Andy Kaufman Revealed! (40 page)

Because of the shock to me of such news I cannot recall who told me, Andy, George, or Lynne, but Lynne assures me it was Andy who called. Despite our having pulled a hundred hoaxes, whatever he told me did not hit me like a joke. I flashed on our discussion some months before of his faking his death, but it struck me as unrelated: Andy wouldn’t do that to me, therefore, this was monstrously real.

As the days after the revelation unfolded, Andy calmed down and fell into a pattern of casual dismissal, as if the cancer were a minor inconvenience and would soon pass. I thought of my friend Stan Martindale and his tales as a U.S. Marine on Okinawa. As the sergeant, Stan would get the “stats” from HQ every night, telling him, based on various sources of intelligence, what his casualty rate would likely be during the next day’s battle. Often the numbers were extraordinary and, according to him, usually accurate within 3 or 4 percent. Stan had the option of informing his men beforehand so they could pen letters to loved ones or mentally prepare for almost certain death. He chose to do so, and despite the predictions of a 30 percent or worse casualty rate, not one man thought he’d be in that category. Shot? Okay, sure. My arm blown off? I’ll accept that. But killed? Never.

We live in an era where we are surrounded by vivid death, from the evening news to graphic movies. But we have an exceptionally difficult time accepting it, and when personally faced with death, we are always amazed it could happen to us or near us. It is the nature of death that we shrink from: the end of it all, depending, of course, on your spiritual beliefs. But death is certainly final for this existence, and it is that finality, that closing curtain on all that we know, that is so very, very hard to accept.

Like Andy, I chose not to believe, not to accept it, because it was not real. This couldn’t happen to Andy Kaufman. His life force was so powerful he could ward off anything, particularly something like cancer that he had no business having in the first place! To this day, I beat myself up over that, my inability to take it seriously, at least at first. Lynne now comforts me by saying it was just my way of denying it and dealing with it. She also reminds me that we all took our cue from Andy, and since he wasn’t taking it so seriously, how could we?

But it brings me little comfort that I scoffed at the needs of my friend out of disbelief. Yet to take the illness seriously would have meant the end of everything, of every dream we shared. There were TV shows and films and spectacular stage shows in our futures. There was the Ninety-Nine-Cent Tour I was working on, which would take milk and cookies to the next level. This time we would take an audience on buses to a port of call, Totally unsuspecting and with no notice, they would be taken aboard a vessel and sent on a six-day cruise. We not only would have had luggage packed for them but also would have notified their employers in advance and brought them in on the whole thing. I was already in negotiations with a major cruise line to pick up the entire cost in exchange for the promotional opportunities. If anything happened to Andy, it would be the end of that. No, I had to side with Kaufman — death was not an option.

Andy refused to own the disease for a long time and sought, along with a few confidantes, to keep it quiet. Andy’s brother, Michael, was told with the caveat that he not tell anyone else, particularly their parents, at least for a while. George called and asked if I knew who else knew, because he feared the news could further damage Andy’s already ailing career. Like those involved in the Manhattan Project, we were sworn to keep this dark secret to ourselves. George’s motivation was not commercial in the sense of receiving personal gain; he just didn’t want any more harm to come to Andy, whom he loved like a son. Letting such information out into the already skittish Hollywood community would draw sympathy, and with sympathy comes a price: everyone loves you, but no one will hire you. George knew Andy’s first love was his work, and therefore, he needed to keep Andy working, keep him busy and feeling vital while he fought the battle of his life.

On January 26, 1984, Andy appeared on a television program called
The Top,
a showbiz euphemism for finally making it. It was fitting, for it was Andy’s last appearance on the medium he loved so and had dreamed of conquering since that little kid played to the imaginary camera in the wall of his basement so many years before.

Typical of Andy, he dismissed the dire prognosis given him by the purveyors of Western medicine and looked to heal himself by his own methods. Practitioners of Eastern holistic philosophies, where symptoms are merely the body’s signs that it is attempting to heal itself, use the judicious application of natural herbs and remedies, along with mental and physical harmonics, to rid the body of the invading disease. Though he knew something was wrong with him. Andy did not believe what the doctors said, choosing to follow his own path toward healing, at least for a while.

Always careful what he ate (again, when Tony Clifton wasn’t around), Andy stepped up his regimen to a full-blown macrobiotic diet, a holistic approach that incorporates grains, beans, and vegetables, with moderate seafood and fruit, to create a harmony with nature — what the body
really
needs, not what we
like
to eat. Then he contacted a counselor, a man he’d met in the TM movement who, despite Andy’s banishment, offered to help. His name was John Gray and he would go on to author the wildly successful series of books beginning with
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.

Andy hoped to expose via John Gray’s counseling sessions some deep-rooted, unresolved psychological malaise stemming from conflicts in the primary relationships of his life. His theory was that if he identified that problem or problems, and dealt with them, he might shut off the poison that was infiltrating his system.

When I heard that he’d called in his family and George, I was frightened I’d get the same summons. He had baggage with his family as well as with George, having fought with him for years over much of his “avant garde” work. I feared a confrontation with Andy over something I may have done to let him down. One day, after stewing over that scenario, I was with him and mustered the courage to ask about the counseling sessions and my possible role in them.

He smiled and shook his head. “You? I have no bones to pick with you at all. You’re my best friend.”

Despite his commitment to holistic healing, Andy covered his bet with a course of radiation and chemo. But as the months went by, it didn’t seem to be working: not even holding his own, he seemed to be slowly slipping away. Finally, when his “Western” physicians solemnly told him, “There is no hope,” he didn’t accept it and turned to another means of salvation. Having recently seen a documentary about “psychic surgery” in the Philippines, narrated by Burt Lancaster, Andy made some inquiries and decided to go. He would leave the United States a sick man and come back whole and completely healed: it would be his greatest trick ever.

As I said before, I was in a state of shock or denial about all of this, and when I got the news, I blocked much of what happened from my mind. As I was preparing to write this book, Lynne and I agreed the trauma had erased much of those sad times from our memories, so it was with great excitement that I told her I had uncovered a series of diary entries I had made during that time.

Contained in three large boxes of Kaufman memorabilia I had collected over the years were papers, clippings, mementos, and, incredibly, those valuable pages chronicling my pain and observations during Andy’s last months. Though I had been through the boxes in the past, I had forgotten about the diary until I discovered it just as I was about to begin this book. Providence? Maybe, but I prefer to think someone I know had a hand in my finding it.

I’ve decided to incorporate some of the passages into the next chapter. The excerpts are exactly what I wrote fifteen years ago and contain none of the cheery revisionism that writing can undergo when time has softened the pain, anger, and incredulity that one endures at difficult times. The diary entries helped rekindle my memories of the worst time of my life, and I hope they serve to honestly convey the profound hurt of losing your best friend.

14

Closing Act

He did these fringe reality things where you didn’t know where his reality was.

ROBERT KLEIN

It was a Thursday, March 15, 1984, and I was particularly worried about Andy because I hadn’t spoken to him all day. I kept calling well into the evening and getting the answering machine. Finally, out of frustration and fear, I drove over to the house he and Lynne had rented in Pacific Palisades. On the way I spun all sorts of horrors in my mind — that I’d find him, dead. His treatments were not really helping, and for the past few weeks I could see he was deteriorating quickly. Holed up in his house, he had taken to screening all but a few of his calls. He always took mine, and that’s why I was worried.

I drove by the house and the lights were out. I drove around the neighborhood for a while to kill time and gather my thoughts. Later, around midnight, I passed the house and saw him through the window. I was afraid to stop, maybe because this man was changing and wasn’t the old Andy — perhaps I was afraid to see him that way. I reminded myself that he was my best friend and needed me. I put aside my fears and parked the car. He answered the door and was heartened to see me. The radiation treatments had taken their toll by stripping off a lot of pounds he didn’t have to spare. His hair had fallen out in large clumps, so he’d fashioned it into a Mohawk. Andy and Lynne and I sat around chatting for a bit, and when the mood lightened, Lynne seemed to relax slightly and got up and went to bed.

“I look like that guy in
The Hills Have Eyes,”
he joked, referring to a scary-looking bald character from a recent horror film. I laughed with him. Now that we were alone, I decided to hit him point blank. “So what do you think caused the cancer?”

“I talked to this girl I know about a year ago,” he started out, seemingly in a non sequitur. “We talked about suicide. She said she’d toyed with the idea.”

“You thinking about it now?” I asked, trying to keep my calm.

“No. Not really,” he answered softly. “You know, I think I peaked with
Taxi.
That’s what people will remember me for,” he said with a touch of sadness. “All the stuff I did, and you and I did, all the important things, I don’t think will be remembered. Maybe me dying will make people see they blew it with me. Maybe they’ll realize what I really did.” I sensed a slight bitterness coupled with resignation.

Then he started in on the potential reasons for his illness. He’d read a book called
Sugar Blues
five years ago and told me he should never have read it and strongly advised me never to do so. It planted the idea in his head that sugar was killing him. He felt there might be some mind-over-matter connection, that his belief in the book may have contributed to his getting sick. And since he was addicted to sugar and there was no stopping, the only cure would be for him to go on a strict macrobiotic diet. He said he felt for the last five years that every time he indulged in sugar he was poisoning himself. He said he was almost relieved when the doctor told him he had the cancer because now he could quit worrying when it would actually happen. Now he could finally go macrobiotic and save himself. I thought,
Just like the old bombing routine: bring it to the point of disaster and then turn it around.

Then he launched into a dissection of the problems with his parents as well as his own strange childhood. “I never joined in with the other kids,” he finally observed. “I stayed by myself all the time. I was aloof and got lost in my own world. I’m not so sure if that was such a good choice. Maybe it was unnatural.”

“What would you have done different?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

We sat for a moment, pondering. It seemed Andy’s fate may have been Set many years before. Andy joining in with the other kids? Organizing a kick-the-can game or hide-and-seek? Impossible.

“You know,” he said, “I would have loved to re-create the
Howdy Doody
show. This time, no Peanut Gallery, just me and Howdy and the other puppets.”

I felt like just letting him talk. He talked about the wrestling days and how much fun we’d had. He also admitted his last attempt to wrestle in the South the previous year had been met with “lack of interest at the gate,” and the two weeks he’d scheduled had been canceled. That hurt him, though he never showed it until now.

“
Heartbeeps
,” he said simply. “I really screwed up with that one. You warned me.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” I said, fearing this might degenerate into a session where Andy might start to beat himself up — a quality very unlike him. He was self-critical but not self-loathing. Avoiding that trap, he brushed it off and laughed. “You know, I’d always dreamed of being in the movies.”

“You were,” I said, acknowledging he’d been in some films.

He smiled and shook his head. “No, not really.” Then he changed direction. “The whole thing with Dick Ebersol was hard to take. I really wanted to stay on
Saturday Night
.” He sighed, letting go of any hard feelings. “It doesn’t do me any good to get into that. It’s against my therapy to lay blame,” he said. He paused. “But I can’t help but think every dog will have its day.”

“When do you go?” I asked, referring to his trip to the Philippines.

He brightened. “Less than a week.”

“Have you got a guy picked out?” I asked, regarding his surgeon.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “His name is Jun Roxas, and he’s supposed to be the best. I noticed in the documentary he carried a Bible. I wanted to fit in, so I got one, too.” He reached to a table to show me his new Bible. I thought,
Andy Kaufman with a Bible, how weird is that?

He thumbed through the book absentmindedly. “Nobody believes I’m sick.”

He wasn’t wrong about that. I even harbored some tiny doubts, and there I was sitting five feet from him. “I know,” I said. “Does that bother you?”