Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  Late July: Andy was in London, which Merv announced (suspiciously), when Clifton returned to tape Merv’s show in Las Vegas, so as to promote his forthcoming two-week engagement at Harrah’s Stateline Lounge in Lake Tahoe beginning August 31; Merv asked him why he had come through the casino that day wearing a bag over his head and Clifton said, “Because my makeup man did not get here! And I don’t want the public to see me unless I look right!” Clifton told Merv that he was a forty-year resident of Las Vegas and lived in a Winnebago trailer home and that he had flown the Spruce Goose with Howard Hughes…. In London, meanwhile, Andy was enjoying a stopover on his way to Amsterdam, where he planned to do nothing else but explore the red-light district.

  August 30: Before his gig—for which he would receive $7500 per week, performing three shows per night—Clifton checked into Harrah’s Tahoe while Andy checked into the Ormsby House hotel in Carson City, which was not close but was close enough; he was more concerned with proximity to his beloved brothels than with proximity to Clifton. He came to Harrah’s the first day in order to be seen on the premises and stoke conjecture. According to Gregg Sutton—whom Clifton now called MacNamara (leader of the band, natch)—Andy attended only one show. “He was disguised in a funky beard and weird clothes. He heckled Clifton—‘Tell the truth! You’re Andy Kaufman, you fraud!’ Clifton had him removed from the room.” Most other people left on their own; business was light. Clifton told an intrepid local news crew that he was suing Andy—“He’s using my name to get places! Makes me feel really mad, really bad, really sad—clad, had, mad, dad, fad! That’s every word that rhymes with mad—from A to Z! Thank you very much!” (“The rhyming thing was the one thing Zmuda invented,” said Sutton. The new Clifton also deployed a reptilian tongue which inadvertently slipped out between sentences as means of unpleasant punctuation.) The Hollywood Reporter reviewed the show fully duped—“Kaufman establishes nothing with which people can identify….” A showgirl, meanwhile, also fell for Clifton during his engagement, largely because she thought she was falling for Andy; Zmuda received her advances and intimacies without removing his facial prosthetics. “I told her that as an artist, I had to stay in character,” he said. “And she actually believed me.” Just to be safe, Sutton had advised him to keep the lights out and to make sure that he got her drunk before special moments unfolded.

  Halfway through Clifton’s run, Andy returned to Los Angeles to prepare to host the season premiere of Fridays, for which he had devised a new reality. He told John Moffitt that he wanted to unveil a new him, a Born Again Christian him who would introduce viewers to his fiancée—the woman who had saved him from spiritual ruin. But first he had to find her, which he did—in the ABC studio directly next door, where The Lawrence Welk Show was taped. She was a twenty-nine-year-old featured gospel singer named Kathie Sullivan; he sat her down in the Fridays offices, where she nervously accepted his proposal of making televised charade. “He assured me that if I did this he would not do anything like rip my dress off or embarrass me in any way,” she said. “He knew that I was Born Again. He was a perfect gentleman.” Linda Mitchell asked what size ring she wore and then purchased a cheap but dazzling cubic zirconia for Sullivan to begin flaunting immediately (Andy informed the National Enquirer that it was a $10,000 diamond). He had a press release issued—ANDY KAUFMAN TO ANNOUNCE ENGAGEMENT THIS FRIDAY ON THE AIR—wherein Sullivan was quoted professing, “I’m glad God gave me the chance to meet him. I’m so glad I was given the opportunity to change his life.”

  On Friday night, September 18, he opened the show in a three-piece brown polyester suit; his hair was carefully cropped; he glistened with renewal. Said Moffitt, “He had that look in his eyes that said he had seen God.” He began as Foreign Man and also did Mighty Mouse—reestablishing the benign him—then showed a clip of his unshaven self apologizing after the fight imbroglio. “That was a pretty low point in my life,” he said. “As you can probably tell, since then I’ve gone through a lot of changes.” Then he welcomed onto camera the woman responsible for those changes, whom he called his fiancée, and Sullivan confirmed her love for him and boasted of his conversion to Christianity and said, “We’ll probably end up with a bunch of little kids running around the house saying tenk you veddy much!” And they sang a soaring spiritual ballad “that really says just how Andy and I feel—it’s called ‘Home Again.’” She would recall, “I gave him the easy parts, but he did a real good job, on key and everything.” Later in the program, he further promulgated clean living by criticizing a drug sketch that had just been performed, which delayed his introduction of the rock group The Pretenders, which incited booing (just like the good old days), and he closed the show with the rousing gospel standard “By and By.” George said it was a very good put-on and thought people believed it. Well, many people did. Some people just never believe Andy. Fridays writer Steve Adams, author of the notorious restaurant sketch, would remember the universal response to the show somewhat differently—“His finding God didn’t work too well. By then the public was on to him. I think he knew it, too.”

  Weeks later, he issued another press release—ANDY KAUFMAN AND KATHIE SULLIVAN CALL IT QUITS. “Mr. Kaufman,” it stated, “wants to keep his once-a-week busboy job at Jerry’s Famous Deli in Studio City and continue his intergender wrestling and Miss Sullivan did not approve. Mr. Kaufman found it more and more difficult to give up his own needs and wishes, especially wrestling.” Also, he found the three-piece suits too constricting. In truth, it was Sullivan who thought it prudent to cease the deception. “I got a lot of backlash from the Christian community,” she said. She did, however, get to keep the ring.

  Henceforth, nothing would matter more than the ring. He was back in the ring on October 11—six years exactly since the night he first performed on Saturday Night Live—and this ring was in Atlantic City, where he wrestled Playmate Susan Smith (36-24-36, one hundred thirty-eight pounds, blond) at the Playboy Hotel and Casino. Playboy had challenged him, promising a major magazine pictorial feature documenting the event, which would also be taped for broadcast on the cable Playboy Channel—so he could not refuse such exposure (rubbing), and even George agreed. The match lasted eighteen minutes and thirty-five seconds, and she actually pinned him for four seconds, but the referee was distracted and missed the call and so Andy flipped and pinned her and left for Memphis the next day.

  Like Columbus before him, he officially charted a new world on October 12. He had been down once already in June and again in July, but those had been brief reconnaissance missions that also involved meeting southern females who had sent him inviting letters. True cahoots with his future nemesis had begun even earlier. He had wanted to wrestle women at Madison Square Garden, but was told that wrestling despot Vince McMahon, Sr., would never go for such carny in the hallowed arena. But Bill Apter, who edited Wrestler and Inside Wrestling magazines, had become a friend, and Apter offered another option. Very late one night that spring, after they had seen matches at the Garden, they returned to Apter’s apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens—not far from the hospital where Andy was born. Apter told him, “I have a friend in Memphis, Tennessee, who might be interested in your idea. He’s a wrestler and a promoter down there and his name is Jerry Lawler.” Apter decided that they should call him right then, no matter that it was after one o’clock in the morning. Lawler answered, wide awake, and Apter told him that he had Latka from Taxi with him and Lawler said, “Put him on!” Apter would recall, “They spoke for quite some time. And when he hung up, Andy was very invigorated. He called me a couple of days later and said, ‘I’m going down to see Lawler.’ And that was the start of the whole thing.”

  A few weeks later, on June 5, he flew from Los Angeles to Memphis and headed directly over to the Mid-South Coliseum, which was considered Lawler’s kingdom since Lawler was considered the King of Memphis now that the other one was dead. (Lawler’s local celebrity was such that he had been the first attraction ever to break Elvis’s record for consecuti
ve sellouts at the 12,000-seat Coliseum.) Memphis had long been a wrestling mecca and Lawler was regional potentate, a Baby-face (good guy, per parlance) champion muscle-slab who triumphed over serial insidious Tarheels (bad guys, per parlance) throughout the southern territories. But Lawler was also possessed of business savvy and held ranking office inside the Memphis Wrestling Company, which filled the cards and devised all thunderous theatrics that were played out at the Coliseum. And so the prospect of enlisting the lure of the comical maniac who took on the womenfolk was more than exciting. Lawler, in fact, had been made giddy by that first late-night phone call and, upon hanging up, heard himself splutter, “Oh my God!” He would recall, “All Andy wanted to do was experience the thrill of wrestling in front of a wrestling crowd. That was the whole thing. He had been doing it for people that really came to see stand-up comedy. They didn’t come to see him wrestle and they weren’t appreciating it. He told me, ‘I just want to get the response that wrestlers should get!’” So Lawler told him, “Yes, please! Let’s talk about it!” Jimmy Hart, the preeminent southern Tarheel wrestler, had been in Lawler’s home when the call came. Per Hart’s recollection: “Us being a small territory and Andy being a TV star-well, we knew it would be nothing but big box office business!”

  They welcomed him into their fold in June and took him backstage, where he made taunting tapes to broadcast during wrestling programs that would rile the women enough so that they’d want to come whup him when he returned. It was then decided that from that point forward he would (very legitimately) bill himself as the World’s Intergender Wrestling Champion—he was, after all, undefeated in over three hundred contests—and everyone thought the title had a perfectly highfalutin ring to it. So the date was picked and it would be Columbus Day and now here he was on that very day in October and they threw a handful of girls at him and he loved the size and the stomp and the roar and the smell of this Coliseum where Elvis had performed and where he now rubbed to his longjohns’ content. And none of them could pin him but he pinned most of them. And he brayed at the sea of twisted faces and made his usual affront with the washing-scrubbing-peeling et cetera. And, suddenly, he had become a fully accredited Tarheel! “He had that heeled sense about him and that little prancy, insipid way that he strutted around that ring,” said Lance Russell, who called all matches at the Coliseum. “I never saw anybody who loved it any more than he did. He was just great. And, oh God, he wanted to come back!” Afterward, he made some more ornery tapes and said he would return on November 23 and he really couldn’t wait.

  Budd Friedman asked him to host his syndicated television showcase, An Evening at the Improv, on October 29, but he would have rather been wrestling back down in that colossal arena, because he hadn’t stopped thinking about it, but he couldn’t wrestle now anyway because of the cyst on the back of his neck which had gotten so big and so ripe in the last couple of weeks that the doctor wanted to lance it but instead he told the doctor to wait a few more days because he wanted to try something new in the realm of audience participation. Linda made them wash their hands with the hot towels first. They came up one at a time. He told them not to press it too hard, just touch lightly. And he didn’t do it to be funny, either.

  Lawler came to the airport to pick up Andy and his brother Michael when they arrived for the November event. Michael had come along to see the thousands clamoring for Andy’s blood. They would be joined by Sherry Tuseth of Jonesboro, Arkansas, an art-school student whom Andy had arranged to meet on his June excursion (beguiling fan letter) and who had kept him company during his incipient raids upon Memphis. They went to the Coliseum, where four women wanted a piece of him. He waved the fistful of grand at them and said, as usual, “Any woman that will beat me, as an extra prize, she will get to marry me!” Lawler stood at ringside and watched the first three go down quickly—“So the last one was this heavyset black girl named Foxy Brown—I’ll never forget her,” he said. “She was the first one that really gave Andy a contest that night. They started the match—and she runs across and grabs Andy and picks him up in the air and drops him for a body slam. I mean, the roof came off the Coliseum! All of a sudden, here’s this big mouth getting what he deserves, you know? And he starts scrambling, trying to run out of the ring—and she’s pulling his tights down, holding him in the ring. It was just classic.” And it was a draw.

  Which was when Lawler decided to demand a rematch for Foxy Brown wherein he would become her coach and trainer. Andy loved this idea and immediately made broadcast tapes for Memphis television to say just how much he hated this idea—“I don’t know why Jerry Lawler’s getting his nose into it! He should keep his nose out of my business! Mr. Lawler, you think you can teach this woman how to wrestle? I will destroy her no matter what you say you can do! Mark my words, Mr. Lawler!” And both men tucked away their secret smiles and waited a week to advance a notion that would grow into a spectacle that was to be theirs alone.

  That Foxy Brown went limp and was pinned in eight minutes thirty-five seconds during the November 30 rematch was irrelevant. Andy just sat on her after he won and gratuitously pushed her face into the mat and kept on pushing like the heel that he was supposed to be. And that was when Lawler was compelled to step into the ring and begin his new destiny—“So I just reached down and pulled him up off her. And he flies clear across the ring, falls over, then jumps up. And all of a sudden his eyes get big and he starts screaming at me.” And he kept screaming and then Lawler pushed him down again and Andy leapt out of the ring and grabbed Lance Russell’s ringside microphone and played his part—“I WILL SUE YOU, LAWLER! I WILL SUE YOU! YOU DON’T TOUCH ME! I AM FROM HOLLYWOOD! I’LL GET HOLLYWOOD AGAINST YOU, BABY! I DON’T WRESTLE MEN! YOU DON’T TOUCH ME, BABY! I’LL SUE YOU FOR EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT!”

  And now that they had established themselves as mortal enemies, they started to think of ways to elevate their feud and sell more tickets and figure out how the fellow in longjohns wasn’t going to get hurt. Several meals were shared in the process of discussion. Lawler’s wife liked to cook. George, meanwhile, would think it was fortunate that reports of this last occurrence did not filter anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon line.

  Heartbeeps opened December 18, one year after its haphazard completion following the SAG strike. Variety noted, “Each moment passes like hours waiting for this slumgullion to slide by.” Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, “It’s a mystery to me why this film was made.” George reported, Of all the films that opened at Christmastime, it did the worst. Absolutely embarrassingly bad at the box office, which is a setback for Andy’s motion picture career quite considerably.

  They were saying he was poison.

  They were saying he was impossible.

  Simka returned to Latka during the first week of 1982, when the eighty-first episode, “Simka Returns,” was filmed and Andy was exceptionally late for an important rehearsal that week and Ed. Weinberger called George and screamed—“Who the hell does Andy think he is? I’m completely fed up with him!”

  Taxi had been struggling in the ratings ever since the season before when the network moved it from Tuesdays to Thursday nights. It would rank in the lowly fifty-third position by the end of this season, its fourth, and would be canceled by ABC on May 4 but then rescued (for its brilliance and integrity) on May 21 by NBC, where the series would be permitted its fifth season, which would also be its last.

  Simka, meanwhile, had returned to save Latka from his multiple personalities disorder. In addition to the playboy Vic Ferrari, he had also become, in varying measures, Arlo the cowboy, Sir Geoffrey Hypen-Hill, who was British Man, and Alex Reiger, wherein he emulated the Judd Hirsch character. With Simka, he gave them all up for love. They would marry six episodes later.

  He returned to Saturday Night Live, where it had been more than two years since he wrestled and disappeared from the show. Dick Ebersol had been brought in as executive producer not long after the Charles-Rockett-fuck incident, which had prompted in part
a creative house-razing and a fresh start with new personnel. Andy had wanted to host, but Ebersol said no; Andy had wanted Clifton to appear, but Ebersol said no. Elvis appeared, instead, on January 30; he wore a wig now because of his thinning hairline; he also wore a stunning cerulean studded jumpsuit that Bill Belew had recently designed. Elvis lip-synched to the old chicken opera record—which was funny but a desecration—after which Elvis picked two girls from the audience to be brought to his dressing room by Elvis’s bodyguard Red West (Zmuda). The cameras followed them inside, whereupon Elvis instructed the girls to rassle—“Whoa! Wait a minute,” he said as they began. “Take off your clothes, but leave the panties on.” And as they moved to do this, he stopped them and removed his wig and addressed the camera—“Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to just say something right now. Um, what I just did was based on that book by Albert Goldman about Elvis. And, uh, I would just like to say, all my life I’ve been a fan of Elvis Presley and, uh, I disapprove of that book and also I disapprove of what I just did.”

  David Letterman returned to NBC with a new talk-and-comedy show called Late Night with David Letterman, which took the place of The Tomorrow Show immediately following Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Andy made his first appearance on the program in its third week, February 17, and proudly showed clips of himself wrestling and berating women in Memphis—after which Letterman said, “Andy, you’ve turned out to be quite a fine young man.” He then displayed his brand-new World Intergender Wrestling Championship belt, claiming it was really real. “He’s not kidding,” said Letterman. “This is molded plastic.”

  Clifton went on the show the next night. Letterman said, “So there’s no truth to the rumor that you’re actually Andy Kaufman?” Clifton said, “There’s no truth in that whatsoever! That’s a total fabrication on your part!” He also boasted, “I’ve been removed from almost every major motion picture set and TV studio in America!” Andy thought Bob did a wonderful job. Nobody at the Letterman show knew the difference.