Andy Kaufman Revealed! (34 page)

Our scam at Harrah’s worked on several levels. When George Shapiro booked Clifton there, he never expected Tony to last two nights, let alone two weeks. That bastard Kaufman told me afterward (in spite of his pep talk) that he had figured I would survive no longer than ten minutes. I surprised them all. Actually, Andy felt
Tony Clifton
couldn’t last longer than ten minutes, given his propensity for crowd antagonism. I pointed out that although his Clifton begged rejection, mine gingerly courted acceptance. Whereas Andy’s Tony was a form of vicious catharsis for him, my Tony was just an
act.
And as an act I instinctively worked to keep most of the audience in their seats. (I say “most” as I could never forget that I was, after all, Tony Clifton.)

Prior to my debut at Harrah’s, Andy warned me, “Clifton can get to you. You have to fight with him sometimes, he’s pretty intense, hard to shake.” During the filming of
Man on the Moon
I passed that warning on to Jim Carrey. A consummate artist, Jim discovered the wisdom of my words: Tony, once you fell under his spell, was a very tough demon to exorcize. Jim also had a choice over how to play Clifton: my version or Andy’s. He chose mine because it was a more “accessible” direction for the way he wanted to portray Tony.

Much has been written on the Andy-as-Tony phenomenon, and some have suggested that Andy exhibited classic multiple personality disorder, or MPD. One expert felt Andy might have been demonstrating a rare case of “controlled” MPD in that, unlike most other sufferers of MPD, Andy could actually regulate his disorder, calling it up almost like a channeler.

One fact that seems to support the notion of MPD concerns a particular sexual preference over which Andy and Tony differed utterly: oral sex. According to experts, one cannot change hard-and-fast sexual proclivities, and though Andy was absolutely repulsed by oral sex, Tony Clifton lived for it. My friend psychologist Joe Troiani says that one cannot change such an orientation unless multiple personalities are involved.

But whoever Tony Clifton or Andy Kaufman or Bob Zmuda
really
were at that moment wasn’t as important as that we achieved our two goals, getting Tony more press and proving you could book him and he wouldn’t necessarily self-destruct. Now we had
two
Cliftons in Our arsenal, had Tony and worse Tony, so I went back to work on
The Tony Clifton Story
and Andy returned to
Taxi,
as we awaited the impending premier of
Heart-beeps.

On the weekend that
Heartbeeps
debuted, we held our breath, knowing Tony’s movie future probably hung in the balance. Cut down to seventy-nine minutes, it was one of the shortest films Universal ever released. I was told by an eyewitness that when studio head Ned Tanen saw it in an early screening, he went ballistic. The picture opened and the word “bomb” was tied to it before the first reel unwound.

On the Monday after it opened, Universal conveyed a brief message to us that contained two statements: one, no way in hell would they ever make
The Tony Clifton Story;
and two, leave immediately. By comparison, the people on the
Titanic
had all day. When I fled to my Rambler Rebel I was stunned to see they had
already
stenciled my name out. I wanted to call David Steinberg and tell him I now understood. Suddenly the existential nature of the lyric “When you’re hot you’re hot, when you’re not you’re not” made a lot of sense to me.

That train wreck called
Heartbeeps
rolled over Andy as fingers began pointing in all directions. “Well, he kept us waiting with all that meditation” was one reason some of the perpetrators of the film claimed it bombed. Andy’s meditation had been contractually approved by the studio, but in the aftermath of a disaster people play fast and loose with the facts. The bottom line was Andy’s film career was dead, and with it our chances of making
The Tony Clifton Story.

Adding salt to the wound of our loss of Tony’s cinematic chance was the fact that the writers of
Taxi
had become so enamored of Tony Clifton’s brazen demeanor, not only on their set but also in the trades, that they created a paler, more acceptable imitation called Vic Ferrari. When I heard of the Ferrari character I thought,
Quit stealing our material — write your own. You might have bought Foreign Man’s soul, but not Tony Clifton’s.
They had Latka, who was feeling inadequate about meeting girls, devise his own Mr. Hyde, the supercool Vic Ferrari, not unlike Jerry Lewis’s Buddy Love from
The Nutty Professor.
The swaggering Vic Ferrari was so popular the show ran with him for a number of episodes. Though Andy used none of the Clifton features or props, you could still see glimpses of Clifton — as a younger man — in Ferrari.

Then (probably because in Hollywood nothing fails like failure) ABC announced that they were passing on Andy’s basement comedy “Uncle Andy’s Funhouse.” It was another stake through the heart. Not long after, a similar project got mounted. It was called
Pee-wee’s Playhouse,
and instead of Uncle Andy hosting a kid’s show for adults, the host was Pee-wee Herman (aka Paul Reubens).

Despite Reubens being a fan of Andy’s he more or less commandeered Andy’s idea. I know that because Andy told me Reubens paid him a visit to break the news and ask for his blessing. What else could Andy do but be magnanimous about it? Legally, Andy couldn’t claim ownership to a Howdy Doody–type show, but it bothered him that someone else pulled off his dream project. Yet in a town like Hollywood, where ideas are openly stolen on a daily basis, it’s to Paul Reubens’s credit that he sought Andy’s permission. Andy considered Reubens a fellow artist and did nothing to stand in his way. That
Pee-wee’s Playhouse
went on to become a major success was in some small way a validation of Andy’s original concept. Though Andy never told anyone else, he once confided to me that it deeply bothered him that Reubens got the shot and we didn’t.

Two other instances where Andy felt his ideas had been commandeered by others both revolved around Tony Clifton. The first occurred when Andy befriended one of the
SNL
writers in hopes the writer could persuade Lorne Michaels to allow Tony Clifton on the show. One day the writer called and gave Andy good and bad news: Lorne liked the idea of a sleazy lounge-lizard character; unfortunately he didn’t see Andy in the role. Consequently, the recurring part went to Bill Murray. Always magnanimous, Andy gave the writer his blessing as Murray’s Nick, the lounge singer, went on to become a signature character for the actor.

Kaufman also felt that Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi’s creations, Jake and Elwood, the Blues Brothers, were influenced by the Clifton persona. One of the most powerful elements of the Blues Brothers’ mystique was that from the moment they entered a venue to the time they left, they never broke character.

At that time, no act other than Kaufman was doing anything even remotely similar.

Going back home to
SNL
took our minds off the debacles of late. It was fun being a fly on the wall of the set. One day, during a dress rehearsal, I noticed Eddie Murphy walking around in a preposterous Gumby outfit. Dick Ebersol, who had recently been brought back to run the show after Jean Doumanian’s short reign, was telling Murphy he wanted to cut the piece.

“Nobody remembers Gumby,” he insisted.

Andy and I were happening by and overheard. “Oh, no,” countered Andy. “Gumby’s great! You should leave him in.” And we walked away.

Ebersol must have listened, because a cigar-chomping Murphy as Gumby, railing, “I’m Gumby,
damn it!”
turned out to be one of Murphy’s (and the show’s) most popular characters.

During his tenth appearance on
SNL,
on January 30, 1982, Andy was slated to play Elvis in a sketch. Albert Goldman’s tell-all bio,
Elvis,
was just out and had stirred up great controversy in its depiction of the King, particularly the sexual peccadilloes he allegedly exhibited, such as his fondness for girls wrestling each other while clad only in white cotton panties. That revelation was a stunner for Andy, who burst with pride that he and his idol shared such a fetish (women wrestling, not the white cotton panties).

Using the Goldman book for inspiration, Andy and I concocted a scene that played on the wrestling allegation. After a concert, Elvis (Andy) repairs to his dressing room where his bodyguard Red West (me) brings in two young girls to meet Elvis. Elvis dismisses Red and then asks the two (clothed) girls to wrestle. Just as they take a wrestling stance, Elvis stops them and says, “Hold it! Take off your clothes first — but leave on them white cotton panties.”

The moment he uttered that line, Andy suddenly broke character, removed the Elvis wig, and turned to the camera. “I do not agree with this scene,” he said angrily, “and I do not agree with Albert Goldman’s book.” He then walked out.

A few weeks later, on February 17, 1982, Andy appeared on
Late Night.
Dave gave him a forum to challenge Albert Goldman to a wrestling match. If Goldman lost, as Andy swore he would, he would he required to take back all those terrible things he said about Elvis in his book.

Goldman never accepted the challenge. Did Andy mean what he said? Was he really offended by Goldman’s claims? Not at all. Andy wasn’t really the kind of person to be offended by much of anything and in fact secretly enjoyed the book.

By March of ’82 we were back in sweet home Chicago, playing the Park West again. We scheduled a few extra days in town just to hang out. Andy wanted me to take him to the locations of two of my greatest pranks. Like a little kid, he wanted to go to the exact locale and hear the stories all over again. As we drove down North Avenue, the scene of my first “psychodrama,” I thought about my days with the guerrilla theater company, forty budding actors committed to complete lunacy.

“One evening, all forty of us spread out to various bus stops along here, probably over a mile or so,” I began. “As the bus came along and picked us up, pretty soon everybody was on the same bus, all of us. So then at the appointed time, a fellow who was more or less the director of our little group of merry pranksters starts coughing. Pretty quick we all join in, all forty of us, hacking away.”

“Of course, there was nothing to cough about,” noted Andy.

“Nothing,” I concurred.

“And there were other people on the bus, right?” asked Andy.

“Oh yeah, yeah, the thing was packed. Us and probably fifteen, twenty other people. Anyway, one of us starts it with, ‘Hey, do you smell those gas fumes?’ and the rest of us jump in, ‘Oh, yeah, there’re gas fumes coming from somewhere,’ and immediately the others — the unsuspecting passengers — they’re coughing too.”

Andy grinned. “The power of suggestion …”

“Big time. So they’re all coughin’, and pretty soon so’s the driver, he’s coughin’ his head off. He pulls over, everybody’s eyes are watering. The driver radios in, ‘We need another bus,
and send medics!’
That night we made the local news and the whole troupe died of laughter.”

While we drove Wound, I told him my famous Escaped Lions incident. That time the troupe went to the zoo and took up positions at specific locations. Suddenly all of us began screaming that we’d seen the lions get loose and they were after everyone. In no time our forty became four hundred, as everyone, even the hot-dog vendors — fearing the big cats would be drawn by their steamed tube steaks — fled for their lives. I told Andy that even after all those years, not one of the forty conspirators had spilled the beans.

“That’s amazing. That many people, for that long,” he said.

“Yeah, but it’s necessary to keep secrets. We’ve sure got a few we don’t want anybody to know, don’t we?” I offered.

He paused. “Yeah, we do.” After a moment he spoke again.

“I’ve got a secret, something only my family knows, maybe one or two other people.”

“Yeah? What’s that?” I asked, feeling a setup.

“I have a daughter.”

“Oh, Kaufman, what total
bullshit!”
I roared.

He was quiet for a moment. “No, Bob, it’s true. I do have a daughter.”

At that point in time, I’d known him going on ten years, and I could recognize the truth in his eyes. When you’re someone like Andy Kaufman, you need at least one person with whom you can once in a while drop all pretenses, all the masks, and just be yourself, be
vulnerable.
We had that sort of relationship, so I realized he was dead serious.

As I mentioned earlier, the young lady Andy impregnated while living in Great Neck decided to forgo an abortion and keep the child. Although Andy had offered to “do the right thing” and marry her, both her parents and Andy’s thought it prudent he not do so. When the child was born she was put up for adoption. Now, years later, as we spoke of her, this daughter whom he’d never seen was probably just about to enter her teens. Andy seemed slightly wistful as he talked of her, but soon we moved on to another subject, and he never again spoke of her.

Andy demonstrated an uncanny ability to obliterate any uncomfortable thoughts at will due to his TM training. As he had demonstrated on that tiny, wind-whipped airplane in the skies over Illinois, his years of meditation had given him the tools necessary to control his mind. Feeling such benefits of mind control were valuable, Andy not only had me promise to take a meditation course but also inserted that requisite into my contract and specified that I train for a minimum of one year, paid for by him.

I followed the TM methodology, accepting my mantra, a secret word each disciple is given to be used for the rest of his or her life. The word is repeated over and over during meditation, creating a sort of resonance in one’s psyche. It is somewhat like holding down one key on a computer so that the screen of the mind fills with that one letter or, in this case, word; ushering off all other thoughts and bringing harmony — because there isn’t room for anything else, just pure nothingness. That’s the gist of it.

I underwent the training, and one year to the day after I began, I quit. I felt the techniques were good and certainly valuable, and I occasionally use them to this day to still my thoughts and refocus, but I took issue with what I saw as the cultish aspects of that “movement.” But I respected Andy’s devotion to transcendental meditation and appreciated its role for him — it was truly his religion and a safe place to which he could retreat when the pressures of big-time showbiz, or life in general, tried to overwhelm him.