Lost in the Funhouse (38 page)

Clifton, in full persona, checked into the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, where he would open, once again, for Rodney Dangerfield during the last three nights of January. The two-show-per-night engagement at the Warfield Theater would be especially historic because now the audiences would actually try to kill him. (Coincidentally, or not, the movie of his life was now two months dead, having been rejected by Universal and then Paramount, Columbia, and Warner Bros. as well.) David Hirshey had flown out from New York to continue his
Rolling Stone
exploration and to search for cracks in the Clifton façade (finding none besides the presence of George and Bob and the occasional backstage disappearance of Clifton’s gut). “He looks like Roy Orbison pumped with cortisone,” Hirshey would write. On the first night, derision flamed as Clifton sacreligiously mangled “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and someone screamed TAKE THE DOGSHIT OUT OF YOUR MOUTH! Debris quickly rained from the balcony and, before Clifton had left the stage, twenty people would be refunded their money. Dangerfield found this hilarious—“They
all
hated him, you know? And he kept saying, ‘It’s too bad that a
few
of you out there have to spoil it for everyone!’ I loved it.” On the second night, a small German man rushed the stage wielding a penknife and threatened, I CAN’T TAKE IT! NOW GET ZE HELL OFF! Vince Prentice, who had taken over Cliftonian makeup chores, apprehended the perpetrator,
whom security mistook as a plant. Clifton then dodged exploding beer cans and a bottle of Southern Comfort—“That was a glass bottle and you’re a fuckin’ asshole!” he brayed at the assailant, then elected to sing his final three numbers while hiding in the wings. On the third night, triple-folded fishnet would be lowered in front of the stage and Clifton would don a riot-squad helmet with plastic face-guard, which was most advisable, because fruit and vegetables were now on sale in the lobby and much produce was heaved, as were coins and eggs and banana cake. It was a blistering apple, however, that tore through the net and crashed squarely into the faceguard and disintegrated on impact—which sent Clifton teetering offstage, where he completed his performance and retreated to his dressing room. Hirshey found him there, crowing triumphantly about the whole experience. But Clifton also warned him, “Watch yerself! You print that I’m Andy Kough-man and I’ll sue yer ass! I’ll sue
Bowling Green’s
ass!” Meanwhile, Hirshey had received a phone call in his hotel room earlier that day from Andy, who said he was down in Los Angeles. Hirshey mentioned that someone had thrown a bottle at Clifton the night before. Andy said, “Really? Are you sure it wasn’t his manager?”

On Friday, February 20, the disregard found new plateau.
Saturday Night Live
had left him to twist alone toward madness; he had not been asked to return since the wrestling anticlimax fourteen months earlier. (Moreover, the show had fallen into notorious disrepair after the abdication of Lorne Michaels in May 1980.) Thus, Andy trucked with the upstart enemy: He hosted ABC-TV’s
Fridays—a
Los Angeles-based live sketch-comedy replication whose limp ratings invited drastic attention-getting measures. He began plotting with producer John Moffitt on the Sunday before the broadcast and said he wanted to open the show by bombing so as to challenge the audience from the outset. George, who was present, tried to convince him otherwise:
I had a disagreement with him again because we both know I hate the bombing routine and he thinks
very highly of it. I find it boring—if you do not entertain an audience, you fail as an entertainer, and I do not want him to fail, even if he is willing to fail.
(He would settle, in the end, for opening as Laughing Man, deliriously convulsed and blithering incoherently, whose first intelligible words were
Ohhh, I need help, I need help.)

He also proposed a piece called the Masked Magician, wherein Zmuda would disguise himself as a disgruntled illusionist (barely obscured in a ski mask) and reveal the secrets of the interlinking rings and basic sword-swallowing; Andy would help plunge a sword—a bit overzealously—down Zmuda’s gullet, and Zmuda would then regurgitate blood and intestinal matter and Andy would vomit vegetable soup. (By airtime, network censors would permit Zmuda only bloody spittle and no guts or vomit whatsoever.)
Fridays
writers, meanwhile, prepared two sketch pieces for him—a Point/Counterpoint debate with himself concerning federal arts-funding and a show-closing restaurant sketch called “Marijuana” in which he and three regular cast members, as two couples, would each take turns going into the bathroom, ostensibly to smoke dope, then return to their table quite stupefied.

Andy called a private meeting midweek and suggested a notion to Moffitt, coproducer Jack Burns, and network executive Vic Kaplan. “It
was
his idea,” Moffitt would recall. “He presented it in a very straight-ahead and serious fashion. He said, ‘This is what I’m gonna do. I want to rehearse the marijuana sketch as planned until we’re on the air and then I want to break out of it. I’m gonna say—but only on the air—that it’s a silly sketch and I’m just not gonna finish it. I want to break the wall of reality and create a confrontation—and because I just ruined the show, it should end in a fight.’ He laid it out point by point, and we agreed to do just that as long as he promised no other surprises in the moment. And he gave his word.” No one else on the staff or in the cast would be told with the exception of some writers and the sketch participants, who were Michael Richards, Melanie Chartoff, and Maryedith Burrell—although many would claim that Chartoff and Burrell were also left in the dark. Chartoff,
however, said Jack Burns told them just before the sketch, “Stay in character and go with it!”

And so, roughly two minutes into the sketch, it unraveled as planned when he returned from the restaurant bathroom and sat and paused and grinned helplessly and stammered, “I can’t … I can’t play … I can’t play stoned … I feel really stupid … I feel so stupid.” And Burrell began laughing maniacally as though gripped with actual terror. And Chartoff said to him,
“You
feel stupid?” and quivered. And he remained uncomfortably paralyzed and muttered on about feeling stupid. (Richards would recall, “He just shut down and sat there. And I could just feel that he was just gonna keep on sitting there and let everybody squirm and stink. I realized that he now wanted me to push it to the next level.”) So Richards walked off camera and returned with the cue cards and angrily plopped them in front of Andy, who said, “It’s all in fun—c’mon!” The actors stayed frozen/panicked, whereupon Andy stood and tossed a glass of water at Richards, and Chartoff rose to push a buttered dinner roll into Andy’s hair and Andy threatened to push butter in her face and Burrell kept laughing edgily and Jack Burns, apparently livid, ran onto the set and rushed at Andy, and Andy shoved him and several crew members, who
were
incensed and afraid of further destruction, stormed forth to intercede in the scuffle and Burns screamed for the director to go to a commercial—and it was all very much like the incident on the closed-circuit campus program
Grahm Spotlight
on which Burt Dubrow had tackled Andy and called for a commercial after Andy pulled a gun and tried to commit suicide on camera. But this, of course, was bigger and the network switchboards lit like Las Vegas marquees and
The New York Times
ran a story days later under the headline WAS “
FIGHT
”
ON
TV REAL OR STAGED? IT ALL DEPENDS, wherein Tony Schwartz wrote, “It looked like a spontaneous fistfight on live television. Whether it really happened is a matter of interpretation.” And Howard Rosenberg in the
Los Angeles Times
wrote, “Was it real? Yes, and the Brooklyn Bridge is in Wyoming…. Kaufman, whose schizophrenic comedy consists of reality and fantasy rolled up into one big put-on, convinced a lot of viewers that he had cracked up on the air….”

Stanley and Janice had watched in Great Neck and realized that their son would never work again; Stanley told George that he had decided at that moment not to invest any of Andy’s money in the stock market, figuring he would heretofore need it to survive. There was some relief, however, that at least he hadn’t wrestled on the show.

The next night, in New York, a new
Saturday Night Live
cast member named Charles Rocket uttered the word
fuck
in the closing moments of the show. It was just a coincidence.

Grizzled, haggard, wretched, unshaven, woebegone—it had worked well before—he tried the following Friday night to read the statement “prepared” by the producers to confirm for viewers that the fight had been a planned improvisational experiment. But then he stopped his monotonous recitation and refused to continue. “This has been a very hard week for me,” he said. His job at
Taxi
was on the line, he said, and no one would hire him and his friends wouldn’t speak to him and his wife had left him and he had only been trying to have fun and the laughter from the audience now was pretty tasteless, he said, because he wasn’t trying to be funny. Then came tears. Tears were always easy.

Two days later, he and Clifton posed together for photographer Herb Ritts in a session that was intended to produce a
Rolling Stone
cover. Vince Prentice had transformed Zmuda into a lippy lounge gargoyle, but it worked and even George thought this Clifton was impressive both in look and comportment—Clifton strangled Andy in several shots—and within weeks it was decided that Zmuda would take over the role and be booked on talk shows and perform an engagement at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe Resort and everyone would continue to think that Clifton was Andy but now it truly wouldn’t
be Andy. They went to the Japanese restaurant Amagi—George, Bob, Andy—and piled their hands together on the tabletop and vowed that no one but Prentice and a few others would know the truth.
I will not discuss Tony Clifton [even] with my partner Howard, which is his pleasure,
George later dictated.
Rolling Stone
editor Terry McDonell called George the next day and said he had nixed the Andy-and-Clifton cover and instead wanted Andy posed alone strapped into a straitjacket which George nixed—although
Fridays
photographer Wayne Williams had shot him in a straitjacket three weeks earlier and those pictures had appeared as commercial bumpers on the infamous broadcast. They would tentatively settle on using a more straightforward photograph, but it would not matter, because when the April 30 issue of the magazine was published, Ringo Starr was the cover subject and at the very top of the cover were the very small and very provocative words
WHY ANDY KAUFMAN IS NOT FUNNY.

As quoted by David Hirshey—

CARL REINER
: Unless you let the audience in on the joke, you are making fools of them, and that’s what he’s doing with this Tony Clifton.

STANLEY KAUFMAN
: I never understood why he would want to alienate the audience to such extremes unless he was trying to get them to go from hate to love. Why Tony Clifton? It’s possible he created this character to draw hisses for the villain so he can come out the hero.

CAROL KAUFMAN
: I don’t think anything that makes people uncomfortable is entertainment. Sometimes I just want to stand up on my seat and shout, “He’s only kidding, everybody!” I think with Andy, it all goes back to the self, the
I.
What am
I
going to get pleasure out of, not how am I going to please the audience. He knows they want to laugh, they want him to tell jokes. But no. That would be selfless.

Two letters to
Rolling Stone
were subsequently published:

One: … “As for my not letting people in on the joke, there are times when real life is funnier than deliberate comedy. Therefore, I try to create the illusion of a ‘real-life’ situation or character. However, it must be believed totally; if I were to let people in on the joke, it wouldn’t have that effect…. Finally, concerning my ‘brief flirtation’ with levitation, this is something I have studied and practiced for several years and I take it very seriously. Not only am I able to levitate about eight feet off the ground, but once in the air, I am able to fly about in all directions.”

Two: “You promised to put my picture on the cover of your magazine and I flew to Los Angeles at my own expense and I spent a whole evening posing for your photographer standing next to that asshole egotist Kaufman who thinks he’s Mr. Hollywood Show Business and I didn’t get nothin’ out of it and as far as I’m concerned to me that’s a waste of time and you’re all a bunch of schmucks and you can go fuck yourselves. Incidentally, I am appearing on
The Merv Griffin Show
June 8 all across the country, so could you let your readers know about it.”

All things had been well considered at
Taxi:
The sixty-fourth episode—entitled “Latka the Playboy” as written by Glen Charles and Les Charles—introduced Vic Ferrari, a slick, smooth-talking cad who was Latka Gravas’s alter ego. It was the first indication of a multiple personality disorder that would possess Latka for much of the next year.