by Bill Zehme
Anyway, he left and Conaway called him at home a few days later and apologized and said that he had been drunk and way out of line and Andy told him that it was okay and that he knew Conaway was drunk and thus not in control of himself and Andy suggested they get together soon to talk it out. And Conaway was flabbergasted by his benevolence—“He was so forgiving and so understanding. And he apologized, too, for provoking me. I thought, This guy’s amazing! What a guy! And so after that we got friendly.”
To get to Carnegie Hall:
That February, Foreign Man taped a Cher special called Cher and Other Fantasies and he played Adam in the Garden of Eden and Cher played the serpent with the apple and also Eve but Eve as a New Jersey harridan in cat-rimmed eyeglasses. A week later in New York, on February 24, he was himself again, as such, on Saturday Night Live, where he performed “I Go Mad When I Hear a Yodel” with the B Street Conga Band, as he had done on the Van Dyke show, and he was as good as ever although there was not much laughter from the audience which was understandably rendered agog (arty juxtaposition et cetera). Lorne Michaels, meanwhile, had begun to detect some change taking place which became more and more apparent with Zmuda now fastened to his side. “With success, there were now people around him that seemed opportunistic. I hadn’t much liked Zmuda, perhaps wrongly, for that reason. After Andy went out to California, I also think he felt this pressure to get more astringent in what he did on our show, so that his stand-up had less of a desire to please, because he was doing that professionally on Taxi. Suddenly, he wasn’t getting laughs and didn’t mind. Andy, who had been this benign artistic presence and had happily done two or three minutes at a time on the early shows, now wanted to do six or seven minutes. The feeling around Saturday Night—particularly as the cast’s popularity heated up, and particularly with John Belushi—was, Why was he still considered untouchable? It wasn’t that anybody—John included, and maybe even John most of all—ever questioned him while it was still in this innocent thing, for lack of a better word. But it got a little slick, a little more West Coast, a little more show business. It was now less innocent and I was surprised.”
And then he toured again and his touring life, especially on college hustings, had now become a cockeyed caravan bent on fleshly pursuit and serial idiocy. He missed planes constantly and would only step on a plane with right foot first (superstition) and, once on the plane, he and Bob improvised altitudinous hijinks—he would weep uncontrollably or feign panic attacks and Bob would slap him loudly or chastise him loudly and it was great fun for an audience of two, meaning themselves and/or each other. He liked to carry a toy gun in his suitcase and, on March 14, American Airlines caught sight of it in the X-ray detector and guards pounced on him and he tried to explain that he always carried his toy gun, for ten years he had carried his toy gun, and they roughed him up anyway and he missed that plane as well. And Bob, of course, found him to be a complete pain in the ass on the road, no matter that he loved him like a brother, and came to abhor playing the role of caretaker, shepherding him to engagements, feeding him phony rehearsal times and phony departure times (two or more hours earlier than they were actual, because he would always be at least two hours late for such irritants), then keeping him company at asinine day-parts and night-parts and dawn-parts, having to check under his hotel beds and peek into his hotel closets to make sure that the boogeyman was not lurking therein, and never being able to go get properly loaded, since “Koughman”—as Bob liked to call him—would not indulge in anything stronger than chocolate. And so Bob learned ways to ditch him, to shove him off on other poor bastards and this was most easily achieved in college scenarios because there was always some kid in charge of getting them to and from wherever the hell they were supposed to go.
Best/worst/standard example in ditch-Koughman history: March 21, 1979; York College; York, Pennsylvania; poor bastard—kid named Terry Cooney, age twenty, soon-to-be-amazed. The show went well; Andy wrestled mannish girl, won, not his type, wanted other options; back to Ramada Inn, Cooney driving Andy, Bob, in his own Ford Pinto; at Ramada, Bob handed Cooney twenty dollars and said, “Take Andy out to get something to eat.” (Ditch was thus completed.) They drove, Cooney, Andy, no Bob, to three places, in each of which Andy questioned management as to whether the fish was fried or broiled; he wanted broiled; it was always fried; he settled for a Bob’s Big Boy; ordered himself fried fish and two chocolate shakes (Cooney: “I’ll never forget that he had two chocolate shakes”); he accidentally-no-really spit some shake on their waitress (“The woman was horrified, she was fuming”); then it was okay because somebody recognized him as Latka; back in Pinto, Cooney asked, “Back to Ramada?” Andy said no; said, “Let’s do something”—as in females. They drove to another nearby college, to Lancaster F&M, to a frat party Cooney knew of; on the way, Andy rifled through Cooney’s glove box; Cooney worked college security, kept handcuffs stashed in box, just in case (“I couldn’t see what he’s doing and the next thing I know I heard click-click”); and now they were handcuffed (“I said, ‘Oh God, Andy! I don’t have the key! It’s back in York, thirty minutes away, on my dresser!”). They went to the frat party handcuffed; they danced with women handcuffed; women threw themselves at Andy and they felt up the women handcuffed (“Wherever Andy’s hand went, my hand followed. I was living vicariously through Andy—two guys’ hands, one girl at a time”). By 4 A.M., they returned to the car; Andy wanted food again; they entered an all-night joint handcuffed; at the table they hid connected hands under napkin (“I’m turning different shades of red”); they both ordered food that required knife and fork; they took turns with utensils (“We were constantly borrowing each other’s hands to cut things”). It was nearing 6 A.M.; Andy was not tired; Cooney said his roommate’s ski club was having a sunrise breakfast party before early skiing at nearby Round Top mountain; they went and nobody wanted to ski because Andy had come; a girl there professed love for him, urgent love, very extremely, and invited him to her sorority house; Andy, Cooney went handcuffed to sorority house at 9 A.M. (“At one point I was sitting in the hallway with my arm stuck inside the girl’s bedroom door and that was when my hand had the best time of its life”). They had sex with the girl handcuffed, with Cooney outside the door, with Andy en flagrante inside the door (“I just used my imagination because I was trying the best I could to be a gentleman while handcuffed to this maniac”). Finally, they returned to Cooney’s apartment and detached themselves and then Andy jumped on top of the bed of another Cooney roommate and bounced until the roommate awoke and thought the world was ending. Near eleven, twelve hours after their special nocturne began, Cooney deposited Andy back at the Ramada Inn where Bob awaited, refreshed. A friend of Cooney’s later that day asked him what Andy was like. “And I said, ‘That’s the problem. He had different personalities all through the night. I didn’t know which was the real him.’”
He wanted one of the tall blond hookers that dallied with Clifton at Taxi … the one who was originally from Denmark … whose name was Anna … he wanted Anna to come to New York for Carnegie Hall…. Andy told George that she was beautiful and very nice and good at sex…. When Andy had had sex with her before—as when he had sex with most hookers—he had asked people to look into his eyes afterward…. He had asked Kathy Utman or Linda Mitchell or Wendy before she quit to look very deeply into his eyes and he would say, “Did I lose my innocence?” and usually they said he didn’t but sometimes his pupils were kind of opague … not as full of light as at other times…. (He had this ongoing argument with Linda—he thought prostitutes were the wisest women in the world because they understood men; Linda would always disagree. “He would call me in the middle of the night sometimes and start the argument all over again,” she said. “He couldn’t stand me to disagree.”) Anna said she would fly to New York on Thursday, April 26, which was the day of the night of the concert, and would stay with him until Sunday…. Andy sent George to her apartment a week before the show and George gave her her plane t
ickets and hotel information and two hundred dollars for her first night of sexual service with Andy and confirmed Andy’s proposal that she would get another three hundred if she spent the rest of the time with him and George was also impressed by her sweetness and saw nothing wrong with any of this because there was nothing wrong because Andy never made it sound very wrong…. Anyway, at Carnegie Hall, she would watch the concert perched in the gilded filigreed honor box above the stage, seated next to Stanley and Janice who also thought she seemed like quite a pleasant young lady….
There would be twenty school buses to accommodate the 2,800 people who would come and this was a problem because to have twenty buses idling beside Carnegie Hall after ten o’clock on a Thursday night conjured the promise of midtown traffic tangles most horrendous. So it was decided that he should give special patronage to local law enforcement which was why on Sunday night he had appeared at a swank Shubert Theater benefit to help provide bulletproof vests for the New York Police Department. He did three numbers (two were Elvis ones), and he performed on a bill that included the likes of Robin Williams, Lauren Bacall, Marlo Thomas, Chita Rivera, and Sarah Jessica Parker, the twelve-year-old star of the Broadway musical Annie, who noticed (as only a twelve-year-old might) that both Williams and Andy were awkward and sweaty and skittish offstage. Of Andy, she recalled, “He didn’t seem like a confident man. And his eyes were so, you know, wet.” Gregg Sutton, who accompanied him on bass guitar that night and who would conduct the orchestra on Thursday, watched the effete theater crowd display pronounced disinterest in Andy—“They didn’t get him. It started to make us feel a little nervous about Carnegie Hall.” Meanwhile, Good Morning America correspondent Joel Siegel brought a camera crew to 21 Grassfield Road in Great Neck, where Andy led a tour of the cradle of dreams that was the Kaufman basement and introduced Janice to the camera people and the viewer people—“This is my mom. Her name’s Mommy. And she’s very embarrassed, aren’t you, Mommy?” Janice (pinkening): “Yes, I am.” Siegel: “How do you react to the things you see Andy do on television?” Janice: “I love it. I love it all. I’m one of his best fans.” (Of course, the wrestling and the Tony Clifton business she could do without, but this wasn’t the time for mentioning that.) Andy then told Siegel about the little girl in seventh grade with whom he fell in love but never met and said that everything that he had done for the last fifteen years was to earn her attention, especially Carnegie Hall—“It’s only so I can get more confident and become more famous so I can meet this girl.” Siegel: “You’re telling me the truth, right?” Andy: “Um, yeah.”
It would all be the same as before only different and bigger and more unwieldy and not as well paced and cameras would film it and the film would be broadcast in a severely truncated fashion on the cable network Showtime three months later (when it would still look unwieldy), but everyone who was in the auditorium that night would never forget what they experienced and, later, what they ate. Because this was New York, because this was Carnegie Hall, his campaign of disregard was both magnified and sanctified and was thus made instant media legend. He would always consider it to be his greatest professional triumph, edging out his two other greatest triumphs—his network special that the network still wouldn’t air and the Clifton holocaust at Taxi. (Only one other event would enter this hallowed private arena of conquest and that event would actually take place in an arena and he would be the only one who considered it a triumph since it would telegraph to the masses without ambiguity that he was not who they thought he was, not that anyone ever thought they knew anyway.) As with opening night at the Huntington Hartford, it was raining again, albeit lightly. Celebrities were there again—Andy Warhol in row one; Dick Cavett, Penny Marshall, Rob Reiner, Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara, et cetera. (Also present, down in front, were F Troop stalwarts Gil Gevins and Glenn Barrett and Ginger Petrochko.) The program would begin—as it had been eccentrically advertised—at the stroke of three minutes past eight o’clock; Zmuda in referee garb would lead the audience in a sixty-second countdown to evince such.
Ten minutes before eight-oh-three, Clifton stalked about the backstage corridors, very unhappily—he was to begin the proceedings by singing the national anthem, then recite the wife soliloquy (this time minus presence of wife or child), then sing just a little more and refuse to leave the stage. Chuck Braverman, who was producing the Showtime version of the concert, sat outside the theater in the technical truck and told his sound man to switch on Clifton’s wireless microphone to make sure it worked. “So he turned it on and we heard Tony Clifton privately telling Zmuda what an asshole Andy Kaufman was—how he couldn’t stand him and that he didn’t want to go on, that he wanted more money and more credit—just ranting and raving and screaming. And neither he nor Zmuda had any idea that I was doing a mike check at that point! Everybody in the truck just sort of froze and looked at each other and collectively thought, Uh-ohhh, what are we in for tonight?”
One minute before eight-oh-three, an elderly woman who was a man who was Robin Williams who was disguised as an elderly woman who was supposed to be Andy’s grandmother wordlessly tottered from the wings and settled most visibly into a plump easy chair at stage right where she would remain—a docile silent specter—for the next three hours of exposition. As George would report in his exuberant postmortem, He sat there the whole show, reacted as a little old lady would react, sometimes laughing, sometimes nodding, and also nodding off. She acted as though she were falling asleep a few times.
Eight-oh-three: Gregg Sutton, maestro, who wore black tie and tails as did each member of his twelve-piece ad hoc ensemble, lifted his baton. There commenced a remarkable ten-minute overture that he had arranged for this occasion, an orchestral suite that portended all that would follow—Mighty-Mouse-The-Impossible-Dream-Popeye-the-Sailor-Man-MacArthur-Park-The-Cow-Goes-Moo-Oklahoma-Love-Me-Tender-Jailhouse-Rock-This-Friendly-World-Carolina-in-the-Morning. “It was high-class insanity,” he said. (He had intended to conduct in white gloves but had to forfeit them to Robin Williams so as to conceal giveaway hairy hands.) Clifton then emerged and began his attack—as he performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” a montage of images were projected on a large movie screen behind him, including rippling flags, jet flyovers, missile detonations, goose-stepping Nazis, and Hitler himself.
He did it beautifully, said George. For Tony Clifton. People seemed to enjoy it. Before being removed from the stage (and this was his most abbreviated appearance ever), Clifton introduced his “protégés”—the Love Family, a legitimate ensemble of eight brothers and sisters, ages three to fifteen, whose five-part harmonizing was actually very big in Venezuela (Andy had stumbled upon them in Los Angeles on the Venice Beach Boardwalk). And so the Love Family took the spotlight and earnestly launched into sugary medleys from Hair and The Sound of Music while moving about in sprightly/awkward geometric choreography. And the audience—sensing put-on—rebelled by the second number and booed them to tears which were real (actual real tears! oh!); the Loves, now crushed, left the stage which had now been spattered with debris. It was very sad and uncalled for and really cruel, said George, who also noted, I felt they were on too long. Sutton said, “For the first time in history, the audience wanted more Clifton! It was a very hip crowd.”
Andy took over and did what he had done before again—with certain alterations. “Um,” he said early on, “when I was starting in show business, my grandmother—we used to talk a lot and she said, ‘Why are you wasting your time?’ And I said, ‘Grandma, one day I’m gonna be playing Carnegie Hall.’ She said, ‘Oh, come on!’ I said, ‘Yup. Grandma, I promise you—I’ll be in Carnegie Hall and when that day comes, I’m gonna give you the best seat in the house!’ So, anyway, there’s my grandma over there.” And he pointed to the man on the stage who was not his grandmother and said, “See? I told you! I told you this would happen, right?” And he then promised the audience an evening of surprises and cartoons and games and prizes and big-name stars and treats. (“Everybody say m
ilk. Okay, now everybody say cookies. Okay, very good!”) And he brought out an actual street person named Grant “Bliss” Bowman whom Andy had discovered two New Year’s Eves ago in Times Square singing a blissful Happy New Year song at the top of his lungs, which Bowman now blissfully reprised, and re-reprised, and re-re-reprised. (Zmuda and Sutton were dispatched earlier in the week to find Bowman on his favorite corner where they lured him with an offer of one hundred dollars payable after the show; Bowman would not listen to their entreaties until he received—on the spot—a bottle of port, which now protruded from his back pocket. “He wanted the kind that didn’t have a cork,” said Sutton.) Then, Andy showed a forties-vintage Hopalong Cassidy one-reeler that Grandpa Paul had given him long ago, wherein dancing girls wearing horse heads affixed to their waists gamboled to the tune of “I’ve Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle”—after which he brought out the only surviving dancer no really named Eleanor Cody Gould with whom he chatted for a while. (Her: “I knew Tom Mix!” Him: “Did you know Will Rogers?” Her: “Oh, no—and I always wanted to!” Him: “How did you feel when his plane crashed?”) Then he made her ride a stick pony as he borrowed Sutton’s baton and led the orchestra in a dizzying rendition of the song from the film, whose tempo he accelerated until she collapsed of a heart attack and was pronounced dead and was covered with a jacket and she lay in state … for a long disturbing silent interlude … until Andy returned wearing an Indian headdress and performed a sacred tribal dance and she snapped back to life—and it worked just as they had rehearsed earlier in the hotel suite. A couple of people walked out, George reported. Two people in front of me walked out during that segment. They didn’t appreciate that type of humor. But most of the audience enjoyed it.