Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  Clifton, in full persona, checked into the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, where he would open, once again, for Rodney Dangerfield during the last three nights of January. The two-show-per-night engagement at the Warfield Theater would be especially historic because now the audiences would actually try to kill him. (Coincidentally, or not, the movie of his life was now two months dead, having been rejected by Universal and then Paramount, Columbia, and Warner Bros. as well.) David Hirshey had flown out from New York to continue his Rolling Stone exploration and to search for cracks in the Clifton façade (finding none besides the presence of George and Bob and the occasional backstage disappearance of Clifton’s gut). “He looks like Roy Orbison pumped with cortisone,” Hirshey would write. On the first night, derision flamed as Clifton sacreligiously mangled “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and someone screamed TAKE THE DOGSHIT OUT OF YOUR MOUTH! Debris quickly rained from the balcony and, before Clifton had left the stage, twenty people would be refunded their money. Dangerfield found this hilarious—“They all hated him, you know? And he kept saying, ‘It’s too bad that a few of you out there have to spoil it for everyone!’ I loved it.” On the second night, a small German man rushed the stage wielding a penknife and threatened, I CAN’T TAKE IT! NOW GET ZE HELL OFF! Vince Prentice, who had taken over Cliftonian makeup chores, apprehended the perpetrator, whom security mistook as a plant. Clifton then dodged exploding beer cans and a bottle of Southern Comfort—“That was a glass bottle and you’re a fuckin’ asshole!” he brayed at the assailant, then elected to sing his final three numbers while hiding in the wings. On the third night, triple-folded fishnet would be lowered in front of the stage and Clifton would don a riot-squad helmet with plastic face-guard, which was most advisable, because fruit and vegetables were now on sale in the lobby and much produce was heaved, as were coins and eggs and banana cake. It was a blistering apple, however, that tore through the net and crashed squarely into the faceguard and disintegrated on impact—which sent Clifton teetering offstage, where he completed his performance and retreated to his dressing room. Hirshey found him there, crowing triumphantly about the whole experience. But Clifton also warned him, “Watch yerself! You print that I’m Andy Kough-man and I’ll sue yer ass! I’ll sue Bowling Green’s ass!” Meanwhile, Hirshey had received a phone call in his hotel room earlier that day from Andy, who said he was down in Los Angeles. Hirshey mentioned that someone had thrown a bottle at Clifton the night before. Andy said, “Really? Are you sure it wasn’t his manager?”

  On Friday, February 20, the disregard found new plateau. Saturday Night Live had left him to twist alone toward madness; he had not been asked to return since the wrestling anticlimax fourteen months earlier. (Moreover, the show had fallen into notorious disrepair after the abdication of Lorne Michaels in May 1980.) Thus, Andy trucked with the upstart enemy: He hosted ABC-TV’s Fridays—a Los Angeles-based live sketch-comedy replication whose limp ratings invited drastic attention-getting measures. He began plotting with producer John Moffitt on the Sunday before the broadcast and said he wanted to open the show by bombing so as to challenge the audience from the outset. George, who was present, tried to convince him otherwise: I had a disagreement with him again because we both know I hate the bombing routine and he thinks very highly of it. I find it boring—if you do not entertain an audience, you fail as an entertainer, and I do not want him to fail, even if he is willing to fail. (He would settle, in the end, for opening as Laughing Man, deliriously convulsed and blithering incoherently, whose first intelligible words were Ohhh, I need help, I need help.)

  He also proposed a piece called the Masked Magician, wherein Zmuda would disguise himself as a disgruntled illusionist (barely obscured in a ski mask) and reveal the secrets of the interlinking rings and basic sword-swallowing; Andy would help plunge a sword—a bit overzealously—down Zmuda’s gullet, and Zmuda would then regurgitate blood and intestinal matter and Andy would vomit vegetable soup. (By airtime, network censors would permit Zmuda only bloody spittle and no guts or vomit whatsoever.) Fridays writers, meanwhile, prepared two sketch pieces for him—a Point/Counterpoint debate with himself concerning federal arts-funding and a show-closing restaurant sketch called “Marijuana” in which he and three regular cast members, as two couples, would each take turns going into the bathroom, ostensibly to smoke dope, then return to their table quite stupefied.

  Andy called a private meeting midweek and suggested a notion to Moffitt, coproducer Jack Burns, and network executive Vic Kaplan. “It was his idea,” Moffitt would recall. “He presented it in a very straight-ahead and serious fashion. He said, ‘This is what I’m gonna do. I want to rehearse the marijuana sketch as planned until we’re on the air and then I want to break out of it. I’m gonna say—but only on the air—that it’s a silly sketch and I’m just not gonna finish it. I want to break the wall of reality and create a confrontation—and because I just ruined the show, it should end in a fight.’ He laid it out point by point, and we agreed to do just that as long as he promised no other surprises in the moment. And he gave his word.” No one else on the staff or in the cast would be told with the exception of some writers and the sketch participants, who were Michael Richards, Melanie Chartoff, and Maryedith Burrell—although many would claim that Chartoff and Burrell were also left in the dark. Chartoff, however, said Jack Burns told them just before the sketch, “Stay in character and go with it!”

  And so, roughly two minutes into the sketch, it unraveled as planned when he returned from the restaurant bathroom and sat and paused and grinned helplessly and stammered, “I can’t … I can’t play … I can’t play stoned … I feel really stupid … I feel so stupid.” And Burrell began laughing maniacally as though gripped with actual terror. And Chartoff said to him, “You feel stupid?” and quivered. And he remained uncomfortably paralyzed and muttered on about feeling stupid. (Richards would recall, “He just shut down and sat there. And I could just feel that he was just gonna keep on sitting there and let everybody squirm and stink. I realized that he now wanted me to push it to the next level.”) So Richards walked off camera and returned with the cue cards and angrily plopped them in front of Andy, who said, “It’s all in fun—c’mon!” The actors stayed frozen/panicked, whereupon Andy stood and tossed a glass of water at Richards, and Chartoff rose to push a buttered dinner roll into Andy’s hair and Andy threatened to push butter in her face and Burrell kept laughing edgily and Jack Burns, apparently livid, ran onto the set and rushed at Andy, and Andy shoved him and several crew members, who were incensed and afraid of further destruction, stormed forth to intercede in the scuffle and Burns screamed for the director to go to a commercial—and it was all very much like the incident on the closed-circuit campus program Grahm Spotlight on which Burt Dubrow had tackled Andy and called for a commercial after Andy pulled a gun and tried to commit suicide on camera. But this, of course, was bigger and the network switchboards lit like Las Vegas marquees and The New York Times ran a story days later under the headline WAS “FIGHT” ON TV REAL OR STAGED? IT ALL DEPENDS, wherein Tony Schwartz wrote, “It looked like a spontaneous fistfight on live television. Whether it really happened is a matter of interpretation.” And Howard Rosenberg in the Los Angeles Times wrote, “Was it real? Yes, and the Brooklyn Bridge is in Wyoming…. Kaufman, whose schizophrenic comedy consists of reality and fantasy rolled up into one big put-on, convinced a lot of viewers that he had cracked up on the air….”

  Stanley and Janice had watched in Great Neck and realized that their son would never work again; Stanley told George that he had decided at that moment not to invest any of Andy’s money in the stock market, figuring he would heretofore need it to survive. There was some relief, however, that at least he hadn’t wrestled on the show.

  The next night, in New York, a new Saturday Night Live cast member named Charles Rocket uttered the word fuck in the closing moments of the show. It was just a coincidence.

  Grizzled, haggard, wretched, unshaven, woebegone—it h
ad worked well before—he tried the following Friday night to read the statement “prepared” by the producers to confirm for viewers that the fight had been a planned improvisational experiment. But then he stopped his monotonous recitation and refused to continue. “This has been a very hard week for me,” he said. His job at Taxi was on the line, he said, and no one would hire him and his friends wouldn’t speak to him and his wife had left him and he had only been trying to have fun and the laughter from the audience now was pretty tasteless, he said, because he wasn’t trying to be funny. Then came tears. Tears were always easy.

  Two days later, he and Clifton posed together for photographer Herb Ritts in a session that was intended to produce a Rolling Stone cover. Vince Prentice had transformed Zmuda into a lippy lounge gargoyle, but it worked and even George thought this Clifton was impressive both in look and comportment—Clifton strangled Andy in several shots—and within weeks it was decided that Zmuda would take over the role and be booked on talk shows and perform an engagement at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe Resort and everyone would continue to think that Clifton was Andy but now it truly wouldn’t be Andy. They went to the Japanese restaurant Amagi—George, Bob, Andy—and piled their hands together on the tabletop and vowed that no one but Prentice and a few others would know the truth. I will not discuss Tony Clifton [even] with my partner Howard, which is his pleasure, George later dictated. Rolling Stone editor Terry McDonell called George the next day and said he had nixed the Andy-and-Clifton cover and instead wanted Andy posed alone strapped into a straitjacket which George nixed—although Fridays photographer Wayne Williams had shot him in a straitjacket three weeks earlier and those pictures had appeared as commercial bumpers on the infamous broadcast. They would tentatively settle on using a more straightforward photograph, but it would not matter, because when the April 30 issue of the magazine was published, Ringo Starr was the cover subject and at the very top of the cover were the very small and very provocative words WHY ANDY KAUFMAN IS NOT FUNNY.

  As quoted by David Hirshey—

  CARL REINER: Unless you let the audience in on the joke, you are making fools of them, and that’s what he’s doing with this Tony Clifton.

  STANLEY KAUFMAN: I never understood why he would want to alienate the audience to such extremes unless he was trying to get them to go from hate to love. Why Tony Clifton? It’s possible he created this character to draw hisses for the villain so he can come out the hero.

  CAROL KAUFMAN: I don’t think anything that makes people uncomfortable is entertainment. Sometimes I just want to stand up on my seat and shout, “He’s only kidding, everybody!” I think with Andy, it all goes back to the self, the I. What am I going to get pleasure out of, not how am I going to please the audience. He knows they want to laugh, they want him to tell jokes. But no. That would be selfless.

  Two letters to Rolling Stone were subsequently published:

  One: … “As for my not letting people in on the joke, there are times when real life is funnier than deliberate comedy. Therefore, I try to create the illusion of a ‘real-life’ situation or character. However, it must be believed totally; if I were to let people in on the joke, it wouldn’t have that effect…. Finally, concerning my ‘brief flirtation’ with levitation, this is something I have studied and practiced for several years and I take it very seriously. Not only am I able to levitate about eight feet off the ground, but once in the air, I am able to fly about in all directions.”

  Two: “You promised to put my picture on the cover of your magazine and I flew to Los Angeles at my own expense and I spent a whole evening posing for your photographer standing next to that asshole egotist Kaufman who thinks he’s Mr. Hollywood Show Business and I didn’t get nothin’ out of it and as far as I’m concerned to me that’s a waste of time and you’re all a bunch of schmucks and you can go fuck yourselves. Incidentally, I am appearing on The Merv Griffin Show June 8 all across the country, so could you let your readers know about it.”

  All things had been well considered at Taxi: The sixty-fourth episode—entitled “Latka the Playboy” as written by Glen Charles and Les Charles—introduced Vic Ferrari, a slick, smooth-talking cad who was Latka Gravas’s alter ego. It was the first indication of a multiple personality disorder that would possess Latka for much of the next year.

  It was nobody’s business and he told very few people that he did this, but he did do it and the reason why lived somewhere in a scared and lovely place that was as much a part of him as the other variegated colors. It was early April and his evening flight had been delayed at O’Hare in Chicago, so he decided to take a morning flight instead, because the girl was very sick. He had called her in the hospital weeks earlier because a friend of hers got word to him about how much she loved what he did on television. Her name was Mary Jean Burden of DeMotte, Indiana, age twenty-one, and she had cystic fibrosis and so he called from the airport and rented a car and drove forty miles to the hospital in Crown Point, arriving at midnight. A small crowd gathered in the lounge and he visited and performed for two hours and was Foreign Man and was Elvis—he serenaded Mary Jean on bended knee with “Love Me Tender”—and she would tell a local reporter, “He can really talk with his eyes.” He also wrestled two women and let them win. He invited Mary Jean to come visit the Taxi set when she felt better and he gave her a kiss and kept waving goodbye as the elevator doors closed. Her mother wrote to thank him after Mary Jean died six weeks later. “Words could never say enough,” Mrs. Burden wrote. “You’ll never realize how much you helped her.”

  He had lately been toying with the idea of reviving the Clifton movie by giving Foreign Man a co-starring role. Well, it was just an idea. Anyway, George was encouraged.

  Linda made call after call after call until she found Fabian for him. She finally arranged a lunch at Jerry’s Deli because Fabian Forte lived in nearby Toluca Lake, never mind that he was most wary about the assignation, fearing put-on, knowing what he knew about the one who wished to meet him so desperately. He had heard how his song “This Friendly World” had become Andy’s signature closing number in concert performances—and he never knew quite how to take that. Andy was late, which angered Fabian, who had been prompt, and then Andy arrived. “He looked at me like—I hate to use this word—like he was in awe,” Fabian would recall. “And I’m still thinking, maybe he’s playing with me and that this was a big hoax. Like, if he was having this filmed or something, I was going to tear him limb from limb.” But Andy, he noticed, was nervous—“almost like wringing his hands”—and barely ate his lunch while reciting infinitesimal details about every one of Fabian’s records and Fabian laughingly asked him, “Why the fuck do you do ‘This Friendly World? Are you putting me down?” Andy said, “No, you have to understand. That song means everything to me. I wish the world really was that way.” And Fabian would always be pleased that he surprised Andy with a bearish Italian hug when they parted that day and would remain touched by the image of the unusual boy in the basement who had sung along with him. “You could see in his eyes that he wasn’t kidding,” he said.

  P-l-o-t-s—there would now be nothing but plots; he pursued old ones and hatched new ones and slipped in and out of view, in and out of towns, in and out of countries; he was mercury and he moved as such….

  April: Andy was in New York, which Merv announced (suspiciously), when Clifton taped his first appearance on Merv’s program in Los Angeles; Clifton was suddenly fatter and shorter and less nasal and more stupid and slightly nicer; he sang “I Will Survive” and pronounced it surveeve; Merv said he looked nothing like Andy Kaufman and Clifton said, “I am not Andy Kaufman! I want to have nothing to do with Andy Kaufman!” … In New York, meanwhile, Andy spent days wandering into clubs and onto various public access cable programs in the persona of a pompous cigar-smoking monosyllabic Russian who also happened to be himself (“I am Hollywood, I am television star on Taxi and I hate when I do not get respect I deserve! I am champion! Champion wrestling, champion many things!”). At the
Improv, he burst in on an improvisational class taught by Martin Harvey Friedberg, himself an esteemed madman of performance theory, whom Andy antagonized relentlessly, waving his cigar in Friedberg’s face—“Smoke is bother you? Why is bother you?” Friedberg: “You enjoying all that poison that’s going down into your system? You’re enjoying all that cancer that’s getting into your lungs?” Andy: “Yeah.” (He felt that being Russian required a cigar always; but neither he nor Clifton ever actually inhaled the smoke.) On the Slycraft Hour, a barely seen public access show, he brought on Stanley and Janice—who did not feign Russian dialects—and he argued moral decency with a right-wing quack and evinced his right to destroy Fridays. “Fridays is rip-off, exactly copy of Saturday Night Live. Is bull. Is lot of bull. So I get mad. I ruin that show. I will do it again. Here is my mommy.” … Not as a Russian, he tracked down Alan Abel, a satirist known to be the World’s Greatest Hoaxer, whose New York Times obituary on January 2, 1980, had thrilled Andy, since Abel was not dead but only fooling and had tricked the paper of record into printing news of his demise. Among books Abel had published were The Confessions of a Hoaxer, The Panhandler’s Handbook, and How to Thrive on Rejection—so Andy felt a very close bond and the two of them became fast friends that spring and they would walk seventy-five blocks up and down Broadway together. “We talked and talked and talked and talked,” said Abel. “We did have a lot in common in the sense that he liked the kind of crazy shit—if you’ll pardon the expression—that I did. We would compare notes on panhandling-he was very dedicated to it, you know. He wanted us to collaborate on something really fantastic and enormous, but we could never figure out what it would be. He was especially fascinated with my rejection book and how I had gotten people to believe I was dead. He’d say, ‘How can I do that? I want to do that.’”