Andy Kaufman Revealed!
Page 17
In February 1979, a couple of months before the Carnegie show, we were in New York to wrap up some details regarding the show and for an appearance by Andy on SNL. After SNL wrapped we went out for some late dinner. We had just taken our table when an odd-looking young man with an improbably overwrought haute couture look approached.
“Excuse me,” he said, then focused on Kaufman, “but Andy Warhol is sitting over there and would just love to meet you.”
We looked at each other, shrugged why not, then followed the artistic young fellow over to the table of the Pale One. Warhol stood, greeted us, and shook our hands. “Would you care to join me?” he offered.
What were we going to say? We sat down. The minion excused himself, so it was just the three amigos, Bob and Andy squared. I knew Kaufman had a deep appreciation for Warhol, for aside from seeing him as a very talented artist, he also respected Warhol as a fellow put-on master. Warhol’s famous Campbell’s Soup Can veritably screamed, I’m art because he says I am! Kaufman loved that brand of artiste’s bravado. His own forays into such onstage put-ons for art’s sake included doing his laundry — with a real washer and dryer — or leisurely eating while everyone just numbly watched.
The elevation of the ordinary to the level of art was something they shared. Despite their commonality as renegade creative intellects, they also shared another trait: excruciating shyness. Consequently, as soon as the hellos and idle chatter were memories, uncomfortable silence set in.
Eventually Warhol muttered a few compliments, then Kaufman muttered a few back, followed by more silence. After a moment, Kaufman perked up. “We did a special for ABC a year or so ago,” he offered. “It hasn’t aired yet, but I think you’d like it.”
Kaufman was right, our special was pretty avant-garde, apparently a little too much so for that tight-ass Fred Silverman, I thought bitterly.
“What did you do in it?” asked the wan Andy.
“Oh, we did some funny bits and had some guests. Howdy Doody was my special guest.”
“Howdy Doody? Really…,” mused the producer of several Paul Morrissey movies.
Bingo. The dueling Andys suddenly bonded faster than you could say “pop phenomenons.” Warhol was also quite taken by the little wooden man, and it turned out he had as much Howdy nomenclature tucked between his ears as Kaufman. Eventually the Howdy recitation wound down, but they were on to other subjects — once the ice was broken I couldn’t get them to shut up.
Lorne Michaels years later saw a parallel between the Andys. “I call it the Warhol sensibility,’” he said. “In Warhol’s Sleep, an eight-hour film of a man just sleeping, it’s a nonclimax, he doesn’t wake up. Like Andy’s Gatsby, he doesn’t read and fall into a hole. Nothing happens. It was conceptual and pure. I wish I could say it was popular. It was certainly popular in the small segment of society that I lived in. In the seventies, the kids called it Brechtian.” When Lorne first spotted Kaufman, he had the insight and wisdom to see that in Andy he wasn’t dealing with a simple comedian, but rather a bona fide conceptual artist.
On returning to New York a few months later we hit the ground running with the nearly overwhelming Carnegie show prep. A few days before the April 26, 1979, show date someone in management at Carnegie Hall mentioned that some crazy had been out front railing at potential ticket buyers not to patronize our show. They tried to underplay it but nevertheless thought we should know.
“No problem,” I said dismissively, “it’s New York.”
Sure enough, a deranged man sporting long, scraggly, blond hair and swathed in street rags stood outside Carnegie Hall for a couple of days and screamed at anyone who passed by, let alone walked up to the ticket window. “Andy Kaufman is the Antichrist!” he wailed. “The Antichrist, I tell you!” To bolster his claim he wielded a cardboard sign: Andy Kaufman = Anti-Christ. The fervor didn’t hurt ticket sales, as the show sold out during the lunatic’s preachments to the deaf. We never told Carnegie Hall management that the insane man was Andy in disguise.
“When I was a young boy,” Andy began, as he addressed the Carnegie audience that night after the boffo opening, “I’d tell my Grandma Pearl, who I love more than anything, that someday her little Andy would be famous and he’d be here, at Carnegie Hall. And I told her when I was, I’d give her the best seat in the house. Well, here I am …,” and with that a little old lady walked out onstage, “and this is my Grandma Pearl.”
She and Andy had a heartwarming hug, and the audience went wild. “I said I’d make good on my promise, so I had her flown in from Florida. But you need a place to sit, don’t you, Grandma?”
The frail oldster nodded, whereupon Andy gestured and two Mayflower moving men leaped from the wings bearing a frilly couch. They set it at the edge of the stage. “I also had your sofa flown in and it is now the best seat in the house.”
It was a warm fuzzy moment and everyone in the place could see the pride on that little lady’s face as she gazed adoringly at her Andy. Grandma watched the entire show from her sofa, and in the end, as at the Huntington, we brought out the Rockettes and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. As the snow once again began falling, and just before he invited the audience out for milk and cookies, Andy coaxed Grandma Pearl to take a bow.
Her ancient, tortured joints forced her to rise ever so slowly, and then she ambled over to the footlights. Gingerly bending her sore old back she took a long bow, and as the audience’s warm applause encouraged her, suddenly, in one incredible, lightning gesture, she pulled off her wig and sent it flying into the front row. Then, peeling back her face, she revealed to all that she was really Robin Williams! This was Robin’s first rough sketch of what would eventually become his brilliant character in Mrs. Doubtfire.
Once again, we did the milk-and-cookies run, only this time it required 35 buses and four months of clearing red tape with the city of New York to get a permit to do so. For this incarnation of “Milk & Cookies” we hired magicians, sword swallowers, midgets, and fire eaters. We tried to find Turko the Half Man from our childhoods, but to our great disappointment, he had apparently passed on to that great sideshow in the sky. I guess as a half man you only got a half life in the bargain.
During the cookie-and-milk festivities, Andy made an offer to wrestle any woman in the house. Women began lining up, and the party continued unabated until I finally looked at my watch and was alarmed to see we were just passing 1 A.M. Fearing the awaiting bus drivers would soon be into some healthy overtime that could put the hurt on Andy’s checkbook, I plowed my way through the partyers and whispered my concerns to him.
“What should we do?” he asked, surrounded as we were by a revelry with no apparent end in sight.
“Tell them to go home and get some sleep because the show will continue tomorrow morning at eight-thirty on the Staten Island ferry.”
“Really?” said Andy innocently.
“Christ, Kaufman, I don’t know, just say something, we need to get out of here!”
Andy repeated exactly what I’d said, and in no time the obedient crowd dispersed. When I got back to the hotel and hit the sack after a week of day and night preparations for the show, the last thing I wanted to do was get up at 8 A.M. Besides, I’d gotten lucky, and one of the Rockettes was slumbering next to me, having demonstrated into the wee hours how limber dancers really are.
At precisely eight o’clock my phone began ringing. I ignored three or four rings, and whoever it was gave up. I went back to sleep, and five minutes later there was a hard knocking at my door. I staggered out of bed and found Andy all bundled up and ready to go.
“Oh God, now what is it?” I said impatiently.
“Do you think anybody took us seriously?”
“About… ?” It was early and the notion anyone took us seriously about anything tasked my brain too much.
“About the ferry. Do you think anyone really went down to the Staten Island ferry?”
“No way,” I said, but doubt instantly began forming. “They all knew
it was a joke. Sure. Go back to sleep.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah, absolutely, no one believed us.”
“I was just worried,” he said, then turned to leave. “Okay, you’re right.”
As he moved off down the hall I pictured the dock and that one lone, trusting fan standing there. I shook my head. “Shit…”
Andy turned. “What?”
“All right, let’s go.”
I left a note for the Rockette to stay put, and then Andy and I jumped in a cab.
“Staten Island ferry,” I ordered the driver.
As we arrived at the ferry dock on the south tip of Manhattan we were stunned to see a crowd of about three hundred milling around — all familiar faces from the night before. In an instant, Andy and I were close to tears because our audience had thought enough of Andy to pull one over on him. A cheer went up as we alighted from the hack. Andy waded to the front of the group and bought tickets for all, then once aboard, treated everyone to ice cream. On the trip to Staten Island, Andy again made his offer to wrestle any of the ladies, so right there on the deck he took on five going and four more coming back.
And the Rockette was still there when I returned.
For the next few days we hung out in the city, basking in the glow of having just blown the lid off the place. Overnight, Andy became the talk of the town after our Carnegie Hall show rippled out as the cause célèbre of Gotham’s trendy entertainment scene. People of all walks of life suddenly wanted to meet Andy.
One afternoon we were crossing Fifth Avenue, and a guy approached us and asked for Andy’s autograph. Andy was always obliging, almost too much so. Then the man made an odd request. “Listen, Mr. Kaufman, Andy, my wife is your biggest fan, she loves you, and, uh, well, we only live a few blocks away and I was wondering if you’d wait a minute until I went and got her? She’d kill me if I didn’t.”
I couldn’t believe my ears and looked to Kaufman to blow this clown off. I was even more stupefied when he said, “Sure, go get her. We’ll wait.”
As the guy ran off, I said, “What are you thinking? We’re just gonna stand here?”
“Zmuda, c’mon, this guy’s a fan,” he said instructively. “It’s my fans who’ve made me what I am. That’s the difference between me and other celebrities. See, I remember that.”
Okay, I thought, that Kaufman head is swelling again and I need to lower the air pressure inside. I decided to bide my time. After forty interminable minutes the guy returned, this time with his starstruck wife in tow. Now, more than ever, I wanted to get even with Andy for making me wait. I saw my opportunity to pounce and very loudly announced, “You see, that’s the difference between Andy Kaufman and other celebrities. He knows it’s the fans who made him what he is today.”
Andy immediately realized where I was going and shot me a look, but the fuse was lit and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do. As a crowd gathered I continued, laying it on with a trowel. “That’s right. Kaufman knows it’s fans like yourselves that have made him a star!”
After a few moments doing my best sideshow barker, enough people had assembled that I felt it was time to sink the knife. “As a matter of fact,” I roared, pointing at the original couple, “I think you, Andy, should take this lovely couple out to dinner!”
Our small curbside audience registered their approval with whistles and applause, but the husband was reluctant. “Oh, you don’t have to do that, Andy.”
“Nonsense!” I said. “He wants to, believe me, he does! Don’t you, Andy?”
He was on the spot. I’d served him back his words as an hors d’oeuvre.
“Yeah, sure, I’d love to,” he said, giving me the glance of death. After politely declining the trio’s invitation to accompany them by saying it was best Andy commune with his public alone, I chuckled to myself as the big-shot celebrity and his new friends went off down the sidewalk in search of an eatery.
The next night we went out to dine in a fashionable restaurant and concluded it was time for a little bit of our patented mischief. When the waiter arrived at our table, he took one look at Andy and was instantly repulsed by the massive ball of snot hanging from his left nostril. Of course he was too embarrassed to say anything and averted his eyes as Andy ordered his salad. When I lowered my menu, the young aspiring actor nearly dropped his order pad when he zeroed in on the king-size booger cantilevered from my own snot locker. He blanched, then reflexively looked hack at Andy, who now had monumental green chunks of solidified mucus poised under both nose holes. Then the kid got it and started laughing, so we removed the bogus boogers and laughed with him. Andy never left home without fake snot in his pocket.
We returned to Hollywood, and Andy began working on his first feature film, In God We Tru$t. It was a small but flashy role, and best of all he was to act opposite Richard Pryor. British comedian Marty Feldman (another Shapiro/West client) had sent Andy a warm letter some months earlier asking him if he would do him the honor of appearing in a film he had written and was planning to direct. Andy was more than happy to oblige and was assigned the character of Armageddon T. Thunderbird, a bombastic televangelist.
The film debuted in 1980 and bombed, and poor Marty Feldman’s heart also failed, less than two years later. And though the lack of success of that film didn’t hurt Andy’s chances in Hollywood, his next picture would be critical. Hollywood has a frightening habit of branding one “not movie material” on a second strike that can kill or severely hinder a career. Despite his seemingly anti-Hollywood leanings, Andy did one day want to succeed in the movies. He would get another chance in two years.
8
Mustang Sally
I said, “This man is outta his mind.” But I dug it because I said, “This man shows there are no boundaries.”
SINBAD
After Andy’s ninety-minute special aired, on August 28, 1979, Andy was as hot as he’d ever been. As his writer, I was the beneficiary of his success. Outside the industry’s tight inner circle my abilities were unknown, but in the minds of the right people I was developing a rep as a very savvy and creative writer, the man behind the maniac. Of course, we had to keep my role semi-classified; after all, how could such a fluid talent, such an iconoclast, have a writer? That illusion was our carefully guarded secret. To the public, we worked hard to promulgate the notion that Andy Kaufman would never use a writer. Writers? Writers? He don’t need no stinkin’ writers.
Sure, yeah, absolutely.
So far, he looks normal!
Comic Relief Archives,Courtesy of the Kaufman estate
Andy at camp (fourth from left)
Comic Relief Archives, Courtesy of the Kaufman estate
A good Jewish boy
Comic Relief Archives, Courtesy of the Kaufman estate
The Kaufman clan
Comic Relief Archives, Courtesy of the Kaufman estate
Following the beat of a different drummer
Comic Relief Archives, Courtesy of the Kaufman estate
The kid act that he would eventually do for adults
Comic Relief Archives, Courtesy of Grahm Junior College
Andy as the Hillbilly Cat
Comic Relief Archives
Robin Williams—a die-hard Kaufman fan—backstage at Carnegie Hall
Comic Relief Archives, Elizabeth Wolynski
Saturday Night Live sketch: Andy as Elvis, Zmuda as Red West
Comic Relief Archives
His childhood idol
Comic Relief Archives, Elizabeth Wolynski
I’m shocked Andy showed up for the the photo shoot.
Comic Relief Archives
Letterman and Merv fooled! They think it’s Andy … it’s really Zmuda.
Comic Relief Archives
Andy as the fakir, with the obedient Zmuda by his side
Comic Relief Archives
Tony Clifton makeup, designed for both Kaufman and Zmuda faces
Comic Relief Archives
International singi
ng sensation Tony Clifton with the Cliftonettes—Harrah’s Main Show Room
Comic Relief Archives
Two living legends, together at last!
Comic Relief Archives, Courtesy of Jim Henson Productions
Judd Hirsch yelling at Clifton while two prostitutes look on
Bill Knoedelseder
Tony Clifton getting thrown off the Paramount lot
Over 300 wrestling matches. No woman ever won the money.
Comic Relief Archives, Elizabeth Wolynski
Andy stalking his prey, Zmuda as referee
Comic Relief Archives, Elizabeth Wolynski
Zmuda choreographing the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes for the Carnegie Hall Show
Comic Relief Archives, Elizabeth Wolynski
Zmuda and Kaufman triumphant as they receive a standing ovation from the Carnegie Hall Audience
Comic Relief Archives, Elizabeth Wolynski
Andy takes the entire Carnegie Hall audience of 1,800 people out for milk and cookies.
Comic Relief Archives, Elizabeth Wolynski
Bob Zmuda (above) with Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, and Billy Crystal
Comic Relief Archives
Zmuda teaching Jim Carrey how to do Clifton
Copyright © 1999 by Universal City Studios, Inc. Courtesy of Universal Studios Publishing Rights, a division of Universal Studios Licensing, Inc. All rights reserved.
The legendary Milos Foreman, directing Bob Zmuda and Jim Carrey in Man on the Moon
Copyright © 1999 by Universal City Studios, Inc. Courtesy of Universal Studios Publishing Rights, a division of Universal Studios Licensing, Inc. All rights reserved.
Offers began coming in for Andy left and right. One of the propositions was from Harrah’s Casino in Las Vegas. Though casino shows had long been the domain of the blue-hair set, the management of the gambling facilities realized they’d better approach a fresh, younger demographic before their current clientele died of old age. Yuppies were now lined up as management’s latest victims, a new crop of hedonists they hoped would arrive in droves and happily surrender their paychecks to the cashiers and dealers. But sheer gambling alone was too naked an inducement to come to Vegas, and as it was in the beginning and now and ever shall be, entertainment was the guilt-softening element necessary to bring in the largest contingent: I paid for my trip and saw a couple of good shows. Uh-huh, if you say so.