Lost in the Funhouse (35 page)

Clifton = buffoon jerkoff = Andy.

Word spread.

He agreed to play a five-night engagement at Harrah’s Reno Resort and Casino in Nevada beginning October 6 because Bob told him that the Mustang Ranch was only fifteen minutes away. Harrah’s arranged a press luncheon to announce the event a week prior to the Dinah Shore appearance; the luncheon was held in the wine cellar of the tony Blue Fox restaurant in San Francisco, whose proximity to Nevada created puzzlement in itself. Andy showed the fortysome-such reporter people who attended how he could skip rope for ten minutes straight; he did so with his napkin tucked into belt. Milk and cookies were served for dessert. Gerald Nachman of the
San Francisco Chronicle
wrote: “Booking Andy Kaufman into Harrah’s is rather like selling Andy Warhol originals at Lucky’s [supermarket].”
Andy announced that he was no longer a song-and-dance man. “I’m a wrestler,” he said. He also said that he wished to publicly invite the three thousand Russian combat troops currently stationed in Cuba to fly to Disneyland at his expense. “We’ll go on some rides and then we’ll have milk and cookies. This is my contribution to world peace.” He looked stricken, as this was met with chuckling. “I’m serious! Everyone thinks everything I do is part of the act.” Zmuda had planted himself as a reporter from the
Norwood Free Press
(based outside of Chicago, he said) and assaulted Andy with many probing questions—
“Is it true, Mr. Kaufman, that you wrestle women only to fulfill your perverted fantasies?”
George eventually went over and slapped him, then threw him out.

Harrah’s Headliner Room would be the most commercial venue he had played to date and he did fine but cared more about getting over to the famous Mustang Ranch bordello as soon as the shows were over because this was the most exciting thing that he had ever done in his life. George would get several reports daily. George would sometimes be on the phone with Bob after Andy’s performances and he would hear Andy in the background imploding—“Come on, come on, Zmuda! We have to
go,
we have to
leave!”
Andy told George that he had sex with twenty-four Mustang girls that week. Zmuda could not keep up. Sean Daniel and Bruce Berman from Universal came to Reno to discuss the Clifton movie and Andy dragged them to the Mustang, where they could talk while he scoped his slatternly prey. Daniel would recall, “We were there for official business. Andy, on the other hand, was there for love. I think he found much love there.” Andy told George, “They loved me! It was truly a religious experience!” Sometimes he would pay them just to talk to him or to wrestle each other for him. He was different, they all thought. So nice, too, they thought, too. He returned to Los Angeles, deliriously happy, and was immediately treated for a red and itchy case of the clap.

On the night that arguably began the spiral toward destiny, he wore Grandpa Paul’s elegant calf-length Sulka bathrobe that he had
inherited years earlier. Beneath the robe were the white longjohns and the black athletic trunks and beneath the trunks over the white longjohns was the masking tape that Zmuda had wrapped around the groin and pelvic region to conceal the appearance of a televised erection. It was October 20 and it was
Saturday Night Live:
He started out nicely enough, speaking of the olden days when wrestlers had traveled with carnivals from town to town offering money to any man who could last three minutes in the ring with them. His tone was quite pleasant as he explained that he had been doing the same, only with women. (“This is a very legitimate thing and the reason I chose women is because I’m not an athlete…. If I chose a man, I might get beaten.”)
(… rubbing …)
He maintained his level tone while sharing his belief that women were best suited for the-scrubbing-the-washing-the-peeling-the-mopping, but lamented that men of late had allowed women to achieve societal status gain—“Men are a bunch of pussycats and pansies for letting this happen. And I think the men in this country are nothing but pitiful specimens of manhood.” And, of course, the audience—women and men alike—grumbled and booed, since he had now alienated both sexes and all of North American humankind at once. Zmuda waved the five hundred dollars in the air and five volunteers bounded to the stage and the audience selected a pregnant woman to wrestle him—which he would not do—so he asked for the runner-up, who happened to be prettiest and she was a lithe brunette named Mimi Lambert, heiress to the Lacoste sportswear fortune, who studied dance with Martha Graham and was clad in a leotard because she had danced six hours that day (“My legs were like rubberbands”) and she had no idea who Andy Kaufman was because she never watched television but thought he was obnoxious and she lasted well beyond the allotted three minutes, although referee Zmuda neglected to notice, as was his occasional habit, before she was pinned. And during their grappling, he broke away to strut and mug and bait the audience that wanted his blood—
“Shadduppp! Shadduppppp! I’m not chokiri’! Come onnnnn! Let’s see some competition up here!”
—and after he was declared the winner he gave Mimi Lambert a kick as she began to get to her feet and shoved
her back down on the mat. Then he strutted some more and breathlessly issued an open challenge to Olympic swimmer Diana Nyad (“supposedly the world’s strongest lady”) to wrestle him on a future show, offering ten thousand dollars if she won. “Not only that—but I’ll have a barber here and if you beat me, I will have my head shaved in front of everyone right here in the ring! Diana,
any time, baby!
I don’t think you can
dooooooo itttttttttttt!”
And he clucked like a chicken. And then he took Mimi out for a very late dinner and they began dating immediately thereafter and she joined him on tour within three weeks and returned with him a few more times to
Saturday Night Live,
where Bill Murray would send flowers to her in Andy’s dressing room and Andy always walked the flowers directly out of the dressing room and made sure to give Murray a curious look every time he did so.

He was throwing fits in hotels. At the Seattle Hilton, the switchboard ignored his requests to have his morning calls stopped. He threatened to slander the hotel whenever possible, using much offensive language to illustrate his point. George had to make nice. At the Chicago Holiday Inn, he was asked to relinquish his large room for a smaller one due to a mix-up. He screamed and kept the big one. Only four hundred tickets were sold for his Chicago engagement at the University of Illinois; the auditorium capacity was eleven hundred. A week earlier, only two hundred ninety tickets were sold for a Boston concert, which was canceled due to lack of interest. (A short six months had passed since he had sold out Carnegie Hall.) George believed it was the wrestling. The mail poured in after the
Saturday Night Live
appearance, all very extremely hostile. George told him to maybe rethink it. He told George that he had a better idea—a crosscountry tour, underwritten by a sponsor, in which all tickets would cost only ninety-nine cents apiece. George liked the idea. No sponsors would be very interested.

November 17, a brief announcement on
Saturday Night Live,
in response to the negative mail: “So you’re trying to get me to stop wrestling on television, huh? Well, there’s NO WAY YOU’RE GOING TO DO IT! I will wrestle on
every
show! I will wrestle on every variety show, on every talk show! You will not be able to turn the dial fast enough! YOU’LL NEVER GET RID OF ME UNTIL A WOMAN BEATS ME IN A WRESTLING MATCH!! That’s right! But there’s not a woman who can beat me BECAUSE WOMEN DO NOT HAVE THE BRAINS!!!
Shadduppppp! Shaddupppppp!!”
And because Diana Nyad had never responded to his gauntlet, he now challenged all of the rest of them out there, offering a thousand dollars and the shaved head and the promise to keep his rubbing off television forever. He asked them to send photographs and statistics and the reasons they wanted to wrestle him and certain people at
Saturday Night Live
(who were amenable to his input) would decide which finalists would be flown in to wrestle him on the program three days before Christmas. (The photographs were imperative.) Guest host Bea Arthur then came on camera and said, “Boy, I hope somebody beats him. And beats him badly!” He screamed at her from the
sidelines—“Shadduppp! Shaddupppp!
I’ll take
you
on, baby!”

His sister and his brother collected him on Thanksgiving morning, very early, at Mimi Lambert’s Upper East Side apartment, where he had spent the night. Mimi playfully flashed her naked breasts for them as Michael and Carol dragged Andy to the elevator. The three of them rushed to Macy’s and boarded a circus float on which they rode in the Thanksgiving Day parade. Andy wore ringmaster togs and Michael attempted to be a juggler and Carol was a trapeze princess in pink and they waved at people for hours. Andy had agreed to be in the parade only if he could bring his siblings. Andy had agreed to perform two nights later at Kutsher’s Resort up in the Borscht Belt only if he could bring his family—which meant a complimentary weekend stay for Stanley and Janice and Michael and Carol and Grandma Lillie and Grandma Pearl, who would turn eighty on
Sunday. He brought them all onstage as well that night, which was the twenty-fourth, and each performed acts perfected around the Kaufman dinner table—Michael sang “La Bamba” and Carol imitated Maurice Chevalier and Pearl told the one about the dog at temple and Lillie sang “Row Row Row Your Boat” with her famous grandson and Stanley and Janice wisely opted to remain silent, as did the audience, uncomfortably so, except when Andy polled the crowd as to whether or not they enjoyed his family. They did not enjoy his family. Nor did they enjoy him or any part of his one hour and forty-five minutes (elongated by the wrestling) of meandering stagecraft. He shed conga tears for them. They did not care. They were, for the most part, silver- and blue-haired Jewish retirees who came to Kutsher’s for a weekend of bingo and bridge and ballroom dancing. “A bunch of old farts” was what Stanley called them. Gregg Sutton would recall, “I broke a complete sweat. It was the worst gig that I’d ever been a part of. I was dying with Andy and the family up there. The only person who didn’t think it was that bad was Andy. He was oblivious and was just going through it. He was getting a kick out of having his grandmothers and his family up onstage, and they were dying.” The rest of the band had wanted to quit somewhere in the middle. Sutton said, “You stay right there, fuckers!” That was how bad it was.

Afterward, Andy sat for a filmed interview with Seth Schultz of the Brooklyn showcase club Pips, who was making a documentary about the history of Pips. Andy recalled with delight the free hot fudge sundaes he had consumed there years before. Then he spoke of the audience he had just left and looked tired as he did so and he seemed to be convincing himself that it had not gone well—“Maybe they thought I
wanted
them to boo and hiss at me, but gosh, they were so
rude!”
He repeated the word
rude
five times in two minutes. He said they had been the worst audience he had encountered since he and Little Wendy played for those doctors at the Cedars-Sinai benefit at the Beverly Hilton and Carl Reiner wanted to hide under the table. Anyway, later that night he found a hostile note tacked to his door and various audience members accosted the family in the corridors
and Sutton and Zmuda fled in a rental car to go get loaded and Zmuda deliberately drove off the road and through a fence while lecturing to Sutton, “See! The system was made to bend!” And Sutton knew that Andy was in trouble, even if Andy didn’t know he was in trouble—“He was already on his way down.” As they left the resort the next day, Andy rolled down the back window of the limousine in which he sat and hollered to no one in particular, “It’s people like you who give Jews a bad name!”

Simka Dahblitz would be played by Carol Kane and Simka was to be Latka’s rib and eventually his wife and they would come together for the first time in the fortieth episode of
Taxi,
which was called “Guess Who’s Coming for Brefnish?” to be filmed December 14. Because Simka had recently emigrated from Latka’s country, Carol Kane required lessons in dialect known only to Foreign Man and so Andy agreed to help and invited her to his house in Laurel Canyon, where he presented her with various avenues of pursuit—“He said maybe we should go someplace for dinner where no one knew either of us so we could just speak in the language and people would believe that’s how we spoke,” she said. “He thought we should go to Mexico. It seemed like a big thing, but he stated it as though it made simple logical sense. I figured since he’s willing to do this with me, I should just agree to go.” Which she did, if a bit warily. Then he said, “I
know!
I’ve got another idea! A really good way to get to know each other fast is to wrestle together!” She said Mexico was one thing, but wrestling was another, and said she would rather not, but he said oh-come-on-please-it’s-really-fun and explained how it broke down inhibitions and he showed her his wrestling room with the rubber mats on the floor, but she still said no and he sulked “like a disappointed kid” and disappeared into the kitchen to make a phone call, which turned into a very long phone call and she finally got aggravated and went in to say, “You know, Andy, I’m thinking it’s getting a little late for dinner if we’re going to go to Mexico.” And he looked at
her as though she was crazy and said, “Mexico? We’re not going to Mexico. I was just kidding you. You thought we were going to Mexico?” But she took no umbrage and began to better understand his reality such as it was and they went out for Chinese and spoke only in gibberish except for when he translated her dinner order for the waiter and she thought it was an ingenious exercise because the normalcy of a public situation forced a naturalness upon their dithering nonsensical conversation—“You had to make it sound as real as you could.” But she never did wrestle with him, never would, about which she was most happy.