Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  He was a guest referee at the Chicago Amphitheater when Lawler wrestled there on February 12. They yelled at each other in front of everybody. They pushed each other around and he got to do his screaming. He was happy to see Lawler again. The crowd was like thunder, which was exciting again. The media ignored the fact that he was there. He hadn’t told many people that he was there, anyway.

  Latka Gravas donned his coveralls for the last time on earth. The one hundred twelfth episode of Taxi was filmed at Paramount Stage 25 on February 18, and it was the final time they would all do this together. Danny DeVito would say, “Everybody was very emotional due to the fact that we were all splittin’ up and we knew it and we didn’t want to.” Tears were easy for Andy, always were, and he shed not one that day. He always felt that he had done his best work as Latka five years before there ever was a Latka.

  Five days later he told Letterman that he wanted to film a remake of the Laurel and Hardy classic Sons of the Desert, starring himself and Fred Blassie, who sat to his left. Blassie demonstrated—“You’ve got us into a fine mess again, you pencil-neck geek! Now you’re crying again! You hearing that pencil-neck geek crying again?” “Well,” said Letterman, “I know people will look forward to that!” Andy also announced that he would be appearing in a legitimate Broadway play called Teaneck Tanzi, which would begin previews in April. Letterman teased him—“No wrestling in this?” Andy said, “Um … actually, I’d ra—Hmmm. It’s hard to—No, I don’t know.”

  The play was set in a wrestling ring and he would portray the belligerent referee who presided over the matches of a woman wrestler named Tanzi (portrayed by Deborah Harry), who would solve her life problems by grappling, in turns, with her husband, her parents, her shrink, her best friend, et cetera. He had lobbied for the role and went to London to meet with the producers in March and began rehearsals in New York shortly thereafter. (The rehearsals, it turned out, had reached a crucial stage by April 9, the night on which Saturday Night Live would be hosted by Joan Rivers, who had pluckishly decided to bring Andy back onto the show, and Dick Ebsersol had actually acquiesced to her wishes—but Andy could not extricate himself from his theater duties, nor did he leap to try. “By that point,” said George, “we were just fed up with the whole thing at Saturday Night Live. We didn’t go after it anymore because we were still pissed.”)

  And so Teaneck Tanzi: The Venus Flytrap opened at the Nederlander Theater on April 20 and also closed on April 20 and Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times that he had found only one high point in the evening and it had nothing to do with the play itself, but with a theater usher—“Slipped in among the bona fide employees of the Nederlander is a ringer—the comic Andy Kaufman. Mr. Kaufman’s shtick, as his fans know, is hostility, and here he is, in the highest of dudgeon, a cigarette dangling from his lips, barking at seated customers. He demands to see our ticket stubs, and, should we not immediately locate them, he loudly threatens to eject us clear out to the street. As most of Mr. Kaufman’s victims don’t recognize him, there’s sadistic fun to be had in watching the surly comedian provoke the uninitiated into angry screaming. A critic near me almost slugged him.”

  Daddy and Michael and Carol had attended opening/closing night but Mommy hadn’t been feeling well. She had been experiencing shortness of breath and chest pains for some time and then she and Daddy were playing tennis and suddenly she became so winded that she could barely breathe at all. They went to the doctor, who discovered plaque obstructing one of her heart arteries and said she needed triple bypass surgery and was ordered to take it easy until the operation was scheduled. And she felt it was ridiculous that at age fifty-eight she would need such a thing done. But, just the same, Uncle Jackie Kaufman’s wife, Aunt Fran, went to keep her company on the night of the premiere. “She was very jealous, of course, that she couldn’t go,” Aunt Fran said. To miss her Pussycat’s Broadway debut, yet! She went into St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, known for its excellence in heart procedures, in early May not long before Mother’s Day and the operation was a success and on the day she was supposed to come home she suffered a massive stroke, which paralyzed the right side of her body and heavily affected her speech. She couldn’t talk for a long while afterward, and when she did she didn’t sound much like Mommy anymore. Andy stayed on Grassfield Road all through May and would go to the hospital and pat her hand and tell her that he would find some kind of cure to make her better and she would nod and try to smile. She would be all right, he knew, but she wouldn’t be quite the same, which he didn’t want to know. All through these famous years, he had always come home as much as possible because Mommy really was his anchor and would always take care of him and make him breakfast in the late afternoon and listen to his ideas. And she was the one who had taught him about vitamins—to take lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of vitamins—and he was the one who had taught her about meditation, just like he had with Michael and Carol, and Daddy would remember driving along with the three of them meditating in the car and always said it was like being stuck in a car full of zombies. The whole family suddenly felt sort of lost, but strong at the same time. Daddy, who was lost and strong, saw that Andy was the same but maybe a little more lost. He said, “I think Andy was very affected by this.”

  They gave him an installment of the PBS concert series Soundstage, for which he was invited to fill an hour as he saw fit and, since this was public television and no serious money was involved, he saw fit to contrive the most elliptical and surreal refraction of existential realities that he had ever attempted. He spent the better part of June working at the WTTW production facilities in Chicago, where the series was produced and where he plotted stratagem as he went along, with George and Lynne Margulies and Elayne Boosler as his sounding board. He would begin the show at the end and start again near the middle and utilize ideas learned as a child from watching Winky-Dink and You, wherein viewers were instructed to put cellophane on the television screen and draw on it to help him out of jams. He would have himself arrested and thrown into television court (all with cartoon backdrop) and defend whatever broadcast transgressions he had so far commited on the program. He would have an interviewing desk that was now seven feet high (calling no attention to this) from which he would imperiously interview Elayne, wherein they (candidly, no, really) traversed what had gone wrong with their relationship—“Sometimes I would wake in the morning,” he told her, “and I’d think I’d like to tell you that we’re gonna break up. I’d say, Well, I gotta tell her tonight—we’re gonna break up!” The Clifton puppet would meanwhile stalk the desktop and serve as sidekick.

  After the final credits rolled (in which the absent Zmuda was wryly listed as “Invisible Man”) and Andy had sung a happy goodbye song and the studio began to empty, he became his dark, snappish incarnation—“Boy, the people out there in public are such a bunch of sheep! They’ll listen to anything I say!”—which again was basically his tribute to the duplicitous Andy Griffith character, Lonesome Rhodes, in A Face in the Crowd. At which point, Foreign Man magically confronted him—

  FM: Excuse me, eh, Meester Kaufman. Can I talk to you just for one meenute please?

  AK: No. Get outta here, you foreign freak!

  FM: Please?

  AK: No … Okay, for a minute, okay?

  FM: All right … Why do you have to say these kinds of theengs? Such mean theengs about people and you’re, you’re so mean to people?

  AK: So?

  FM: You know, I don’t care what you do for yourself, but you, you’ve not only ruined your career, but you ruined my career, too!

  AK: So what? Who cares?

  FM: Because of you, everybody doesn’t like me, either. Why do you do thees? I think I know why. I think it’s because you are really, underneath it all—I don’t think you’re such a bad man.

  AK: Oh, thank you.

  FM: I think you are a little shy, a shy little man. A little, scared little man.

  AK: What do I have to be scared of?

/>   FM: You’re afraid of being hurt.

  AK: Get outta here—go away!

  FM: Because deep down inside you have a gentle soul. And that’s why you have to put on thees tough-guy façade. Because you hide your inseeecurity.

  AK: [Starting to cry] Really?

  FM: You know, when you … come to terms weeth your own deficiencies, then you’ll be able to accept your true self and you won’t have to hide behind thees macho act!

  AK: [Crying] Right.

  FM: Oh, come on—don’t cry. Meester Kaufman, don’t cry. Oh, eet’s all right…. Leesten, I’ll feenish the show for you, all right?

  AK: Okay … thank you, thank you … [Walking away sobbing]

  FM: [To camera] Eh, goodbye, everybody. Eh, be good. And I love you veddy much. Bye bye … [Turning to crew person] Okey! Are we off the air? Okay, who wants to wrestle? Come on! Who wants to wrestle! Come on!!

  He could not help himself.

  He joined Lawler on the pro tour.

  They wrestled in Memphis and in Nashville.

  They wrestled in Indiana and Florida.

  He spent most of July wrestling and bellowing.

  He and the heel Jimmy Hart formed a tag team.

  They plotted and connived to bring down Lawler.

  His choreography improved and he now tucked better.

  It was a touring carnival.

  He climbed on and off the noisy wagons well into November.

  Nobody paid much attention.

  He kept on screaming and strutting.

  He had disappeared.

  Nobody cared.

  So as to not be from Hollywood anymore, he gave up on Los Angeles, which he had always hated. After Latka went away forever, he got rid of the place in Laurel Canyon and put his stuff in storage and Linda Mitchell left him to pursue her guitar playing and Kathy Utman handled whatever organizational chores arose which were minimal. He resumed the nomadic life that he liked best. Lynne got a place in San Francisco and mostly he was there except when he wasn’t. He carted Huey Williams with him wherever he went and was by now well into the fourth book of the opus, having scrawled out a thousand pages of the magical inpenetrable adventure thus far. He found a dessert shop in San Francisco called Carson-York where he loved to write day after day while eating chawwwwklit things. He had always liked San Francisco. He used to visit Gloria Acre there because she had married some guy and moved there and got divorced and so they would get together and he would sometimes stay with her and they would lie in bed and wonder about the baby who wasn’t theirs anymore. Because he always did wonder, whenever it occured to him. Anyway, he liked not having to be anywhere and not having to be on time to be anywhere. He liked floating.

  On September 22, Letterman said that it had been a long time since he had been on the show. Letterman asked, “What have you been doing since then? What’s going on for you?”

  “Nothing,” he replied.

  He then recounted that Taxi had been canceled and Saturday Night Live had voted him off the air and the Broadway play closed in one night but he said, “I just like to accept things and go on from there…. But I’m having a very good time, though, with myself.”

  He reported that he had been doing some hitchhiking and also that he was in the process of adopting three underprivileged sons whom he invited out onstage and they were three fairly menacing-looking black fellows in their early twenties named George, Herb, and Tony-also-known-as-Tino. Tony explained how Andy came into their lives—“One night I was walking on Broadway, and I was desperate—didn’t have no money. And I see this guy walking down the street. And I said, Well, I’ve been out here all night, and this is the guy that I’m gonna mug.”

  Andy beamed proudly and said, “It’s true!”

  He had shared the premise with the Letterman producers a week earlier and then cased city parks near Upper West Side housing projects for days until he could find them. He was always meticulous in his planning for the Letterman appearances—since Late Night was the only forum he had left. Letterman himself could only marvel at Andy’s dedication to comic conceit—“He was the best for us. No one was as careful and thoughtful as was Andy about his appearances and performances. Each one was something that he had orchestrated, rehearsed, and figured out to achieve maximum impact. He would always tell us, almost beat for beat, what was going to happen. And whatever the impact, good or bad, he would just savor it. Nobody could blow the place apart like him.”

  Before presenting the adopted children idea, he and segment producer Robert Morton had discussed another plan. He wanted to sign his last will and testament on the air with Letterman as witness. He went to Stanley first to see what he thought of this. Stanley suggested that he think of something else to do. Morton witnessed the signing of the will instead in the privacy of his Late Night office.

  In search of new credibility, he decided that he wanted to go out on the college lecture circuit. That fall, George set him up with a Pasadena lecturing agency called Stofan/Blancarte and postcards were printed and later mailed out to universities everywhere. The postcards featured photographs of him playing Elvis and Latka; of him snarling as a wrestler; of him eating ice cream; of him wearing a straitjacket. The words on the back of the postcard read:

  On Creating Reality:

  The Physics of Human Response

  Andy Kaufman’s career of the past 10 years has been a series of experiments which form the groundwork for a thesis. Using film clips and telling stories, Andy will set you straight once and for all about his controversial career and how it relates to the dynamics of human behavior.

  For the first time, Andy tells the TRUTH!!

  They aimed to send him out on the speaker hustings sometime by the end of the year. “He would have been a smash,” George would say. “As for telling the truth, though, I’m sure he would’ve made something up.”

  Budd Friedman needed him in Los Angeles on November 7 to perform for the Improv’s twentieth anniversary taping, and so he came back and stayed in Linda Mitchell’s small apartment, not far from the club, to prepare his material. He remembered something that he had never used before but had always meant to, which was “Cash for the Merchandise”—the labyrinthine spoken-word multivoiced opening number for The Music Man, in which a train car full of nattering traveling salesmen bandy about the nuances of hucksterism in impossible syncopation. He practiced and practiced with his conga drum in Linda’s tiny guest bedroom/den—and this felt familiar….

  At the taping, he had a portable clothes dryer waiting for him onstage. He carried a load of laundry up and threw it in the machine, then pressed the start button. He went to the conga and established his beat and sang the Elvis song “Paralyzed” in his own voice, which was something he had never done before. Then he launched into “Cash for the Merchandise”—which he had transformed into a dizzying spectacle of recitation, a performance piece both thrilling and stupefying. The audience cheered more forcefully than any that he had experienced in a very long while.

  He then brought out Little Wendy—with whom he had mended because she was an important part of his world and he was never very good at estranging himself from people who meant something—and he ventured into a new veiled autobiographical fantasy that had been itching to surface. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “you know, when I was about fourteen, I was in junior high school, and my first girlfriend—I got her pregnant. And had a little girl—who I have hardly seen, because we gave her away—or she gave her away for adoption. And for about twenty years, I have lived with the thought that somewhere in the world there’s a little Andy Kaufman running around. So, just recently—a few weeks ago, I was contacted by an agency called Children Anonymous. And that’s an agency [to aid] adopted children looking for their natural parents. So, because of that agency, I’ve spent a very delightful week with my child. Whose name is Wendy Dalton … and this is her. She’s nearing her twentieth birthday.”

  And he instructed her to speak with him just as they
did when they had been reunited and he asked her questions about her adopted family and about what she thought of his wrestling (“I hated it”) and they sang a song called “The Muleskinner Blues” and then she retreated and he performed an anguished dramatic monologue from a play that he made up in his head while he spoke and was heckled by a plant throughout and it all exploded into a mess and he conga-cried and then left the stage with his laundry as the theme from Fellini’s 8 1/2 echoed through the club.

  On the first night that he came to Linda’s, they decided that he would split her monthly rent so that he had a place to stay when he had jobs in Los Angeles. They had gone to dinner at Inaka, his favorite vegetarian restaurant on La Brea Boulevard, and apropos of nothing she asked, “What would you do if you had six months to live?” And he said, “Go somewhere and finish my book. What would you do?” She said she didn’t know.

  “Within a week,” she would recall, “he was coughing. He’d always coughed. But this was a really bad cough.”

  It would have been a good time and an important time for him to go gather deep silences and he felt it, he felt the real need for it, and there came word of a teacher-training course that had been abruptly scheduled for December and he had just sent a five-hundred-dollar donation and was looking forward to going and he was at Linda’s when he heard that they didn’t want him to come. This had happened before, even though he was a TM governor, because sometimes bliss people didn’t understand that what he did when he performed was only fooling in fun, and someone in the movement would then make a call on his behalf to someone else and he would get to go. But now he learned, vaguely, that a new and powerful woman administrator—who had long hated the wrestling-with-women business—declared that his was not the behavior of a teacher and that his presence was not welcome at this particular course. And he called and called his influential peers in the movement and none of them could do much to reverse the decision. He even called his friend Jerry Jarvis, who had up until recently presided over the entire American TM hierarchy because he knew that Jarvis appreciated his dedication as few others could—“Andy had a more profound understanding of Maharishi’s teachings than many people I had ever come in contact with,” Jarvis would recall. And Jarvis now spoke with him at length and calmed him and told him that it was a misunderstanding and it would eventually be cleared up by the time of the next training course. But there was nothing to be done about this one. And so he felt hurt and the hurt touched his spirit, which had always been sustained by meditation. He felt betrayed inside his secret soul. “Who are they to tell me how to run my career?” he said over and over. Linda was there while he digested the hurt. “He didn’t smash anything or throw anything,” she said. “He was angry and then very sad. But he didn’t stop meditating.”