Andy Kaufman Revealed! (2 page)

“What did I tell you? Bullshit, huh?” I didn’t say anything. How could I? I was still in a stupor over having just seen the greatest act of my life. As we walked away, my mind whirled over the implications of it all. That was like no entertainment I’d ever seen, no sight I’d ever laid eyes on. Ed Sullivan sure as hell never had anything like Turko. It was repulsive and unbelievably compelling at the same time. I never told my dad what that dollar really bought, but it changed my life. It showed me what power there was in getting people off balance, throwing them a curve, entertaining them by making them
uncomfortable.
It was wonderful.

Later that summer, a thousand miles away in Times Square, a thirteen-year-old kid named Andy, whom I would meet ten years later, went with his Grandma Pearl to see the sideshow at a Storefront freak show called Hubert’s Museum. He saw Turko.

From that sideshow he emerged with his life’s mission.

Looking back, 1968 was the greatest year of my life for many reasons, but mainly because it was when I opened my eyes for the first time. The three men I have to thank for that, because of a little confrontation between them that summer, were Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman on the left, and Mayor Richard Daley way over to the right. After my encounter with Turko, it was the next life-changing event in my life.

Jerry and Abbie and their Youth International Party, or Yippies, had a mission to overturn the evil capitalistic government of the United States of America by deprogramming the youth from the twisted values of previous generations, those comprising fully vested members of the Establishment. Their approach, more or less, was to shitcan every social convention that had been chartered in the previous one hundred ninety-some years of the Republic and start all over. Their goal was enlightenment by awakening the youth of America through the chaos of revolutionary thought, and their tools were sex, drugs, and rock and roll. By sending out their army of flower children to plaster my middle-class Chicago neighborhood with flyers, they announced a “love-in” in Lincoln Park.

What the hell was a “love-in”?
my friends and I wondered. We were “greasers.” John Travolta may have played one in the movie
Grease,
but we lived it. Clad in skintight sharkskin pants, three-inch Cuban heels, and enough Vitalis to lubricate a fleet of Cadillac Biarritzes, we may have looked tough, but we embodied the middle-class and lower-middle-class ideals passed on by our parents. Graduate high school, maybe go on to college, then pick a trade or profession, get married, have kids, and “settle down.” That’s what we knew, that’s what we were.

So when a group of us saw the flyers, adorned with drawings of blissful-looking hippie chicks, we would have ignored them had they not featured one eye-grabbing item: the hippie girls with the flowers in their hair and the diamond-shaped dark glasses seemed to have forgotten to wear their tops. Love-ins we didn’t know from, but tits we did. We decided to go. When we arrived, the park was teeming with thousands and thousands of people, stoned, drunk, having sex in public, and, of course, lots and lots of titties. It was a mini-Woodstock. For the first time in my life I smoked pot. Stoned out of my gourd, I must have made out with half a dozen different girls. It was heaven. That night when my buddies and I wandered home we vowed to return.

The next day I arrived in jeans, barefoot and shirtless. A girl gave me some “love beads” and I put them on. Overnight, the Fonz had become Dennis Hopper. After briefly coming into possession of a few joints I was at one with the cosmos. I found a group of people chanting and sat down next to an older guy with a beard who seemed to be leading the chorus of oms. Even though the crowd was not hung up on affectations like names, the bearded guy introduced himself as Allen. Allen Ginsberg. As I shook his hand someone mentioned that Allen was a writer.
Cool,
I thought.
I’m stoned and hanging out with writers and girls without tops.

After a few peaceful hours of grooving to the vibes and the music and the sweet smell of dope drifting on the night air, Abbie Hoffman climbed onto a wall and announced to the multitude that we had been commanded by the Chicago police to clear the park because it was closing. Now, I had relatives on the force and also knew that Chicago parks never closed, so I smelled a rat. Then a cop blared through a bullhorn that we had to disperse immediately or be arrested. As soon as his announcement ended you could hear the whooshing sound of about three thousand simultaneous tokes. And nobody moved. We were thinking there was no way they could arrest us all. We figured it was a hollow threat if we sat still, with safety in numbers being our salvation. We were wrong.

The “Honorable” Richard Daley, dictator of Chi-town, was jumpy because of the proximity of our love-in to the Democrats’ big convention, so he decided we were not so much Illinois’s sons and daughters as crazed radicals bent on the destruction of all that he and his held holy. He took action. A midwestern Napoleon, he let slip his dogs of war, then set upon us his police, bristling with clubs and tear gas. In moments, our love-in became a scene from
Doctor Zhivago.
Surrounded by hundreds of panicked revelers, I fled, my new girlfriend in tow, smoke and gas and pandemonium reigning as we avoided the swinging billies and advancing walls of grimly determined storm troopers. Thinking we were safe, we rounded a street corner only to run smack into a phalanx of horse cops. My girlfriend slammed into the flank of an equine. She took a nightstick to the face, which knocked her senseless, and then was hauled off by several cops. I managed to push away to escape down an alley, running for my life.

Just that balmy summer weekend forced me, along with thousands of other good, law-abiding, conservative kids, to deal with the shattered myth that the government was looking out for our best interests. Suddenly the words of Abbie and Jerry and Huey and Stokely were starting to ring true. Was the government the enemy? I’d seen it firsthand.

My thinking changed. I started hanging out in the old town area, a bastion of radical thought, and eventually, for all practical purposes, moved in. My new friends weren’t greasers but rather members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). I gave up drive-ins for coffeehouses, and though I still smoked dope I began to trade ideas,
philosophies,
with my new comrades. Though we were all middle-class kids we had just discovered that “that man behind the curtain” was not benevolent but instead was pretty scary. I joined a radical guerilla theater group. I traded my sharkskins for bell-bottoms and grew my hair long. I started saying “far-out” and “outtasight.” I swore off Vitalis for good.

Every weekend, I would sneak into Second City, the famed satirical improv troupe, to catch their latest biting political shots. As time passed, the scales fell from my eyes and I began to realize that this was my country and it had to be saved from the conservative, corrupt fat cats who had sent us into a war merely to profit the “military industrial complex.” It was those men who had subverted the “system” to satisfy their own cravings for power, and, worse, it was those people who had given orders to someone who had whacked my girlfriend-for-the-day across the kisser.

I was pissed. Mayor Daley had created not a “programmed” good kid in a short-sleeved white shirt with a pocket protector and a slide rule, ready to become a “productive” citizen, but rather a warrior, a radical commando, prepared to topple a system that had become irreparably corrupt. But in my case, instead of a gun or a bomb, my weapon was between my ears: my wits and a rapidly developing sense of humor. And I was ready for war.

Andy Kaufman, meanwhile, had become a drunk. Falling into a spiral of party after party in his hometown of Great Neck, New York, a small upscale town on Long Island just over the border from northeast Queens, in Nassau County, Andy spent more time in the local park than at home. Getting hammered day and night with some of the less desirable residents of Great Neck, Andy would often be cajoled into doing his Elvis Presley impression, which he labored to perfect despite the disorientation of his lifestyle. Andy had been doing a dead-on impression of his hero many years before it was hip.

Around this time he took a job as an errand boy and found himself making deliveries for the local butcher shop to comedian Alan King’s luxurious home. Andy would occasionally corner King in his house and do five minutes of his routine. Though King admired Andy’s tenacity, the day he discovered Andy taking an unauthorized dip in his pool he asked the butcher to send a different delivery boy. What impressed Andy most about King’s lifestyle was his fully equipped bar featuring a functioning beer tap. The link between King’s career in entertainment and the fact that he had his own beer dispenser made a huge impression on Andy. He soon began to inform people that he would one day have his own draft-beer delivery system.

Eventually Andy’s constant partying led to a pregnancy. The girl’s parents put the child, a girl, up for adoption. That event gave Andy pause, and he abandoned the parties in the park for the coffeehouses in Greenwich Village, an environment that stimulated his wildly active mind. Soon he was writing poetry and attending read-ins at the various hangouts where post-beat-generation devotees flocked. He grew a beard and let his hair grow, adopting the look of his clique. More important, Andy found the inspiration to begin serious contemplation of his future, the role he might play in the drama of life. With Alan King’s beer tap in mind, as well as the attendant modus vivendi that came from a big-time career in showbiz, Andy decided television was going to be his road to riches.

With high school grades indicating he was barely above a moron, a powerhouse university was not in Andy’s cards. But Grahm Junior College, in Boston, was. Possessed of a modest television department and sympathetic to Andy’s less-than-sterling high school scholastic record, Grahm welcomed him with open arms. It was during this time that two things changed Andy’s course of life permanently. The first was his introduction to transcendental meditation.

Founded in 1957 by His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, transcendental meditation, or TM, was a movement that was sweeping the country. Represented by practitioners as the way to unlock the extraordinary powers within oneself through deep meditation, those in the know liken its effects on the mind and body to drawing a bow: pull back the arrow two feet, and it will fly two hundred yards. Supposedly able to bring one enhanced mental powers in addition to a well-being exceeding the effects of half a dozen draft beers, it was perfect for Andy. He jumped in with both feet and soon embraced the life of a devotee: no more booze or drugs, and two hours a day given over to alpha bliss.

It has been said that chance favors the prepared mind, so perhaps TM had a large role in what happened next. One day Andy was approached by a fellow Grahm student and asked to perform in the campus talent show. Andy had performed as a child in his own room in front of an imaginary camera, putting on lavish specials with famous guests while surrounded by spectacular sets. His shows set records for audiences worldwide. Of course the audiences were only in his mind. His experience with real audiences started around the time he was nine with little shows for neighborhood kids, always with the condition that adults were expressly forbidden to attend.

Now he was being asked to do his thing in front of an audience over whom he had no control. His knee-jerk reaction was to decline, but TM had been altering his thought processes, allaying his fears and shyness, showing him that his concerns about others’ scrutiny of him were groundless. His mental placidity gave him a new confidence he had never before experienced. He agreed to do it.

Using his TM discipline to wash away the terror and jittery nerves, Andy charged himself with a million volts of electricity and went before that audience at Grahm Junior College and performed some of the same routines he had done for his friends as a child. The juxtaposition of his children’s material with an adult audience was lightning in a bottle uncorked. The crowd’s extraordinary reaction, coupled with his new mind-set from TM, proved to Andy that his fears were no longer part of his luggage, so he set them down and never looked back.

Perhaps he had been working up to that point of demarcation all his life. He had always lived in his own mind, but his meditation somehow allowed him to turn inside out and see outside reality as no more dangerous than had been his make-believe world as a child. Andy Kaufman had reinvented himself. It was mid-1969 and he was now ready to take the next step. Emboldened by his formal debut as an entertainer, Andy knew his next move was a necessity for his ascendancy as a performer to the great heights he envisioned. If that was to be his path, his direction in life, he required an audience with the most influential person he knew of. But meeting this person would be harder than getting to the Pope or the president, mainly because this person was bigger than either of them. Andy didn’t know how he was going to do it, but he knew he had to.

He had to meet Elvis.

Andy had written a book about Elvis. Having authored several other unfinished manuscripts, Andy felt his work in progress about Elvis was worthy of passing on to the King for approval. Somewhere around two hundred pages in length, the book was more a hand-scrawled tribute than a biography, and Andy felt it was a perfect calling card for an audience with this great man. Andy’s daily forays into meditation had given him the courage and resolve to meet Elvis. Almost completely broke and without a car, Andy visualized the gulf between himself and the King and saw them meeting. Now he just needed to, as they say,
actualize
the whole thing.

At this point in his career, Elvis was in the throes of a comeback. Overwhelmed by his success in the late ’50s and early ’60s, Elvis had lost some of his bearings and had become to many almost a parody of his former self. One of his strategies to pull himself out of his tailspin was to return to live entertaining, and Las Vegas was the Mecca for live performing. Having already failed once at a comeback, this time Elvis took notice of the successes of Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck and created a power-packed, glitzy show with capes and flair and flash. Thus re armed, he rode hack in triumph as the “new Elvis,” now transformed into the white-clad, sequined, high-collared stage denizen with whom we are so familiar through myriad emulators.