by Bob Zmuda
Meanwhile, I went back to L.A. to continue work on a picture with director Joel Schumacher. I had returned to Universal (they’d resprayed my name onto the parking place), and Joel and I and another writer had cowritten a film called D.C. Cab. The film had been green-lighted for production and we were busily in preproduction. I’d even been cast in a role. It was a dream come true.
Back in New York, Andy was going through a nightmare. He called me many times during that period to give me constant updates as well as to have a shoulder to cry on. For the first tune, I’ll reveal the extent of our conversations. Andy and Dick Ebersol did in fact lock horns in a screamfest backstage on SNL, but it was wholly staged, designed to build momentum for the vote they planned soon after. Dick read the statement to build conflict, and so far, so good. Then came the vote.
“Well, didn’t you know it was going to go against you?” I asked.
“Of course I did,” said Andy. “I’m not an idiot.”
“So why are you pissed? You got thrown off the show. That was the plan, right?”
“That was only half the plan. The only reason I went along with it was because Dick and I had a secret agreement.”
“What kind of agreement?” I asked warily.
“Okay, it’s true I would not be allowed back on the show, but guess who would?”
“Tony Clifton?” I wondered.
“Exactly.”
“That’s great! So what’s the problem? Who’s going to play him? Me or you?”
“Neither,” he said with a sigh. “Ebersol screwed me. He won’t return my calls.”
The joke was on Andy, and he wasn’t laughing. Ebersol had suckered him with the vote and then went back on their agreement. Both Andy’s agent, Marty Klein, and his manager, George Shapiro, were appalled over Ebersol’s treachery. A few years ago, George Shapiro ran into Ebersol at a party and confronted him, saying, “It was a shitty thing to do.”
Andy had always courted rejection with audiences and then either pulled success out at the last minute — or fled the building. For the briefest moment I wondered if this was just another Kaufman stunt, but Andy was being completely sincere. He loved his appearances on SNL, not only for the freedom and exposure, but for the feeling of security — almost of family — they gave him. Though the cast had changed over the years, walking into that studio fit him like an old pair of slippers, and the loss of it hurt him profoundly.
After all of Andy’s hard work to examine and exploit failure, with this very real expulsion from his beloved Saturday Night Live, his wishes had come horribly true. His desire to succeed at failure had come full circle. A good friend of mine, who is a psych professor at Northeastern University, speculated at the time that Andy had been flirting with the threat of being “shut down” for some time. He was constantly amazed at the antics Andy pulled on television and, because of the “sedative for the masses” nature of the medium, thought it inevitable that TV’s gatekeepers would one day rebel against the rebel and switch him off. With Andy Kaufman on camera, their precious connection to the American consumer was in danger of being interfered with by that man, pushed to its (and the viewers’) limits, thus diminishing its primary goal of selling, not entertaining. Kaufman jeopardized that relationship and had to go. Someone had to remove the madman from the controls. Andy underestimated his own impact, and when he was thrown off the stage of Saturday Night Live as Andy, not Tony, he was shocked.
But the shocks were just beginning.
13
Over the Cliff
I knew an essentially shy kid who had gone from his parents’ home to a stage to national television.
LORNE MICHAELS
One day as Andy and I sat around his place reading his reviews, he happened upon one particularly vicious article. “Hey,” he said, with that boyish enthusiasm, “this one says I’ve gone as far as I can go, short of killing myself on stage. What do you think?”
I lowered the review I was reading and fixed him with my patented “get serious” look. “So, you’re gonna kill yourself on stage?”
“What do you think?”
I smiled wryly. “Sure, why not. You’ve already died on stage. Remember Kutscher’s?”
“No, not like that. What if I faked my own death?” he said, with a gleam in his eye.
“Count me out. That’s too much.”
“But why? It’s perfect!” he said, suddenly thrilled at the notion.
“I’ll tell you why, because faking your own death is illegal. I’d be an accomplice to a crime. I don’t want to do that for a living, be a criminal. Besides, it’s nothing new, that’s why it’s a crime … people fake their deaths every day.”
“They do?” he asked. “Why?”
“Sure. Insurance fraud, child support, bankruptcy, maybe they pissed off the Mob, you know, lots of reasons.”
Andy was intrigued by this, never having thought about such scenarios. I continued. “You know, some people just want to disappear and start again from scratch, a whole new life. No, Kaufman, if you really wanted to fake your death, you couldn’t tell anybody, and I mean anybody.”
“Why?”
“Well, because I don’t think anyone would be able to stand up to questioning. Plus they have lie detectors and stuff.”
He got it. “You couldn’t tell a soul.”
I went back to the article I was reading. “Not a soul.”
That was the last time we discussed the subject — Andy never brought it up to me again, but he did to two others, Jack Burns and John Moffitt, producers of the television show Fridays. John recently related the following story to me: “I remember the conversation quite distinctly. It was after the telecast of one of our shows Andy was on. He joined myself and other cast members at Jack’s house. Later in the evening, Andy asked to speak privately to both me and Jack. We moved into a quiet room away from the others, and Andy closed the door, making sure no one besides us could hear. He told us he was about to embark on the greatest prank of his career and made us swear we would never repeat it to a living soul. He then told us it would be the biggest thing in the history of show business, then he lowered his voice and said, ‘I’m going to fake my death, go into hiding for ten years, and then reappear.’” John understands the explosive nature of this story but stands by it and is willing to take a polygraph test to prove it.
In addition to John Moffitt’s startling revelation came another, from Mimi Lambert, the young lady Andy wrestled on Saturday Night Live and with whom he established a lifelong friendship. Mimi said that Andy once told her he was seriously considering faking his death. But the detail Andy disclosed to her that he held back from me and Burns and Moffitt was how he would “die.” Andy told Mimi that if he did go ahead with his plan, he would do so by pretending to have cancer. Mimi said she was disgusted by the idea and told Andy it was anything but funny and to never speak of it again to her. He never did.
A few months after his confession to Moffitt and Burns, on January 6, 1983, Andy brought his parents, Stanley and Janice, on Letterman for one reason, to go before millions of viewers and tell them how much he loved them. He also hugged Dave, telling him how much he loved him too. In retrospect, it was almost as if he was saying his good-byes.
Following his dismissal from SNL, the next blow to him was Taxi. Though the show was picked up by NBC and seemingly revived, the reprieve was short-lived, and by February 1983 the last episode had been shot. Taxi was toast, and Andy no longer needed to fret about the tax it exacted from him.
From the start, Taxi had been hard for Andy to accept. It had provided excellent employment and made him a star, but it had short-circuited one of his romantic aspirations of being a highly regarded but esoteric artiste. Though he had dreamed of being famous since he was a child, when it finally happened it was not what he’d expected, like Alan King’s beer tap he’d so coveted. Andy felt he had become just another highly successful schmuck and in some ways had missed out on the romance of the pain and the struggle.
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A few months later, on May 26, 1983, an L.A. television interview show called Tom Cottle: Up Close featured a very unusual interview with Andy. It was the only time he appeared on television as himself, totally unaffected, totally Andy. Among many things, he spoke candidly about losing his beloved grandfather and how his folks kept that news from him. He even told Cottle how, on hearing the news that Elvis had died, he wondered if it was really true, how a guy that young and vital could die so young. Another thing you don’t notice unless you look for it: throughout the interview Andy coughs occasionally.
During that time I was very busy with a career that had slowly separated from Andy’s, and I remember watching that show and wondering out loud, “What is he up to? This is very un-Andy of him.” Since the contact between us had dropped off to two or three phone calls a week, I suspected he was planning something, and this was the setup. Though I wanted to be in on it, the press of my own schedule prevented me from exploring it with him.
Fifteen years later, while working on the film Man on the Moon, I was having dinner with its director, Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus, The People vs. Larry Flynt), and we were discussing Andy’s psyche. Milos believed that people often instinctively know when their days are numbered, even when they haven’t been “formally” informed, and unconsciously begin wrapping up their lives.
Paul Giamatti (Private Parts, Saving Private Ryan), the talented actor who played me in the movie, had his own contribution to that theory. Paul’s father, the late great baseball commissioner and former president of Yale University, A. Bartlett Giamatti, despite having no inkling of trouble, began to put his life in order a few months before he died. No sooner had he made his last will and testament than he dropped dead of a massive coronary.
In September and November of 1983 Andy made appearances on Letterman and, during both visits, introduced a theme he’d never broached with anyone: his “own” children. Bringing out three young black men on one of the shows, Andy insisted they call him Dad. Also, that he was thirty-four and they looked to be in their early twenties was unimportant: Andy told Dave they were his kids and he was proud of them. As usual, Dave played along patiently.
Why did he introduce as his sons three men who obviously weren’t his sons? On the lines of the above ruminations about impending death, some suggest Andy was playing out some sort of last-minute “family life” psychodrama because, at least on an unconscious level, he realized he wasn’t long for the world. Probably Andy was merely extending his wrestling persona, first being the “bad guy,” wrestling women and insulting the people of Memphis, then being the “good guy,” showing he was all heart. And the fact that the three young men were very ethnic recalled the bit we did with the four tough-looking guys accompanying Andy on “It’s a Small World.” That a nice Jewish boy could father three inner-city youths is ludicrous, and therein lay the humor.
To Andy everything was theater, and this was just more role playing. If Andy needed a family, he already had one in his loving parents and brother, Michael, and sister, Carol; if he needed a child, he had that too, a daughter whom he’d never met nor ever made any attempt to contact.
So now here was the score: he’d been summarily kicked off SNL, Taxi was gone, and what motion picture career he’d hoped for was now beyond his reach. Andy and his managers saw no hope of landing anything in films. When George Shapiro and Howard West called him with a possible sitcom, his knee-jerk reaction was, Oh, no, not again, but, like it or not, he had gotten used to that fat weekly paycheck. He grudgingly agreed to consider it, but there was one catch: the producers of the sitcom wanted him to audition. Such a command could have been a slap in the face to a guy who’d just done five years on a very successful show, but Andy complied, assuming it would be a mere formality. He didn’t get the part.
Deciding Broadway might hold a creative outlet and critical success, he signed on to a British import, a play called Teaneck Tanzi: The Venus Flytrap. What intrigued Andy was that its theme was wrestling and that he would be starring opposite songstress Debbie Harry of Blondie. They rehearsed in earnest for many weeks, but when the play opened on April 14, 1983, it did so to such scathing reviews that the first two performances were also the only two.
Demoralized by Teaneck’s head-spinning demise, Andy received another punch to the gut: his mother had a stroke. That all of those crises happened around the same time is almost unfathomable, but Andy hung in there, weathering one shot after the other, a series of setbacks that probably would have sent most others into a spiral of irretrievable depression. What kept him out of the abyss was his faith. Transcendental meditation was his religion, and now more than ever he needed the refuge its practices and teachings could offer him.
TM was Andy’s safety net, and by making a pilgrimage to the meditation center in Switzerland he would be able to spend time among the other initiates and get his balance back. He was in a crisis and desperately needed that haven to retreat to and mentally sift through the wreckage that had become his life. Each one of the recent blows had knocked down his confidence and stripped away that facade of invulnerability he had been building since he entered the movement and found his inner peace. He made the call to the transcendental meditation center to make his, reservation and received a heart-stopping reply: “We don’t want you.”
Finding his behavior unacceptable, that is, wrestling women, creating arguments on television, and so on, the leaders of the movement informed Andy (who had by then ascended to a very high ranking within) that he was no longer following their path and would not be allowed to take another course. If his ousting at SNL hurt him, this news was a knife through the heart. For Andy such rejection was tantamount to a Roman Catholic being excommunicated. Suddenly he was rudderless, cast adrift by his own religion at the lowest point in his life.
Then he received the coup de grâce.
A few months later, during his Thanksgiving visit with his family, everyone noticed Andy’s small but persistent cough. He promised he’d see a doctor back in L.A. and did so in December of 1983. When he got the verdict the news was absolutely stunning: cancer. It was not something that could be easily fixed. This was deadly, a nearly hopeless type of carcinoma sometimes called large cell or undifferentiated cell carcinoma that had attacked his lungs with a vengeance. When he was told he had about three months to live, he couldn’t believe it. This was the worst kind of smoker’s cancer, a strain so malicious and advanced that doctors could do nothing but suggest counseling and a good hospice. Andy didn’t believe it. After all, except for occasional forays into Tony’s world, where cigarettes and booze abounded, Andy was by no means a smoker.
I really believe Andy never thought he was going to die. How could he? He had the supreme confidence a self-made man has. He was Andy Kaufman: This just can’t be. As long as he meditated twice a day, every day, he was invincible. The cancer was a temporary inconvenience, a bad cold, nothing more. Terminal, the doctors said? Ridiculous, for TM had taught him any adversity could be overcome through meditation.
Because of the shock to me of such news I cannot recall who told me, Andy, George, or Lynne, but Lynne assures me it was Andy who called. Despite our having pulled a hundred hoaxes, whatever he told me did not hit me like a joke. I flashed on our discussion some months before of his faking his death, but it struck me as unrelated: Andy wouldn’t do that to me, therefore, this was monstrously real.
As the days after the revelation unfolded, Andy calmed down and fell into a pattern of casual dismissal, as if the cancer were a minor inconvenience and would soon pass. I thought of my friend Stan Martindale and his tales as a U.S. Marine on Okinawa. As the sergeant, Stan would get the “stats” from HQ every night, telling him, based on various sources of intelligence, what his casualty rate would likely be during the next day’s battle. Often the numbers were extraordinary and, according to him, usually accurate within 3 or 4 percent. Stan had the option of informing his men beforehand so they could pen letters t
o loved ones or mentally prepare for almost certain death. He chose to do so, and despite the predictions of a 30 percent or worse casualty rate, not one man thought he’d be in that category. Shot? Okay, sure. My arm blown off? I’ll accept that. But killed? Never.
We live in an era where we are surrounded by vivid death, from the evening news to graphic movies. But we have an exceptionally difficult time accepting it, and when personally faced with death, we are always amazed it could happen to us or near us. It is the nature of death that we shrink from: the end of it all, depending, of course, on your spiritual beliefs. But death is certainly final for this existence, and it is that finality, that closing curtain on all that we know, that is so very, very hard to accept.
Like Andy, I chose not to believe, not to accept it, because it was not real. This couldn’t happen to Andy Kaufman. His life force was so powerful he could ward off anything, particularly something like cancer that he had no business having in the first place! To this day, I beat myself up over that, my inability to take it seriously, at least at first. Lynne now comforts me by saying it was just my way of denying it and dealing with it. She also reminds me that we all took our cue from Andy, and since he wasn’t taking it so seriously, how could we?
But it brings me little comfort that I scoffed at the needs of my friend out of disbelief. Yet to take the illness seriously would have meant the end of everything, of every dream we shared. There were TV shows and films and spectacular stage shows in our futures. There was the Ninety-Nine-Cent Tour I was working on, which would take milk and cookies to the next level. This time we would take an audience on buses to a port of call, Totally unsuspecting and with no notice, they would be taken aboard a vessel and sent on a six-day cruise. We not only would have had luggage packed for them but also would have notified their employers in advance and brought them in on the whole thing. I was already in negotiations with a major cruise line to pick up the entire cost in exchange for the promotional opportunities. If anything happened to Andy, it would be the end of that. No, I had to side with Kaufman — death was not an option.