Andy Kaufman

by Bob Zmuda

  Many months later, when Jim’s good friend, director Rob Reiner, saw our documentary and a rough-cut screening of Man on the Moon back to back, he told Jim that Universal should shelve the motion picture and release the documentary instead, as it, according to Reiner, “was a truer representation of Kaufman’s art.” For years, Lynne and I have been trying to convince Jim to release it. It’s the most intimate and truthful work of Jim’s career. His coming up the ranks as a nightclub impressionist before he was an actor taught him early on to work from the outside in. Our documentary afforded him the opportunity to work from the inside out. For that reason alone he may be oversensitive about its being seen by others.

  “Dailies” is the term used for the previous day’s shooting. It’s processed overnight and gives the various departments of camera, sound, lights, costume, hair, sets, etc., a chance to see how everything looks blown up on the big screen. Since only twenty-four hours have gone by, it’s a safety device used just in case something is amiss so it can be reshot before the set is taken down. On our first day of dailies, much to everyone’s surprise, none other than Tony Clifton (played by Jim Carrey) struts in bigger than life. You should have seen Milos’s face. Very seldom does the star of the film show up for dailies. Obviously it’s the star second-guessing the director’s work even if that director, in this case, has two Academy Awards on his mantel. So Clifton plops his ass down right in front of Milos and yells, “Lights out. Roll ’em.” Clifton’s persona was so over-the-top authoritative the poor projectionist just did as he was told. The scene they were looking at was one of Andy’s, not Tony’s. Clifton quickly barked, “NOT GOOD! TOO MUCH! HE’S PUSHING!!” Then Clifton got up, turned to Milos and scolded him, “YOU’VE GOT TO WATCH THAT GUY.” And then Tony and his entourage (us) left. Basically it was Jim’s way of telling Milos, “Watch my impression of Andy. Make sure I’m not overdoing it”—which he was and caught it. It wasn’t a lecture the legendary Milos was used to hearing. But that’s Jim’s work ethic. That’s why he’s numero uno. His motto is, “I don’t care who you are or how many Oscars you may have, it’s my career and I’ve been this successful in it so far because I scrutinize everything.” Someday I’d love to see Jim direct. He could do it. He can pretty much do everything. Milos hates stars. He’d rather work with unknowns.

  Also in the screening room that day was Michael Hausman, who line-produces all of Milos’s films. He’s appalled at Clifton’s behavior. How dare he bark orders at the maestro Milos, let alone bring a documentary crew in on the dailies? Lynne with her camera would be a constant thorn in Hausman’s side for the entire filming of Man on the Moon. But there was nothing he could do. What Jim said was law. Hausman had to bite the bullet on a daily basis. Never before in the history of a major motion picture was a documentary camera (Lynne’s) given the free range to be everywhere and anywhere she wanted to go. Lynne never overstepped her position, and everybody in the cast and crew soon learned to love her, as she truly is one of the sweetest people you’ll ever meet. After a time, she blended into the woodwork and caught a behind-the-scenes look at Hollywood that only insiders see. A truly extraordinary achievement.

  ***

  Everybody went crazy. I mean everybody. Biopics bring out the worst in everyone. Man on the Moon was no exception. Every family member, past girlfriend, college buddy, or fan who might have met Andy for five minutes felt the movie should be about Andy and them. The film’s writers, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewksi, interviewed everybody. We already knew that the biggest role besides Jim’s would go to Andy’s manager, George Shapiro, played by Danny DeVito. DeVito was executive producer on the film and his Jersey Films was the production company, so obviously George Shapiro’s role was going to be well taken care of, as it should have been. George was a big part of Andy’s career and nobody handled trying to explain Andy’s bizarre methodology better to the suits than George did.

  Now George and I had a love/hate relationship. Originally, when Andy brought me on as his writer, George welcomed me with open arms. After all, Andy was a lot to deal with, as most talent is. Talent needs constant hand-holding, and the personal manager’s job is to do just that. When I came on the scene, at first George was relieved. Now he had someone to field the constant phone calls other than himself. Over the years, when my power base grew with Andy and I had his ear, George didn’t like it so much. Looking back over Andy’s career, I’d say my one great regret was that George and I didn’t communicate enough with each other, if at all.

  It wasn’t long into the process when DeVito turned on his own director, Milos. Milos didn’t like the script that Larry and Scott had written, even though it was Milos who had brought Larry and Scott in. DeVito was clever when Milos started throwing his weight around and wanted to do a rewrite himself. Danny quickly bonded with Larry and Scott who, like all writers, didn’t want one word on their script touched, and so he was able to quickly turn them against their old pal Milos. DeVito even sealed the deal by giving Scott and Larry another job writing another script for him and the promise of even letting them direct it, which they did, which also got them out of town for the whole Man on the Moon shoot, “coincidentally.” Another smart maneuver on DeVito’s part, making sure Milos and his writers couldn’t join forces again.

  So now DeVito had the writers in his camp. Milos was furious and ran off and wrote his own script over a weekend. I never read it, but Danny, Scott, Larry, and Stacey said they didn’t like it. When he handed it in Monday morning, it was in longhand, hard to read, with numerous misspellings. Its central theme, as much as they could decipher, was that people intrinsically know if they’re going to die and therefore their subconscious seeks to get as much living in as possible before the clock runs out and that’s why Andy created Clifton, according to Milos’s version. Interesting concept.

  So here we were a few weeks away from shooting and Milos wanted to throw the whole script out and start from scratch. Well, this went over like a lead balloon. DeVito told Milos, “No fucking way.” He must do the script they gave him. Michael Hausman’s take was, “How dare they question the great and infallible Milos Forman?” DeVito now seized the opportunity and offered to direct the picture himself, which is what he wanted all along. Here’s where I came in to exact my revenge against Danny. I by now had Jim Carrey’s ear and told him of DeVito’s plot to dump Milos. Jim wouldn’t hear of it. After all, he signed on to the film to work with two-time Academy writer-director Milos Forman, not Danny DeVito. Milos wasn’t going anywhere, thanks to me. Besides, he wasn’t about to lose a multimillion-dollar payday. So we started our film with everyone basically hating and distrusting everyone else. Poor Jim. He was flying solo and needed to channel Andy more than ever.

  ***

  To add to the clusterfuck, Stanley Kaufman still harbored resentment that the movie wasn’t about him and Andy. All the rest of us, including George, should be secondary characters. Stanley, who had an ego comparable to Danny’s, Milos’s, and Jim Carrey’s combined, as family patriarch now poisoned the rest of his offspring, Michael and Carol, to hate the script also. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Here you have a major studio spending a shitload of money making a film on a not-very-known performer to begin with, and the family’s attacking the film. How fucking stupid can you get? Not only were they looking a gift horse in the mouth, they wanted to send it off to slaughter before it even had a chance to run around the track.

  Milos, now pissed off about having to direct a script he wasn’t crazy about, bit the bullet and did his best.

  After production wrapped, I had a final dinner alone with Milos, where he confided in me that he had never before had his producer turn on him and try to take the film away. He said it was the most miserable experience of his career. He was so distraught over it he managed to get no more than three to four hours of sleep a night while shooting. It was a damned shame. Milos deserved better.

  If it wasn’t for producer Stacey Sher, who showed up every day on the set buzzing with enthusiasm
and love for the project, it would have been a total disaster.

  Well, if they, like all the others, couldn’t get their shit together to make a film, at least Jim, Lynne, and I would. That film wasn’t Man on the Moon, but the little documentary we were shooting that we named, appropriately, Andy Lives.

  ***

  Ring …

  B: Hello.

  A: It’s Andy.

  B: What’s up?

  A: I figured it out.

  B: Figured what out?

  A: I die at sea! NO BODY. It makes it a whole lot easier. There’s a boating accident and I fall overboard. It’s night. Everybody thinks I’ve gone under, but I’m a strong swimmer. So I’ll swim away a good distance and then you can pick me up in a powerboat.

  B: I already told you I can’t help you with this one. What if they give me a lie-detector test?

  A: Why would they do that?

  B: Because they’ll suspect you faked your death.

  A: Why would they suspect that?

  B: Because you’re running all around town blabbing about it!

  A: No, I’m not.

  B: Yes, you are. John Moffitt told me you went over to his place and made him and Jack Burns swear on a Bible that they wouldn’t tell anybody about your plans to fake your death.

  A: Who told you that?

  B: John Moffitt!

  A: Damn it, he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. He swore on the Bible.

  B: He’s a Jew. He could give a shit about the Bible.

  A: I thought if you swore on a Bible, you had to keep that promise.

  B: Andy, you’ve been watching too many Perry Masons. Since you’ve told some people, they’re not going to believe this “lost at sea” con. You need a body. And you need to quit telling people your plan.

  A: Bob, don’t worry. It’ll all work out in the long run.

  CHAPTER 3

  Sneaking into the Playboy Mansion

  Like a top athlete, Jim had Lynne and me as trainers in all things Kaufman. Put-ons were the order of the day, much to the chagrin of Milos’s henchman, Michael Hausman. None though was more elaborate than the one we played on Mr. Playboy himself, Hugh Hefner.

  It all started when Jim received an invitation to attend an event at the Playboy Mansion. It was called “A Midsummer’s Night Dream”—a pajama party at Hef’s pad for the rich and famous. But this was not just any pajama party. This was the pajama party of all pajama parties. Playboy had pulled out all the stops, as it was the first party Hef had given in years, because for the last nine, he had been married to Kimberley Conrad, the mother of two of his children. When Kimberley asked for a divorce, Hef was devastated. Once again, at age seventy-two, he found himself a bachelor. The Playboy organization, on the other hand, loved it. For too long, Hef was a dutiful husband and father. All those sex romps that he was known for in the early years before marriage was what Playboy was all about. Now once again a free man, he removed the kids’ toys from the house and replaced them with new toys of a vibrating nature. “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” would be Hef’s coming-out party, and no expense was spared. It was the hottest ticket in town, and since Jim was the hottest star in Hollywood, he was at the top of Hef’s to-get list. There was only one problem: Jim didn’t want to go. He thought the whole thing silly. To him the Playboy philosophy had played itself out back in the ’60s and ’70s. If Jim wanted to meet hot girls, all he had to do was leave his house and show up at any number of trendy Hollywood nightspots. Within minutes, he’d have any girl of his choosing going home with him. Why did he need to dress up in a pair of silk pajamas and satin slippers and suck on a pipe not even filled with ganja?

  I, on the other hand, a Chicago boy who grew up in the city where Hef started the magazine and the first Playboy Club and where Playboy for years had its corporate office, thought an invite to his first big party in ten years was, “Hell, yeah!” Damn, if Jim didn’t want to use the invite, I surely would.

  By now, Lynne and I realized that Jim was a real recluse and very seldom left his digs except to be driven to the studio to work. We had encouraged him to get out. Besides, Lynne and I needed a break from Jim, as we didn’t want to get burned out. He said he’d consider it. But as the date grew closer, he just couldn’t muster the enthusiasm to go. Then one day, he had a brilliant idea, a very Kaufmanesque idea. Jim Carrey wouldn’t attend, but Tony Clifton would. He told his assistant, Linda Fields, to get Hugh Hefner on the phone. He had a plan.

  Jim had never met Hefner before, and Hef was excited to take the call. Jim explained that he was working on Man on the Moon, that he was totally absorbed in a character named Tony Clifton, and that he’d be happy to attend “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” but only under two conditions: 1) He’d come not as Jim Carrey but as Tony Clifton, and 2) Hef couldn’t tell anyone that Tony was Jim. Jim said if people knew that Tony was Jim, it would defeat the whole purpose of being in character and in that case he’d rather not come. Hef happily agreed to both conditions, eager to get Jim there in any form.

  As Jim sat in a chair in his living room, Ve Neill, the makeup person from the film, applied the Clifton prosthetics to his face. Jim was in the chair over an hour. I was in the kitchen having a snack, while Lynne was testing her video and sound equipment. Jim had cleared it with Hef to bring along a videographer, as we were making our documentary. This in itself was apparently earth-shattering, as Hef never allowed cameras in his lair. Jim was nearly finished when I phoned my home to check messages. There was one from Bill Zehme. Zehme was a friend of mine from Chicago, a good writer who had written a book himself about Kaufman called Lost in the Fun House. He had also written a book about Hefner called Hef’s Little Black Book. He was letting me know that he had heard the rumor (obviously from Hef) that Jim was going to be there dressed up as Clifton. He was calling to know if it was true. When I told Jim about the message, he just about hit the roof. “That FUCKING Hugh Hefner. I told him not to tell anybody. Well, FUCK him! He blew it. I’m not going.” He leapt out of the chair and quickly started ripping the Clifton prosthetics from his face. He was pissed. We all were. What a bummer.

  Fifteen minutes later, Jim perked up. “Wait a second … I’ve got it—two can play this game. Tony is going to go tonight, except it won’t be me. Zmuda, it’s going to be you!” “What?” I said. “NO WAY!” I hadn’t done Clifton in years and told Jim so. Jim pleaded, “Come on, Bob. You can do it. It’ll be good for you to get back in the old fellow’s skin. Come on, Lynne, tell him he’s got to do it.” Lynne encouraged me also. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in the makeup chair. Ninety minutes later, I was Tony Clifton.

  Here was the plan: I, as Tony, along with Lynne, would jump into the limo and go to the Mansion. Hefner would believe that under the makeup I was Jim. But, exactly at 11:00 p.m., Jim Carrey would show up as himself. If everything worked out, Hugh Hefner would be pranked, and it would all be caught on tape for our doc. The only caveat that Jim insisted on was that he would not reveal that he knew Lynne and Tony and would act just as mystified as to our presence as Hef would be—i.e., once caught, Lynne and Tony would be on their own, and whatever trouble they were in, Jim wasn’t going to bail them out.

  Jim had ordered up the biggest stretch limo he could find for Clifton. Heads turned as it barreled down Sunset Boulevard toward the Playboy Mansion, which was lit up like a Christmas tree for the occasion. Limos were backed up waiting at the guard gate where credentials were checked to ensure only the crème de la crème were let in. Immediately, Clifton—tossing $20 to his chauffeur—had him start laying on his horn, signaling the limos before him to hurry up. Certainly not the right protocol for such an esteemed lot. When that didn’t work, Clifton lowered his window, stuck his head out, and started to yell obscenities.

  “Hurry up, assholes, I don’t have all day. Let’s move it, I don’t want all that hot pussy to get cold.” The security guard at the gate looked dumbfounded and appalled.

  When Clifton’s limo finally arrived at his
gate, Clifton was beside himself. “What the fuck, man? Next time you hear me toot, you let me right in. I wait for no one, let alone these Hollywood wannabes.” The guard, unimpressed and already hating Clifton, looked at his clipboard and said, “Name?” Clifton snapped back, “Name! Are you shittin’ me? Everyone knows me. I’m a household name, for Christ’s sake!” The guard repeated more firmly, “NAME!” Clifton, becoming more irate, spat back, “The name’s written on the bottom of my shoe, and soon it’s going to be up your motherfuckin’ ass—which by the looks of you you’ll probably enjoy. That reminds me, how do you get a gay guy to fuck a girl? Put shit in her pussy!”

  The guard was not amused, turned his head slightly, and spoke into a small microphone mounted on his lapel, “Code 14. Troublemaker. 10-4.” Clifton said, “Troublemaker? The only trouble, fuck face, is the trouble you’re going to be in if you don’t let me in immediately. I’ll sue you, your children, and your children’s children.”

  Lynne interceded, realizing that if this kept up they weren’t going to get in. “His name is Tony Clifton.” Clifton reprimanded her, “Don’t tell him shit.” The guard scanned his list up and down. “No name like that on it.” Clifton screamed, “I DON’T NEED MY NAME ON ANY LIST. I’M AN INTERNATIONAL SINGING SENSATION, AND I WANT THE RESPECT DUE ME. YOU BETTER LET ME IN OR I’LL REPORT YOU TO THE BETTER BUSINESS BUREAU.” The guard turned back to his lapel mike, “There’s some asshole here named Clifton. He’s not on the list.” While they were checking on the other end, Clifton yelled, “I’ll give you thirty seconds and then I’m turning around and going to Larry Flynt’s party. His girls are much younger than Hef’s old broads in their twenties and are willing to flash their buttholes.” The guard was stunned when the word came back over the speaker to let Clifton in. “OK, you’re cleared.” Clifton continued, “Damn right I’m in, and you’re out. I’ll have your job. How old are you?” The guard wouldn’t answer. “I said, ‘How old are you?’” Just to move Clifton along, he answered, “Thirty-eight.” Clifton fired back, “Thirty-eight! And this is all you’ve made of your life? Pathetic. Truly pathetic.” With that, Clifton’s driver drove on to the house. You could hear the guard back on his microphone saying, “You got a real piece of shit coming your way. Ten-four.”