Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  He and Lynne went back to New York for the one-night-only showing and/or premiere of My Breakfast with Blassie at the art theater the Thalia. (Variety deemed it an “effective no-budget conversational comedy” with limited home video potential.) A few nights later, on November 17, he reported to David Letterman that the Thalia audience was “rolling in the aisles.” He then showed a clip from the film The Big Chill, because, he said, “I saw it yesterday and I liked it.” Later, his three sons reemerged to display newly acquired trade skills. Andy said, “The adoption papers are now actually legal.”

  Thanksgiving on Grassfield Road during which, as per custom, everyone around the table performed for their supper—

  Lynne, as a newcomer, observed, “It was a Kaufman family tradition at Thanksgiving. And they were very serious about it. Everyone had practiced their little routines for days.” So, with trepidation, she would sing her special version of “I’m a Little Teapot,” which Andy loved because she changed the words so that it was about being a little rib from inside Andy. “That came from him always saying, ‘I’m the man, you’re the woman, you came from the rib!’”

  Andy, also as per custom, recorded the festivities on tape.

  When his turn came, he said, “Should I read my poetry or do my routine?” Michael said, “Whatever you think better exemplifies your talent.” Andy said, “Okay, well, my poetry’s from when I was fourteen, so we won’t do that.” So he elected to perform “Cash for the Merchandise” sans conga and he was spectacular, if a little breathless, and when he finished he was gasping for air. And Stanley teased, “I wanna tell you something—you are so outta condition, it’s pathetic! You are really out of condition! Feel his heart. I bet it’s pounding!” Andy checked and, still winded, said, “Heart isn’t pounding. It’s hardly even pounding.” Stanley said, “How come you’re out of breath? You used to do something like this without even … But wow!”

  “I gotta jump rope more, right?” he said.

  But they were all flabbergasted by his virtuosity.

  Lynne said it had also been hypnotic with the conga weeks earlier.

  Stanley said it was too damned good for the Letterman show.

  Janice could only smile proudly.

  He had repeated coughing fits that night.

  Maybe, he said, he was coming down with something.

  Needed vitamins.

  Whenever he left rooms that were meaningful, he would always tell the rooms goodbye. He never left the house on Grassfield Road without wandering into every room to say, Goodbye, room, and he would give the room a little goodbye wave. He went downstairs before leaving again for California. He waved goodbye to his den just as he always had. Goodbye, den, he said.

  Lynne returned to San Francisco and he returned to Los Angeles and to Linda’s apartment and he kept coughing. Linda said he had to go to the doctor, which he had known for weeks but for some reason hadn’t done it. Hypochondria had never been a stranger to him. But he usually believed that his holistic-macrobiotic-bean-weed-mulch-vitamin-meditation-sleep regimen (chocolate notwithstanding) sufficiently warded away all dark things. Plus, he had gotten a clean bill checkup six months earlier.

  He had been waiting for the cancer.

  He saw something oddly romantic about it.

  He was going to use cancer to save his career.

  Cancer was how he would fake his death, he told them.

  “He had a very strong mind,” Lynne would say. “Sometimes I wonder if he just talked himself into it. Because he used to always think he was gonna get cancer. I remember saying one time that I had known a lot of people who died of cancer, and he said, ‘Yeah, you just wait and see—I’m going to, too.’ I said, ‘Well, don’t say that! That’s terrible!’ And every time he went to the doctor he’d say, ‘Well, do I have cancer?’ He was just determined that he was going to get it.”

  Second week in December: Linda drove him to see Dr. Rubins. Dr. Steven Rubins had an office in Beverly Hills. He had been Linda’s doctor and then, when the hepatitis hit him after the Huntington Hartford, Dr. Rubins became Andy’s doctor as well. He told Dr. Rubins about the cough and said his left arm hurt, too. “We did a chest X ray,” Rubins would recall. “And we saw a lesion in the left lung on the left-heart border. And that was suspicious.” And Rubins knew what it was and sent him and his X rays to lung specialist Dr. William Young, who also knew what it was—“It was just a question of confirming the diagnosis,” said Young. They stuck a camera down this throat—an endoscopy of his trachea and bronchial tubes—and the camera saw the tumor and they sent a needle down his throat to remove a tiny piece of the tumor and they looked at the tiny piece and knew precisely what it was. “Unfortunately, it came back large-cell carcinoma,” said Rubins, “which is a fairly highly virulent cancer of the lung that can occur, sporadically, in nonsmokers.” In patients under forty, Young would see it approximately once every two years. The tumor was blocking a bronchial tube, which had caused pneumonia, which had caused the cough.

  The malignancy had already begun to metastasize.

  Which meant that it was now crawling through him.

  It swam in his blood.

  It was eating his arm in half—a bone lesion, they called it.

  An expansile lytic lesion of his left humerus, specifically.

  Which was what made it hurt.

  Radiation was recommended.

  “Upfront, we told him that it was palliative, probably not curative,” said Rubins. “And that there were no guarantees. Frankly, it was his option. We thought that maybe it would buy some time.”

  He heard the word inoperable but not the word incurable.

  That was all that he heard.

  It was difficult to understand anything that he heard.

  “He didn’t know that there wasn’t a difference,” said Linda. “He had no idea. They said, ‘We aren’t going to operate.’ And so Andy said, ‘Fine. Great.’ He didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t ask anything. He thought, ‘They aren’t going to operate—that’s a good thing.’ He didn’t know it was terminal lung cancer. Andy didn’t know what that was.”

  George had come to Cedars-Sinai to hear the diagnosis and sat there with him and they heard. “He said, ‘George, you gotta get me on the Letterman show after Christmas so David could ask me, “Andy, what did you get for Christmas?” and I could say, “Cancer.”’ That was the first thing that he said to me after the doctor told him.”

  He called Lynne in San Francisco: “He called me and said, ‘See? See? I told you. I’ve got cancer!’ You know, it was that type of thing. He knew he was gonna get it and I hadn’t believed him. It was like, ‘See, I told you so….’”

  He wasn’t afraid because it wasn’t going to kill him because he wasn’t going to die because he would do things and eat things and try things and make it go away, so he was, um, fine.

  He wanted no one else to know, especially his family. Since he was not going to die, there was no reason to alarm anyone. Lynne came down from San Francisco and moved into the little bedroom with him at Linda’s. He did not want the radiation. He drank herbal sludges instead. The arm felt better; then the arm felt excruciating. They went to Dr. Irwin Grossman in Beverly Hills who gave the arm radiation and the pain stopped. “He became my immediate best friend,” said Grossman. “He was very sweet, very appreciative.” The radiation helped the pneumonia as well, since it shrunk the tumor blockage, thus lessened the cough. Eventually, he would see Grossman every day, receive a one minute dosage of pinpointed radiation and leave. Nausea was ever attendant. He once threw up in Linda’s car on the way home. He decided to call and tell Michael on Christmas Eve. Michael heard his brother say the word malignant; like his brother, he chose not to fully grasp what that meant. Andy swore him to secrecy and Michael said nothing to anyone.

  He slipped in and out of Cedars-Sinai for tests. He wondered sometimes what they were testing for. Some days, he drove himself to his appointments; some days, he was driven. He often ma
de Rubins and Young wait before entering the examination rooms to see him, because he was meditating—“You waited for him,” said Young. “Doctors, you know, are not used to waiting.” Some days were very extremely angry days. He avoided sadness, however, for the most part, since there were alternatives. “Andy didn’t want to hear bad things,” said Rubins. He researched alternative treatments, and so did Lynne, and so did Linda. “He was not a person who gave in to failure,” said Young. “He believed that, through his spirit, he was gonna win, that he was not gonna die.” He listened to visualization tapes constantly and wrote out affirmations—“I’m getting better and better every day.” He wrote better and better over and over. He also wrote, “I’m not my Papu Cy, therefore I can’t have cancer.”

  “These things are really proven to be chromosomal,” said Young. “It’s all about just having the wrong genes.”

  George started talking into his tape recorder again on New Year’s Day. On January 7, he reported, I went to bed at 1 A.M. and slept restlessly until 4 A.M. and couldn’t sleep after that. I cried my eyes out this morning for the first time since learning of Andy’s cancer. It was probably triggered when I became aware that the doctors are giving him only three months of life. I love him so much. He’s just like my kid brother—my crazy, creative, unique, lovable kid brother.

  Andy walked into the Shapiro/West offices two days later and made calls to nutritionists and to whoever else he could think of who could help him. He called a macrobiotics clinic in Boston. Andy looked pretty good, although he’s confused, as he’s talking to so many people…. He expressed concern that if it got out [that he has cancer] he’d have trouble getting work. I do not feel it would affect the college lecture dates and David Letterman would certainly like to have him. Meanwhile, he looked pretty good.

  He told Zmuda on January 10. Zmuda came over to Linda’s and Andy told him. Andy smiled nervously when he said the words. Zmuda waited for the gotcha but knew there would be none.

  He called Gregg Sutton and told him. Sutton laughed and said, “That’s hilarious!” Andy said, “No, no, I’ve really got cancer.”

  So many of them would laugh when they learned. He liked that part, but it got a little tiring. No really no really no really no really. At least, he had acquired much practice at this.

  The family knew nothing, except for Michael, and they went as usual to their winter condo on Singer Island in Florida. Janice’s speech had been improving somewhat. Michael sat near her by the pool and she stared ahead into nothingness and into sunshine and two words escaped her lips. “Poor Andy,” she said. And that was all she said.

  “It was almost like a mother’s intuition,” Michael would say. “This was a month before she knew anything, but she already knew.”

  He turned thirty-five on the seventeenth. George brought over a photo album full of pictures from the Soundstage taping in Chicago when he had snapped at Foreign Man—“What do I have to be scared of?”

  His left eye hurt, he said. It was now inside his head, where all of his other selves lived. Dhrupick’s left eye hurt and it was now inside Dhrupick’s head, where all of his otherselves lived.

  George got him an offer the next day—to host the pilot for a syndicated music-video-and-performance showcase called The Top; it wouldn’t require anything more strenuous than taping introductions to various segments of the program. He could even pretend it was a children’s show and call the home viewers boys and girls. “I wanted him to do this,” George would recall. “Because performing gave him positive energy which would distract him from focusing only on his sickness.” Andy said he would do it and he did, on January 22; a limo collected him with Lynne and Linda and took them to the taping. “All of a sudden, we were out in the world again and it was so bizarre,” said Linda. “We were all very nervous. The doctor told me his arm could break if anybody even bumped it or grabbed him to say hi. So I stood there the whole time, next to his arm.” George was there to oversee—The production was quite disorganized technically and Andy was off on his timing and lacked energy at times. On some takes he did well, but he was a far cry from his normal exciting energized self. He was unsure of himself and goofed up several times. I do feel that with sharp editing, the show will turn out quite good. It will be telecast this Friday, January 27. This will be Andy’s last show for a while or until he gains his strength. “He did the show and we went home,” said Linda. “He was exhausted.”

  Life and strength drained as radiation blasted. He stopped the radiation for a while, then felt worse. Often he couldn’t move. Lynne and Linda prepared and brewed his placebo gruels for hours at a time—mashes of millet and burdock root and squash; broths of fresh ginger. They shaved piles of ginger scraps to dump into Linda’s bathtub, which would be filled with scalding water, where he would steep himself for forty-five-minute purges. “One night he was too weak to get out of the tub,” said Linda. “So we had to pull him out, but he was all slippery from the ginger. He kept sliding out of our hands—we couldn’t get him out. Suddenly, out of frustration, she and I just burst out laughing. This had all just gotten ridiculous. He was pissed.” They tried to explain that the strain was sapping them as well. He yelled, “The only strain that I’m aware of is that I can’t have chocolate cake!”

  He saw only one reason that this was happening to him. “It’s the chocolate,” he told them. “Too much chocolate.”

  George said industry people were starting to hear about it on the streets. On February 10, he insisted that Andy tell Stanley before it turned up in the tabloids. Andy refused, said not yet, because he might get better. George called Michael and urged him to tell Stanley. Michael said he would try, but then he couldn’t quite do it, either. “He didn’t tell his family for two months,” said Lynne. “Finally, I just snuck off to the phone and called his dad and said, ‘You better get out here. Andy’s sick.’ A day or two later, his mom walked into the bedroom-Andy had no idea they’d been told—and he got mad at me.”

  It was by now the third week of February. Stanley said, “When we saw him for the first time lying on this mattress on the floor, it was devasting. He was already just about gone. He had no use of his arm. Sometimes he couldn’t walk or talk. It was a disaster.” They hastened him back into radiation. Stanley would lift him up the three steps onto the linear-accelerator table, as Grossman witnessed with overwhelming sadness. “I cried—I mean, there were tears in my eyes. I had to leave the room. It was so sad, seeing a father have to pick up his kid and put him on this table….” Janice would hold his hand every night until he fell asleep. George, Stanley and Linda saw Rubins a week later and Rubins said it could be anywhere from two weeks to a few months.

  Andy called psychologist John Gray, whose love seminar he had attended just over a year before, and asked for counseling to help him and his family understand what was happening. “He wanted to say goodbye to his family,” said Gray, whose work with relationships later manifested itself in such books as Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. “He gave them a chance to share feelings and to talk about their life together. Andy was very open to role-playing, which creates a context to express and understand different points of view without aggravation. He responded very well to it.” They went to Gray’s home office in Brentwood for a few days and in different groupings. Stanley loathed every minute of it—“We called them ten-Kleenex-box sessions. His success was based on the number of Kleenex boxes the clients used. He was trying to bring out our anger toward each other—that we were angry with each other, that we didn’t love each other. He wanted hatred and anger to come out, and boy, he wouldn’t take no for an answer. This was meant to please Andy because if there was no emotion, then Gray wasn’t cleansing our souls. And he had Janice there—who could hardly speak, knowing that her son was in such terrible shape—and he had to make her cry! It was cruel.” Said Carol, “I remember how awkward it was watching Andy—who had swelling on the brain that day—so he couldn’t talk. And my mother couldn’t talk. They just l
ooked at each other. It was kind of heartbreaking.”

  George attended a session with Michael, Lynne and Andy. In the session, Andy expressed his resentment toward me when I didn’t support some of his artistic endeavors like his wrestling, Tony Clifton, his novel, Howdy Doody et cetera. He opened up his feelings, and during an exercise I played the role of Andy expressing his feelings toward George, telling him I didn’t feel enough support from him in my creative efforts as an avant garde entertainer. It was stimulating for both of us. I felt great afterward and so did Andy. …