Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  They had started filming in early June up in the redwood groves of Santa Cruz and, on extremely hot days, his gelatin face would melt and his cheeks and jowls would droop and he would age forty years. By the second week on location, he could not stand being without a female. A thirteen-year-old girl knocked on his hotel room door very early one morning and she wanted an autograph and he took her name and phone number and told George that he planned to stay in touch so that he could date her in four years. Out of boredom, he called the National Enquirer and told funny lies about how he and Bernadette were having fights and that the director Allan Arkush had thrown him off the set many times. The unit publicist didn’t think this was a great idea. The Enquirer published the story. Arkush, however, did once wield a gun in order to get him to come out of his trailer. “Look, either you’re on the set now or you’re a dead man and we’re recasting the movie,” Arkush told him half jokingly. “Andy thought that was hysterical,” Arkush said. Andy had Clifton call Arkush to tell him to lay off. One day, he stepped out of a very dramatic scene because he saw a candy bar on the set and he wanted it. Meanwhile, everyone thought the dialogue was too slow; the dialogue, in truth, was excruciatingly slow. George thought Arkush was utilizing only ten percent of Andy’s comic abilities. By the sixth week of filming, back in Los Angeles, a Universal executive cornered George and proposed that if Andy would show up on time for two consecutive days the studio would install a hooker in his dressing room. Andy loved the idea and actually came early the first day of the challenge when the executive informed George that the studio brass couldn’t quite justify budgeting procurement of prostitutes. Andy took the news stoically. The Screen Actors Guild went on strike two days later. Andy went directly to Nevada to have sex.

  He had looked at his ABC special again, in the makeup chair, on the same day the hooker thing was first mentioned. And he saw the old him on the special. And he had just read something that the critic Marvin Kitman had written about the old him being better than the new him. Marvin Kitman hated the new him. Like all those people who wrote the wrestling letters saying that he was a chauvanistic arrogant idiot asshole now. (George had told Linda to start collecting the letters because George envisioned a book of Andy Kaufman’s hate mail, which no publisher would deign to consider.) George told him that there were probably far more people who felt the same way and hadn’t sent letters. People thought that he had changed, George said. People didn’t think he was lovable anymore. He pondered this for a while and asked George, “Do you think I can still be innocent?” And he sounded a little more worried about it than usual.

  Harrah’s gave him a free suite and, once he had checked in, he went straight to the Mustang and stayed until six the following morning and called George later and acknowledged, “You’re right, I am an extremist. Once I get there, I’m crazy and I don’t do anything in moderation.” He had skinny twins wrestle for him the first night. “I love skinny women,” he said, but had other kinds as well. He made Zmuda fly in the next night; they instantly fell in love with the same married hooker. He called his mother from Reno to say that he was having a wonderful time. She reported this to George and George reported this, among other Nevada updates, for posterity—She said, “I asked him if he went to that camp that he goes to,” meaning the Mustang Ranch. She said, “When I said that, Andy laughed.” He [told] her that he did go to the camp, and he told her about the twins. Andy tells his mother and father everything, or almost everything. He had six girls on the third night, made some wrestle, spent four hundred dollars (they charged thirty dollars per half hour). He says he doesn’t treat them like sex objects, he treats the girls like human beings. Sometimes they will just sit and talk for a while and he’ll give them rubdowns…. He ordered his parents a twenty-five-hundred-dollar Niagara adjustable bed with the cyclo-massaging-vi-brating feature—he felt that they are really wonderful parents and it gave him great pleasure to send them this gift. He tried to talk George into a new wrestling scheme—“I have an idea where it will be acceptable! Let’s start a new organization, Men for the Promotion of Women’s Equal Rights, and then they’ll know that I am pro women and won’t be angry with me when I wrestle them.” I told him it’s cockeyed … I told him that it’s destructive to his career—it’s been done, he did it already, there’s nothing new. He’s got such a fixation on it … it’s a sexual experience for him. He told George that there was a second, more modern, Mustang Ranch, which was up for sale. He said he wanted to buy it and rename it Uncle Andy’s Fun House. Bob, he said, still couldn’t keep up with him. “He just conks out very early.” The girls had begun referring to Andy as “some kind of superman” by the end of the week. He’s real proud of himself.

  The SAG strike moved into its second week and he stayed on in Reno and began branching out to other bordellos in Carson City and outlying areas. George worried that all of his whoring was going to knock him out. Andy said, “Let me tell you—I’m a happy man. If I happen to die in one of those rooms, just let everyone know that I died happy. We should tell everybody not to be sad. Everyone should be happy about it.” Not that he wants to die. But that’s the way he wouldn’t mind going. After two weeks of such, he left Reno with a Mustang Ranch hooker named Joanne and, as the strike continued apace, they spent the next two weeks together romping along the California coast and he made a fracas in Sacramento trying to get them into the state fair after hours (succeeding only after he screamed that he was Latka on Taxi). All of which delayed an intended trip home to New York to visit his family. Janice told George on August 20, “He was going to come about a week ago, but he got waylaid—and I mean way laid!” Anyway, he didn’t have to be a robot again for several more weeks, during which time he would promote the release of In God We Tru$t and wrestle more women, but not on television. He liked being on strike, although he didn’t quite understand what he was striking for—something about residuals from pay television and videocassettes or something.

  Merv greeted him and regarded his clothes and said, “You don’t have a wife, do you? You do your own laundry?” Mmm-hmmm, he responded. “You’re frayed all over!” Merv continued. “I mean, your pockets are ripped!” Andy said, “That’s ’cause I wear the same pants for five years.” He wasn’t trying to be funny but the people laughed anyway and anyway he was only trying to help Marty Feldman sell tickets to a movie that nobody would want to go see.

  Mea culpa came that autumn. He had lost everything no really, he said, establishing a landmark in his march of passive-aggressive disregard. David Letterman, a Comedy Store alumnus whom he had known a little in California, was now the host of a new NBC morning program broadcast live from Rockefeller Center, two floors below the Saturday Night Live studios, and Letterman’s show would be canceled less than a month after Andy visited, which was mostly coincidental but still. The plot unspooled over two appearances in the course of a week or so—he had stopped shaving days before presenting his plan to the producers. “He showed up looking kind of rocky, kind of dirty,” said Gerard Mulligan, a writer-talent coordinator for the program. “He said, ‘Well, I’ve been sleeping in doorways the last couple of nights getting ready for the show and what I’d like to do is come out and just look the way I look now, but with a couple more nights under my belt. And David—’ (He always called Dave David.) ‘—will ask me what’s up. And I would say that wrestling has ruined my life and my career and I only see one way out.’ At that point he said he wanted to take out a prop gun and shoot himself in the head. He said he had always wanted to do that on television. We said, ‘Well, jeez, Andy, let us get back to you on that.’” And it was decided that he wouldn’t shoot himself, but he would panhandle in the audience instead, but that would come with the second appearance—for the first appearance, he would be brought on minutes before the end of the show, as though he had dropped in by surprise, and he looked thoroughly untucked and bedraggled but seemed cheerful enough and announced, “I’m in New York and I’ve been sleeping in doorways, to see what it�
�s like. It’s true! I haven’t been in a bed or anything for a few weeks now….” And he excitedly launched into a tale about having been chased off an apartment house staircase, whereupon Letterman said there was no time left in the show and that perhaps Andy could come back another day, which he did, looking far worse—hair standing on end, whiskers thicker, eyes glazed imperviously. Above his lip, the makeup girl had smeared Vaseline to approximate drained mucus, for which Letterman proffered a tissue immediately—“You have a little … just a little bit of something here … See, people sometimes eat breakfast while they watch the show …”

  He wiped and remained oblivious and humorless; he smiled never once and said that he had quit Taxi and that Saturday Night Live hadn’t asked him to be on the show for a long time and he coughed in virulent spasms and Letterman said, “But things are okay?” and people laughed. Then he went onto the stage and sat on a stool and said that he wanted to talk about his marriage (and people laughed) and said he had met his wife when he was starting out in clubs and she had been a cocktail waitress and they had two children, Mark and Lisa, and then Saturday Night Live discovered him and he then coughed up more phlegm (and people laughed) and he said, “I’d rather … if you don’t laugh, because I’m not trying to be funny right now.” And he said that he went to California and got a manager named George Shapiro, “a wonderful man,” and Taxi came along—“And I kind of felt inhibited by it, that I was just able to do the one character. I wanted to have more freedom, creatively, to do these other things.” So he started wrestling women and received a lot of hate mail and quit the show and had been trying to get a job doing dinner theater in Wisconsin and his wife had finally left him—“She got the kids, the house, she got all my money. Uh, not all my money, but some. Anyway, she got everything…. And I, I don’t really have anything.” And he coughed and coughed. “So, anyway, if anybody could—I know this sounds like a cliché. But if you could … uh … any extra money … I would appreciate it. Don’t throw it—I’ll just come up …” And he staggered up into the bleachers and collected coins and security came to escort him from the studio and the audience made the awwwww noise as he left and Letterman said, “Always a pleasure to have the young talent on the show.”

  “We got instant reaction to that show,” Letterman reported not long thereafter. “Phone calls, letters. People were mad at me for having him on, mad at him, sorry for his plight. Other people thought I had not been sympathetic to the needs of this obviously desperate human. [Andy] was real eager to get the hate mail. He made me promise to send it…. Sometimes when you look Andy in the eyes, you get a feeling somebody else is driving.”

  Phone call with Kathy Utman, during which he heard no bells but told her about everything that hurt and frightened him, perking up only when he spoke of the Letterman show and how so many people had believed it was really real:

  “A lot of people said that was the greatest thing they ever saw me do—people who know me. That and the wrestling thing are both, like, very avant-garde type of off-the-wall humor, you know? And it’s not very popular with people in the business, ’cause they don’t think it’s commercially viable. So I’m having this thing lately … like, there was a time when I could have quit Taxi and I would have been able to just be an artist—like, you know, do my thing and have confidence in that. But now I’m thinking that there’s a lot of people that won’t really … I mean, if I was to quit Taxi which I’m not gonna do—See, I’m not doing what the producers in this business like. They like skits and mindless comedy and I don’t do that. The thing is, I’ve always wanted to have my own show. And for years now no one will give me one. They won’t give me my own regular series. And I know that that’s what I would do best. George told me the other day that two cable companies don’t want to give Andy Kaufman a show, because Andy Kaufman performs for himself and not for the public. And that really bummed me out … But if everybody in the business thinks that way, then I can’t—I mean, if they’re all stupid, I’m the one that suffers. You know, also—because when I went up onstage at the Improv in California, I didn’t get that big of an applause. And also, Friday night at Taxi, I didn’t get that big of an applause when I came out onstage, like I usually do. That makes me think, like George says, that because of all the really weird stuff that I do, I’m losing a lot of fans—fans that really like me because of Latka and stuff like that. But if I kept doing Latka all the time, I wouldn’t be true to my art, you know? And I choose to be an artist rather than catering to the masses. But, still, I don’t want to be losing my career, you know? Ever since he told me that I’ve been thinking, Oh, I’m a has-been. It’s in my mind …

  “The thing is I don’t perform for the mass public! But as long as there’s a group of people out there that understands what I’m doing, I’m performing for them. Of course, I perform for myself, too—all good artists do. But it’s not like I’m the only one that understands what I’m doing…. I just hope that I’m not on the downslide…. You know how when someone that you know dies and you know they’re gonna die a week before they die? So that when they die, it’s not really a shock to you—but everyone else is crying and stuff? Well, I think they should have realized that the person was gonna die! They shouldn’t have been so shocked and be crying at that point. Now, maybe it hasn’t happened to my career yet. But, just in case it does, I’m doing it now, I’m realizing there’s something wrong. So that if it does happen, I won’t feel it as hard…. Anyway, it could just be a phase…. It might be all in my head, I don’t know…. Did I tell you about the prostitute that I had …”

  Suddenly, there in the valley of lengthening apathy, Rolling Stone expressed interest in doing a major profile, maybe a cover story—maybe even Andy and Clifton together on the cover!—because maybe this destitution thing had some emotional validity and maybe he was nuts and what could be more entertaining than chronicling a man bent on destroying himself in public? Writer David Hirshey was dispatched to execute the sleuthing, which began during the first few days of 1981 in New York. It was nearly two A.M. when they arrived at the Improv (in a horse-drawn carriage) and the place was thinning out and Andy took the stage and started hopping and then—“A hunnn-dred bottles of beer on the wall, a hunnn-dred bottles of beer …” And Hirshey would report that the reception was understandably anguished at first and so Andy began performing each numeral in a different voice and persona, proceeding slowly at times, quickly at other times, and the people at the tables, who were initially annoyed, now became entranced, then fervid, then frenzied, and then—at fourteen bottles of beer—he walked offstage. At which point, the six remaining people screamed in agony and begged him to finish, which he did and was instantly flushed with euphoria. “That was magical,” he said. “‘A Hundred Bottles of Beer’ has always been a fantasy of mine…. There are such psychological implications to that song, such great things you can do. Once they’re hooked, they won’t let you stop. Can you imagine?”

  On an ensuing night they returned to the Improv, where he wrestled—after they had first dined on Japanese food, which Andy did not consume until he had bowed his head in prayer and then swallowed fifty vitamins, one at a time. “I’m an open book,” he said to Hirshey. “I have to be totally honest with you. That’s the way I am.” Later, however, when he insisted that they look for hookers in Times Square, he asked Hirshey to maybe not mention it in the article so as to not shock his family.

  Redemption was offered two weeks later by Dick Ebersol, who had three years earlier left Saturday Night Live in the hands of Lorne Michaels. Ebersol had moved to Los Angeles to shape other NBC projects, which now included restructuring The Midnight Special, a long-running rock music cavalcade that aired Friday nights following The Tonight Show. Beginning in early 1977, Andy had made a handful of appearances on the show—the most memorable of which featured his renditions of “You Light Up My Life” and “Stayin’ Alive,” for which he accompanied himself on cymbals. Ebersol now proposed that Andy take over an entire ninety-
minute installment of the show, which would dedicate itself, partly in documentary style, to answering the ephemeral (and all-too-urgent) question—Who is Andy Kaufman? “Andy Kaufman is me,” he announced at the outset. “I’m Andy Kaufman.” The program would largely serve as an in-studio showcase in which he welcomed many selves onto the stage: Foreign Man would appear and do de Elveece and there would be conga numbers (he beat along to “Tallahassee Lassie” sung by boyhood hero Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon) and Slim Whitman would teach him to yodel and he would do bad ventriloquism with store-bought Howdy Doody and Little Red Riding Hood puppets and Clifton would perform his usual malevolent set (during which Andy would be seen laughing riotously in the audience). And in the documentary clips he would sit in his sparsely furnished home and explain the evolution of his career and cameras would follow him through the Taxi soundstage and through a busboy shift at Jerry’s Famous Deli in Studio City, where he now worked Tuesday nights since the Posh Bagel had closed. (Jerry himself would be heard describing him as “an excellent, hardworking, very serious-in-his-work type of man” and expressed interest in hiring him full-time.) Also there would be wrestling footage shot a few nights earlier at The Comedy Store about which he explained that he played the role of the villain to purposely engender audience hostility—“I believe in being a purist and going all the way with the role—and not breaking character or giving away that I’m playing a role. I believe in playing it straight to the hilt.” And George would be seen mournfully discussing the hate mail and the loss of fans. And Zmuda would be seen matter-of-factly stating, “The wrestling has definitely cost Andy Kaufman his career. There’s no doubt about it. Right now this is the only show that has offered this man to be on in a long time. And we thank you for that.”