Andy Kaufman Revealed! (21 page)

“You filthy, wife-stealing son of a, bitch!” I screamed as I pulled the gun from my coat and his hands went up hopelessly to shield himself from the blast…

“Bang!”
I said, as my “finger” gun pointed at him. “You’re dead,” I said with a smirk.

For a brief moment he honestly believed I was gunning him down. When he looked through his outstretched hands and saw my finger, I burst into hysterics and had to sit on the damp grass, I was laughing so heartily. It took him a few moments to comprehend he’d been had, having bought my story hook, line, and sinker. Once the shock washed away he joined me, and we laughed long and hard. It was a good reminder for both of us, as put-on artists, how guilt can leave you completely unguarded.

By now, the media were reporting on all Andy’s antics. People had heard about the campus wrestling matches and Tony Clifton’s bizarre appearances and the rumors that Clifton was really Andy Kaufman who was also that “cute little foreign guy” on
Taxi.
Suddenly the public was demanding Andy’s presence, and we were eager to give it to them.

Because Andy was growing in fame and stature as a performer, we decided to mount a big show. Hollywood was our natural choice because it was home turf. Of course Andy played the Improv and the Comedy Store all the time but those venues limited the scope of what we wanted to do. The Park West had been a fun show, but we decided it was time to pull out all the stops and produce a
big
show, the show to end all shows, something that would have people talking for years. Like a couple of bargain-basement Selznicks, we sat down and started laying out our
Gone With the Wind.

We booked the twenty-three-hundred-seat Huntington Hart-ford in Hollywood for two shows, December 15 and 16, 1978. No sooner had tickets gone on sale than they sold out. For some time, we had been flirting with the notion of a large show somewhere in New York, and we decided the Huntington Hartford shows would be the trial run. If they went well, then Hello, Big Apple.

On the night of our first show, Andy had done some extra meditation, and the only thing that kept me from worrying too much was the pressure of five thousand details before we opened. Then the time came, and we brought down the house lights.

After a moment of anticipation, Tony Clifton took the stage. I had set up a 35-millimeter projector, and as he began the first strains of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” I played images of the Blue Angels precision aerial stunt team executing intricate maneuvers as their aircraft spewed great plumes of red, white, and blue smoke. The audience stood, hands over their hearts, and sang along with Tony as I unfurled Old Glory. It was the largest flag I could find and had to be trucked in from Texas. It was stirring, and the crowd suddenly felt more as if they were at an event, like the Olympics or World Cup, than at a comedy show. Then Tony went to work.

Drinking in the standing ovation, Tony took a number of bows before the crowd settled. This was a hip, showbiz crowd, and most everyone knew that eight weeks earlier Tony Clifton had been unceremoniously tossed off the Paramount lot. Now he had returned in triumph, and the who’s who of Tinsel Town applauded the sheer courage of this legend, this god even (albeit tin-plated), for he had done something almost all in attendance had wanted to do but lacked the courage: tell Hollywood to go fuck itself.

Tony sang for a while (backed up by his band, the Cliftones) and, in between verses, berated various proximate audience members, but he was not as vicious as usual, and the crowd was still with him. After a while, Tony signaled his band and the music stopped. He then took the microphone and strolled somberly across the stage as he related a very personal story of profound pain and unbounded joy.

“My wife, Ruth, was the best thing in my life, and when we had our baby, Susie, I was overjoyed. They were the two most precious pearls of my life,” said Tony in a rare moment of vulnerability. “And a few years back, when Ruth passed on after an untimely illness, I didn’t know what I was going to do, I didn’t know if I could go on, but every time I looked into that little girl’s big brown eyes and she’d say, ‘Daddy, it’s going to be all right,’ well, I knew she was right,” he related, his voice nearly breaking. “Folks, I wanna bring out the light of my life, my twelve-year-old angel, Susie. Honey, come on out and meet these nice people!”

As the little girl parted the curtains and shyly shuffled over to Tony, most were on the edges of their seats, some even wiping their eyes, as Tony stood to embrace his beloved child and then sat her on his knee to sing a sentimental duet.

Certainly this guy wasn’t as awful as they had heard; in fact, the big lug apparently had a heart of gold. And even if this blustering lounge denizen wasn’t really Andy Kaufman, he had them in the palm of his hand. The band struck up a soft old show tune, and father and daughter began to sing. It was a wonderful, heart-touching moment, at least until the kid made a mistake by singing over Tony’s part.

Suddenly his hand shot up, and the loud smack it made against her cheek couldn’t have stunned the audience more had it been a gunshot.

“What are you, a fucking idiot?” screeched Tony. The stunned child began to cry.

“Shut the fuck up or I’ll give you another one.” Some of the horrified onlookers stood and booed.

“Hey,” cautioned Tony, “don’t boo. She’s only a child and doesn’t know any better. She’ll think you don’t like her.”

He continued to sing as the little girl whimpered and tried to sing along. She fumbled her next verse and burst into full-blown tears.

“I said shut up, kid!” yelled Tony. “I’m tryin’ to entertain da folks!”

With that, the pitiful, browbeaten youngster jumped down and ran from the stage, bawling her head off. Two security guards swiftly emerged from the wings and removed Tony, to the cheers of the crowd. I announced a short intermission as Andy got out of his Tony getup. And Tony’s little girl? She was back-stage having a soda, laughing with the crew. Nowhere near twelve (she just looked it from a distance), she was one helluva good actress. A few minutes later Andy took the stage to wild applause and began his act, which encompassed everything from lip-synching to his sing-along gibberish harvest song from Caspiar, to his Yiddish “MacArthur Park,” and finally to his killer Elvis. It was two spectacular hours.

Just as the crowd gave Andy his standing O and was preparing to exit after a wonderful show, Andy threw a surprise at them: the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes suddenly took the stage, all 34 of them, high-kicking over their heads. Next, the back door opened and 350 robed members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir marched up the aisle singing “Hallelujah” from Handel’s
Messiah.

Then, just when they thought nothing could top that, Andy introduced Santa Claus, who flew (on a special rigging I found) down to the stage, where he was greeted by Andy. It began to
snow.
Now the audience was delirious with joy, buzzing in delight. Andy took the microphone and stepped to the lip of the stage.

“Everyone, I have a very special treat for you. If you will all proceed outside in a very orderly manner, there are twenty-five buses waiting to take you to milk and cookies.”

Of course everyone thought it was another Kaufman smoke job until they went outside and saw he wasn’t kidding. There
were
twenty five school buses, doors open, waiting to take the twenty-three hundred guests to their treats. Andy came out and routed people into the buses, then they all caravanned twelve blocks down Sunset to the Olde Spaghetti Factory where, inside, the audience was welcomed by fifty volunteers wearing Uncle Andy T-shirts.

Each audience member was handed a milk carton and a package of Famous Amos cookies. Wally “Famous” Amos wasn’t that famous back then, but he was on his way. Wally generously gave me twenty-five hundred bags of cookies to hand out to our guests. A little more than two years later, in February 1981, Andy would return the favor, and “Famous Amos” would star in a dream sequence on
Taxi
wherein he gives cookie-making Latka the comically cynical advice that family and friends are great, but success and cash are better.

The cookie-munching group was so thrilled it was as if they’d died and gone to Andy’s version of heaven. We’d turned the tough, jaded Hollywood “insiders” into kids again. People came up to me to shake my hand, and men and women mobbed Andy so they could hug him and tell him it was one of the most magical experiences of their lives.

Every time Andy looked at me that night, it was with total admiration, for only he and I knew the truth, that his success that night was the direct result of my writing and producing the show. The Rockettes, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Santa Claus, the snow, and the buses were my ideas. Andy truly appreciated that I kept my mouth shut about it and let him take the credit. It was not just a matter of who was buttering my bread; after all, I owed everything to Andy and was content giving him back whatever I could.

I secretly enjoyed every time Andy did a talk show such as Tom Snyder’s or Letterman’s and the host would praise him for his brilliance in taking the audience out in buses for milk and cookies. It was almost as if the milk and cookies episode had become his new trademark. I was content to stay behind the scenes and pull the strings. In most print interviews, Andy readily admitted to having a writer. But talk shows were different. On those he had to maintain the mystique of being out there all alone and quite mad.

The day after the second show, Andy was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Hospital with debilitating hepatitis. Andy had performed his act while suffering from a 104-degree temperature. He took a few days to recuperate despite loathing downtime. Meanwhile, news of the amazing show spread. Soon we were in talks with the management at Carnegie Hall to stage our Huntington show there. We rolled up our sleeves and added a few surprises. This was a dream come true for Andy as he’d always visualized the apex of career success as playing Carnegie Hall.

In February 1979, a couple of months before the Carnegie show, we were in New York to wrap up some details regarding the show and for an appearance by Andy on
SNL.
After
SNL
wrapped we went out for some late dinner. We had just taken our table when an odd-looking young man with an improbably overwrought haute couture look approached.

“Excuse me,” he said, then focused on Kaufman, “but Andy Warhol is sitting over there and would just love to meet you.”

We looked at each other, shrugged why not, then followed the artistic young fellow over to the table of the Pale One. Warhol stood, greeted us, and shook our hands. “Would you care to join me?” he offered.

What were we going to say? We sat down. The minion excused himself, so it was just the three amigos, Bob and Andy squared. I knew Kaufman had a deep appreciation for Warhol, for aside from seeing him as a very talented artist, he also respected Warhol as a fellow put-on master. Warhol’s famous Campbell’s Soup Can veritably screamed,
I’m art because he says I am!
Kaufman loved that brand of artiste’s bravado. His own forays into such onstage put-ons for art’s sake included doing his laundry — with a real washer and dryer — or leisurely eating while everyone just numbly watched.

The elevation of the ordinary to the level of art was something they shared. Despite their commonality as renegade creative intellects, they also shared another trait: excruciating shyness. Consequently, as soon as the hellos and idle chatter were memories, uncomfortable silence set in.

Eventually Warhol muttered a few compliments, then Kaufman muttered a few back, followed by more silence. After a moment, Kaufman perked up. “We did a special for ABC a year or so ago,” he offered. “It hasn’t aired yet, but I think you’d like it.”

Kaufman was right, our special was pretty avant-garde, apparently a little too much so for that tight-ass Fred Silverman, I thought bitterly.

“What did you do in it?” asked the wan Andy.

“Oh, we did some funny bits and had some guests. Howdy Doody was my special guest.”

“Howdy Doody? Really…,” mused the producer of several Paul Morrissey movies.

Bingo. The dueling Andys suddenly bonded faster than you could say “pop phenomenons.” Warhol was also quite taken by the little wooden man, and it turned out he had as much Howdy nomenclature tucked between his ears as Kaufman. Eventually the Howdy recitation wound down, but they were on to other subjects — once the ice was broken I couldn’t get them to shut up.

Lorne Michaels years later saw a parallel between the Andys. “I call it the Warhol sensibility,’” he said. “In Warhol’s
Sleep,
an eight-hour film of a man just sleeping, it’s a nonclimax, he doesn’t wake up. Like Andy’s Gatsby, he doesn’t read and fall into a hole. Nothing happens. It was conceptual and pure. I wish I could say it was popular. It was certainly popular in the small segment of society that I lived in. In the seventies, the kids called it Brechtian.” When Lorne first spotted Kaufman, he had the insight and wisdom to see that in Andy he wasn’t dealing with a simple comedian, but rather a bona fide conceptual artist.

On returning to New York a few months later we hit the ground running with the nearly overwhelming Carnegie show prep. A few days before the April 26, 1979, show date someone in management at Carnegie Hall mentioned that some crazy had been out front railing at potential ticket buyers not to patronize our show. They tried to underplay it but nevertheless thought we should know.

“No problem,” I said dismissively, “it’s New York.”

Sure enough, a deranged man sporting long, scraggly, blond hair and swathed in street rags stood outside Carnegie Hall for a couple of days and screamed at anyone who passed by, let alone walked up to the ticket window. “Andy Kaufman is the Antichrist!” he wailed. “The
Antichrist,
I tell you!” To bolster his claim he wielded a cardboard sign: Andy Kaufman = Anti-Christ. The fervor didn’t hurt ticket sales, as the show sold out during the lunatic’s preachments to the deaf. We never told Carnegie Hall management that the insane man was Andy in disguise.