by Bill Zehme
A week later Freddie Prinze shot himself in the head and died within forty-eight hours and fellow comedians grieved and Andy did not want to think about it and chose not to attend the funeral—where fellow comedians flocked—because he did not want to think about it. He had by this time become a boarder in a big house above the Sunset Strip owned by actress Joanna Frank, sister of rising television writer Steven Bochco, and he took a bedroom next to Joanna’s and people came and went—TM people predominantly, since Joanna was one as well—and Joanna’s exparamour Richard Beymer, the actor who played Tony in the film West Side Story, lived in the basement. Joanna Frank experienced Andy as an uncommunicative narcissist unwilling to give more than passing nods; she fully engaged his interest only once, when he quizzed her about a cleansing diet she had begun—“He was fascinated with the way the bowel movements happened and what came out.” She would remember another conversation—a soliloquy, really—in which he told her, “I always knew that I wanted to be in the entertainment field. And what I was looking for was a place where no one else was doing what I was gonna do. I didn’t want competition. I knew that I really couldn’t compete. I had to find something that was not being done.” Ultimately, she could not find humanity behind his eyes—“I don’t think Andy’s heart was very developed at all. His mind was developed and he was crafty. He had this total single-pointedness, this obsession with himself, with his work—he didn’t have any off-moments like normal people do, when you’re just a person. He was always on, he was always doing The Andy Kaufman Show no matter where he was. And he was always using people for his end result.” So he would have Mel and Little Wendy come over to the house, because he wanted to try something completely new, he wanted in fact to mount his own talk show at the Improv, in which he could do what he most desired and experiment with personae, and he convinced George to make a deal with Budd Friedman to let him take over the club for three successive Saturday nights, beginning at two-thirty in the morning, and perform a faux broadcast for club patrons only, and the show would be called Midnight Snacks (since it would be nearly midnight in Hawaii and parts of Alaska, which was the pretend target viewership). Richard Beymer, who was a fledgling filmmaker among other avocations since his acting career had somewhat stalled, agreed to videotape the shows as well as loose rehearsals at the house and Joanna agreed to be a guest on one show and Mel would direct and aspiring comedy writers Merrill Markoe and Cheryl Garn asked if they could help and were made “producers.” Said Markoe, “I certainly wasn’t writing for him—nobody could write for Andy Kaufman. You could suggest. But he had to just ad-lib and do his own thing.” Everyone would receive one dollar as payment for their participation, since George said that would compensate for all binding rights to the material just in case anything of value grew out of the exercise.
Midnight Snacks began on the last Saturday in February and concluded its run on the second Saturday in March and played to packed predawn crowds and Foreign Man would do twenty minutes at the start until Andy blinked him away and stated in his own voice, “Ladies and gentleman—so far everything I’ve done for you, really, I’m only fooling. This is really me.” And during false commercial breaks, he purposely turned monstrous and snappishly Cliftonian (minus disguise) and berated Mel Sherer—“This is Mel, our floor director. Hey, Mel, why don’t you bend down and show everybody your bald spot! Come on, get down there and kiss my feet! Get down on your knees, Mel!”—and Mel would sheepishly acquiesce until the break ended and Andy would resume blissful unctuousness at his interviewing desk, which was noticeably several inches above the guest chairs which were peopled with his revolving platoon of plants whom he either ignored or forced to wrestle with each other (Markoe and another woman grappled, much to his delight, in the second show) or humiliated or openly flirted with or instructed to take naps. “You know,” guest Joanna Frank told him onstage, “in all the time I’ve known you, this is the first time I’ve ever really been able to sit and talk with you. I just feel like you ignore me all the time. It’s like your eyes get all glazed over and you twitch your nose whenever I look at you.” (He squirmed and barely defended himself and later said that he liked this exchange a great deal.) He also introduced a segment called Has-Been Corner during which he cheerily questioned alleged show business failures so obscure as to be believable—“How did you know it was all over for you?”—the first two of which were made-up characters but, on the third show, Richard Beymer consented to withstand the embarrassment. “Well, tell me,” said Andy, “how does it feel to be up in front of lights after fifteen years of doing nothing?” And Beymer replied, “You’re really sick, you know? You come out here and do jokes at other people’s expenses! I’m not a has-been!” And as the finale of each show, Andy beckoned his cast to link arms onstage and sway to and fro and sing Fabian’s “This Friendly World” with him (just like he had envisioned as a boy) and, when the singing had stopped and business was done, he would turn nasty again and pat Mel’s stomach and say, “Hey, what are ya growin’ in there? Kiss my feet, Mel!” And it was a secret to no one who knew him (as well as he could be known) that he cherished the old Elia Kazan film, A Face in the Crowd, in which Andy Griffith played the beloved broadcast entertainer Lonesome Rhodes who shucked-and-grinned in public and was a loathsome horror in private—and he really wanted extremely badly to star in a remake of the film once he was really extremely successful.
Foreign Man returned to The Tonight Show two nights before the second Midnight Snacks infraction and told Carson about it—we have good time lots of fun and I sit at desk like you—and also discussed his love life—I have girlfriend but I cannot say her name because her boyfriend may get mad. Then he went forth to display his Elveece for the first time on the program—reprising the songs he performed on Saturday Night—upon completion of which he said, per custom, tenk you veddy much and Carson applauded with unmasked glee and cackled loudly and wiped a laugh-tear from his eye and that was the final canonization necessary to market the franchise. Mid-March, he traveled as the opening act for Sonny and Cher—now divorced but still working together—going to Honolulu (where the Advertiser reviewer, who referred to him as Al, wrote “I still can’t figure out if Kaufman is for real, or simply a bad joke”) and to San Francisco (where the Chronicle reviewer used words like originality and hilarity and advised readers, “Note the name”). Then he returned to Los Angeles to become the franchise.
George Shapiro and Howard West had sold him to the American Broadcasting Company with some ingenuity, and with a caveat, in that he would be the delightful Foreign Man on the network as and when needed, first in a sitcom pilot already developed to suit him and then as a guest performer on six variety specials hosted by other people (guaranteeing him $30,000 inside of one year at $5,000 per appearance whether or not he was utilized)—but, more importantly, he would be supplied a budget of $110,000 to create and produce a late-night special for himself, plus an additional $25,000 to write his own sitcom pilot. And the economics of it all meant nothing to him and he told George to call Stanley and give him the financial details, then and ever after, because he just wanted to focus on the work. On March 29 he fulfilled his first obligation and taped the pilot for a “futuristic” sitcom called Stick Around, in which Foreign Man was an android household servant (named Andy) employed by a most annoying family-of-tomorrow and it was an odorous endeavor beyond redemption, which the network instantly realized, opting not to turn it into a series, although the executives had liked his work as the robot. Robot … oh … he would be a robot again … later … in three years … it would be a very bad thing … very very extremely bad thing … and the makeup he would wear … taking hours and hours to apply … he would look like lacquered fruit and, oh, the smell … and they said it would almost be like an art film … George even thought so … but … oh…. Foreign Man then did de Redd Foxx variety special and was very funny interrupting de nightclub sketch and somehow ABC had no other variety specials for him to infiltrate for the remain
der of the contract year and so there was thirty grand for a day’s work, not that he understood, though George and Howard and Stanley did. And, in June, Foreign Man went with George to the production offices of the game show The Hollywood Squares hoping to secure a celebrity square for him to occupy and the producers were amused at the outset of the visit but grew less so as the mask did not drop and minutes passed and the pidgin-dither continued and producer Jay Redack said finally, “Well, lookit—shit—we’re getting no place. Time is valuable here and so if you’re gonna fuck around …” And Foreign Man was truly stunned by the outburst and George yanked him out of the meeting then sent Andy back in and Andy was perfectly congenial but said nothing of what had just transpired and got his square and George whispered to Redack afterward, “That’s the first time I ever saw him break character like that!” And Foreign Man taped a week of shows for them, although he was never asked to return.
Uncle Andy’s Fun House was what he wanted to call the ninety-minute special whose rehearsals would begin July 12 with taping to commence three days later at KTTV studios—but the uncle part seemed a bit presumptuous at this point, so it would be called Andy’s Fun House but the network would advertise it as The Andy Kaufman Special but the advertising part would come much later because network entertainment president Fred Silverman was much too terrified to actually broadcast it any time during his term of office. (It would be, according to Silverman, “too avant-garde” with its oddball pacing and sly/dry moments of dead/awkward air and it would frighten dim-witted viewers, who were the viewers he seemed to prize most.) Many weeks earlier, and twentysomesuch years earlier, Andy had started writing the show. But Mel would now help him, too, and where was Bob? Baaab? Baaaaaaab? Back in New York, Bob Zmuda had become the preferred Clifton stooge (You’re Polish!? Hey, look at Polish here! How many Polish does it take to screw in a lightbulb, Baaaaab?), especially after the Little Hippodrome went belly-up and Zmuda hired on as a bartender at the Improv, where he was ever available for plant hijinks. (His comedy partner Chris Albrecht, meanwhile, became house manager at the Improv after Budd went west.) Andy had always told Zmuda that once he became famous he would want Zmuda to write for him because Zmuda was a prankster after his own heart and had big fanciful foolish dangerous dark ideas and was an expert, like Andy, at altering truth and embellishing truth and disregarding truth—he said “gotcha” a lot—and he was a very sweet guy and it was a shame that he didn’t meditate. “Bob is comedy personified,” Andy liked to say. But Zmuda had disappeared from New York and George finally found him that spring working as a short-order cook in San Diego, where he had fled with his girlfriend to rethink show business. “Kid,” George told him, “your ship just came in!” And so they plotted in late spring—Andy, Bob, Mel, George—and conceived a structure not unlike that of the Midnight Snacks shows in which Andy would preside at a desk even higher than before and turn Cliftonian when the cameras appeared to be off and abuse floor director Zmuda and he would reprise the Has-Been Corner with a cohort named Gail Slobodkin, who had been a child actor on Broadway in The Sound of Music (“Did you lose a lot of friends?”), and he would interview Cindy Williams, asking her if she had any hobbies or diseases or if she had ever been under the care of a psychiatrist and whether she was Laverne or Shirley and what her costar Penny Marshall was really like, then force her to sing “Mack the Knife” against her will. (Originally, she had rehearsed a monologue from Edward Albee’s Zoo Story which ended with her pulling a knife and stabbing him to death on the air—but then how would he finish the show?)
Foreign Man was, of course, required to open the show, sitting quietly in a stuffed chair near a television set on which the program was to be broadcast, and blink into the camera and welcome viewers and tell them that ABC gave him one hundred thousand dollars for the special and they told me take thees money and you can do anything you want weeth it … so I went on vacation weeth de money … I spent all de money, now I don’t have any of de money left … and that basically there was no special … eet’s not joke, I will just sit here for ninety meenutes … and softly hum to himself to kill some time before leaning forward to say now that we have lost the audience and only my friends are there, now we can watch my special. Then Foreign Man began describing the special as he watched the television set on which Foreign Man walked onto the stage and did de act and transformed into de Elveece who wore a new and most extravagant white studded jumpsuit designed at a cost of approximately $3,500 for the show by Bill Belew, who had designed most of Elvis’s costumes—and this costume was made from the very same material Belew had once used for Elvis, plus the same gems and studs, which was exciting. (“Andy asked me a million questions about Elvis,” said Belew. “You could tell there was a very pure and sincere esteem, sort of an awe.”) After singing “Treat Me Nice” and tenking the studio audience, he said everything that he had done so far had been fooling and this was the real him. And later he would have the audience (whom he addressed as boys and girls throughout) sing “The Cow Goes Moo” with him and demonstrate for them how to prepare an ice cream snack and again he would sing “It’s a Small World” with the Van Dyke conga players (whose name had become the B Street Conga Band) and he and Little Wendy would sing “Banana Boat” and Nathan Richards would perform “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” (which would be edited from the show) and Tony Clifton would summon from the audience Miss Jones, his former elementary school teacher, and confront her—“You useta tell me that I was never going to amount to anything! You always useta ridicule me in front of the class! Well, I kinda amounted to something, wouldn’t you say? Wouldn’t you say, huh?! How much money you makin’?” (And this, too, would be cut.) And, in the end, all participants would lock arms and sway and sing “This Friendly World.”
But the emotional zenith of the project was the appearance of special guest Howdy Doody, who was the real original Howdy Doody, although a second newer Doody called Photo Doody (because he photographed well) would be brought in also and it was Burt Dubrow from Grahm who made all of this happen. Andy knew Dubrow was pals with Buffalo Bob Smith, who of course was Howdy’s best pal. So Andy called Dubrow and said, “You gotta do me a favor. You gotta get me Howdy.” And Dubrow convinced Buffalo Bob to play along, which meant Buffalo Bob flew in to record Howdy’s voice, which kept dislodging itself into phlegmy coughing spasms during the sound recording session, which frightened Andy—especially when Buffalo Bob gagged at one point and blurted, “Could I have a drink of water? My fuckin’ throat is killin’ me!” “Andy was mortified,” Zmuda would recall. “And he wanted to get the hell out of there. This whole imaginary world he loved was being destroyed right before his eyes.” And there would be the story of another scare when Andy thought he was about to meet Howdy for the first time prior to rehearsals and was so excited that he couldn’t sleep the night before and then he kept asking crew people who had seen Howdy, “What’s he like? What’s he like?” and then he nervously approached the puppet which was not a puppet to him at all and he suddenly screamed, “That’s not Howdy! That’s a phony! That’s Photo Doody!” And he ran to his dressing room and locked the door through which people heard sobbing and objects crashing and … Well, Zmuda always liked telling that story. According to Dubrow, who heard it directly from original Howdy puppeteer Pady Blackwood, who was there to operate Howdy for the special, Andy announced to all present at the outset, “Please don’t show me Howdy. The first time I want to see Howdy is when we’re taping.” So he rehearsed with Photo Doody until the moment when cameras rolled, which was when he at last met his childhood hero, “the first star that I was ever aware of in my whole life,” and there they were together in tender union with Andy not simply talking to the puppet, but delicately relating with it and sharing the most elemental part of his soul in the process—“Howdy, I just want you to know I’ve looked forward to meeting you and being able to talk with you like this all my life. And I’m finally able to and I just want you to know that I, um, love you and I can’t get ove
r what’s happening right now at this moment. I can’t believe it. I’ve wanted to do this my whole life and I wish we could talk for eight hours. I just have so much that I’d like to tell you. There’s just so much to say….” And his eyes seemed to mist over during much of their long, earnest exchange in which Howdy spoke of living in a box for seventeen years (“Wow,” said Andy, “isn’t it boring?”) and thanked Andy for his countless warm sentiments and explained that Buffalo Bob couldn’t be there tonight because he had some other show to do—which Andy privately believed was just as well. And at the very close of the special, Foreign Man, in his review of all that had transpired, noted, To have de Howdy Doody … oh! dat was touching you know because then you think you have Howdy Doody and eet’s going to be funny but eet’s really serious I think eet was brilliant and Has-Been Corner, eh, dat ees bad taste, went a little too far … but you know lots of show ees very stupid but lots of eet was very good….
Mel would remember the coughing, how Andy coughed a lot during the rehearsals and the tapings. “He said it was nothing, just a little cold or something. But it wasn’t going away and it didn’t go away. I said, ‘Andy, you’ve got to go to the doctor.’ He said, ‘I don’t really go to doctors—I go to holistic practitioners.’ He fought me and fought me on this.” Anyway, he had always coughed. Everyone knew he always coughed. It was like a habit kind of. And the Crying never really helped matters—with all the bleating esophageal contractions, which were sort of brutal, so as to make the loud rhythmic eeeeeeeppppp-eeeeeeeppppps that took him to the drums. But it was, of course, nothing. Everyone knew. It was, um, just a habit.