Andy Kaufman Revealed!

by Bob Zmuda

  Seemingly taken aback, Gail was nevertheless pleasant despite Andy’s cold-blooded question. Andy, undeterred, pressed on. “Gail,” he asked, “what’s it like being a has-been?” The sweet girl was gut-shot by his remarks but cheerfully defended herself and her decision to return to showbiz. Andy summed it up, “Well, I hope you make it … but I don’t think you will.” And with that rousing introduction Gail sang a selection from The Sound of Music, the charming “Lonely Goatherd.” As Gail gamely belted out her song, Andy was in the background conducting an “angry” discussion with the floor director, me. When he’d notice the camera on him he’d shove me away and let Gail continue. We did this twice, then Gail finished.

  During the taping Gail was obviously hurt by Andy’s mean comments and reacted by giving him a gentle slap. It was done more out of her own pain than to inflict pain on Andy. She kept her chin up, did the show, and left the building. Three days later a distraught Gail checked into a low-rent Hollywood motel, took a hot bath, ratcheted open a can of Van Camp’s pork and beans, shoveled the cold beans down her throat with a plastic spoon, then cut that throat with the jagged can lid. Her body was discovered by the housekeeper the next morning. Her suicide note blamed Andy for his cold-hearted mockery of her on national television. The LAPD finally passed the note on to Andy, who kept it by his framed picture of the Maharishi. Only once did I summon the courage to ask him about his feelings surrounding Gail’s death.

  He never answered because it never happened.

  You’ve just been had. Gail Slobodkin not only is still alive but is living happily in southern California. It was all a put-on. Gail’s reactions were all carefully staged and her feelings were intact. The point of the story was to demonstrate to you, the reader, the feeling of being Kaufmanized. This was the same emotion Andy and I sought to evoke not only in audiences but often when we were out in public, just the two of us. A mass Kaufmanization of an audience was fun, but the process itself was the rush, and to befuddle just one person was often just as thrilling.

  The Gail Slobodkin story is an example of the tomfoolery Andy and I attempted to perpetrate with our special, but the executives at ABC were reluctant to become victims of Kaufmanization and resisted many of our suggestions about elements of the special. For instance, psychological games were one thing, but fucking around with the God-given technology of our medium? Well, it was unthinkable. When Andy told the network brass that we wanted to cause the picture to roll at one point during the telecast so people would think that their sets needed adjusting or that there was some interference from beyond their living rooms, the TV execs wet themselves. Andy told them he wanted the rolling to endure for as long as three minutes. The suits became terrified that people might switch channels to check what was wrong and not come back. They obviously had a lot of faith in the ability of our material to hold people’s attention. After a lot of wrangling we finally acknowledged that three minutes might push the limits of even the most ardent Andy fan, so we limited the rolling picture to about thirty seconds — just long enough to irritate but not completely lose our viewers. It was typical Kaufman brinkmanship, not only in the picture rolling itself, but in the process of scaring the executives with the inflated estimate of the time the effect would last. We never intended the rolling to last three minutes, we just used Kaufmanization to soften them up.

  Another offbeat routine that I wrote for that special was a musical interlude where Andy played the congas backed by four burly, bad-ass-looking brothers. The song? Disney’s “It’s a Small World after All.” The juxtaposition of a children’s song and tough guys as the singers was Kaufman and Zmuda at their best.

  When the special was complete we proudly handed it over to ABC, sat back, and waited for a time slot in the near future. Fred Silverman, ABC’s president and the man who would later go on to be recognized as the savior of NBC, scrutinized the pilot in his office with a gaggle of ass-kissing programming executives. Had Silverman been a medieval king with the power of life and death, he first would have chosen the rack for us and then chopped off our heads and put them on pikes for all the vassals of the Kingdom of Hollywood to see and fear. Since he couldn’t do that, he exercised his next best option: he proclaimed that our special was “unairable” and that “people in Kansas wouldn’t understand it.” He promptly banned it from his network. We were crushed.

  After letting the dust settle for a year, Shapiro/West took the program to NBC, but lo and behold, Fred had taken his court there, and once again we were stymied. I was deeply depressed and hurt at the time, feeling that our rejection stemmed from having gone in such a strange, unconventional direction. I was certain the fruits of our labors — of which we were very proud — would never see the light of cathode ray tubes across the country. Then, about a year after the NBC pass, Shapiro/West again knocked on ABC’s door. This time the castle was in the hands of Tony Thomopoulos, who, bless his heart, loved our special.

  ABC finally ran the show — on August 28, 1979, more than two years after we’d taped it — and put it up against Johnny Carson. When the Nielsen results came in, we had knocked Carson off his throne, at least for that evening, and our special was hailed by critics as genius invention, with one critic saying it was “the most innovative TV special of its type.” We were finally vindicated. Even Fred Silverman was lambasted for his lack of vision and for sitting on the program. It was a sweet moment for us, but the process had taught me a fundamental fact about Hollywood: it took only one executive to shut you down.

  Andy’s famous penchant for wrestling had its roots around the time of his twenty-ninth birthday, in January 1978. I didn’t have a clue what to get him for his birthday. Andy had enough money to buy what he wanted, but lived below his means and didn’t really want much. The only thing he wanted — his own television show — I didn’t have the power to grant him.

  My solution was to try and fulfill one of his fantasies. Our relationship had become very close, so I started asking him what got him off. He had heard that Elvis loved watching wrestling between girls who were clad only in white cotton panties. (This was before Albert Goldman’s 1981 book, Elvis, revealed all manner of weirdness ascribed to the King, including that pastime.) Andy too was thrilled to observe scantily clad young women grappling in a no-holds-barred scenario.

  One afternoon, soon after making my inquiries about his sexual thrills, I was at his place working with him on some material. “Oh, I’ve gotta show you something,” he said, jumping up and heading into his bedroom.

  I followed. “What is it?” I asked. He closed the curtains in the room as I entered. Though this was around the time videotape recorders were first available, neither of us had one. Andy pulled out a little 8-millimeter projector.

  “What’s this? Porno?” I asked, feeling I was about to have my question answered regarding the nature of his titillation.

  “You’ll see,” he said as he spooled up a film and flipped the switch.

  The projector beamed to life and suddenly we were watching two bikini-clad babes wrestling. I could hear Andy’s breathing rate increase despite the sharp crackle of the machine. When the grainy, three-minute featurette ended I had an idea of what would constitute Andy’s dream gift. I could tell he was still aroused by the footage, so I tossed another log on the fire. “Who would you like to see wrestle?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Two women, maybe even someone we know, wrestling.”

  His eyes lit up “Someone we know?”

  “Yeah, like, say, Marilyn and, uh, I don’t know, maybe Gail,” I offered.

  The prospect of those two friends wrestling began playing in his mind. Marilyn Rubin was an aspiring actress in our circle whom Andy had been eyeing but had not yet made a play for. And Gail Slobodkin, Marilyn’s best friend and our “has-been” actress, was also someone that Andy found attractive. They had both appeared in our ABC special, and as I explained, Gail had survived.

  “Get them to wrestle?” Andy asked, hoping
I wasn’t kidding.

  “Yeah, sure, in bikinis, just like your girls there,” I said, indicating his projector.

  A few days later, on the night of his birthday, we held a party at his apartment with about twenty friends. Once the evening was well under way, I cleared part of the living room and laid down a wrestling mat. I put Andy in a chair ringside and then changed into a referee outfit. Then I introduced the contestants, Marilyn and Gail, who entered from the bedroom wearing skimpy little bikinis. It was all good, clean fun, but I knew Andy pretty well, and I could tell he was dizzy from overstimulation.

  That night everyone but Marilyn Rubin went home, an occurrence that would be repeated many times: girl comes over, they chat, they wrestle. To facilitate those assignations, Andy installed a mat in his bedroom and frequently wrestled his female guests before capping off the evening grappling between the sheets. That night — whether as a voyeur or as a participant — Andy had discovered the joys of live wrestling, which would soon become a large part of his act. Many people thought that the wrestling was just another put-on, that it was Andy being Andy.

  In fact, it was just Andy being horny.

  Andy’s affair with Marilyn would be on and off for years. She confided to me that what she found so amazing about Andy was that on the outside he appeared shy and wimpy, yet in the sack he was the exact opposite. She said she was flabbergasted the first time and called him “one of the greatest lovers” she ever experienced. Secretly, I was somewhat relieved when she qualified him as one of the greatest lovers, as I also had a brief fling with her.

  Marilyn proudly boasted that Kaufman made a point of calling her every New Year’s Eve, no matter where he was. What she didn’t know was that I had the opportunity to spend one of those New Year’s Eves with Andy, and from noon to midnight I watched him work the phone from his little black book. It was inspirational to watch him in action, personalizing his contacts like an ace salesman, with both past lovers and potential new leads.

  That was when we came up with the concept of wrestling Andy’s female college fans. It was an excuse to go somewhere and it gave him the opportunity to rub against a number of different student bodies every night. Watching Gail and Marilyn thrash around was one thing, but to actually rut around with new girls, strangers even, was heaven for Andy. It also paid off in terms of his success with his opponents, for he not only always won but also had sex with at least a third of them.

  The college shows were fun for Andy, but I had to find a way to make them pay for me. Going on the road was going to cost me in lost income, for when I was absent from Hollywood I was not receiving my five or six thousand a week for writing. I brought it up to Andy one day, early on, before we actually went on the first tour. “I need to get paid for this, especially if I’m doing the whole setup, producing it and all.”

  Andy shrugged. “Yeah, sure. Talk to George.”

  I made the phone call. “How’s a thousand a show?” I asked Shapiro.

  “Sounds fair,” he said. And that was that.

  We were booking sometimes three shows a week, so making three thousand was technically a loss, but it was still damn good money. And of course, surrounded by fawning coeds more than made up for any financial deficit I suffered when I was away from town. Our forays into the heartland to obtain sex partners for Mr. Kaufman came to be referred to by us as the Fan Mail Sex Tours.

  Meanwhile, it was March 1978 and Andy wanted a new angle on his Great Gatsby routine. He had been reading Gatsby to audiences for years but wanted to take the act on Saturday Night Live. Budd Friedman had let Andy do the bit on nights the club was slow, but only just before closing time. When he wanted to clear the place out he’d send Andy on stage, The Great Gatsby in hand. People would laugh for about fifteen minutes, but after that, exactly to plan, it became a deadly bore (with apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald) and the place would empty almost as fast as if you’d yelled “Fire.”

  Lorne Michaels wisely never agreed to let Andy do the full routine, given that the show’s sponsors wouldn’t appreciate Andy “clearing the house.” I came up with a way to keep the bit to five minutes and make it funny, thus making the transition from an experiment to test the tolerance of an audience to a part of his act that worked for all and was actually funny from start to finish. Andy went along with the alteration.

  On the night he first performed the revised bit, Andy took the SNL stage in front of the cameras. Instead of his trademark turtleneck he was wearing an ascot. When he spoke it was in an exaggerated “English” accent — actually akin to the stilted dialect many American screen actors of the ‘30s and ‘40s adopted — and the audience knew they were in for something special.

  “Tonight, I am going to read The Great Gatsby,” he informed them. He didn’t say, “I’m going to read from The Great Gatsby.” The implication was that he was going to read the whole thing. Then he began reading … from page one. Occasional laughter erupted like sporadic gunfire, but most individuals were transfixed by a man reading a book on national television. A few minutes into the reading the audience rebelled in unison and “British Man” slammed the book shut and scolded them. Then he offered them a choice: more Fitzgerald or a record. The small record player sitting nearby, coupled with the almost cult following, from Andy’s lip-synching of various children’s standards and the audience’s boredom with the book, made the choice clear. The crowd screamed for the record and Andy, wearing the slightest of smirks, gave them what they wanted. He dropped the tone arm and the record turned out to be … none other than British Man reading Gatsby. It got a huge laugh, was a perfect out-cue for the bit, and later Andy went on and on with praise for my coming up with the idea. This was an important step in the Kaufman-Zmuda relationship. It showed Andy that even a routine he’d been doing for years could be improved.

  Andy’s peculiar habits saved him from much of the savaging that went on behind the scenes of SNL. All week during the rehearsals, and right up to actual airtime, Lorne would be making constant adjustments to people’s sketches. Andy was able to avoid having his material downsized for a couple of reasons. First, since he was not a cast member, he was required to show up only a few days before the airdate to briefly run through some blocking. His other excuse stemmed from his habit of meditating up to the moment of his actual performance. For those reasons he was usually unavailable for conferences with Lorne, which, for anyone else, often meant a cut in their screen time.

  Because of that scarcity of presence and since he never participated in any sketches (at least in the first few years), Andy also was not privy to all the backstabbing and claws-out infighting that went on backstage at SNL. Even when Andy’s pieces went a little long he experienced none of the resentment that anyone else would have suffered. As a fly on the wall I began to see the cast and staff’s vision of Andy: almost a holy man of comedy, pure and simple and brilliant. There was the sense that Andy was a real “artist” in their midst, and everyone treated him with sincere respect.

  The late John Belushi, himself a rebel, marveled not only at Andy’s onstage antics but at his offstage ones as well. In every dressing room at SNL there was a television monitor displaying the show — the same feed that was broadcast. Every dressing room, that is, but Andy’s. He couldn’t have cared less about the telecast and always had his TV switched to a wrestling match. Although a few cast members were appalled that Andy wasn’t watching (and let him know it), Belushi often joined him. One time, Belushi, in his killer-bee outfit, settled in with Andy in his dressing room to watch a wrestling match. Meanwhile, as the show went out live, the talent wranglers were hysterically combing the corridors looking for Belushi, fearing he had walked out of the building.

  On March 14, 1978, three days after Andy did Gatsby on SNL, we jumped on a plane to Columbus, Ohio, to conduct an experiment. Andy’s old friend Burt Duhrow, with whom we dug up Howdy and Buffalo Bob, was there producing a children’s show for Group W called Bananaz. Intrigued by anything to do with children’s e
ntertainment, Andy had approached Burt with the idea of his making an appearance on the show, whose format allowed for such flexibility. Burt assured Andy, as a visiting celebrity, that he could do “anything he wanted.” What Andy did not immediately tell Burt was that the show was going to be a test for a concept we’d been kicking around.

  One night during our writing sessions for Andy’s special, we discussed an incident that had occurred on Carson’s show several years earlier. Ask any freshman comic from the ‘60s or ‘70s about the unscheduled “wave-over.” If Carson liked your act, at his whim you were invited to the next level, which was to cross the stage and actually sit and chat with His Excellency. If you finished your act and didn’t get the wave-over, that is, if Johnny just applauded and thanked you but made no attempt to speak to you, you probably should have considered the insurance business as a new career before you even left the stage. Many comedians survived the non-wave-over, but it was a bitch to really make it without that stamp of approval from the man who’d launched the careers of probably 80 percent of all working comics.

  After performing his set on the stage of The Tonight Show, a young comic got his big break and received the much-coveted wave-over from Johnny. This was his chance to interact with the Titan of Late-Night Comedy in a way that could get him better bookings, better-looking women, and, best of all, a shot at his own series. It sounds insanely capricious but the wave-over could indeed represent such opportunities. Unfortunately, at the same time the comic was getting his wave-over, forces were at work to unhinge his karmic fortune. Don Rickles was taping a sitcom down the hall and decided to waltz over to see what his buddy Johnny was doing. Just as the young comic was plopping his ass down for some quality time with Mr. Carson, Rickles entered stage right and the audience went bonkers. Rickles, as usual, was hilarious. Suddenly the young comic was rolled over by the wheels of the Master of Put-Down Comedy, and Rickles wasn’t even aware of it. Carson was now in stitches and the young comic became wallpaper.