Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  He was throwing fits in hotels. At the Seattle Hilton, the switchboard ignored his requests to have his morning calls stopped. He threatened to slander the hotel whenever possible, using much offensive language to illustrate his point. George had to make nice. At the Chicago Holiday Inn, he was asked to relinquish his large room for a smaller one due to a mix-up. He screamed and kept the big one. Only four hundred tickets were sold for his Chicago engagement at the University of Illinois; the auditorium capacity was eleven hundred. A week earlier, only two hundred ninety tickets were sold for a Boston concert, which was canceled due to lack of interest. (A short six months had passed since he had sold out Carnegie Hall.) George believed it was the wrestling. The mail poured in after the Saturday Night Live appearance, all very extremely hostile. George told him to maybe rethink it. He told George that he had a better idea—a crosscountry tour, underwritten by a sponsor, in which all tickets would cost only ninety-nine cents apiece. George liked the idea. No sponsors would be very interested.

  November 17, a brief announcement on Saturday Night Live, in response to the negative mail: “So you’re trying to get me to stop wrestling on television, huh? Well, there’s NO WAY YOU’RE GOING TO DO IT! I will wrestle on every show! I will wrestle on every variety show, on every talk show! You will not be able to turn the dial fast enough! YOU’LL NEVER GET RID OF ME UNTIL A WOMAN BEATS ME IN A WRESTLING MATCH!! That’s right! But there’s not a woman who can beat me BECAUSE WOMEN DO NOT HAVE THE BRAINS!!! Shadduppppp! Shaddupppppp!!” And because Diana Nyad had never responded to his gauntlet, he now challenged all of the rest of them out there, offering a thousand dollars and the shaved head and the promise to keep his rubbing off television forever. He asked them to send photographs and statistics and the reasons they wanted to wrestle him and certain people at Saturday Night Live (who were amenable to his input) would decide which finalists would be flown in to wrestle him on the program three days before Christmas. (The photographs were imperative.) Guest host Bea Arthur then came on camera and said, “Boy, I hope somebody beats him. And beats him badly!” He screamed at her from the sidelines—“Shadduppp! Shaddupppp! I’ll take you on, baby!”

  His sister and his brother collected him on Thanksgiving morning, very early, at Mimi Lambert’s Upper East Side apartment, where he had spent the night. Mimi playfully flashed her naked breasts for them as Michael and Carol dragged Andy to the elevator. The three of them rushed to Macy’s and boarded a circus float on which they rode in the Thanksgiving Day parade. Andy wore ringmaster togs and Michael attempted to be a juggler and Carol was a trapeze princess in pink and they waved at people for hours. Andy had agreed to be in the parade only if he could bring his siblings. Andy had agreed to perform two nights later at Kutsher’s Resort up in the Borscht Belt only if he could bring his family—which meant a complimentary weekend stay for Stanley and Janice and Michael and Carol and Grandma Lillie and Grandma Pearl, who would turn eighty on Sunday. He brought them all onstage as well that night, which was the twenty-fourth, and each performed acts perfected around the Kaufman dinner table—Michael sang “La Bamba” and Carol imitated Maurice Chevalier and Pearl told the one about the dog at temple and Lillie sang “Row Row Row Your Boat” with her famous grandson and Stanley and Janice wisely opted to remain silent, as did the audience, uncomfortably so, except when Andy polled the crowd as to whether or not they enjoyed his family. They did not enjoy his family. Nor did they enjoy him or any part of his one hour and forty-five minutes (elongated by the wrestling) of meandering stagecraft. He shed conga tears for them. They did not care. They were, for the most part, silver- and blue-haired Jewish retirees who came to Kutsher’s for a weekend of bingo and bridge and ballroom dancing. “A bunch of old farts” was what Stanley called them. Gregg Sutton would recall, “I broke a complete sweat. It was the worst gig that I’d ever been a part of. I was dying with Andy and the family up there. The only person who didn’t think it was that bad was Andy. He was oblivious and was just going through it. He was getting a kick out of having his grandmothers and his family up onstage, and they were dying.” The rest of the band had wanted to quit somewhere in the middle. Sutton said, “You stay right there, fuckers!” That was how bad it was.

  Afterward, Andy sat for a filmed interview with Seth Schultz of the Brooklyn showcase club Pips, who was making a documentary about the history of Pips. Andy recalled with delight the free hot fudge sundaes he had consumed there years before. Then he spoke of the audience he had just left and looked tired as he did so and he seemed to be convincing himself that it had not gone well—“Maybe they thought I wanted them to boo and hiss at me, but gosh, they were so rude!” He repeated the word rude five times in two minutes. He said they had been the worst audience he had encountered since he and Little Wendy played for those doctors at the Cedars-Sinai benefit at the Beverly Hilton and Carl Reiner wanted to hide under the table. Anyway, later that night he found a hostile note tacked to his door and various audience members accosted the family in the corridors and Sutton and Zmuda fled in a rental car to go get loaded and Zmuda deliberately drove off the road and through a fence while lecturing to Sutton, “See! The system was made to bend!” And Sutton knew that Andy was in trouble, even if Andy didn’t know he was in trouble—“He was already on his way down.” As they left the resort the next day, Andy rolled down the back window of the limousine in which he sat and hollered to no one in particular, “It’s people like you who give Jews a bad name!”

  Simka Dahblitz would be played by Carol Kane and Simka was to be Latka’s rib and eventually his wife and they would come together for the first time in the fortieth episode of Taxi, which was called “Guess Who’s Coming for Brefnish?” to be filmed December 14. Because Simka had recently emigrated from Latka’s country, Carol Kane required lessons in dialect known only to Foreign Man and so Andy agreed to help and invited her to his house in Laurel Canyon, where he presented her with various avenues of pursuit—“He said maybe we should go someplace for dinner where no one knew either of us so we could just speak in the language and people would believe that’s how we spoke,” she said. “He thought we should go to Mexico. It seemed like a big thing, but he stated it as though it made simple logical sense. I figured since he’s willing to do this with me, I should just agree to go.” Which she did, if a bit warily. Then he said, “I know! I’ve got another idea! A really good way to get to know each other fast is to wrestle together!” She said Mexico was one thing, but wrestling was another, and said she would rather not, but he said oh-come-on-please-it’s-really-fun and explained how it broke down inhibitions and he showed her his wrestling room with the rubber mats on the floor, but she still said no and he sulked “like a disappointed kid” and disappeared into the kitchen to make a phone call, which turned into a very long phone call and she finally got aggravated and went in to say, “You know, Andy, I’m thinking it’s getting a little late for dinner if we’re going to go to Mexico.” And he looked at her as though she was crazy and said, “Mexico? We’re not going to Mexico. I was just kidding you. You thought we were going to Mexico?” But she took no umbrage and began to better understand his reality such as it was and they went out for Chinese and spoke only in gibberish except for when he translated her dinner order for the waiter and she thought it was an ingenious exercise because the normalcy of a public situation forced a naturalness upon their dithering nonsensical conversation—“You had to make it sound as real as you could.” But she never did wrestle with him, never would, about which she was most happy.

  He went on Merv Griffin’s show and Merv kept asking him about Tony Clifton. He told Merv in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t Clifton. He told Merv to invite Clifton on the show sometime so that Merv could see that it wasn’t him. He said he would even come on the show with Clifton to prove it. Merv said, “How come you never blink?” He said, “I don’t know.” Then he wrestled.

  “When I win this, I think it would be nice if all you ladies out there get in the kitchen and cook
a little meal for your man!” he said before the match on December 22, when he wrestled the finalist on Saturday Night Live. She was Dianna Peckham, whose father was an Olympic wrestling coach, and she wrestled him to a draw and it was mostly boring even though his boyhood hero who had started all of this with the strutting and the I-got-the-brains-bad-guy business—“Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers—was standing right there on the stage and had informed the world that he was now Andy’s wrestling manager and it was Buddy who held Andy’s watch and also Grandpa Paul’s robe during the match but it didn’t much matter because it was all very boring. And George would report:

  After the match, Andy called and when he first got on the phone he said, “George, I’m going to tell you something that I think will make you happy.” Then he went forth and told me that he felt that maybe the audience was not ready for wrestling and he was going to hold off on wrestling on television for a while. I’m glad he arrived at this decision himself. I felt that it was hurting his career, but the man is creative and has to have his space within which to work.

  Grandma Pearl died January 8, 1980.

  And he was very disconsolate.

  They buried her at the Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, Long Island.

  She had given him Hubert’s.

  Had taken him to the wrestling matches.

  Had taken him to see Howdy.

  Cut the kiddin’, Kid McCoy, she always said.

  “I remember he was standing there at the grave site and he looked so pitiful,” said sainted former housekeeper Margaret E. English, from whom he had long ago hid in the back of Daddy’s car and then surprised Mommy and Daddy while the car crossed the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and, since they were already late for the formal dance in the city that night, they dropped him off with Grandma Pearl.

  Papu Cy was buried there too.

  And Grandpa Paul.

  The Kaufmans and the Bernsteins were all going to be buried there together, since they always got along so well. Mommy and Daddy also had plots there. Everyone would be together. Eventually.

  Anyway, he had not been to the cemetery for a very long time.

  So he stood there and looked pitiful.

  “He was so sad,” said Margaret.

  Gregg Sutton always told him that it was Kutsher’s that had killed Grandma Pearl.

  He immediately went down to see Grandma Lillie in Hollywood, Florida, where he found a JCPenney nearby and bought her a big color television set and also a home movie camera for himself so that he could take home movies of her watching her new color television set (and, incidentally, she did not approve of him spending such a ridiculous amount of money on her and did not understand why he set up his crazy camera to film every minute of every hour that they spent visiting).

  He also filmed a nice visit they had with Aunt Esther Denoff—

  ANDY: You watch Saturday Night Live when I’m on, don’t you?

  LILLIE: Sometimes.

  ANDY: You like that show, don’t you?

  LILLIE: No.

  ANDY: You only watch it for me?

  LILLIE: Yeah.

  ANDY: And what about when I wrestle? Do you like it then?

  LILLIE: No.

  ANDY: What do you think of it when I wrestle?

  LILLIE: It’s terrible.

  ESTHER: I never saw you wrestle.

  LILLIE: You never saw him wrestle? You didn’t miss anything.

  But he was her darling grandson and she played along with whatever shenanigans he wished, even when very late that night he kept his camera running while she fell asleep sitting on the sofa holding the remote control to her new television—he liked filming her sleeping very much—so there he was sitting beside his sleeping grandmother for a very long time before he took the remote control out of her hands and watched the television himself and then he woke her when he found the unseemly commercials for the not-very-nice things. “Oh, look! Grandma, look, look! Isn’t that terrible, what they advertise on television? X-rated motel? Isn’t that something? They put that on television? Look at that! Topless dancing places now! And men! Nude men dancers! Now, look at that! Look at that, Grandma! Only sexy things, it says. On television! It’s terrible!” Grandma Lillie groggily agreed that it was all very terrible.

  On March 1, he made a six-minute-forty-one-second version of Uncle Andy’s Fun House for a proposed experimental ABC-TV program called Buckshot on which little films made by interesting people would be featured. The network people said that if the little version of Uncle Andy’s Fun House was especially good, it could even become a weekly series. He was very excited. It would be a children’s show for adults, he decided. He had puppets made of Tony Clifton and of Knuckles, his prime creation, who was a moron, and he would interact with them. He wanted the show to look like it originated from the basement den on Grassfield Road, so he flew out Stanley and Janice, who would play themselves sitting upstairs in the kitchen and they would yell down at him in the basement and tell him to come upstairs and eat. He would have his own Peanut Gallery in the den with him and everyone in the Peanut Gallery would wear Uncle Andy T-shirts. And he would show viewers a twenty-four-second clip of Grandma Lillie sleeping on her sofa in Florida—which the network hated, but he insisted that it not be removed because it added to the magic of the Fun House. George said, Andy gets locked into what he perceives as art and every inch and every second of a bit that he does, in his mind, seems to be perfect. He’s not flexible on changes. In any case, Buckshot aired and Grandma Lillie was seen sleeping on national television and Uncle Andy’s Fun House never returned.

  Stanley came to George’s office in Beverly Hills to discuss drawing up Andy’s will, since Andy didn’t have a will and the accountant thought it would be a good idea to make out one. Stanley said to his son, “Why don’t you leave something to the Mustang Ranch?” Andy said, “That’s a good idea! Why can’t I do that while I’m still alive?” George said that he could. George said that he could even have a room there named in his honor. Andy asked George to look into that.

  Saturday Night Live celebrated its one hundredth show and he made a tape in George’s backyard which was disguised as Andy Kaufman’s Wrestling Farm and behind him six women with whom he had recently mud-wrestled at Chippendale’s strip club could be seen grappling with each other and he apologized to the camera for not being in New York to help celebrate this momentous occasion and thanked the show for starting him off on his path to success. Unfortunately, the one hundredth show ran long and his tape, which had been a hit at dress rehearsal, was never broadcast.

  The robots were ValCom-17485, which was him, and AquaCom-89045, which was Bernadette Peters, and they fell in love and he died at the end (lost battery power, really) before he could pass along life wisdom to the robot child they had made and he cried when he read the script and George told him he would get half a million dollars plus percentage points from Universal—which had now given him an overall deal because once the robot movie Heartbeeps was out of the way, they would probably start shooting the Clifton movie in the spring and also use him in other movies. George thought Heartbeeps had the makings of a classic, like The Wizard of Oz, only more deliberately artful, so he was very optimistic. The movie would take place in the futuristic world of 1995, when everyone had domestic robots tending chores in their homes. Much makeup would be required and it was designed by Stan Winston and applied in daily three-hour sessions by artist Vince Prentice and the process involved gluing pieces of a gelatinous mask (made from ground-up calves’ hooves) to the face, then adding eight coats of metallic paint, then dusting it with sparkly Pearl Essence powder (made from crushed seashells). Andy quickly bored of the ritual—he sent Linda to find tapes of Abbott and Costello and Amos ’n’ Andy and Brando and Bogart which he could watch to stem tedium—and his latenesses in the mornings became more frequent and more objectionable on top of which he said that he needed to clear his bowels before going into makeup, which meant another twenty minutes wherein an assistant director wo
uld always have to bang on the bathroom door and ask, “Is anything happening yet?” and he’d scream “Get away from me!”

  He coughed—before he sat in the makeup chair and while he sat in the makeup chair. It was a small, persistent cough. “Gee, what’s the matter?” Prentice would ask. “I don’t know,” Andy said. “It seems the longer I stay in L.A., the more I cough.” Prentice figured it was the rubbing alcohol he used as a thinner. “That would irritate anybody’s breathing,” said Prentice. Besides, Andy said that he had always coughed.