Andy Kaufman Revealed! (3 page)
Andy discovered that Elvis was to do a series of shows at the Las Vegas Hilton, then the flagship of the chain and one of the biggest houses in Vegas. Having formulated the outline of a plan, and inspired by Jack Kerouac’s classic,
On the Road,
Andy gathered up his looseleaf Elvis opus and hit the asphalt. On foot. From Great Neck, Long Island, twenty-year-old Andy Kaufman began hitchhiking the twenty-five-hundred-some miles to his destiny with the greatest entertainer in the history of the world. Within a week he was entering the outskirts of America’s Gomorrah. By that time, Andy didn’t even have money for food, let alone a ticket to Elvis’s show. So he improvised.
The Vegas Hilton was a huge scurrying anthill, and within a few hours of arriving, Andy had ingratiated himself with the staff and determined that Elvis was indeed going to perform that evening, and that when he did he would pass through the kitchen on the way to the stage. A service elevator that opened directly to Elvis’s penthouse came down to the kitchen, and by using it he would avoid his fans and achieve the quickest access to the stage.
Andy found a small, rarely used walk-in storage cupboard and decided it would be his command center. After scrounging a few leftovers and an empty coffee can for disposal of his bodily excretions, he slipped into the closet and left the door cracked just enough to spot Elvis, or at least to hear any commotion. Like a wild animal burrowing into a den to await its prey, Andy hunkered down and mentally prepared himself for his close encounter. More than eight hours would pass while Andy sat patiently, the Book of Elvis clutched to his chest, his eyes wide in expectation.
Finally it happened. Across the vast kitchen Andy was jarred from a transcendental reverie by an event: Elvis had left the penthouse … and was entering the kitchen. Andy leaped to his feet and prepared himself like a trap-door spider. Peering through the cracked door, suddenly he saw him, in the flesh: the man, the god, that son of Mississippi, Elvis Aaron Presley. Despite his TM discipline, Andy’s heart raced as Elvis advanced on his position, flanked by the preeminent members of the Memphis Mafia, his bodyguards Red and Sonny, the burly West brothers.
Just as E and his coterie reached ground zero, the cupboard door flew open, and this wild-eyed, bush-haired kid popped out, thrusting what looked like a very thick subpoena at Elvis. Red and Sonny instinctively moved to shield their monarch and overwhelm the threat, but something about Andy caused Elvis to stop them.
“Whoa, whoa, boys,” E said, staying any mayhem to the kid — after all, he looked harmless, and this was before stalkers turned pro … and psychotic.
His manuscript held out in supplication, Andy summoned the guts to speak to his bespangled deity. “Elvis, I’m your biggest fan. I wrote this book about you.”
Elvis nodded approvingly. “That’s good, that’s very good.”
As he now seemed to have Elvis’s attention, however fleeting, Andy was pumped up enough to impart to Elvis the sentence he had traveled across the country to utter. “I’m going to be famous, too,” he said confidently.
The King paused to regard him for a second, then uttered the blessing Andy so desperately sought: “I’m sure you will.” And with that, Elvis reached out and gently patted Andy on the shoulder.
Then E continued on, a great white shark surrounded by pilot fish. The encounter had lasted all of twenty seconds, but for Andy it was timeless. Though it was over, he just stood there, still in the grip of its implications, his eyes wide, his feet unmoving. Elvis had already ascended the stage before Andy shuffled away, his book undelivered. But that was unimportant. Andy had received The Blessing. All other considerations were secondary. The moment had been perfect, with Andy saying exactly what he wanted to say, and with the King responding exactly as Andy had imagined he would. It was a defining moment for Andy, perhaps the single most motivating one of his life. He was now ready to become something, and though he wasn’t sure what, it didn’t matter: the King had looked into his eyes and acknowledged him and had transferred a seed of greatness to Andy. Now Andy needed only to cultivate it.
While Andy began developing his stage presentation back in New York, I enrolled at Chicago’s Northeastern Illinois University. Imbued with the defiance I had inherited through experiences with fellow radicals and battles with the police, my scholastic career was oriented toward learning and protest, with the accent on the latter. While taking a literature test one day, I borrowed from my encounter with Abbie Hoffman and adapted a quote I had gleaned from his book
Steal This Book.
In keeping with the spirit of Abbie’s command, I had actually stolen the book and then proceeded to read and practice his writings. When the professor innocently asked the question “What is art?” I audaciously penned, “Art is anything you can get away with, for example, ‘fuck you’ is art if I say it is.”
My cynicism and zeal to emulate Mr. Hoffman, coupled with previous antisocial offenses, gave me two choices: leave the school permanently, or volunteer for a work-study program in the bosom of Appalachia. Quitting would have been a cop-out, so with the blessing of my school I journeyed to Pikeville, Kentucky.
Dubbed the All-American city by the local chamber of commerce, Pikeville was a sleepy little town surrounded by even sleepier little towns such as Raccoon, Hi-Hat, and Beaver. A stronghold for “Christian” values, it was a place where men called each other “neighbor” and women often referred to their cousins as “my husband.” Pikeville had not yet made it into the ’60s, even though it was almost 1970, and when I arrived at Pikeville College, to my horror I was told that when a few professors had protested “the war” the students had had them bodily removed. I had entered a place where the mind-set was One thought fits all. … Stepford with inbreeding.
I settled into life in Pikeville, and, for a while, all went well. I submerged the rebel and searched for my inner Barney Fife. Though my volunteer work at the college was only tolerable, I received new inspiration when I met a beautiful brunette, a fellow volunteer named Brenda Oyer, and we began dating. I took a part-time job at a local radio station, and Brenda and I started discussing a future together, outside Pikeville. Our best options were to head back to Chicago or to go on to Brenda’s hometown of Pittsburgh, but Brenda was unsure when we should actually leave Pikeville. I’d determined that Pikeville was no longer in my game plan, so I hatched a plot to hasten her decision.
Christmas was just around the corner, and the people at the local radio station had dropped their guard and begun letting me do live spots. I had created a character named Winny the elf who, in consort with my blustering Santa Claus, exhorted children to patronize the local toy store. But I became sick of constantly deceiving the children of Pikeville in order to induce them to mindlessly line the pockets of our sponsor. So one day I arrived ready to free Winny, Santa, and the youth of eastern Kentucky from the shackles of rampant consumerism. I opened my microphone and, instead of sweetly heralding the arrival of Santa, Winny the elf shrieked, “Boys and girls, bad news! This is terrible! Santa’s dead!” I was halfway out the door as the switch-board lit up like a Christmas tree.
Later that day, on the way to Chicago, I proposed to Brenda.
In Chicago I went back to school. After a year or so, Brenda and I decided to head to Pittsburgh. Once we settled in, Brenda’s sister Janet sized up my subversive attitude and suggested an outlet for my energy: the drama department at Carnegie-Mellon University, one of the most prestigious acting schools in the country. I auditioned, was accepted, and soon the acting bug had seriously infected me. Rubbing elbows with fellow students Ted Danson and Judith Light, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and began visualizing an acting career. Responding to a bulletin-board flyer announcing a summer-stock gig in Mansfield, Pennsylvania, I auditioned for and got the part of the villain in
The Drunkard.
After a particularly artistic rendering one evening, another cast member, a guy I didn’t know all that well named Chris Albrecht, approached me with the tip that a very cute girl in the audience had been particularly taken with my performance. Despite the fact that I was married, I was an
actor
first and foremost, so I approached her at the after-show party, empowered with the knowledge that I was doing my duty to my public. When she vigorously blew me off I knew I’d been had. Given the choice between punching Albrecht’s lights out and laughing with him, I chose the latter. It was a good decision, as we became very close friends.
Chris and I talked a lot about acting. Eventually the subject all
real
actors discuss in their careers came up: when do we move to New York? Brenda would not endure the chaos of the Big Apple, so she and I parted, at least temporarily. It was a tough decision, but I knew that my destiny lay in New York, so I reluctantly said good-bye and rendezvoused with Chris in New York to assault the acting world.
By late 1972, Andy had become the cause célêbre of the New York comedy-club scene as the vanguard of new comics arrived. The year before, Andy’s uncle Sam Denoff, a very successful television writer and producer, had introduced Andy to Carl Reiner. Thoroughly impressed, Reiner recommended Andy to his nephew and manager, George Shapiro. George saw Andy’s potential and helped him gain a foothold in the burgeoning world of club comedy. Though the clubs didn’t pay back then, they were great places to receive exposure if one hoped to move up to paying gigs or even television. Every night, Andy would borrow his dad’s car and shuttle between the two main venues, Budd Friedman’s the Improv and Rick Newman’s Catch a Rising Star. Andy’s act was impossible to categorize. Though agents and managers all desperately wanted him, they just didn’t know what to do with him. Imagine a man coming out on stage, eating a bowl of potatoes, then climbing into a sleeping bag and snoozing while an alarm clock ticks down. No one had ever seen such an act, and incredulous audiences laughed constantly for the twenty minutes until the bell rang.
Some described Andy’s presentations as performance art before the genre even existed. Some were reminded of the late comic genius Ernie Kovacs, but, still, Andy was too edgy, too unusual to permit definition. Despite the local acclaim, Andy could not even afford to buy his own beers, let alone his dream beer-tap system. But the growing perception of him as a comic “artist” was compensation enough.
Andy came to be known as a comedian, a categorization he would grow to hate, as he felt it didn’t begin to express the depth of his talents or the breadth of his vision as an artist. Though Andy would have accepted “con man” or even “bullshit artist” over “comedian,” he preferred to think of himself as a song-and-dance man. But the young “comic’s” evolving act encompassed a blend of the real and the unreal, often woven into a demonstration where some or all of what the audience witnessed did not occur. While the other stand-ups were simply telling jokes, Andy created a whole world for his audience — a world they were frequently unsure of. Andy was honing the birth of what I call Kaufmanism, his original interpretation of smoke and mirrors.
Unfortunately for the acting team of Albrecht and Zmuda, the light of stardom did not shine in time to save us from squandering our savings as well as from losing our apartment. Soon we were starving and homeless, which was the real, unglamourous introduction to the entertainment business that most people don’t talk about. Luckily, Chris and I weren’t on the streets for long, as a kingly gentleman named Dick Scanga offered us a tiny salary and lodging in the back of his Upper East Side theater. Dick was not only best friends with actor Chuck Grodin but also the proprietor of the Little Hippodrome, New York City’s first dinner theater.
Dick’s notion was that since Broadway shows were expensive and usually preceded by dinner, a thrifty combo would be just the ticket for budget-minded seekers of live culture. Unfortunately for Dick, New York theatergoers considered themselves far too sophisticated for such “packaged entertainment,” and his big experiment was Hoovering up his life savings at an alarming rate. But Dick’s financial dilemma was the furthest thing from our minds, ensconced as we were in his actors’ dressing rooms in exchange for light duties around the place such as cooking, cleaning, and table waiting. Dick’s only stipulation was that we have our sleeping bags out of the way by the time his thespians arrived at 7
P.M.
The clockwork torture of every audition becoming another personal rejection was beginning to take its toll on us. One night after getting bumped from our rooms by Dick’s slightly less starving actors, Chris and I went separate ways to find a little solace from the lowest-rung-on-the-food-chain existence that had become our lives. Dazed and feeling sorry for myself, I took a left on 44th Street instead of my usual right. A moment later I was staring at the facade of the Improvisation, or the Improv, as it would become shorthanded, the first comedy club in America. I had a couple of bucks in my pocket (thanks to Dick), so I paid the two-drink minimum and went inside. I didn’t know it at the time, but my entry into that club was no less significant than had I been riding into Virginia City, Nevada, in 1849, at the start of the gold rush. But now it was 1973, and within the next few years a comedy rush would take place, with the Improvisation as Main Street, Virginia City.
A Foreign Man
It wasn’t an act, it was a happening.
CARL REINER
As I cozied up to my vodka that night, I watched an array of young, talented unknowns named Jay Leno, Richard Lewis, Elayne Boosler, Joe Piscopo, Richard Belzer, and Larry David take the Improv’s stage. (Larry would later co-create, write, and produce a little show called
Seinfeld.)
During breaks between acts, a shaggy-haired young foreigner could be heard from the back of the room begging, then demanding, that Budd Friedman let him on the stage. The strange young man with the odd accent got the attention of everyone in the packed house as he and Friedman went back and forth about his being permitted onstage. I didn’t know Budd Friedman, but I thought he was being overly patient with this sad loser.