Lost in the Funhouse (39 page)

It was nobody’s business and he told very few people that he did this, but he did do it and the reason why lived somewhere in a scared and lovely place that was as much a part of him as the other variegated colors. It was early April and his evening flight had been delayed at O’Hare in Chicago, so he decided to take a morning flight instead, because the girl was very sick. He had called her in the
hospital weeks earlier because a friend of hers got word to him about how much she loved what he did on television. Her name was Mary Jean Burden of DeMotte, Indiana, age twenty-one, and she had cystic fibrosis and so he called from the airport and rented a car and drove forty miles to the hospital in Crown Point, arriving at midnight. A small crowd gathered in the lounge and he visited and performed for two hours and was Foreign Man and was Elvis—he serenaded Mary Jean on bended knee with “Love Me Tender”—and she would tell a local reporter, “He can really talk with his eyes.” He also wrestled two women and let them win. He invited Mary Jean to come visit the
Taxi
set when she felt better and he gave her a kiss and kept waving goodbye as the elevator doors closed. Her mother wrote to thank him after Mary Jean died six weeks later. “Words could never say enough,” Mrs. Burden wrote. “You’ll never realize how much you helped her.”

He had lately been toying with the idea of reviving the Clifton movie by giving Foreign Man a co-starring role. Well, it was just an idea. Anyway, George was encouraged.

Linda made call after call after call until she found Fabian for him. She finally arranged a lunch at Jerry’s Deli because Fabian Forte lived in nearby Toluca Lake, never mind that he was most wary about the assignation, fearing put-on, knowing what he knew about the one who wished to meet him so desperately. He had heard how his song “This Friendly World” had become Andy’s signature closing number in concert performances—and he never knew quite how to take that. Andy was late, which angered Fabian, who had been prompt, and then Andy arrived. “He looked at me like—I hate to use this word—like he was in
awe,”
Fabian would recall. “And I’m still thinking, maybe he’s playing with me and that this was a big hoax. Like, if he was having this filmed or something, I was going to tear him limb from limb.” But Andy, he noticed, was nervous—“almost
like wringing his hands”—and barely ate his lunch while reciting infinitesimal details about every one of Fabian’s records and Fabian laughingly asked him, “Why the fuck do you do ‘This Friendly World? Are you putting me down?” Andy said, “No, you have to understand. That song means everything to me. I wish the world really was that way.” And Fabian would always be pleased that he surprised Andy with a bearish Italian hug when they parted that day and would remain touched by the image of the unusual boy in the basement who had sung along with him. “You could see in his eyes that he wasn’t kidding,” he said.

P-l-o-t-s—there would now be nothing but plots; he pursued old ones and hatched new ones and slipped in and out of view, in and out of towns, in and out of countries; he was mercury and he moved as such….

April: Andy was in New York, which Merv announced (suspiciously), when Clifton taped his first appearance on Merv’s program in Los Angeles; Clifton was suddenly fatter and shorter and less nasal and more stupid and slightly nicer; he sang “I Will Survive” and pronounced it
surveeve;
Merv said he looked nothing like Andy Kaufman and Clifton said,
“I am not Andy Kaufman! I want to have nothing to do with Andy Kaufman!” …
In New York, meanwhile, Andy spent days wandering into clubs and onto various public access cable programs in the persona of a pompous cigar-smoking monosyllabic Russian who also happened to be himself (“I am Hollywood, I am television star on
Taxi
and I hate when I do not get respect I deserve! I am champion! Champion wrestling, champion many things!”). At the Improv, he burst in on an improvisational class taught by Martin Harvey Friedberg, himself an esteemed madman of performance theory, whom Andy antagonized relentlessly, waving his cigar in Friedberg’s face—“Smoke is bother you? Why is bother you?” Friedberg: “You enjoying all that poison that’s going down into your system? You’re enjoying all that cancer that’s getting into your lungs?” Andy:
“Yeah.”
(He felt that being Russian required a cigar always; but neither he nor Clifton ever actually inhaled the smoke.) On the
Slycraft Hour,
a barely seen public access show, he brought on Stanley and Janice—who did not feign Russian dialects—and he argued moral decency with a right-wing quack and evinced his right to destroy
Fridays. “Fridays
is rip-off, exactly copy
of Saturday Night Live.
Is bull. Is lot of bull. So I get mad. I ruin that show. I will do it again.
Here is my mommy.” …
Not as a Russian, he tracked down Alan Abel, a satirist known to be the World’s Greatest Hoaxer, whose
New York Times
obituary on January 2, 1980, had thrilled Andy, since Abel was not dead but only fooling and had tricked the paper of record into printing news of his demise. Among books Abel had published were
The Confessions of a Hoaxer, The Panhandler’s Handbook,
and
How to Thrive on Rejection—so
Andy felt a very close bond and the two of them became fast friends that spring and they would walk seventy-five blocks up and down Broadway together. “We talked and talked and talked and talked,” said Abel. “We did have a lot in common in the sense that he liked the kind of crazy shit—if you’ll pardon the expression—that I did. We would compare notes on panhandling-he was very dedicated to it, you know. He wanted us to collaborate on something really fantastic and enormous, but we could never figure out what it would be. He was especially fascinated with my rejection book and how I had gotten people to believe I was dead. He’d say, ‘How can I do that? I want to do that.’”

Late July: Andy was in London, which Merv announced (suspiciously), when Clifton returned to tape Merv’s show in Las Vegas, so as to promote his forthcoming two-week engagement at Harrah’s Stateline Lounge in Lake Tahoe beginning August 31; Merv asked him why he had come through the casino that day wearing a bag over his head and Clifton said,
“Because my makeup man did not get here! And I don’t want the public to see me unless I look right!”
Clifton told Merv that he was a forty-year resident of Las Vegas and lived in a Winnebago trailer home and that he had flown the
Spruce Goose
with Howard Hughes…. In London, meanwhile, Andy was enjoying
a stopover on his way to Amsterdam, where he planned to do nothing else but explore the red-light district.

August 30: Before his gig—for which he would receive $7500 per week, performing three shows per night—Clifton checked into Harrah’s Tahoe while Andy checked into the Ormsby House hotel in Carson City, which was not close but was close enough; he was more concerned with proximity to his beloved brothels than with proximity to Clifton. He came to Harrah’s the first day in order to be seen on the premises and stoke conjecture. According to Gregg Sutton—whom Clifton now called MacNamara (leader of the band, natch)—Andy attended only one show. “He was disguised in a funky beard and weird clothes. He heckled Clifton—‘Tell the truth! You’re Andy Kaufman, you fraud!’ Clifton had him removed from the room.” Most other people left on their own; business was light. Clifton told an intrepid local news crew that he was suing Andy—“He’s using my name to get places! Makes me feel really
mad,
really
bad,
really
sad—clad, had, mad, dad, fad!
That’s every word that rhymes with
mad
—from A to Z! Thank you very much!” (“The rhyming thing was the one thing Zmuda invented,” said Sutton. The new Clifton also deployed a reptilian tongue which inadvertently slipped out between sentences as means of unpleasant punctuation.)
The Hollywood Reporter
reviewed the show fully duped—“Kaufman establishes nothing with which people can identify….” A showgirl, meanwhile, also fell for Clifton during his engagement, largely because she thought she was falling for Andy; Zmuda received her advances and intimacies without removing his facial prosthetics. “I told her that as an artist, I had to stay in character,” he said. “And she actually believed me.” Just to be safe, Sutton had advised him to keep the lights out and to make sure that he got her drunk before special moments unfolded.

Halfway through Clifton’s run, Andy returned to Los Angeles to prepare to host the season premiere
of Fridays,
for which he had devised a new reality. He told John Moffitt that he wanted to unveil a new him, a Born Again Christian him who would introduce viewers to his fiancée—the woman who had saved him from spiritual ruin.
But first he had to find her, which he did—in the ABC studio directly next door, where
The Lawrence Welk Show
was taped. She was a twenty-nine-year-old featured gospel singer named Kathie Sullivan; he sat her down in the
Fridays
offices, where she nervously accepted his proposal of making televised charade. “He assured me that if I did this he would not do anything like rip my dress off or embarrass me in any way,” she said. “He knew that I was Born Again. He was a perfect gentleman.” Linda Mitchell asked what size ring she wore and then purchased a cheap but dazzling cubic zirconia for Sullivan to begin flaunting immediately (Andy informed the
National Enquirer
that it was a $10,000 diamond). He had a press release issued—
ANDY KAUFMAN TO ANNOUNCE ENGAGEMENT THIS FRIDAY ON THE AIR
—wherein Sullivan was quoted professing, “I’m glad God gave me the chance to meet him. I’m so glad I was given the opportunity to change his life.”

On Friday night, September 18, he opened the show in a three-piece brown polyester suit; his hair was carefully cropped; he glistened with renewal. Said Moffitt, “He had that look in his eyes that said he had seen God.” He began as Foreign Man and also did Mighty Mouse—reestablishing the benign him—then showed a clip of his unshaven self apologizing after the fight imbroglio. “That was a pretty low point in my life,” he said. “As you can probably tell, since then I’ve gone through a lot of changes.” Then he welcomed onto camera the woman responsible for those changes, whom he called his fiancée, and Sullivan confirmed her love for him and boasted of his conversion to Christianity and said, “We’ll probably end up with a bunch of little kids running around the house saying
tenk you veddy much!”
And they sang a soaring spiritual ballad “that really says just how Andy and I feel—it’s called ‘Home Again.’” She would recall, “I gave him the easy parts, but he did a real good job, on key and everything.” Later in the program, he further promulgated clean living by criticizing a drug sketch that had just been performed, which delayed his introduction of the rock group The Pretenders, which incited booing (just like the good old days), and he closed the show with the rousing gospel standard “By and By.” George said it was a very good put-on and thought
people believed it.
Well, many people did. Some people just never believe Andy
.
Fridays
writer Steve Adams, author of the notorious restaurant sketch, would remember the universal response to the show somewhat differently—“His finding God didn’t work too well. By then the public was on to him. I think he knew it, too.”

Weeks later, he issued another press release—
ANDY KAUFMAN AND KATHIE SULLIVAN CALL IT QUITS
. “Mr. Kaufman,” it stated, “wants to keep his once-a-week busboy job at Jerry’s Famous Deli in Studio City and continue his intergender wrestling and Miss Sullivan did not approve. Mr. Kaufman found it more and more difficult to give up his own needs and wishes, especially wrestling.” Also, he found the three-piece suits too constricting. In truth, it was Sullivan who thought it prudent to cease the deception. “I got a lot of backlash from the Christian community,” she said. She did, however, get to keep the ring.

Henceforth, nothing would matter more than the ring. He was back in the ring on October 11—six years exactly since the night he first performed on
Saturday Night Live
—and this ring was in Atlantic City, where he wrestled Playmate Susan Smith (36-24-36, one hundred thirty-eight pounds, blond) at the Playboy Hotel and Casino. Playboy had challenged him, promising a major magazine pictorial feature documenting the event, which would also be taped for broadcast on the cable Playboy Channel—so he could not refuse such exposure (rubbing), and even George agreed. The match lasted eighteen minutes and thirty-five seconds, and she actually pinned him for four seconds, but the referee was distracted and missed the call and so Andy flipped and pinned her and left for Memphis the next day.

Like Columbus before him, he officially charted a new world on October 12. He had been down once already in June and again in July, but those had been brief reconnaissance missions that also involved meeting southern females who had sent him inviting letters.
True cahoots with his future nemesis had begun even earlier. He had wanted to wrestle women at Madison Square Garden, but was told that wrestling despot Vince McMahon, Sr., would never go for such carny in the hallowed arena. But Bill Apter, who edited
Wrestler
and
Inside Wrestling
magazines, had become a friend, and Apter offered another option. Very late one night that spring, after they had seen matches at the Garden, they returned to Apter’s apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens—not far from the hospital where Andy was born. Apter told him, “I have a friend in Memphis, Tennessee, who might be interested in your idea. He’s a wrestler and a promoter down there and his name is Jerry Lawler.” Apter decided that they should call him right then, no matter that it was after one o’clock in the morning. Lawler answered, wide awake, and Apter told him that he had Latka from
Taxi
with him and Lawler said, “Put him on!” Apter would recall, “They spoke for quite some time. And when he hung up, Andy was very invigorated. He called me a couple of days later and said, ‘I’m going down to see Lawler.’ And that was the start of the whole thing.”

A few weeks later, on June 5, he flew from Los Angeles to Memphis and headed directly over to the Mid-South Coliseum, which was considered Lawler’s kingdom since Lawler was considered the King of Memphis now that the other one was dead. (Lawler’s local celebrity was such that he had been the first attraction ever to break Elvis’s record for consecutive sellouts at the 12,000-seat Coliseum.) Memphis had long been a wrestling mecca and Lawler was regional potentate, a Baby-face (good guy, per parlance) champion muscle-slab who triumphed over serial insidious Tarheels (bad guys, per parlance) throughout the southern territories. But Lawler was also possessed of business savvy and held ranking office inside the Memphis Wrestling Company, which filled the cards and devised all thunderous theatrics that were played out at the Coliseum. And so the prospect of enlisting the lure of the comical maniac who took on the womenfolk was more than exciting. Lawler, in fact, had been made giddy by that first late-night phone call and, upon hanging up, heard himself splutter, “Oh my God!” He would recall, “All Andy wanted to do was experience the thrill of wrestling in front of a wrestling crowd.
That was the whole thing. He had been doing it for people that really came to see stand-up comedy. They didn’t come to see him wrestle and they weren’t appreciating it. He told me, ‘I just want to get the response that wrestlers should get!’” So Lawler told him, “Yes, please! Let’s talk about it!” Jimmy Hart, the preeminent southern Tarheel wrestler, had been in Lawler’s home when the call came. Per Hart’s recollection: “Us being a small territory and Andy being a TV star-well, we knew it would be nothing but big box office business!”