Uncle Andys Fun Afterlife
Twenty years later, dead or alive, will Andy Kaufman return?
by Dave Shulman, LA Weekly
(Photo by Elizabeth Wolynski)
Bob Zmuda, Andy Kaufmans best friend and co-writer, describes the final 12 or 15 hours of Andys show at Carnegie Hall in 1979:
The first act ended with the 350-member Mormon Tabernacle Choir (impersonators, but whos counting) entering through the back doors and caroling down the aisles, the New York City Rockettes (likewise) entering from the wings, the real Santa Claus riding through on his sleigh, and Andys Grandma Pearl whod been sitting onstage on her own sofa for over two hours ripping off her face to reveal that she was actually Robin Williams. Act 2: The audience of 2,800 boarded a herd of buses and were driven in the rain to the New York School of Printing, where they were seated in kindergarten chairs and given milk and cookies while snake charmers and sword swallowers performed, and Andy wrestled all interested female attendees. It got close to 2 a.m., the hour when the bus company would start charging serious overtime fees, so, to clear the crowd, Andy announced Act 3: The show would continue the next day at 1 p.m. on the Staten Island Ferry. Andy and Bob hadnt actually planned an! ything there, but just in case anyone believed them, they figured they should show up a good idea, since when they arrived at 1:20 they found about 350 people from the night before, waiting, as Zmuda puts it, with smiles on their faces like little kids. Andy proceeded to buy each person a roundtrip ticket and an ice cream cone, and, again, to wrestle all interested female attendees. (In the movie Man in the Moon, the Carnegie Hall show was fictionalized into something that Andy did after finding out that he had lung cancer, like it was supposed to be a farewell performance. Very sweet, very touching, but in fact it took place years before he was diagnosed.)
Before Kaufman died (or died) on May 16, 1984, he told several friends that he was planning to fake his death, disappear and return in 20 years, precisely. So, on May 16, 2004, Comic Relief, the charity organization Zmuda founded in 1985, will present . . . something. Something secretive, something at House of Blues on Sunset Strip. Title: Andy Kaufman Dead or Alive?
So this May 16 isnt going to be exactly like Carnegie Hall, Zmuda concludes across a wide, wide bowl of soup, just around the corner from the Nuart Theater, where last Andy Kaufman appeared in public. But its gonna be in the ballpark.
?
Andy Kaufman was born in 1949 in Great Neck, Long Island, the eldest child in a strait-laced upper-middle-class family of, eventually, five. Most prominently featured in the Kaufman family, in terms of volume, was his father, Stanley. Stanley yelled a lot, and Andy didnt like it. So he went to his room. And stayed there for the rest of his life.
There in his room, Andy began performing at age 4, with daily artificial broadcasts on Channel 5, his name for the Kaufmans home at 5 Robin Way. He played his act jokes, magic tricks, songs to an imaginary audience until, at age 8, he went out on the neighborhood kid-party circuit, where parents adored him but didnt pay him until he turned 14.
Around when this bigtime-entertainment money started coming in, the wide-eyed young admirer of Elvis, Buddy Nature Boy Rogers and Howdy Doody began writing poetry and short stories with aspirations of greatness, and taking conga lessons with Babatunde Olatunji, who had performed at an assembly at Andys school. And Andy read Jack Kerouacs On the Road and got terribly excited about it. Reread it and reread it and reread it some more. Carried it around with him everywhere he went, in his backpack with his own novel in progress, The Hollering Mangoo. Forced even good friends to listen to him read excerpts from both. Andy wrote hard and long, poems and stories Eidandrofields, The Faggot, Oh People Funny People, Hi and a play called The Shameless Bohemian; writing and talking his way into the budding Great Neck beatnik scene.
In late 1963, he wrote The Extreme Success:
Mr. X was a failure so far,
but hadnt had a chance yet,
for he had just started.
Mr. X is a playwrite [sic];
Mr. X is a poet.
Mr. X is both.
He wrote a poem,
and put it in his play.
It got to be promoted.
And it got to be produced.
It was opening night.
Mr. X was very happy.
With all his friends to come and see,
the stage with actors,
the theater sold out.
It was the largest success
of plays that played.
At end, they called him up.
He then took a bow.
The applause was almost deafening,
and Mr. X went off.
He put his hand in his pocket,
and took out his gun.
He had the broadest smile of anyone,
as he shot into his head.
He was Dead!
?
While fixing to die, Andy made his girlfriend, Lynne Margulies, and Zmuda promise to document his life and work, in book and/or film and/or video, and to keep Tony Clifton alive. In 1989, Lynne directed and co-produced the documentary Im From Hollywood, which followed Andys wrestling career as it pummeled to death his career as a popular entertainer.
Andy and I started Im From Hollywood together, Lynne recalls. And he was going to make it even worse, in terms of showing the ruination of his career. We were going to film him, like, in a Tenderloin hotel room, totally destitute. Just down and out, filthy and insane. But he died before we could start filming it.
If only hed had another year, he could have lost it all.
If only.
Andy Kaufman was the Rorschach test of comedy. He inspired a host of new terms like comedy of the absurd, the Dada of ha-ha, Kamikaze Comic, the guerrilla comedian and agent provocateur of comedys Post-Funny School. Kaufman, who died on May 16, 1984, at the age of 35, renounced these labels . . .
Michael Nash, High Performance, Issue No. 28
Zmuda met Kaufman at the Improv (there was just the one, in New York) in 1973, while he was bartending and performing as half of the comedy team Albrecht & Zmuda (the other half being Chris Albrecht, currently the chairman and CEO of HBO). At the time, Andy was working on his Foreign Man character (taenk you veddy motch), his Elvis, his Mighty Mouse, assorted less-defined Andy-like entities, and an abusive, talentless lounge singer named Tony Clifton. Cliftons job was to abuse the audience until they hated and rose up together against him. Zmuda had just quit a job being an assistant to an extremely messed-up but successful screenwriter, Norman Wexler. Wexler was kind of a Tony Clifton without the benefit (or deficit) (or courtesy) of a stage hed do horrible things. Abuse people in public. Abuse people at their place of work. Take a shit in the middle of JFK Airport. And Zmudas job was to record Wexlers victims reactions on tape, to be transcrib! ed later as realistic screenplay dialogue. So Andy seasoned his Clifton with a bit of Bobs Wexler, and things seemed to click.
The real Tony Clifton, Andy explained, was this guy hed seen performing at a small club in Las Vegas in 1969, when Andyd gone there on a hitchhiking mission to meet Elvis (he did, or at least he said he did) at the Las Vegas Hilton.
Clifton has confirmed this. 1969, he recalled in an interview with VH1 last February. 1969, Im playing a little club, down in old Las Vegas. And this kid walks in. Skinny little Jewish kid. Nice guy. And this kid is Andy, Andy Kaufman. But I didnt know this at the time. The guy didnt introduce himself. Okay? Years later, this kid becomes famous. You know that TV show Taxi? You know who that guy is? Thats the guy. He becomes famous on Taxi. And then he does a show at Carnegie Hall. All right? Now, guess who his opening act is? Me, Tony Clifton. Except know what? I DONT KNOW ABOUT IT! HES DOING IT! HE CAME AND STOLE MY ACT, AND HES DOING IT! Can you believe it? Thinking Im some bozo who doesnt have a big powerful lawyer like him. I dont have the Jew-lawyer.
?
Andy cared an awful lot about cancer. He didnt smoke, took good care of himself (except for eating lots of chocolate ice cream), had no reason to expect cancer to befriend him. But he wouldnt shut up about it. I used to get really mad at him, Lynne tells me. I mean, Id get really, really mad at him. Id say, Youre gonna talk yourself into getting cancer.
And this was, like, when hed find any little thing wrong?
Not even. No. Just in normal conversation. Like, I remember one time I was talking about a friend of mine who was dying of cancer. And Andy said, Yeah, well, youll see. Thatll be me, too. Or hed go to the doctor, you know, to get a checkup. And hed say, Okay, okay, tell me. Ive got cancer, right? And the doctor would say, Andy, youre perfectly healthy. He was obsessed with it.
?
In 1965, at 16, Andy finished his first (never published) novel, The Hollering Mangoo, which he later described as the ultimate fantasies of a 16-year-old. Hed taken on a scruffy, rebellious beatnik countenance, and began spending time in Greenwich Village, reading Mangoo excerpts and poetry at Cafe Wha? and other hipster hangouts. In 1967, he barely managed to graduate from high school.
The draft was on, so Andy had to get a physical, to make sure he was healthy and reasonable enough to burn down villages. After scoring a solid 0 on the psychology test, Andy was awarded the much-coveted 4-F status: unfit to kill. This gave him the opportunity to get occasional jobs (driving taxis and delivery trucks, washing dishes), but mostly to loiter with locals at a nearby park, drinking heavily, doing a fair amount of drugs, and taking occasional field trips to Manhattan for improvised street theater.
Alan Watts had recently made Zen Buddhism digestible for the American middle class, and Andy developed an interest in Transcendental Meditation. In 1968, Andy left Great Neck for Boston, to study television and radio production at Grahm Junior College, a small, brand-new school that required only good money and not good grades for admission. He found a good T.M. center in Boston not far from school, and began meditating twice daily, which hed continue through the rest of his days. And in the basement of the dormitory across from Andys, a student named Al Parinello ran a coffeehouse and booked performers. In Bill Zehmes biography, Life in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman, Parinello describes Andys first night onstage at Als Place:
He opened with his Foreign Man character, hopeless and inept, all pidgin English, and there was nervous tittering in the audience. And he did Mighty Mouse with the phonograph and I was astonished by his timing, absolutely impeccable. Then he had the conga, which he started banging in sync with this crying jag he had started crying as the Foreign Man because he lost his place and said he was ashamed, but he turned this into a conga symphony banging to the beat of these big gulping sobs. The audience was going crazy. And then the way he closed was absolutely sensational because it was Elvis and it was incredible because the coeds were screaming! Im saying they were emotionally involved with this impression to the point of screaming . . . I remember looking around, thinking to myself, Something very important is happening here . . .
?
With renewed, T.M.-assisted confidence and optimism, something very important graduated from Grahm in 1971, left Boston to travel around Europe for a few months, then returned to New York and set out to become famous.
Budd Friedman caught Andys act at a Long Island rock club called My Fathers Place, and soon Andy was performing regularly at Friedmans club in New York, the Improvisation. Mighty Mouse, congas, Foreign Man doing Archie Bunker and Jimmy Carter, and, of course, the ultimate Elvis. (Andy was Elvis favorite Elvis impersonator.) Always dressed up as his father, in Stanley Kaufmans hand-me-downs.
From there, Dick Ebersol and Lorne Michaels invited him to perform his Mighty Mouse piece on the inaugural episode of NBCs Saturday Night, and soon periodicals across the land were printing brilliant and genius and new genre and performance artist, and Foreign Man was given a job portraying lovable mechanic Latka Gravas on Taxi, and Foreign Man became famous throughout the land as some form of Andy Kaufman.
Andy wasnt very interested in Latkas fame, or in Taxi. But he figured it was a fair trade: In exchange for Foreign Man image control, Andy got paid more than enough to support his pursuit of more important projects, like busing tables and wrestling.
?
Wrestling was fun, and wrestling women led to lots of recreational sex. In order to be a wrestler, one needs a persona. Andy decided hed be a bad guy a much more fun role than good guy, and also quite shocking to an audience that thought of him mostly as Latka the lovable.
The confusion arose from the publics astute determination that Andys bad guy a stereotype of the Hollywood Jew as soulless, money-grubbing, belligerent wimp had the exact same name as Andy, and wore neither mask nor much of a costume (pale long underwear with dark boxer shorts on top). So audiences thought Andys character was Andy. And thats what really made it fun.
For some, though, maybe it wasnt such fun. If it were your lifes work to change audiences into entertainers, would you allow your parents to believe youd broken your neck in a wrestling mishap, let them watch paramedics lift you onto a gurney and drive you away? Or would you tell them up-front, and risk blowing the gag?
?
Sometimes when you look Andy in the eyes, you get the feeling somebody else is driving.
David Letterman
Middle of the night, 1980: Andy called Zmuda. It happened often. Andy was the kind of guy who, when he came up with an idea in the middle of the night, he had to talk with you right then. So we met at Canters, and I said, So what is it? He said, This is the greatest idea ever! This is the greatest put-on of all time! Now, at this time, Elvis had died, and there were already rumors going around about did Elvis fake his death, did Jim Morrison fake his death. Andy said, You know, if some celebrity really did this, do you know how big it would be? How legendary it would be?
And dont get me wrong: Andy was always looking to be legendary. Always looking to be legendary. So I knew where he was going with this, but I was tired. I said, So . . .? And he said, Im thinking about faking my death. What do you think about that concept? I said, Andy, I think its absolutely brilliant. But count me out. I dont wanna hear any more about it.
He said, Why? I said, Because its illegal to fake your death I think its a felony. Because theres insurance fraud, theres premiums paid, youre a member of AFTRA, of SAG. People fake their deaths all the time for insurance money, or they dont wanna pay child support or whatever. If youre really serious about this, you gotta take that into consideration.
And besides that, Im not gonna lie to your parents that youre dead when youre not. I dont think you could ask anyone to do that.
I think its a great idea, but dont ever bring it up to me again. Get it?
And he said, Got it. And that was it.
?
I understand the theory behind the Atkins Diet, but Zmudas 3-inch stack of pastrami still doesnt look healthy. Were at Jerrys Deli in Studio City, where Andy elected to work part time as a busboy while Foreign Man was enjoying the height of his popularity as Latka on Taxi. Zmudas telling me about interviews hed been conducting for Ribs, a book/screenplay hes writing about the discovery of 339 backlogged bodies at the Marsh familys Tri-State Crematory in Noble, Georgia, in 2002.
Strutting his gut: Tony Clifton
prepares to get Talia Shire wet.
Zmudas an animated fellow, certainly, but so far he hasnt revealed any signs of any other characters living inside of him. Its difficult to picture him as Tony Clifton, whom he first portrayed in 1980 at Harrahs in Reno he and Andy did ye olde switcheroo to mess around with the hotel management, whod hired Tony thinking theyd get Andy; it was so much fun, they did the same on Letterman and Merv Griffin. So it freaks me out considerably when, without fair warning, Zmuda disappears entirely, and in his place appears the howling backwoods cracker son of an unburned, unburied mother, face scrunched up as if wrapped around a hundred-year-old wad of chewing tobacco, shrieking, to the dismay of adjacent lox-gobblers, SOMEONES GOTTA STOP THEM NEGGERS!! THEM NEGGERS DESECRATED MAMA!! THEYS VAH-LATED MAMAS BODY!!
(Yep definitely room in there for Tony.)
?
Yeah, says Lynne. We used to discuss the proper you know, I thought he was just kidding but what would be the proper amount of time to go away for, after he died. And at first it was 10 years, but then he decided, No, 10 years wasnt enough. Twenty years would be good. Ten years he could see someone going away for that long. But 20 years . . .
anyone think he'll actually show up may 16th?...that would be the mother of all pranks
ren
Twenty years later, dead or alive, will Andy Kaufman return?
by Dave Shulman, LA Weekly
(Photo by Elizabeth Wolynski)
Bob Zmuda, Andy Kaufmans best friend and co-writer, describes the final 12 or 15 hours of Andys show at Carnegie Hall in 1979:
The first act ended with the 350-member Mormon Tabernacle Choir (impersonators, but whos counting) entering through the back doors and caroling down the aisles, the New York City Rockettes (likewise) entering from the wings, the real Santa Claus riding through on his sleigh, and Andys Grandma Pearl whod been sitting onstage on her own sofa for over two hours ripping off her face to reveal that she was actually Robin Williams. Act 2: The audience of 2,800 boarded a herd of buses and were driven in the rain to the New York School of Printing, where they were seated in kindergarten chairs and given milk and cookies while snake charmers and sword swallowers performed, and Andy wrestled all interested female attendees. It got close to 2 a.m., the hour when the bus company would start charging serious overtime fees, so, to clear the crowd, Andy announced Act 3: The show would continue the next day at 1 p.m. on the Staten Island Ferry. Andy and Bob hadnt actually planned an! ything there, but just in case anyone believed them, they figured they should show up a good idea, since when they arrived at 1:20 they found about 350 people from the night before, waiting, as Zmuda puts it, with smiles on their faces like little kids. Andy proceeded to buy each person a roundtrip ticket and an ice cream cone, and, again, to wrestle all interested female attendees. (In the movie Man in the Moon, the Carnegie Hall show was fictionalized into something that Andy did after finding out that he had lung cancer, like it was supposed to be a farewell performance. Very sweet, very touching, but in fact it took place years before he was diagnosed.)
Before Kaufman died (or died) on May 16, 1984, he told several friends that he was planning to fake his death, disappear and return in 20 years, precisely. So, on May 16, 2004, Comic Relief, the charity organization Zmuda founded in 1985, will present . . . something. Something secretive, something at House of Blues on Sunset Strip. Title: Andy Kaufman Dead or Alive?
So this May 16 isnt going to be exactly like Carnegie Hall, Zmuda concludes across a wide, wide bowl of soup, just around the corner from the Nuart Theater, where last Andy Kaufman appeared in public. But its gonna be in the ballpark.
?
Andy Kaufman was born in 1949 in Great Neck, Long Island, the eldest child in a strait-laced upper-middle-class family of, eventually, five. Most prominently featured in the Kaufman family, in terms of volume, was his father, Stanley. Stanley yelled a lot, and Andy didnt like it. So he went to his room. And stayed there for the rest of his life.
There in his room, Andy began performing at age 4, with daily artificial broadcasts on Channel 5, his name for the Kaufmans home at 5 Robin Way. He played his act jokes, magic tricks, songs to an imaginary audience until, at age 8, he went out on the neighborhood kid-party circuit, where parents adored him but didnt pay him until he turned 14.
Around when this bigtime-entertainment money started coming in, the wide-eyed young admirer of Elvis, Buddy Nature Boy Rogers and Howdy Doody began writing poetry and short stories with aspirations of greatness, and taking conga lessons with Babatunde Olatunji, who had performed at an assembly at Andys school. And Andy read Jack Kerouacs On the Road and got terribly excited about it. Reread it and reread it and reread it some more. Carried it around with him everywhere he went, in his backpack with his own novel in progress, The Hollering Mangoo. Forced even good friends to listen to him read excerpts from both. Andy wrote hard and long, poems and stories Eidandrofields, The Faggot, Oh People Funny People, Hi and a play called The Shameless Bohemian; writing and talking his way into the budding Great Neck beatnik scene.
In late 1963, he wrote The Extreme Success:
Mr. X was a failure so far,
but hadnt had a chance yet,
for he had just started.
Mr. X is a playwrite [sic];
Mr. X is a poet.
Mr. X is both.
He wrote a poem,
and put it in his play.
It got to be promoted.
And it got to be produced.
It was opening night.
Mr. X was very happy.
With all his friends to come and see,
the stage with actors,
the theater sold out.
It was the largest success
of plays that played.
At end, they called him up.
He then took a bow.
The applause was almost deafening,
and Mr. X went off.
He put his hand in his pocket,
and took out his gun.
He had the broadest smile of anyone,
as he shot into his head.
He was Dead!
?
While fixing to die, Andy made his girlfriend, Lynne Margulies, and Zmuda promise to document his life and work, in book and/or film and/or video, and to keep Tony Clifton alive. In 1989, Lynne directed and co-produced the documentary Im From Hollywood, which followed Andys wrestling career as it pummeled to death his career as a popular entertainer.
Andy and I started Im From Hollywood together, Lynne recalls. And he was going to make it even worse, in terms of showing the ruination of his career. We were going to film him, like, in a Tenderloin hotel room, totally destitute. Just down and out, filthy and insane. But he died before we could start filming it.
If only hed had another year, he could have lost it all.
If only.
Andy Kaufman was the Rorschach test of comedy. He inspired a host of new terms like comedy of the absurd, the Dada of ha-ha, Kamikaze Comic, the guerrilla comedian and agent provocateur of comedys Post-Funny School. Kaufman, who died on May 16, 1984, at the age of 35, renounced these labels . . .
Michael Nash, High Performance, Issue No. 28
Zmuda met Kaufman at the Improv (there was just the one, in New York) in 1973, while he was bartending and performing as half of the comedy team Albrecht & Zmuda (the other half being Chris Albrecht, currently the chairman and CEO of HBO). At the time, Andy was working on his Foreign Man character (taenk you veddy motch), his Elvis, his Mighty Mouse, assorted less-defined Andy-like entities, and an abusive, talentless lounge singer named Tony Clifton. Cliftons job was to abuse the audience until they hated and rose up together against him. Zmuda had just quit a job being an assistant to an extremely messed-up but successful screenwriter, Norman Wexler. Wexler was kind of a Tony Clifton without the benefit (or deficit) (or courtesy) of a stage hed do horrible things. Abuse people in public. Abuse people at their place of work. Take a shit in the middle of JFK Airport. And Zmudas job was to record Wexlers victims reactions on tape, to be transcrib! ed later as realistic screenplay dialogue. So Andy seasoned his Clifton with a bit of Bobs Wexler, and things seemed to click.
The real Tony Clifton, Andy explained, was this guy hed seen performing at a small club in Las Vegas in 1969, when Andyd gone there on a hitchhiking mission to meet Elvis (he did, or at least he said he did) at the Las Vegas Hilton.
Clifton has confirmed this. 1969, he recalled in an interview with VH1 last February. 1969, Im playing a little club, down in old Las Vegas. And this kid walks in. Skinny little Jewish kid. Nice guy. And this kid is Andy, Andy Kaufman. But I didnt know this at the time. The guy didnt introduce himself. Okay? Years later, this kid becomes famous. You know that TV show Taxi? You know who that guy is? Thats the guy. He becomes famous on Taxi. And then he does a show at Carnegie Hall. All right? Now, guess who his opening act is? Me, Tony Clifton. Except know what? I DONT KNOW ABOUT IT! HES DOING IT! HE CAME AND STOLE MY ACT, AND HES DOING IT! Can you believe it? Thinking Im some bozo who doesnt have a big powerful lawyer like him. I dont have the Jew-lawyer.
?
Andy cared an awful lot about cancer. He didnt smoke, took good care of himself (except for eating lots of chocolate ice cream), had no reason to expect cancer to befriend him. But he wouldnt shut up about it. I used to get really mad at him, Lynne tells me. I mean, Id get really, really mad at him. Id say, Youre gonna talk yourself into getting cancer.
And this was, like, when hed find any little thing wrong?
Not even. No. Just in normal conversation. Like, I remember one time I was talking about a friend of mine who was dying of cancer. And Andy said, Yeah, well, youll see. Thatll be me, too. Or hed go to the doctor, you know, to get a checkup. And hed say, Okay, okay, tell me. Ive got cancer, right? And the doctor would say, Andy, youre perfectly healthy. He was obsessed with it.
?
In 1965, at 16, Andy finished his first (never published) novel, The Hollering Mangoo, which he later described as the ultimate fantasies of a 16-year-old. Hed taken on a scruffy, rebellious beatnik countenance, and began spending time in Greenwich Village, reading Mangoo excerpts and poetry at Cafe Wha? and other hipster hangouts. In 1967, he barely managed to graduate from high school.
The draft was on, so Andy had to get a physical, to make sure he was healthy and reasonable enough to burn down villages. After scoring a solid 0 on the psychology test, Andy was awarded the much-coveted 4-F status: unfit to kill. This gave him the opportunity to get occasional jobs (driving taxis and delivery trucks, washing dishes), but mostly to loiter with locals at a nearby park, drinking heavily, doing a fair amount of drugs, and taking occasional field trips to Manhattan for improvised street theater.
Alan Watts had recently made Zen Buddhism digestible for the American middle class, and Andy developed an interest in Transcendental Meditation. In 1968, Andy left Great Neck for Boston, to study television and radio production at Grahm Junior College, a small, brand-new school that required only good money and not good grades for admission. He found a good T.M. center in Boston not far from school, and began meditating twice daily, which hed continue through the rest of his days. And in the basement of the dormitory across from Andys, a student named Al Parinello ran a coffeehouse and booked performers. In Bill Zehmes biography, Life in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman, Parinello describes Andys first night onstage at Als Place:
He opened with his Foreign Man character, hopeless and inept, all pidgin English, and there was nervous tittering in the audience. And he did Mighty Mouse with the phonograph and I was astonished by his timing, absolutely impeccable. Then he had the conga, which he started banging in sync with this crying jag he had started crying as the Foreign Man because he lost his place and said he was ashamed, but he turned this into a conga symphony banging to the beat of these big gulping sobs. The audience was going crazy. And then the way he closed was absolutely sensational because it was Elvis and it was incredible because the coeds were screaming! Im saying they were emotionally involved with this impression to the point of screaming . . . I remember looking around, thinking to myself, Something very important is happening here . . .
?
With renewed, T.M.-assisted confidence and optimism, something very important graduated from Grahm in 1971, left Boston to travel around Europe for a few months, then returned to New York and set out to become famous.
Budd Friedman caught Andys act at a Long Island rock club called My Fathers Place, and soon Andy was performing regularly at Friedmans club in New York, the Improvisation. Mighty Mouse, congas, Foreign Man doing Archie Bunker and Jimmy Carter, and, of course, the ultimate Elvis. (Andy was Elvis favorite Elvis impersonator.) Always dressed up as his father, in Stanley Kaufmans hand-me-downs.
From there, Dick Ebersol and Lorne Michaels invited him to perform his Mighty Mouse piece on the inaugural episode of NBCs Saturday Night, and soon periodicals across the land were printing brilliant and genius and new genre and performance artist, and Foreign Man was given a job portraying lovable mechanic Latka Gravas on Taxi, and Foreign Man became famous throughout the land as some form of Andy Kaufman.
Andy wasnt very interested in Latkas fame, or in Taxi. But he figured it was a fair trade: In exchange for Foreign Man image control, Andy got paid more than enough to support his pursuit of more important projects, like busing tables and wrestling.
?
Wrestling was fun, and wrestling women led to lots of recreational sex. In order to be a wrestler, one needs a persona. Andy decided hed be a bad guy a much more fun role than good guy, and also quite shocking to an audience that thought of him mostly as Latka the lovable.
The confusion arose from the publics astute determination that Andys bad guy a stereotype of the Hollywood Jew as soulless, money-grubbing, belligerent wimp had the exact same name as Andy, and wore neither mask nor much of a costume (pale long underwear with dark boxer shorts on top). So audiences thought Andys character was Andy. And thats what really made it fun.
For some, though, maybe it wasnt such fun. If it were your lifes work to change audiences into entertainers, would you allow your parents to believe youd broken your neck in a wrestling mishap, let them watch paramedics lift you onto a gurney and drive you away? Or would you tell them up-front, and risk blowing the gag?
?
Sometimes when you look Andy in the eyes, you get the feeling somebody else is driving.
David Letterman
Middle of the night, 1980: Andy called Zmuda. It happened often. Andy was the kind of guy who, when he came up with an idea in the middle of the night, he had to talk with you right then. So we met at Canters, and I said, So what is it? He said, This is the greatest idea ever! This is the greatest put-on of all time! Now, at this time, Elvis had died, and there were already rumors going around about did Elvis fake his death, did Jim Morrison fake his death. Andy said, You know, if some celebrity really did this, do you know how big it would be? How legendary it would be?
And dont get me wrong: Andy was always looking to be legendary. Always looking to be legendary. So I knew where he was going with this, but I was tired. I said, So . . .? And he said, Im thinking about faking my death. What do you think about that concept? I said, Andy, I think its absolutely brilliant. But count me out. I dont wanna hear any more about it.
He said, Why? I said, Because its illegal to fake your death I think its a felony. Because theres insurance fraud, theres premiums paid, youre a member of AFTRA, of SAG. People fake their deaths all the time for insurance money, or they dont wanna pay child support or whatever. If youre really serious about this, you gotta take that into consideration.
And besides that, Im not gonna lie to your parents that youre dead when youre not. I dont think you could ask anyone to do that.
I think its a great idea, but dont ever bring it up to me again. Get it?
And he said, Got it. And that was it.
?
I understand the theory behind the Atkins Diet, but Zmudas 3-inch stack of pastrami still doesnt look healthy. Were at Jerrys Deli in Studio City, where Andy elected to work part time as a busboy while Foreign Man was enjoying the height of his popularity as Latka on Taxi. Zmudas telling me about interviews hed been conducting for Ribs, a book/screenplay hes writing about the discovery of 339 backlogged bodies at the Marsh familys Tri-State Crematory in Noble, Georgia, in 2002.
Strutting his gut: Tony Clifton
prepares to get Talia Shire wet.
Zmudas an animated fellow, certainly, but so far he hasnt revealed any signs of any other characters living inside of him. Its difficult to picture him as Tony Clifton, whom he first portrayed in 1980 at Harrahs in Reno he and Andy did ye olde switcheroo to mess around with the hotel management, whod hired Tony thinking theyd get Andy; it was so much fun, they did the same on Letterman and Merv Griffin. So it freaks me out considerably when, without fair warning, Zmuda disappears entirely, and in his place appears the howling backwoods cracker son of an unburned, unburied mother, face scrunched up as if wrapped around a hundred-year-old wad of chewing tobacco, shrieking, to the dismay of adjacent lox-gobblers, SOMEONES GOTTA STOP THEM NEGGERS!! THEM NEGGERS DESECRATED MAMA!! THEYS VAH-LATED MAMAS BODY!!
(Yep definitely room in there for Tony.)
?
Yeah, says Lynne. We used to discuss the proper you know, I thought he was just kidding but what would be the proper amount of time to go away for, after he died. And at first it was 10 years, but then he decided, No, 10 years wasnt enough. Twenty years would be good. Ten years he could see someone going away for that long. But 20 years . . .
anyone think he'll actually show up may 16th?...that would be the mother of all pranks
ren
