Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  12

  … And the people could easily see, now, how noble and beautiful those episodes were, and remembered with grief that at the time they occurred they had seemed rank rascalities, well deserving of the cowhide. The congregation became more and more moved, as the pathetic tale went on, till at last the whole company broke down and joined the weeping mourners in a chorus of anguished sobs….

  —Mark Twain,

  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

  The brace had browned from sweat and folly. He wore it and wore it and kept on wearing it and it became a wreath of perpetual martyrdom—and martyrs, everyone knew, were supposed to die. Of course, he had been giving it serious thought. Most certainly, it was on his mind. The idea excited him very much. He had discussed it with eminent hoaxer Alan Abel, who had managed to do it but then called a press conference immediately after his obituary was published. Abel had not properly lingered in death. Elvis, he liked to believe, was doing it well. He had a theory about Elvis, which he shared with a magazine writer named Judd Klinger just one year after Elvis had been gone: He believed that there may have been four Elvises, beginning with the original, who had disappeared in 1958. “The managers saw that he was getting old so they got rid of him. And then from ’58 to ’60 they didn’t have anybody, so they said that he was in the Army. In 1960, they got a new guy who played the part of Elvis Presley until ’69—this guy, you noticed, didn’t look at all like the other guy, didn’t have the sideburns or anything. Then, when they saw that his movies were falling off at the box office, they came up with another guy and he looked different! He played the part until ’73, until they got another guy and this guy was overweight, but then they saw that business was really falling off—the concerts and the records weren’t selling. So they got rid of that guy and they said that Elvis was dead. That was just so they could sell a lot of records, which worked. And in a few years, they’ll get another guy and say, ‘We were only kidding—Elvis is alive!’”

  Well, it was a theory. And, denial notwithstanding, it was a theory of rebirth; it was about returning anew from nadir, about reinvention and rising from ashes. Lately, he could not help but smell smoke, even if he wished to believe otherwise. The slap had resonated across the land and telegraphed excitement and stirred legitimate sympathy. But it had also stirred a deeper concern for his (apparent) wayward psyche; he was dangerous now; he was out of control; he had last been glimpsed raving on television, which was an uncomfortable image to have pressed into collective memory. Certain people—ones with power—preferred, more than ever, to aggressively avert their eyes from him. George’s chagrin was evident when he did not bother recounting the Letterman incident to his tape recorder; in fact, George had been speaking to his tape recorder less and less in the past year, as woe and concern overtook excitement and wonder. By October 1982, he would give up the career chronicling altogether. From that point forward, his foremost responsibility would be that of tending to damage control and soliciting offers that did not often materialize—plus Andy would begin doing things he did not tell George about, such as plotting his own death, which was nothing if not the penultimate bombing.

  Earlier in the year, there had been a Fridays party at the home of co-producer Jack Burns and, there, Andy took Burns and John Moffitt aside—“He said, ‘I want to talk to you,’” Moffitt would recall. “So we went down to Jack’s basement rec room and closed the door, figuring he had a new big idea for the show. Then he told us, ‘Now, what I want to do the next—within the next year or so—is to pretend I’m dead. I want people to believe I’m dead and so I’m going to disappear. Then a few months later, I’m going to reappear again—hopefully on the show. And I think this is gonna be the best thing I’ve ever done—this is gonna be the biggest!’” (Fridays, however, would be canceled that fall and, anyway, Moffitt and Burns thought he was probably, almost certainly, kidding about the whole thing.) Then, later that summer, after the slap, he met with Saturday Night Live producer Bob Tischler and writers Barry Blaustein and David Sheffield to discuss possible ideas he wished to execute in the new season—one of which was to issue a “comedy challenge” (à la wrestling) to Bob Hope, wherein if Hope could get more laughs than Andy in some kind of contest, Andy would have his own head shaved; conversely, if Andy won, he would be called “Mr. Bob Hope” for a week. (Andy quickly reneged on the idea—“I don’t think I can win, ’cause I’m not funny,” he said.) Tischler recounted, “But then he told the three of us, ‘You know, the hoax I’d really like to pull off is my death. But I’m afraid of doing it—because when I do these things, I do them for real, and so I wouldn’t even be able to tell my parents. And I wouldn’t want to hurt them.’” But throughout the next year he would posit the idea to other people—to Zmuda, certainly, as well as his sister and his brother and also Mimi Lambert. “He said, ‘What if I pretended to have cancer or something?’” Lambert would recall. “I was horrified. I said, ‘Forget it, Andy. That’s revolting, it’s not good karma!’” Anyway, by that time she would be more concerned with the fact that he had this cough.

  He wanted Latka to wear the brace, too. Ed. Weinberger adamantly refused. He removed the brace before the filming of the first episode of the season and put it back on after they all took bows that night. Cast members just rolled their eyes. He pretended not to notice.

  George did not want him to do My Breakfast with Blassie, which was an hour-long videotaped movie in which he would eat breakfast at a Sambo’s in Hollywood with bombastic former-five-time-heavyweight-wrestling champion, silver-headed bad guy Freddie Blassie, who enjoyed calling people pencil-neck geeks and had made a novelty record called “Pencil-Neck Geek,” which Andy admired as much as he admired Freddie Blassie himself. The man who wrote and produced Blassie’s record, Johnny Legend (whose real name was Martin Margulies), now wanted to make a very cheap parody of the art film My Dinner with André, which Andy hated as much as he respected Blassie. Legend asked Andy if he wanted to do it and Andy said that he did despite George’s protests. (George thought that Andy’s involvement in anything that smacked again of wrestling—including a boring movie about having breakfast with a crazy wrestler—only invited further destruction. He told Linda Lautrec—who co-created the film with Johnny Legend—“I hope you sell it in a foreign country and everybody makes their money back and no one here ever sees it.” But he meant it in a nice way.) So, on August 9, the movie was shot at Sambo’s and there was no script because it was going to be an extemporaneous exercise in which the two men—one in a dirty neck brace, the other carrying a cane—discussed life and geeks and fastidious hygiene. “I want my hands to be like a surgeon’s when I eat,” Andy told Blassie. Both men agreed that it was unwise to shake hands with people in restaurants and then this girl from the next table came over to shake hands and ask for an autograph and at her table were three other girls, and they were all plants, and one of them was Linda Mitchell (who would also play classical guitar on the sound track) and another was Johnny Legend’s younger sister, Lynne Margulies, whom Andy had not met until that very moment on camera. And he thought she was very attractive and flirted with her instantly, right there on camera, and she was unamused and truthfully said that she had never seen him on television. “I’m a famous star,” he told her, and she said, “Oh.” He demonstrated tenk you veddy much for her and said, “When you first walked in, I noticed you right away. And I said to myself, Now, this is somebody who I would give my time to. ’Cause I don’t give my time to just anybody. But to you, I would.” And he kissed her hand and tried to get her phone number and Linda called him obnoxious and, later, Zmuda came over to the table and pretended to be a hostile fan and pulled several befouled drinking straws from his nose and laid them on the table and also vomited (ice cream) and Blassie said, “I’m ready to puke in that asshole’s face!” And Andy also spoke of his late wrestling career and asked Blassie, “Do you think I’m a has-been now?” And Blassie said no, but also said, “It’s better to be a has-been than a neve
r-was.”

  He reclaimed Clifton for himself one more time. Clifton performed a medley of songs with a troupe of chorus girls on The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show, which was an ABC-TV special taped in Toronto a week after the Blassie congress and which would rank fifty-fourth in the ratings when it aired a month later. Horrified Muppets watched him from the control room. Miss Piggy said, “Isn’t he something?” Kermit the Frog hemmed and hawed uncomfortably and finally acknowledged, “Interesting.” Andy wrote the name of one of the Clifton dancers in his ever-burgeoning phone book—“Darlene, looked sixteen, really twenty-one, Taurus.”

  There would be no more Clifton. Not for him.

  He flew directly to New York to end what he had started precisely where he had started it. The material—everyone said there was nothing new, that he needed something new…. He was to perform on the HBO taping of Catch a Rising Star’s tenth anniversary, which would take place at the Upper East Side club where he had first hauled forth his props and made everyone think he wasn’t who he was and vice versa. So he decided to kill it off, to put the material out of its misery, to expose it as the charade and the lodestone that it had become…. For the sake of nostalgia, he would do what he had done at the outset, what had induced them all into falling down and falling over and falling to the floor and, most of all, falling for him. He could fool no one anymore, they said, because everyone was “on to” him, they said, and people were even making light of the neck brace of which he was so proud which seemed very rude…. Besides him, there would be other Catch alums performing—Richard Belzer, David Brenner, Gabe Kaplan, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Joe Piscopo, Pat Benatar. He planted Zmuda up front and had Rick Newman make sure that a microphone was hidden somewhere on Zmuda’s body so that Zmuda could be clearly overheard as the material was drained of its blood and left for dead…. “Anyway,” he said, “tonight what I’d like to do is the exact same routine which I did ten years ago. It’s called Foreign Man Turning into Elvis Presley.” At which point there was warm applause. At which point Zmuda could be heard throughout the club and, later, on television saying, “Tenk you veddy much.” And Foreign Man blinked into character and said, “Tenk you veddy much.” Zmuda turned to a woman nearby and said, “See, see! Tenk you veddy much!” “I am veddy happy to be here but one theeng I don’t like about New York—” “Ees de traffic …” “Ees too much traffic you know tonight eet was so much traffic—” “Eet took me an hour…”“—eet took me an hour and a half to get here!” “See! See!” “Talking about de terrible theengs—” “Take my wife …” “—take my wife, please take her!” “Her cooking ees so bad eets …”

  And this was not mere heckling; it was worse and also better; it was the act anticipated, performed in parsed phrases, slightly ahead of itself. It was Foreign Man unmasked and torched and vanquished forever. And the audience laughed with majestic unease as the humiliations echoed on—through “eemetations/ eemetations” and “de Archie Bunker/de Archie Bunker” and “dingbat get eento de kitchen and make me de food/ dingbat get eento de kitchen and make me de food.” And Andy was wet; his face was soaked with flop summoned from trained synapses and abetted by blistering lights and he had to say something to stop this man down in front of the stage from ruining everything and he had to say something to push this man down in front of the stage into now decimating everything that he was and had ever been and so he said, “Is there a problem?”

  ZMUDA: No, there’s no problem. The only problem is that I’m doing your act for you…. If you did some new material, then I wouldn’t know what you’re gonna do next.

  ANDY: Well, uh, I was asked to do this material tonight, okay? This is what the club asked me to do, and I’m doing it.

  ZMUDA: Sure, they asked you to do it because your new stuff’s a bunch of crap…. Can I say something? I was always a big fan of yours, like, I’m talkin’ seven, eight years ago. And I just feel that you have been repeating yourself continually…. I don’t consider wrestling women to be funny, to be creative, to be any of those things.

  ANDY: I do a lot of original stuff on Late Night …

  ZMUDA: Okay, so what? What’s original?

  ANDY: Well, did you see me on Fridays? Caused a lot of talk.

  ZMUDA: Yeah, I saw you on Fridays. A put-on. Pushing people around and actors … That’s not original, that’s not comedy. That’s put-on! Anybody could do that. You understand?

  ANDY: You’re right, it was a put-on.

  ZMUDA: I’m telling you, I’m just being honest…. I’m not trying to be obnoxious. I’m just saying that you were a very original guy.

  ANDY: I was. I was a very original guy. I was considered a very original comic.

  ZMUDA: That’s right. And was is the key word. You said it yourself.

  ANDY: Well …

  ZMUDA: You’ve lost all credibility. I’m just saying that you used to be an original performer, see?

  And, of course, the audience felt embarrassment beyond any embarrassment ever felt for the pitiful Foreign Man when Foreign Man was new and innocent and lost. This was now the disemboweling of an actual life and career—and, whether or not what was happening was real, it was nevertheless all very true and all very profoundly true. What the room felt was hot sticky suffocating devastation and the man down in front of the stage did not stop—he attacked that stupid character Latka and called that movie Heartbeeps a piece-of-shit-bomb and said that Andy Kaufman would never make another movie because who would hire him now? And a guy in back, who was Pat Benatar’s uncle, who was an off-duty security cop, screamed for Zmuda to shut the fuck up and Zmuda told him to fuck himself and Zmuda returned to his interrogation and the cop reached for the gun that he kept in his boot and Rick Newman crawled over and grabbed the cop’s ankle and whispered, “Shut up! He’s a plant! This is a taping!” And Zmuda demanded to hear new material and Andy responded by doing the twist while singing booboobooboobooboo over and over and the audience laughed and Zmuda said that they were laughing only because they knew him from Taxi and Andy said, “I guess you’re right. I don’t have any new material. I don’t have anything new to do.” And the tears started welling and then came the little gulping sobs and Zmuda said, “See, now this is the old crying routine, the bombing.” And Andy stopped suddenly and said, “You’ve seen me do that?”

  ZMUDA: Yes! Everybody’s seen you do that! Kaufman, look, call a spade a spade. You don’t have anything new to do. [Turning to the audience] As a matter of fact, that is why he hired me tonight to come here. Look—there’s a little mike on me, you see this? He hired me tonight to come here and criticize him, you know? See, today he was saying, “Zmuda, here’s what we’re gonna do … I’ll take my old material and I’ll call it Variation on a Theme….” The theme is the old material and the variation is that I’m told to sit here and criticize it. [To Andy] Well, it’s true. Am I being honest? Am I a plant? Be honest—am I a plant? Come on! Am I a plant? Is this another Kaufman put-on? Is this more bullshit? Am I a plant? … Tell the people … there’s a mike here. [To audience] Come on, you see it. There’s a mike, they sat me down here to do this …

  ANDY: Yeah … [sotto voce] You’re not supposed to say anything.

  ZMUDA: Fine, then just cut it out [of the tape].

  ANDY: [s.v.] You just fucked up the act!

  ZMUDA: Fine! Fine!

  ANDY: [s.v.] You weren’t supposed to …

  ZMUDA: Fuck you! Fffff—

  At which point, on the tape of the program that was broadcast, there would be an awkward edit, as though something had happened and needed to be removed when in fact nothing had happened except the execution of Andy’s notion to make an obvious edit to suggest that something had happened—“It was planned that way,” said Rick Newman. “The public went crazy when the show was broadcast. HBO and Catch got hundreds of phone calls from people demanding to know what happened. We told them there was nothing to be discussed—‘We can’t tell you. Just leave it be.’” And when the program resumed, Andy said, “L
adies and gentlemen, right now I’d like to do my oldest routine, which I’ve done so much that many people are sick of it. Um … but I’m gonna do it anyway, and it’s my imitation of Elvis Presley. Thank you.”

  Elvis, bewigged, hoarse, no longer lean or taut—it did not matter, really. Elvis cleansed the palate with familiarity, with “Jailhouse Rock.” People still hooted, if not screamed. Meanwhile, many people would consider Variations on a Theme—or whatever he wished to call this act of self-immolation—to be perhaps the most brilliant thing that he had ever done. In any case, he felt very extremely liberated afterward.

  The brace finally disappeared. It itched.

  New material: the Fakir, mystical Eastern wonder-worker/fraud. Wearing diaper and turban and black socks and brown walking shoes and nothing else, he wordlessly dances forth and ripples his stomach muscles and his pectoral muscles in syncopation with the beat of conga drums (somebody else plays them) and performs a horizontal handstand (yogic coordination) and then stands to swallow a sword (presented by Zmuda in butler’s togs) and then fixes a felt mustache above his lip and straps on a guitar and imitates the falsetto of Slim Whitman singing “Rosemarie.” (“I’m bringing romance back,” he liked to say now.) He had always been a fakir. But he had never worn a diaper and a turban onstage before. He practiced in L.A. at the Improv. He wanted to do it on tour, but George couldn’t really line up a decent tour for him anymore, so on September 25, he went on a ten-city bus tour of California to campaign for Governor Jerry Brown, who was running for the U.S. Senate, performing in college and high school auditoriums with musicians Kris Kristofferson and Billy Swan. He did not care much about the senatorial race; he did not care much about politics in general. But it was good to tour again. Mostly, he meditated in the back of the bus in between stops.