Andy Kaufman

by Bob Zmuda

  Michael Kaufman would be the first one to say his tastes are quite conservative. So are his sister Carol’s. That’s why, as the curators of Andy’s estate, Michael and Carol have the responsibility to look beyond their likes and dislikes and think of Andy’s. They should not try to rewrite his legacy. The best they can do is simply step aside and let the public decide what it wants to see. I was Andy’s writer for ten years. Nobody—and I mean nobody—knew his wishes better than I did.

  If this sounds arrogant, so be it. If there’s one thing we can all learn from Andy, it’s “don’t hide your light under a shovel.” For years I was content to remain in the shadows. When I finally came out in Andy Kaufman Revealed! and stated, “I was his writer,” I was met with some skepticism. After all, Andy was a “madman.” How could a madman “have a writer”?

  Here’s Andy from an April 1980 interview with the men’s magazine Oui:

  KAUFMAN: Yeah. The Tony Clifton Story. They’re trying to get him [Tony] for it, and I’m writing it.

  OUI: Quite remarkable. By the way, do you write all your own material?

  KAUFMAN: Well, I do have a writing partner, Bob Zmuda. I met him around 1973, at the Improv in New York. We used to exchange ideas. I finally said, “You know, you’re the only guy I know who could write for me.”

  So take notice, any “revisionists” out there.

  Lynne came in later in the game, but is respected nonetheless. Her documentary I’m from Hollywood is brilliant. Andy trusted her artistic insights. Both she and I have worked tirelessly to “keep him out there.” We don’t do what we do for money. We do it as a labor of love.

  ***

  Andy, you’ve got to come back, if for no other reason than to clear things up between Lynne and your brother and sister. I don’t get it. Lynne, as you know, is one of the sweetest people in the world. So are Michael and Carol, but they’re going at it with Lynne like the Hatfields and McCoys.

  It’s been building for years. They think Lynne ripped off a lot of your stuff.

  ***

  Lynne

  When Andy died, if indeed he really did, whatever of his possessions were not in our Pacific Palisades house or San Francisco apartment were in storage. He had put almost all of his belongings in storage after moving out of his Laurel Canyon house. When Taxi was canceled, Andy no longer felt the need to live in Los Angeles; that’s when we got the apartment in San Francisco. After he was gone, his dad Stanley hired Andy’s friend and former secretary Linda Mitchell to get rid of all the “junk.” I believe that Linda sent some things to the Kaufmans, kept a few things for herself, and sent the rest of Andy’s belongings to my mom’s house in San Fernando, where I temporarily stored them in her garage. I talked to Stanley about it; Andy’s record collection, his personal papers, etc.; and he said, “Keep it all.” Michael Kaufman made a trip to my mom’s house at one point to see if he wanted anything. He took a few things and that was that. I have been caring for Andy’s belongings since 1984, moving them from home to home, paying thousands of dollars in storage fees. And now Michael is accusing me of stealing these things? He could have taken everything back in 1984, but I guess it was just too much trouble. But now thirty years later he is suddenly calling me a thief when he always knew I had Andy’s belongings? That hurts.

  Before Andy died, he made me promise to get all of his work out into the world so that his work would not be forgotten. He made me swear this in front of George Shapiro and my friend Wave Geber. He told them they were witnesses and he made George promise to help me. George promised that he would. So, first I finished I’m from Hollywood according to Andy’s wishes and George helped with that in that he set up the interviews with Robin Williams, Marilu Henner, and Tony Danza. He also was trying to help me sell it but my investors were not very savvy and they drove him crazy. So he did help with Hollywood. But after that was finished, I got ready to dive into getting the rest of his work out as I promised, and called George to make a plan. George said something like, “What? No, I promised to help with I’m from Hollywood, nothing else.” In other words, “Fergitaboutit baby! Get out of Hollywood and let the big boys take over.”

  ***

  Andy, Lynne said after you supposedly died that Stanley wanted to get rid of everything and told her she could have it all. Now thirty years later your career has improved and your memorabilia is worth something, and your family wants it all back.

  Remember that Grandmother album you always wanted to do? Lynne “got it out there” like you wanted. Your dad went berserk. At first he thought I did it and started bitching about me. When they found out it was Lynne, they went bonkers! Got lawyers after her and everything.

  ***

  Lynne

  One of the things Andy very dearly wanted to do was to make an album out of the mini-cassette recordings he had made. In the late ’70s, after hearing Bob’s stories about Norman Wexler tape recording everything he did, Andy decided he would do that too. He carried a mini-cassette recorder everywhere and recorded everything and everyone. His grandma, his girlfriends, strangers on the street. He would create situations in public so that he could capture the reaction on tape. He admired an album that Steve Allen had put out in the ’60s called Funny Fone Calls and wanted to do something similar with his tapes. I had dutifully carried the tapes around for twenty-five years and wasn’t able to drum up any interest until, in 2008, I made a book deal with Process Media to release Dear Andy Kaufman, I Hate Your Guts, a compilation of hate mail that Andy received from women after challenging them to wrestle on Saturday Night Live. My publisher, Jodi Wille, immediately saw the potential of Andy’s tapes and hooked me up with Drag City Records, a small independent label out of Chicago. I was so happy because finally I was able to fulfill Andy’s dream of making an album out of the tapes! But right before the album was to come out, on the release date, as a matter of fact, I got a threatening letter from the Kaufmans via a lawyer telling Drag City and me to cease and desist! I couldn’t believe it. Until that moment, I had believed that the Kaufmans and I were completely on the same page with the same goal: to get Andy’s work out into the world. That’s what Andy wanted and what I’ve always worked toward. I mean, there’s no money in this, come on. It’s a labor of love. But here was this letter. I tried to call Michael to talk about it, but in response got an even nastier letter from his lawyer. Wow. Luckily, Drag City had already produced the album, so I just walked away from the deal and gave it to the Kaufmans. All that mattered was getting the album out. But they weren’t through yet. After that I started getting threatening letters about Andy’s belongings! The belongings that Stanley Kaufman had given to me and that I had cared for all these years. These belongings had recently been the core of a New York gallery show called On Creating Reality by Andy Kaufman. This was a huge, prestigious show that cemented Andy’s contributions to performance art and television. Bob even insisted that Michael Kaufman be involved. I thought that the Kaufmans would be thrilled that, through Bob and me, this recognition of Andy as an important presence in art and performance was happening. Instead I found out later that they were livid! What the hell? I am truly baffled by their behavior.

  ***

  I told Lynne you’re coming back and will straighten everything out. She thinks I’ve lost my mind, of course. In retrospect, next time you do something like this, leave a will. Then it will be clear what your wishes are. I’ll tell you one thing, I never used to think about having a will until I witnessed this crap. I know you never gave much thought to the “almighty dollar,” so it’s going to be interesting to see if your philosophy has changed with age. When you’re young, you feel infallible, but the older people get, the more they run scared.

  Oh, get this—remember the Moonlight Brothel in Carson, Nevada? Like how can you forget! Anyway, remember that big guy named Dennis? He once put up one hundred dollars if one of the girls could pin your shoulders—and then when the girl couldn’t do it, he gave her the money anyway? Well, guess what—he now owns the
place. It’s now called Dennis Hof’s World Famous Bunny Ranch. You’ve seen it on HBO, if you have HBO. It’s a series called Cathouse. He’s been so successful in the world’s oldest profession that he now owns seven brothels altogether. Well, he and I are buddies. He’s going to be there when you return with a half dozen of his top girls and here’s what he’s offered to do because he’s such a big fan of yours: Any customer who buys a ticket to see you, all he has to do is show up at Dennis’s brothel the next day and his ticket stub will be good for one free hooker. I’m not joking. He personally is going to pay for the hookers out of his own pocket. If 400 people show up from the night before, so be it. The hookers are on him!

  So screw you if you don’t show up! Some people are going to buy a ticket just to get the free hooker. Like Dennis says, “There’s no business like ho-business!” Of course, you’re going to have to partake yourself the next day. He’s got more than a few that will knock your socks off. Some real big ugly ones too, the kind that you like.

  Speaking of hookers, remember the time we were playing Harrah’s in Reno for a week’s run? Lisa Hartman was your opening act. It was the first time we went to Joe Conforte’s Mustang Ranch, and you made a bet that you would screw all forty-two girls before you left town and did! Remember the last day there were like six girls remaining and you said, “My penis feels like it has been through a meat grinder,” but you pulled it off, all forty-two. Those were the good old days. Well, soon they’ll be back, and this time you’ll have to break your old record.

  What a show! Free hookers! Wrestling! I’m also going to reach out to R.E.M. to see if I can get them to perform that evening. They split up, you know, but I think I can get them together again for such a once-in-a-lifetime occasion. Maybe that’s how we do it—they close the show by playing “Man on the Moon”—three-quarters of the way through the song is when you make your grand appearance! Think about it. How spectacular would that be?

  ***

  If Andy Kaufman was strange, sex made him normal. The stranger Andy got, the more sex he needed to bring him back to earth. The average male might go to a brothel and have a girl or even two per visit. Andy would have six to eight during the same time period. Even hard-core prostitutes who have worked the Ranch for years would say they never saw anything like it. In a pretentious world, Andy craved the unpretentiousness that sex with hookers provided, as it is the only realm of primordial adventure still left to most of us. He couldn’t get enough of it, and the more he got the more he wanted. When the pressure of show business got to be too much, he’d head to the Ranch to “decompress.” The girls loved him and found it strange that he displayed no airs of celebrity whatsoever. He seldom talked about himself and was truly more interested in who they were. He developed relationships that would last a lifetime with many of them even after their sexual relations had ended. He flew more than a half dozen out at his own expense to learn TM from instructor and friend Prudence Farrow. One would even knit him sweaters. He never looked down at what they were doing. If anything, he looked up to them as “sexual healers.” He didn’t “fuck” them, he “made love” to them, and as women they knew the difference. As Norman Mailer once said, if a prostitute can’t fall in love with her client, what chance has she? And many of them truly fell in love with Andy. Prostitutes became one of the great joys of his life. He didn’t hide the fact that he was into it and believed it should be legal in every state of the Union. It made him happy, so much so that even his parents learned to accept it as a healthy social activity of his. His mother cheerfully referred to it as “Andy going off to camp.” It was the perfect situation for him, relationship-wise. He could have companionship any time he wanted it. Frequently he’d fly a girl out to be with him for a few days or even a week or so and then when it was time to get back to work, she just as quickly was out of his hair. What was it Charlie Sheen said—”I don’t pay a prostitute for sex. I pay her to leave.” That’s why all of his friends were flabbergasted when Lynne came on the scene. She was so different from any “civilian” girl he had ever dated before. For one thing, she was an artist in her own right, well adjusted, attractive, and had no problem with his sexual romps whatsoever, just as long as he came home to her at night. Prudence Farrow, a close confidante of Andy’s, told me she was so happy when he met Lynne for she felt for the first time in all the years she’d known him that he’d finally met somebody he was serious about. He told her he’d “met his soul mate.” Had he not faked his death, there is no doubt in my mind that he would have married her. That is why I’m till this very day suspicious of what she knows or doesn’t about his disappearance. She’s old-school wrestling code of silence—“loose lips sink ships”—and since I adhere to the same code, I would never ask her what she knows or doesn’t. Besides, she wouldn’t tell me anyway.

  ***

  There is a scene in Man on the Moon where Andy is moving into a new house with Lynne when the phone rings. He puts a moving box down and answers. It’s George Shapiro calling with some bad news. We know it’s bad news because there’s sad music playing on the film score, plus George sounds distraught. He tells Andy that Taxi has just been canceled. I’m sure the filmmakers would have loved to see Andy saddened by the news, but on the set that day, thank God, Lynne and I were present. When we became aware of where Scott and Larry were going with this, we threw down our gauntlet and said, “Enough, already.” If anything, Andy was overjoyed when Taxi was canceled. We know this because Lynne was with him when the real call came in. He was just about doing cartwheels. Of course, the screenwriters who are trying to construct a story line are using the firing of Andy from SNL and now the cancellation of Taxi as a device to lead him spiraling down into getting depressed and sick. Sorry, Scott and Larry, that story structure might have worked for Jim Thorpe—All-American and hundreds of other similar films, but Lynne and I weren’t going to sit idly by while Hollywood tampered with Andy’s essence. Switch a few scenes around here and there and we’ll look the other way, but not when it comes to our boy’s essence. Never. Not on our watch.

  ***

  Lynne

  True, Andy was ecstatic when Taxi was canceled. It was like he’d been freed from prison. He immediately moved out of his rented Laurel Canyon house, put his belongings in storage, and turned his attention seriously toward becoming a professional wrestler and getting his revenge on Jerry Lawler. He knew this was his true calling!

  So of course we sat down with Andy/Jim and expressed our concern. Jim wanted to be as accurate as humanly possible about what really came down and truly valued all insights from us. After all, Lynne and I didn’t spend eighty days with him to bask in “the glory of all things Jim.” There are enough assholes in Hollywood to do that. He knew when it came to the truth about Andy, Lynne and I weren’t messing around. So Jim played the scene totally indifferent to George’s phone call—not saddened in the least. I’m sure in editing Milos was looking for the take where Jim was injured by the news. Sorry, Milos, it never existed. Oh, yeah, one other thing, also in that scene: He reaches up and feels a boil on his neck. We are to believe it’s the start of the cancer. Sorry, guys, it was just a boil on his neck. As for Carnegie Hall being his swan song after he learns he has cancer, wrong again. Carnegie Hall took place nearly six years before his supposed death.

  ***

  Ring …

  B: Hello?

  A: Hey, Bob, it’s Andy.

  B: What’s up?

  A: I went to Madame Tussauds today on Hollywood Boulevard.

  B: What did you think?

  A: I think I can hire somebody to do a wax figure of myself, put it in a coffin, and people will think it’s me. I bet Ken Chase can do it. He made those molds of you and my face for Clifton.

  B: Yeah, but I don’t know if he works in wax. Besides, how would you get him or somebody like him to swear to secrecy?

  A: A portion of the money up front and increments every year people think I’m dead.

  B: That could be a lot o
f money, Andy.

  A: I’ve got a lot of money. You know I don’t spend it. What do you think?

  B: Like I said before, you got to keep me out of it. What I don’t know can’t hurt you. Plausible denial.

  A: What if the police questioned you?

  B: How many times have I played Tony on Letterman, Merv, and everybody thought it was you? I didn’t even tell my own mother. Wrestler’s code! I’m no rat.

  CHAPTER 6

  Andy at SNL

  So let me get this straight, Zmuda. Are you telling us that you and Andy purposely plotted to destroy his successful commercial career?

  Now you’re getting it, Sparky!

  But why would anyone want to do that?

  You know, over the years, I’ve been asking myself that very question. I believe it had to do with the youth rebellion that Andy, I, and the whole country were experiencing at the time. The “turbulent ’60s.” If I was going to make a film about Kaufman today, I’d focus on the time period that most people overlook entirely, and that is when he was fourteen to seventeen years old. He grows his hair long and runs away from home. He’s pretty much a teenage alcoholic, doing every drug imaginable, and hell-bent on not being part of the “system.” In his hip pocket he carries a worn copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. It is at this time the friction between him and his father is at an all-time high. Three thousand miles across the country, I’m experiencing a similar rejection of society, the book in my hip pocket being Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book. When he and I join forces, we “conspire” to overthrow the entertainment industry of the United States of America. It was in our DNA. It’s how society grows. New ideas replacing old. Were we at times arrogant and self-indulgent in that quest? Probably. We were the avant-garde and had to be.