by Bob Zmuda
Andy had his own form of beta-testing material: like Mr. X, Andy and I would draw from real life, or manipulate real life, then adapt the material for his use on stage. We would draw on various events, examining their value and how Andy might use them onstage. Once, years before I met him, Andy was accosted on the streets of New York by toughs who demanded his money. Foreign Man was instantly invented as a fast-thinking Andy haltingly pleaded ignorance and poverty with a thick accent, causing the thugs to abandon the pathetic little immigrant for more worthy prey. On another occasion, Andy witnessed the worst act in Las Vegas and Tony Clifton was born.
Often Andy tested material live and, occasionally, even on national television audiences. This was, to most professional entertainers, insane. When most comedians, even brilliant “extemporaneous” comics such as Robin Williams, are riffing, it is usually very carefully planned — it just looks brilliantly improvised. Going out on stage with a “concept” was terrifying at best, but that was how Andy often sought to discover what was behind the curtain, what the mystery was all about, by pushing that envelope far past his comfort level. To walk out in front of a large group of people with a carefully mapped game plan, then change it, was potential professional suicide, but Andy loved the danger and fluidity of the situation. He was not unlike a sort of behavioral scientist who would step out on stage and begin pushing buttons just to see what would happen. Though Andy was supposed to be the performer, the audience didn’t know it but Andy was really watching them from the stage.
As a new arrival in Hollywood Andy wanted to remain as grounded as possible and not be subject to the glittering temptations that he’d heard so much about. He rented a room in a Hollywood Mills home owned by a man named Richard and his girlfriend, who were fellow practitioners of TM. Richard was a pleasant guy who dabbled in his basement creating works of art — sculptures and whatnot. One day while Richard was out I commented to Andy about one of his pieces, a sculpture of a plastic baby, bleeding as it popped through the shattered screen of a derelict television. Andy’s off-the-cuff comment, “Oh, that’s probably just a metaphor for his life,” didn’t mean anything to me and I didn’t pursue it, but it would come to have a lot of meaning soon enough.
Andy’s obsession with studying failure — its progression, its mechanics, even its chemistry — caused him to begin formulating what he dubbed the “Has-Been Corner.” Inspired by what he saw as the caprices of fame and inevitable decline as he got the lay of Hollywood, Andy felt bringing a has-been on stage with him would be an interesting element to incorporate into his act, a subversive thought given most performers’ desperate need to keep the limelight to themselves. In what he pictured as a showcase for the once-famous, the has-beens would be sent out to flounder in front of an audience like fish in the bottom of a boat, in an attempt to regain some of their vanished fame.
Andy saw the Has-Been Corner as celebrating the entropics of a showbiz career, a decay that intrigued him more and more as he flew closer to stardom. He was fascinated by the ideatum of the inevitable divestment of dignity one must accept after thrusting oneself in the public eye and accepting that praise and adulation. He wanted to re-create the moment when the big karmic wheel spun around and, on the bottom of its arc, squashed the former famous person just as he or she tried to relight that torch of celebrity. Andy wanted to observe that moment. He was beginning to see the mean-spiritedness that came with fame, the quick investiture and equally quick dethronement, and he wanted, like a little kid screwing around with his chemistry set, to watch what happened when certain ingredients were mixed together. He was gripped by the state of being a has-been because, as he put it, “If it could happen to others it can happen to me.”
While we were discussing the more nihilistic aspects of the Has-Been Corner, Andy remarked offhandedly, “You know Richard’s a has-been.”
I pictured his roommate, the artist. “From what?” I inquired.
“Remember West Side Story?” he asked.
“Yeah …”
“He played Tony.”
“What? Like on Broadway? Or some high school production?” I said.
“No, no, he was Tony in the movie, the major motion picture with Natalie Wood.”
My face fell. I was stunned. I’d seen the movie, more than once as a matter of fact, and I hadn’t recognized Richard as Richard Beymer.
“He had a good career going out here in Hollywood,” Andy continued, “then the bottom fell out. West Side Story was this huge Broadway hit, and when they decided to do the movie, instead of using the Broadway stars they cast the leads with two movie actors, Natalie Wood and Richard. When they shot the movie they lip-synched the singing, and because of that they took a rash of unkind press, especially back east. Anyway, when the dust settled, Natalie Wood survived, Richard didn’t.”
It was a sad, ugly story but Richard was not bitter, though he would caution Andy from time to time with advice like, “Watch out, Andy. Once they have no use for you they’ll discard you like an old washrag. I know. It happened to me.” Years later Richard would be cast in David Lynch’s gothic soap opera Twin Peaks, but until that happened his acting career was effectively over. Andy convinced Richard that he should be the first participant in the Has-Been Corner. He may have been a has-been, but Richard was also a good sport.
The West Coast Improv became Andy’s new home, and just like back in New York, Budd gave Andy free rein to experiment with an audience anytime he chose. And we did, often. Any wacky idea we had, Budd let us do it. As a run-through before working the Has-Been Corner into our television special, Andy booked Richard some stage time at the Improv. Andy came out and told a packed house he wanted to give a former star another chance, then Richard took the stage. Describing his early successes, then his last big gig as Tony in West Side Story, Richard held the crowd rapt as he detailed his fall from grace. “If I’d only been allowed to sing ‘Maria’ in my own voice, I would have been a star even today,” he said, wistfully.
“Richard,” prompted Andy gently from the side of the stage, “why don’t you sing it for us? Sing ‘Maria.’”
Richard seemed to demur and the crowd erupted into polite but encouraging applause. Finally acquiescing, Richard wrested the microphone from its stand as the lights went down and a single spot illuminated his face. A hush fell over the house as the familiar Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim musical strains began. “The most beautiful sound I ever heard …” Richard sang, “Mah-ree-ah …” Then it happened. Richard hit a clinker note, but continued gamely. “I just met a girl named Mah-reeah!” and another clinker. And another. The audience cringed. Richard sensed their discomfort but plunged on. Now he was dying and it was only getting worse. The crowd sat in horrified silence as the has-been proved why he was just that. Now they all knew why he’d been overdubbed in West Side Story.
Suddenly, Richard stopped in mid-refrain. The music ground to a halt. “You’re right, Andy,” said Richard shakily through his tears, “you’re right. I am a has-been!” And with that he dropped the microphone and rushed offstage and out the door, faster than if he’d just insulted Richard Burton. The audience was stunned and embarrassed for him. Andy quietly thanked them and exited.
Outside, Andy and Richard shared a good laugh: the put-on had worked. Richard had died on purpose. In fact, Richard had a pretty fair singing voice and could have impressed if not wowed the club. But that wouldn’t have been fitting for a has-been. Andy was so impressed with the disturbing dynamic of Richard’s Has-Been Corner presentation that he enthusiastically pressed Richard to take the act on national television, a feat Andy could arrange through his special. In spite of his good nature, Richard could not be persuaded. A few hundred people at the Improv was one thing, but proclaiming your lameness in front of the entire country? That stretched even Richard’s sense of humor. He declined.
By July of 1977 we were ready to begin taping the special. Despite the opening joke about blowing the entire budget, there was sufficient money for
Andy to fulfill two of his childhood dreams. The first was to hire Bill Bellew, Elvis Presley’s favorite costume designer, (Elvis was still with us at that point, He didn’t turn up dead in his bathroom until August 16, 1977.) Bellew crafted two Elvis outfits for Andy, identical copies of those worn by the King. Bellew even had a jarful of buttons he used on Andy’s costumes that had once been on E’s outfits but had popped off. Andy was constantly hounding Bill about what it was like to work for Elvis and one day Bill told us the secret of how he’d managed to stay costumer to a vain man whose weight varied like an overseas cargo container.
“I never measure him,” confessed Bellew. “He loves to eat, among a lot of other things, Monte Cristo sandwiches. Other costumers did their job but when it was time to check his girth, they’d get fired — you know, shoot the messenger. So I caught on fast. After every concert I get hold of his pants and let ’em out a little. I know he knows it isn’t true but we both keep up the charade his pants still have a thirty-two-inch waist. In reality, I think they’re probably closer to fifty-two.”
Despite the slam on the King, Andy loved the story and had Bill repeat it from time to time. Some months after Elvis was gone, Andy ran into Bellew and asked a curious question. “You think he faked his death?”
Bill Bellew didn’t hesitate. “No. He’s dead, no question about it. Nobody could eat that many Monte Cristos and live.” Case closed. That must have ignited in Andy some fears of overconsumption, for soon after, he took me aside and, looking slightly alarmed, said, “You think I eat too much chocolate?”
Andy did consume an extraordinary amount of chocolate — lots of chocolate during the day topped off by a bowl of chocolate ice cream after every dinner — but I didn’t think it was harmful because he didn’t seem to show any effects, unlike Elvis. “No, I don’t think so. Why, you think you eat too much?”
“Apparently not.” He shrugged and that was the end of it. He never ceased his prodigious chocolate ingestion, but the cautionary nature of Bellew’s story must have remained in the back of his mind. Years later, when he lay dying in his hospital bed at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, he looked at me and summed it up. “Chocolate has killed me.”
The second childhood dream Andy saw come true through his ABC special was being able to work with Howdy Doody. In December 1947, a thirty-year-old guy who had changed his name From Robert Schmidt to Buffalo Bob Smith went on the air with television’s first children’s show and made entertainment as well as cultural history. Though there were only twenty thousand television sets nationwide when the show began, Howdy Doody would go on to enchant that generation of baby boomers, and would eventually build an audience of more than ten million loyal fans per week.
Andy, of course, was one of them, but his identification with the little wooden sideman of Bob’s, the puppet that became known as Howdy Doody, was more than just that of an ardent fan: Andy truly believed that Howdy possessed a life of his own. So when Andy had the power to put nearly anyone he pleased on his ABC special, it was somehow fitting that the first choice of the man who was still a kid was not even a flesh-and-blood person but rather an animated figment from the dawn of television and the dawn of Andy’s cognizance of the art of entertainment.
Booking Howdy Doody on his show was a dream come true for Andy. “He was the first real star of television,” Andy said to me, the reverence in his voice and on his face no sham, so honestly in awe was he of getting the little wooden man as his guest. As a lonely kid in Great Neck, while the other kids played outdoors, Andy would sit in front of the television accompanied by his imaginary friends, transfixed by the interplay between Buffalo Bob and Howdy. When Howdy spoke Andy felt it was to him and him alone. Andy even appeared on Howdy Doody as a member of the Peanut Gallery. Howdy Doody would become the spiritual foundation for many of our future productions, including that ABC special.
Once the edict from Andy went out that we would have Howdy Doody on the show, the first miracle to be performed was finding him and Buffalo Bob. Howdy Doody had ended its run in 1960, and though Smith and the producers engineered a kitsch resurgence of Howdy appearances on college campuses in the early seventies — along with a short-lived revival on the airwaves — Howdy and Bob had more or less disappeared.
Andy had a friend named Burt Dubrow from their days together in Grahm College’s television department, and Andy recalled Burt once telling him that from the time he was about ten years old he had known Buffalo Bob. Andy called Burt, and with his help we found Bob and arranged to have him, Howdy, and the puppeteer fly out to Hollywood to tape the show. Andy wanted only Howdy on camera with him, so the plan was for Bob to lay down Howdy’s voice track, and for the puppeteer to provide the action.
When Howdy (in his box) and the puppeteer, Pady Blackwood, arrived at the studio, we cleared the soundstage of all personnel. This was going to be a big moment for Andy and he wanted privacy. After Pady had unboxed Howdy and propped him up for the meeting, I went to get Andy, who was holed up in his dressing room, waiting nervously for the big moment.
“Is he there?” he asked me, shaking. I knew that he hadn’t slept the night before, so anxious was he over the prospect of facing his entire childhood in the form of a small, wooden marionette.
“Yeah, he’s there. Howdy’s ready to meet you,” I said.
Andy wrung his hands expectantly and slowly rose. His trembling was no joke. He looked at me with a slightly stricken expression. “What if he doesn’t like me?”
As surreal as that question was, I resisted the temptation to make a crack, for I realized this meeting was possibly bigger for Andy than his brush with Elvis. “Andy,” I said gently, “he’ll love you. You’re making him a star again.”
That convinced Andy that it would be all right, so he ventured out into the hallway and headed toward the big stage door. The cast and crew were assembled outside as Andy slowly swung back the door and entered the lighted studio in a scene not unlike that when Richard Dreyfuss enters the alien vessel in Close Encounters. I closed the door and waited for the historic meeting to begin. Not twenty seconds had passed when the silence was shattered by a blood-chilling scream and Andy burst through the door, headed for the security of his dressing room. “That’s not Howdy Doody! That’s an impostor!” he yelled in a rage.
I followed him to his door, but it was locked. “Andy, what’s wrong?”
“That’s not Howdy, that’s the impostor, Photo Doody!” He spat the words angrily.
I went into the studio and found Pady Blackwood, who was quite shaken by the incident. I pointed at the alleged Howdy Doody. “Is this the real Howdy Doody?”
“Yes, of course it is,” he said. “It’s the same marionette we’ve been using for years.”
I looked him straight in the eye. “You can honestly guarantee that this is the original Howdy Doody? What’s Photo Doody?”
The guy paused for a moment as if considering his next words. “Well, actually, this is Photo Doody. He’s just like the other marionette only he’s used for still photographs and so on. He’s got better cosmetics than the original and no strings to get in the way. The other puppet I brought for the taping is the same only with strings. Hardly anybody can tell the difference between these two and the original.”
Andy Kaufman could. I went back to Andy’s room and, when he finally calmed down, explained the situation. After a short meeting we decided that the real Howdy would be brought to Hollywood immediately.
On the day of the taping, Andy walked out onto the stage toward the original Howdy, who was propped up, patiently waiting for him. Andy had apparently done a lot of meditation over this moment, for when he first saw Howdy it was magical. Before we got the take used in the special, we could see Andy in the monitors gazing lovingly at Howdy in crystal-clear sincerity, the man-child revealing the true depth of his feelings for this small wooden man, probably his only real friend as a child. Andy was actually choked up. After he recovered his emotions, we brought in Pady the puppeteer, and the sce
ne went perfectly.
A few days before we got around to shooting that precious moment, Buffalo Bob arrived to lay down Howdy’s audio track. Andy had anticipated a charismatic and delightful older man, clad in his frontiersman outfit, dispensing sage advice to all the “girls and boys” on the set. What he got was an old guy wearing a rumpled leisure suit, sucking up cigarettes, and apparently hung-over. Andy was startled by Bob’s appearance, but the coup de grâce came two minutes after they met when Bob launched into a barrage of foulmouthed “pussy” jokes. I could see Andy’s face noticeably flush. Had Tony Clifton been around, he and Bob would have gotten along famously, hut Andy couldn’t wait to get away from the guy. During the taping Bob broke into an uncontrollable hacking cough that infused the recording booth with the foul odor of cigarette residue and the booze still in his system. Once he had the cough under control he looked at Andy, shaking his head. “I hate that fucking Howdy voice. It kills my throat.” Once the voice tracks were done Andy left and did not speak to Bob again.
An even less fortunate has-been was poor Gail Slobodkin. Andy was friends with the young, struggling actress and offered her a part in the ABC special. A cute, perky honey-blonde, Gail had once played in The Sound of Music on Broadway but enjoyed little success afterward. Thus credited, we bestowed upon Gail the honor of being the first candidate for our nationally televised debut of the Has-Been Corner. The tape rolled just as she was about to perform her segment, and to create believability that she was truly a has-been, Andy asked her something on-camera that he never would have said even in private: “When was the first time you realized you’d never make it?”