very fine.’ He wouldn’t give anyone a way in. Halfway through the party, I saw Andy standing in a corner by himself.”

  Due to the juggernaut of publicity that swarmed the Carnegie Hall event, ABC suddenly felt obliged to schedule the suppressed ninety-minute special, which would air at last on Tuesday, August 28, 1979 (twenty-six months after its completion), and he went to New York to promote it and he took Grandma Pearl onto the locally broadcast Joe Franklin Show and told Franklin, “Grandma happens to write all my material and she wrote my special that you’re gonna see August twenty-eighth. She’s very modest about it.” And Franklin asked Pearl for confirmation of this and she shrugged and said, “If he says it.” And she said of her grandson’s success, “I am very happy. This is my proudest moment.” And she told a joke about a dog going to temple and slow-danced with Andy, but no music played and Andy admitted to being forty-three years old, which was something he enjoyed telling all the reporter people lately. Pearl shrugged some more. And then he went on The Tomorrow Show, which aired on NBC after The Tonight Show, and he talked with host Tom Snyder for close to ten minutes about nothing but weather because Snyder had read the New York magazine article in which Andy expressed his dream of hosting a talk show on which nothing would be discussed except weather and so Snyder gamely (even brilliantly) indulged him by traversing the intricacies of rain and snow and sleet and slippery pavement and iced-over bridges until Snyder could take no more, although it was quite clear that Andy could have continued for another hour. And then he wrestled three women—one was a Playboy Bunny who had worked as an extra on Taxi the week before (and whom he had flown to New York) and the ot
her two were Tomorrow staff members—and he pinned the Tomorrow women and came to a draw with the Bunny, but what was most important was that this was the first time he had wrestled a woman, much less three of them, on a television program. Pearl, meanwhile, had sat in the studio that night, out of camera range, and covered her eyes throughout the wrestling segment thank you.

  Clifton returned and decimated the Dinah Shore show on September 19 and this was not a good thing for Clifton’s career, what with a movie about his life in the works and all. He had gotten separate management by this time—George had handed him off to a Shapiro/West associate named Jimmy Concholla, who became Jimmy C. when dealing on Clifton’s behalf and Jimmy C. had a separate telephone line and took on a separate persona to accomplish such dealings. (Clifton liked Jimmy C. to wear black shirts with pastel ties and sunglasses in his presence.) So Jimmy C. and Zmuda, who didn’t bother to become Bugsy Meyer, and Linda Mitchell, who didn’t bother to become Ginger Sax, and three chickaroonies with whom Andy and Zmuda had recently been dawdling accompanied Clifton (only forty-five minutes late) to the KTLA studios to tape Dinah! and Clifton caused a stink during rehearsal of his number, “On the Street Where You Live,” which delayed matters further. (He had attributed his lateness to a mix-up at the gate, where his name hadn’t been left with security, whereas that-asshole-Kaufman’s name was on the drive-on list.) Because Dinah had a cold, her producers told Clifton that she would be unable to sing the duet that he had planned—“Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)”—which rankled him more and delayed matters even further, until he had to be shooed from the stage. Finally, the taping began—before a live audience of five hundred elderly people—and Dinah introduced him. “With us today is a special guest. His charm, charisma, his voice, his song stylings—well, let me put it this way: He is beyond description …” And he wandered through the audience as he sang what Dinah called “his big hit” and greeted frightened women with the hand that did not hold the microphone and cigarette. (When the show aired about one month later, words would be superimposed below him—THIS IS A PUT-ON and RECOGNIZE HIM YET?) Then he joined Dinah and co-host Charles Nelson Reilly, who stood at Dinah’s cooking counter, where he pointed out his three nubile companions in the front row (“Get a shot of the chickies here! Okay, those are my chickies!”) and then he took umbrage when Dinah inferred that he had many big-selling records (“I haven’t made any records! What kind of crap are you trying to put over on the people here? You’re full of crap!”) and he implored that Dinah sing their canceled duet and produced a sheet of lyrics for her to follow, which she did, with kindly patience, after which he was to demonstrate his recipe for bacon and eggs—but this segment would never see light of airwaves.

  What followed: He dropped a pound of butter into a hot frying pan, then proceeded to crack a dozen eggs, one at a time, then pressed the broken eggshells into Dinah’s hands (erroneous tales would later circulate that he cracked the eggs on her head, because she had pushed away a lock of hair wherein a bit of shell stuck) and, at this point, producers wanted to eject him but feared what he would do with the pan of sizzling grease. Dinah, whose eyes belied panic, tried to go to a commercial and he threw a fit and flicked drops of water at her and began inviting the audience down onto the stage to watch his eggs fry, but now the tape had been stopped in the control booth and producer Fred Tatashore and Dinah’s business manager rushed down to quell his remonstrations and each man grabbed a Clifton arm—“He was yelling, ‘Hey, you guys, what do you think you’re doin’! Do you know who I am?! I’m a big star!’” Tatashore would recall, “So we said, ‘Okay, big star, you’re out of here!’ And we literally tossed him out of the building, where security guys took him away. He was out there still screaming. I was laughing by then. I said to Dinah, ‘I guess we got rid of that!’ And I told the audience, ‘Well, that’s the way it goes with some of these singers!’”

  The producers were actually more rattled than was Dinah—one called George immediately to complain and he woefully reported the incident to his tape recorder—They said that in all the years that Dinah has done her show, nobody treated her as badly as Tony Clifton did. There really was fear of this man. He was insane and unapproachable. He was not funny. He was embarrassing, unprofessional, and insane. He had no respect for the people over there. Everyone was upset. Jean Stapleton, who was one of the guests, was terribly frightened. (Stapleton, in fact, had locked herself in the greenroom, where, according to fellow guest David Copperfield, “she was weeping and sobbing when all the pandemonium broke loose in the studio. It was amazing.”)

  George sent flowers the next day and had Andy’s name inscribed on the card of apology. He also made Andy call the producers and Dinah herself afterward—which he grudgingly agreed to do. “I called Dinah two days later and I said, ‘Listen, Dinah, you have always treated me with such hospitality when I’ve been on your show. I have a lot of respect for you. And I would never do anything to upset your show. I had nothing to do with it. Tony Clifton is Tony Clifton and I am me.’ And she said, ‘Oh, that’s fine, Andy. I know that you weren’t there. I don’t know who told you that, but I wasn’t upset at you.’ Then she said, ‘I want you to come on the show,’ and I said I’d love to.” And, of course, he never returned as any of himselves.

  Clifton = buffoon jerkoff = Andy.

  Word spread.

  He agreed to play a five-night engagement at Harrah’s Reno Resort and Casino in Nevada beginning October 6 because Bob told him that the Mustang Ranch was only fifteen minutes away. Harrah’s arranged a press luncheon to announce the event a week prior to the Dinah Shore appearance; the luncheon was held in the wine cellar of the tony Blue Fox restaurant in San Francisco, whose proximity to Nevada created puzzlement in itself. Andy showed the fortysome-such reporter people who attended how he could skip rope for ten minutes straight; he did so with his napkin tucked into belt. Milk and cookies were served for dessert. Gerald Nachman of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: “Booking Andy Kaufman into Harrah’s is rather like selling Andy Warhol originals at Lucky’s [supermarket].” Andy announced that he was no longer a song-and-dance man. “I’m a wrestler,” he said. He also said that he wished to publicly invite the three thousand Russian combat troops currently stationed in Cuba to fly to Disneyland at his expense. “We’ll go on some rides and then we’ll have milk and cookies. This is my contribution to world peace.” He looked stricken, as this was met with chuckling. “I’m serious! Everyone thinks everything I do is part of the act.” Zmuda had planted himself as a reporter from the Norwood Free Press (based outside of Chicago, he said) and assaulted Andy with many probing questions—“Is it true, Mr. Kaufman, that you wrestle women only to fulfill your perverted fantasies?” George eventually went over and slapped him, then threw him out.

  Harrah’s Headliner Room would be the most commercial venue he had played to date and he did fine but cared more about getting over to the famous Mustang Ranch bordello as soon as the shows were over because this was the most exciting thing that he had ever done in his life. George would get several reports daily. George would sometimes be on the phone with Bob after Andy’s performances and he would hear Andy in the background imploding—“Come on, come on, Zmuda! We have to go, we have to leave!” Andy told George that he had sex with twenty-four Mustang girls that week. Zmuda could not keep up. Sean Daniel and Bruce Berman from Universal came to Reno to discuss the Clifton movie and Andy dragged them to the Mustang, where they could talk while he scoped his slatternly prey. Daniel would recall, “We were there for official business. Andy, on the other hand, was there for love. I think he found much love there.” Andy told George, “They loved me! It was truly a religious experience!” Sometimes he would pay them just to talk to him or to wrestle each other for him. He was different, they all thought. So nice, too, they thought, too. He returned to Los Angeles, deliriously happy, and was immediately treated for a red and itchy case of the clap.

  On the night that arguably began the spiral
toward destiny, he wore Grandpa Paul’s elegant calf-length Sulka bathrobe that he had inherited years earlier. Beneath the robe were the white longjohns and the black athletic trunks and beneath the trunks over the white longjohns was the masking tape that Zmuda had wrapped around the groin and pelvic region to conceal the appearance of a televised erection. It was October 20 and it was Saturday Night Live: He started out nicely enough, speaking of the olden days when wrestlers had traveled with carnivals from town to town offering money to any man who could last three minutes in the ring with them. His tone was quite pleasant as he explained that he had been doing the same, only with women. (“This is a very legitimate thing and the reason I chose women is because I’m not an athlete…. If I chose a man, I might get beaten.”) (… rubbing …) He maintained his level tone while sharing his belief that women were best suited for the-scrubbing-the-washing-the-peeling-the-mopping, but lamented that men of late had allowed women to achieve societal status gain—“Men are a bunch of pussycats and pansies for letting this happen. And I think the men in this country are nothing but pitiful specimens of manhood.” And, of course, the audience—women and men alike—grumbled and booed, since he had now alienated both sexes and all of North American humankind at once. Zmuda waved the five hundred dollars in the air and five volunteers bounded to the stage and the audience selected a pregnant woman to wrestle him—which he would not do—so he asked for the runner-up, who happened to be prettiest and she was a lithe brunette named Mimi Lambert, heiress to the Lacoste sportswear fortune, who studied dance with Martha Graham and was clad in a leotard because she had danced six hours that day (“My legs were like rubberbands”) and she had no idea who Andy Kaufman was because she never watched television but thought he was obnoxious and she lasted well beyond the allotted three minutes, although referee Zmuda neglected to notice, as was his occasional habit, before she was pinned. And during their grappling, he broke away to strut and mug and bait the audience that wanted his blood—“Shadduppp! Shadduppppp! I’m not chokiri’! Come onnnnn! Let’s see some competition up here!”—and after he was declared the winner he gave Mimi Lambert a kick as she began to get to her feet and shoved her back down on the mat. Then he strutted some more and breathlessly issued an open challenge to Olympic swimmer Diana Nyad (“supposedly the world’s strongest lady”) to wrestle him on a future show, offering ten thousand dollars if she won. “Not only that—but I’ll have a barber here and if you beat me, I will have my head shaved in front of everyone right here in the ring! Diana, any time, baby! I don’t think you can dooooooo itttttttttttt!” And he clucked like a chicken. And then he took Mimi out for a very late dinner and they began dating immediately thereafter and she joined him on tour within three weeks and returned with him a few more times to Saturday Night Live, where Bill Murray would send flowers to her in Andy’s dressing room and Andy always walked the flowers directly out of the dressing room and made sure to give Murray a curious look every time he did so.