by Bill Zehme
Which was to say, he believed that with all new hubris came entitlement—and, most of all, he believed that he was entitled to disregard. So he would now aim to seize any opportunity to disregard structure, expectation, rules. It would be part of his art—the disregarding—and it would be calculated always, never done in slipshod fashion, never executed without purpose or means to an end. And he would make all effort to become known for it—since, if he was known for it, then George would have less mess to clean up afterward. George could just shrug and say, “Well, that’s Andy,” and that would always be enough. And Zmuda had this credo that he kept imposing—“Kaufman,” he would urge, “the system was made to bend, the system was made to bend, the system was made to bend”—and Andy knew that anyway because he had been bending it all along. But he and Bob together expanded his playground exponentially, removed any boundaries that might forestall whatever delicious theater-of-life escapades they elected to hatch. They would scheme always now, the two of them. Nothing much would remain very extremely sacred. Of this renegade partnership, not that it was ever to be an equal one, George had patiently observed, “Their mental age is somewhere between twelve and fifteen. When they are really sophisticated, they reach the fifteen-year-old level.” And this was evident once they left New York after the Saturday Night extrapolations of British Man and flew to Columbus, Ohio, where Burt Dubrow was producing a local teen talk show called Bananaz, on which Bob was introduced as Dr. Robert Zmuda, filibustering author of a new book on the little-known science of psychogenesis, whose stiff windbaggery was interrupted by Andy’s arrival in the studio which effectively quashed any wavering interest in Dr. Zmuda, who became increasingly ruffled and eventually lunged for Andy —“Don’t you touch me! I think that you are a phony! You are not a doctor! That man is not a doctor!” And the teens in the audience sat mystified and the host was wholly bewildered and Dr. Zmuda was noisily ejected while Andy played congas and the show ended. After which, Andy and Bob were beside themselves. Dubrow, meanwhile, would answer to management.
In fun only fooling no really:
He was this other one for Mike Douglas in Philadelphia a few days later. He came out and sang the song “Confidence,” which Elvis had sung in the film Clambake, but he sang it as himself and clumsily strummed along on his guitar (With a C and an O and an N and an F and an I and a D and an ENCE! Put’em all together and what have you got …) and then he led the audience in “The Cow Goes Moo” but upon sitting down at the panel with Mike and Carol Channing and Robert Goulet (again) his articulation grew huskily middle-European with a decided arrogance and suddenly he was a new self altogether who spoke of being influenced by a children’s television host called Captain Jack and—“And I thought, This is a good man for me to do. All right, I will develop this man, this character, and so I call it my American character, Andy…. This is not something that I want to talk about, really. Because I want people to think that it’s my real voice. But because this show is interested in truth, I am talking this way. But I hope that people will just forget it, you know.” And so a program of blithe chatter fell into his stony abyss of awkwardness. Brows furrowed as he had hoped. Finally, if tentatively, Douglas asked, “Where are you from, Andy?” “What difference does it make where a man is from? I have traveled! I was raised throughout Europe, Africa, and different countries. But what difference does it make?” And the point of it all was to demonstrate that this was the real Foreign Man—that by merely pitching his voice into a higher nasal range, he could instill this haughty Euro-locution with gentle innocence, which was what people most enjoyed, which had brought him success in show business, even though he was now confessing to being an unlikable fraud.
Before he resumed his American character and moved to a set of cymbals on which he accompanied his own otherwise a cappella rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Carousel—received with muted shock—he was forced to allow Mike Douglas to disrupt his excellent flight of new disregard. Douglas, in actual sincerity, wished to pass along information that Andy had never heard before and it was perhaps the most important information that he had ever heard in any of his lives. “I wanted to tell Andy something that has nothing to do with comedy or anything,” said Douglas. “I was recently with a man named Jerry Weintraub, who handles, among others, John Denver, Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra. He also booked Elvis Presley on all of his engagements before he passed away. And he told me that Elvis told him that of all the people who did impressions of him—of Elvis—he enjoyed you the most. And I thought you’d like to know that….”
(Oh!)
And he was in the midst of being an asshole when he heard this.
And he didn’t break asshole character even as he heard this.
And he seemed to be completely unaffected by hearing this, even though the audience applauded most rousingly—they were proud of him!—and so did Carol Channing and Goulet. But he could only momentarily glaze in a fashion that no one but his intimates would recognize as a chink approximating humanness/humility/happiness before telling everyone that it would be better if they forgot that he was this new self and believed that he was really his American self because the song would work better if they forgot the other—“Please make believe,” he said—and it was very extremely poetic that he sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone” at that particular moment (since the lyrics were about triumphantly walking through the storm and holding your head up high and not being afraid of the dark et cetera which was all very metaphorical), although this would not occur to him, because that sort of thing never really did.
(Well, he certainly knew that Elvis had recorded the song eleven years earlier and it was released as a single on Easter of 1968 and it didn’t do very well, but it sounded really inspiring when sung only with battering cymbal accompaniment the way he was doing it now. Also, he tried to sing it with soaring gospel inflections just the way Elvis had.)
It began in earnest on April Fool’s night in Tucson, Arizona, whereupon they had discussed the possibility of trying this before, but now—because they were on the road and it would offer new means to interact with women—they decided that the time was right. He wanted to rub against a body onstage, he told Bob. About an hour into the act, the gauntlet was thrown. “We decided to offer five hundred dollars—make it really big, so as to get the women up there,” he said. He had adopted Clifton’s appraisal of the feminine species to goad them toward entwining with his body. They were, he hectored, only good for raising the babies and washing the carrots and peeling the potatoes and such. He would wear white long johns with black shorts pulled over them, since Bob told him he should never do it bare-chested, what with the acne on his back which Bob said was disgusting. Anyway, he picked one—they hated him, the ones who had come onstage for the money and the challenge—and he pinned her certainly but while they were rubbing he told her to come backstage after the show. And it would always work this way.
Only one of the characters would be a career cab driver and the others would be different things but they drove cabs to make ends meet—there would be a boxer and an actor and a transplanted country bumpkin and an art gallery receptionist (the only female)—and then there would be the dispatcher who was a little rat. Also, there would be the mechanic who always wore coveralls and spoke in his own indiscernible language and was relentlessly innocent and adorable….
He purified himself in every way. The diet, of course, was full of mulches and grains and weeds and sprouts and broths and curds and juices and herbs—all of which certainly balanced and purged the chunks and mounds and nuggets and bowls of chawwklitt … he called it chawwwwwwwkkklittttttt and his eyes would dance at the sight or mention of it. He washed his hands rather obsessively, too. The more famous he became, the more people wanted to shake hands with him (he was never very good at this, kind of a limp grasp) and he would never touch food if someone had touched his hands, so sometimes in restaurants where people would come over to greet him repeatedly, he would have to ke
ep getting up from the table and going to the bathroom to rewash his hands before he could eat again. And always in restaurants he dipped his utensils in his glass of water and rubbed them vigorously with his napkin before deigning to eat with them. He tried to will his bowel movements never long after eating; he sat and waited for results no matter the duration of digestion. (People got annoyed about this.) He took lots of vitamins before meals (like Mommy taught him) and he would line up the pills in careful meticulous rows then consume them in special order. He did this with almonds and cashews as well—lined them up, ten at a time, and ate them accordingly. (Nuts were sort of sacred.) He liked order just like Daddy did, really. He liked things to be exactly where they were supposed to be. He would scream if somebody moved his pen. He used a different toothbrush for every day of the week except Sunday. He did not like anyone to come into contact with his beddings unless the person was unclothed—the female person, of course—because clothes carried contaminants. (He said this but his motives were clear enough.) Sex was a problem because he loved it with an ardor unmatched—he and Bob sniffed for it on the road like desperate bloodhounds—but he felt that it darkened his spirit and tainted his innocence. To combat the creeping impurity of his powerful urges, he sometimes sent Foreign Man to prostitutes in West Hollywood—there was this storefront setup on Santa Monica Boulevard near Crescent Heights that he knew well. He once even had Little Wendy drive him there and go in with him while Foreign Man negotiated—this was a very pure idea, he thought—then she waited to drive him home afterward and Wendy would remember that the prostitute was not amused in the least by Foreign Man and he emerged worried for his enlightened soul in any case—“We went back to his apartment and he lit incense and did a little TM puja ceremony to cleanse his spiritual self.” Anyway, he had scheduled to go on a long Age of Enlightenment Governor Training Course in San Jacinto, California—from April through much of June. And there he would rekindle his purity and become an actual Governor in the TM hierarchy and he would learn yogic flying, which was kind of like levitating, but more like hopping while seated in lotus position, and it created the most positive energy waves imaginable, and he needed to be positive since he was going to begin work on this television series immediately after the Fourth of July, and he was not at all thrilled about it.
From the start, he kept his distance. He showed up at Paramount on the fifth of July for the first read-through of the first script of the first episode and the actors—they were a lively collegial bunch making with the nervous well-meaning jokey backslapping camaraderie of nascent team endeavor—couldn’t get a fix on him. They pumped his fishy palm and searched in vain for connective light in his eyes and gathered the full spectrum of his social grace—um oh hi fine very good thank you—which was further strained by the fact that he wore headphones that first day and seemed to be listening to something on a portable tape machine. (Danny DeVito, who was cast in the role of the Napoleonic cab dispatcher, Louie DiPalma, was the only one who ventured to ask what he was listening to and Andy passed him the headphones and DeVito heard tribal chanting.) Foreign Man had been named Latka Gravas by the consortium of Brooks-Weinberger-Daniels-Davis because they, as producers/creators, thought it would be funny and yet not unbelievable. And so it was and he accepted this without any greater qualm than the overriding qualm of having taken this job to begin with. (George said he would get $10,000 for every episode in which he deigned to appear and the money would increase if the series continued.) Latka, meanwhile, was conceived to be something akin to the grease-monkey mascot of the Sunshine Cab Company garage, the concrete crucible of Taxi from which all witty twenty-two-minute morality plays sprung forth. His specific heritage would remain unidentified—he would refer to his country frequently without giving it name or locus. He would appear in the first episode, “Like Father, Like Daughter,” at the top of the second act, trundling down the garage staircase to ask Alex Rieger—the patriarchal career cabbie played by Judd Hirsch—for help with English lessons. And his arrival was scripted in such a way as to merely navigate him:
LATKA GRAVAS ENTERS. HE IS DRESSED IN COVERALLS WITH A MONKEY WRENCH STICKING OUT OF HIS BACK POCKET. HE IS SWEET AND INNOCENT LOOKING. HE GOES TO ALEX.
WE HEAR LOUIE’S VOICE.
LOUIE
Latka, where are you going? Don’t hang around the drivers, I need you to fix a cab on the third level.
LATKA TURNS.
LATKA
(IN HIS OWN LANGUAGE, WHICH SOUNDS LIKE A CROSS BETWEEN TURKISH, LATVIAN, AND GIBBERISH. HE SAYS SOMETHING THAT MEANS ROUGHLY: “LET A GUY HAVE A MINUTE, WILL YOU?”)
And thus was established the foreignness and the cuteness and the spunk—whereupon Latka moved to Alex who was using the pay phone and Alex said it was not a good time to work on the English lessons (LATKA STARTS TO WALK AWAY DEJECTED. DEJECTED ISN’T THE WORD—HE HAS TAKEN VULNERABLE TOO FAR), then Alex reconsidered and Latka eagerly read aloud from his phrasebook “‘Lesson twelve: tenk you chambermaid for your excellent serveece, I am glad I don’t require medical asseestance’” and then he shuffled to a bench to sit beside new driver Elaine Nardo (played by Marilu Henner) on whose shoulder he innocently rested his head (THIS GIVES HER PAUSE, BUT HE IS SO SWEET … THEN … LIKE A LOCKSMITH PICKING A LOCK, HE BEGINS SLOWLY PULLING THE ZIPPER OF HER BLOUSE DOWN), and, shocked, she pushed him away and he said, “No bed?” and she firmly replied, “No bed.” And this would be the debut of Latka Gravas, as seen in the series premiere Tuesday, September 12 at 9:30 P.M. (Eastern Standard Time) over the ABC television network which still had no interest in broadcasting his special and now here he was again not only as Foreign Man but as Foreign Man reborn according to the whim of others who had relieved him of the character’s creative custody and who would dictate the character’s inner life and motivation and destiny. Foreign Man was no longer his, but theirs. It was part of the package.
Resigned to this reality, he did what was required of him as best as he could from the remove he required himself to maintain. The producers, meanwhile, respectfully gave him leeway the other actors quickly began to resent. He came late for rehearsals, when he elected to come to rehearsals, which he would soon stop doing altogether, because he didn’t need rehearsals because he had a photographic memory and always knew his lines cold. When present, he regularly disappeared to meditate for long stretches, often in his car, where production assistants would be sent to retrieve him. Everyone was made to wait for him and then he would wander back to rejoin the enterprise and pretend not to notice all the glowering. “I defended him strong to the cast,” said Jim Brooks, “but the cast did not like the way he monkeyed with them. They were really furious. It would bubble up. I remember defending him by always saying, ‘But he’s an artist.’ And they would respond, ‘An artist doesn’t piss on other artists!’” Jeff Conaway, who played the role of struggling actor Bobby Wheeler, came to openly hate his guts—“I didn’t see the big deal about this guy. The producers were obviously crazy about him. I thought he was like a José Jimenez ripoff.” Tony Danza, who played boxer Tony Banta, had the same initial misgivings—“I always liked to say that he wouldn’t have lasted long in my neighborhood. He was so bizarre—I wanted to know who this guy was and he would give you nothing. Sometimes he wouldn’t even acknowledge you to your face; he’d look right through you.” Danza once greeted one of his late arrivals by accosting him with a fire extinguisher—“I figured I’d shoot him, get him aggravated, and maybe we could have it out, you know? I could say, ‘Why don’t you just join in with us here!’ So I take the fire extinguisher and start spraying him near the dressing rooms. And he just stands there. He doesn’t say a word. And I continue to shoot and just empty the thing. And now I’m the maddest guy in the world—because he never even reacts! I didn’t get any reaction. It drove me nuts. Jim Brooks had to take me aside later and tell me, ‘Hey, Tony, no soaking the actors.’”
He kept his walls erect always. On Friday nights, when the show would be filmed before a l
ive audience in bleachers, he sealed himself inside of Latka, interacted with cast and crew only as Latka, took notes from the producers and from director James Burrows and afterward told them tenk you veddy much. Marilu Henner would recall, “If someone in the audience asked him to do Elvis Presley, he’d do Latka doing Elvis Presley: You ain’t nutting but a hound dog. Andy was nowhere to be found.”
Amid the new sitcom lifestyle, he started work late that summer as a part-time busboy at the Posh Bagel on Santa Monica Boulevard. He reported for duty only on Monday nights at eleven, whereupon he donned his apron and began pouring coffee and carting trays until closing. He had not bussed tables since his employment at Chop Meat Charlie’s in Great Neck when he was sixteen—but he had been eager to return to just this sort of solid finite labor. It was, he believed, part of his roots. Plus, he could do funny things in the course of a shift not to be funny no really. The Posh Bagel hired him on the recommendation of this girl Beverly Cholakian who was a part-time hostess there and whom he had met five years earlier in New York when she was a Revlon model before she moved to Los Angeles to become an actress and got cast as one of the incidental high school kids on Welcome Back, Kotter and that was when she began a kind of tortured and volatile affair with Andy, whom she loved deeply (sometimes, per him, a bit too deeply). (He did not want the games of love, just the fruit, and she played the games, which made him yell a lot, and she would call him a big baby and storm off and then they would mend and play until it happened again, and again, and again, but she was very beautiful and he could not stop himself from wanting to be with her, even though his brother Michael had now come to Los Angeles for a long visit and he tried to urge Michael to date her in his stead, but that never quite took, and he did love her, in his way, but that did not stop him from lusting in every other direction, like when he flirted endlessly with a pretty Posh Bagel customer and Beverly interrupted them and said something to ruin his chances and, as Beverly would remember, “Andy went beserk and screamed, ‘How could you do that to me! I could have gotten laid!’ I mean, can you believe that? He had never talked to me like that before. So I ran to the back of the deli and locked myself in a room while he kept screaming. Then we saw him drive off in a rage, swerving and screeching like a madman.” And, of course, they mended again, for a while again, since she wanted to marry him and all.) Anyway, he was what he liked to call an overzealous busboy, in that he liked to remove people’s food before they had finished eating it and often before they had even touched it. “They would get very upset!” said Beverly. “They would want the food replaced. Many times I’d have to say to him, ‘Okay, you’ve done enough tonight—you can leave now.’” And Gregg Sutton would remember dropping by to say hello on a night when the actor Richard Gere was seated in a back booth with a beautiful woman—“And Andy wouldn’t leave them alone. He kept coming by and asking, ‘Would you like more coffee?’ Over and over and over again. Gere said, ‘Quit bugging me!’ But Andy comes over again anyway and starts pouring the coffee while looking away, like somebody had called him, and the coffee starts overflowing all over the table and Richard Gere is flipping out in his Armani suit. If he knows who Andy is, he doesn’t care at this point. He’s screaming, ‘What are you doing, you stupid idiot!’ And Andy’s saying oh-gosh-I’m-sorry and trying to clean up but only making it worse, pushing the coffee all over them. It was hilarious.” And then some reporters found out he was working as a busboy and he would tell them that he did it “because it keeps me in touch with people. Because no matter how famous I may become from show business, I always hope that I could keep my head out of the clouds and remain, you know, just a regular human being. I’m just a human being. And working as a bus-boy reminds me of this.”