Lost in the Funhouse (43 page)

Clifton could, though—except Ebersol hated Clifton, never wanted Clifton anywhere near the show, nobody liked Clifton, even George had to tell him that Clifton was over, that Clifton did not work, that
Clifton was dead, keep the Clifton puppet from the Fun House show and play with the puppet, but there was no way Clifton would be allowed on the show….

Ebersol went to the hotel very late Friday night. He gave his final plea. He told Andy, “Bringing this into a vote is an enormous mistake.” The vote had not been advertised. There would be no loss in killing it. The cast would have time for more sketches. “But the vote is going to lock us in,” he said, “and we’ll have to live with the results.” Andy told him,
“No no no no no no—we’ve got to do it!”

He knew he would lose. He told Zmuda. He told George.

George stayed in California. What was the point? They would think of something. Ebersol had discovered Andy, for God’s sake. Ebersol had given him
Saturday Night Live!
Time would win out somehow.

Zmuda returned to California after the Letterman show. He was working on a screenplay for a movie called
D.C. Cab
and there was nothing he could do anyway. They spoke on the phone about Clifton, who was dead, which they refused to understand.

November 20, on air, cast member Gary Kroeger:

“… During the next hour, we’re going to be counting these votes, and I want you to remember that this show is live … we’re doing it for real. Andy Kaufman’s career at
Saturday Night Live
is in
your
hands. Now, I happen to think that Andy Kaufman is a comedic genius. If you agree with me, call 1-900-720-4101. However, if you think Andy is
not
funny anymore, if you’ve seen enough of his wrestling women, the Mighty Mouse bits, the phony injuries, the stupid, unfunny hoaxes—if you’ve had enough of this loudmouth, call 1-900-720-4202. You can call as many times as you’d like, but remember each call is gonna cost you fifty cents….”

He was never ahead.

Early tally, on air, cast member Eddie Murphy:

“… This is how you people have voted so far. It’s Keep Andy: 38,945 and Dump Andy: 48,838. [Audience cheers] Now, last [season], I asked the people to call in and save Larry the Lobster from being boiled alive. The response to that was overwhelming, and tonight I’m asking you to vote to save a human being. Isn’t Andy Kaufman worth as much as a lobster? [Shouts of
NO!
]
…
You people are sick! …”

End of program, guest host Drew Barrymore and cast stood at homebase stage, Kroeger reported final vote:

Keep Andy: 169,186.

Dump Andy: 195,544.

The lobster poll had drawn a total of 466,548 votes.

His poll inspired a total of 364,730 votes.

One way or another, people had cared more about a lobster.

Ebersol and Tischler walked to the hotel afterward to check on him. “He was disconsolate,” said Ebersol. “He couldn’t believe it. He was very sad. Not angry—sad. I think deep inside he figured that there was some way we were going to deal with this whole thing.” Over the following Thanksgiving weekend, George called Ebersol and said, “Dick, this is a mess. We’re losing bookings. We’ve got to do something about this. It’s really hurting him businesswise.” Ebersol suggested that Andy make some commercials that could be aired very inexpensively during
SNL
holiday repeats in relatively smaller markets
like Omaha, Des Moines, and Macon, Georgia. Andy returned to California and made twelve of them. Some were pathetic—“Maybe one day
Saturday Night Live
will have a change of heart. Or I’ll find another show that I could go on. Until then, I just want to wish you all the best….” Some were indignant—“Sooo, you thought you could get rid of me, you 195,000 people that voted to dump Andy Kaufman! … You will never be able to get rid of me! You see my face? You don’t like it? Try and turn it off! You can’t do it….” Ebersol said he would work one of the commercials into the show’s Weekend Update mock-newscast on January 22, 1983, which he did only because it was legitimate news that Andy was mounting this campaign. He told George, “If the fans don’t go nuts or get really negative about it, then I’ll think there’s enough basis to start figuring a way to bring him back.”

They ran one of the more pathetic commercials, but the audience did not awwwwwwwwww, which would have helped, and some viewers and press alike claimed the show had welshed on its promise by giving Andy even another thirty seconds of airtime. Ebersol called George and said, “We’re going to have to rest this for at least a year or more.” Years later, he would concede that
SNL,
which had prided itself on flagrant rule-breaking, had perhaps taken itself a bit too seriously in this matter—“In retrospect, it seems so silly, but we had a loose sort of integrity with this thing. People had spent money voting—about one hundred eighty grand. It seemed strangely unconscionable to do a backflop on the deal. But eventually we would have.”

Writers Blaustein and Sheffield met with him in the aftermath. They presented an idea in which he would be disguised as a black cleaning woman in the background of sketches over the course of many weeks until finally he ripped away the artifice and declared himself back. He liked the idea at first, but as time went on he thought it seemed a little too desperate. Plus, the whole thing sort of made him, um, sick.

He had lost his favorite playground.

His father, meanwhile, would nurse a hatred for Ebersol that grew more incendiary with every passing year. “Miserable bastard,” Stanley would say. George would also somehow see it all as a double cross. “They could be rightfully pissed at Dick for a million different things,” said Tischler, “but in terms of the vote, it was Andy who was really driving it. He refused to understand the reality of it. Reality, however, was something he always had an unusual relationship with.”

Before the vote, he kept asking Johnny Legend about that Lynne girl and Legend told him that his sister, that Lynne girl, was helping to edit the Blassie movie and then by late fall they were ready to show him a rough cut of the movie out by Venice Beach so he went and he watched her more than the movie and they all went to a Mexican restaurant that was open until three in the morning. Their first night together they stayed up until dawn watching televangelist Dr. Gene Scott, thereby consecrating their own private unusual relationship with shared realities. Which was to say, they fit. She would let him strangle her in cars to frighten other motorists; she would hang out with him in pinball arcades at ridiculous hours; she would perform screaming fights with him in public; she had posed in
Apartment Wrestling
magazine grappling with another girl in bikinis; she had done a nude layout for
Gallery
magazine; and she didn’t mind his obsession with prostitutes. The moment she knew they were meant for each other came weeks after they began and they were at the Berkshire Place in New York—“He took his socks off and blew into them and started rolling them up. I recognized that from the W. C. Fields film
The Man on the Flying Trapeze,
and I repeated a line that Fields’s wife had said—‘Why would the maternity hospital be calling
you
in the middle of the night?’ And his eyes lit up, as if to say, ‘Oh my God! She knows what I’m doing!’ And that was it—that sealed the deal.” He sang her Slim Whitman songs. She liked “Rosemarie” best. He told her he was taking something called the Making Love weekend workshop, which was taught by his old TM friend Johnny Gray—who liked to be called John now—and Gray’s
wife, Barbara De Angelis, both of whom were psychologists. Kathy Utman, who loved to spread love, had urged him to do it, since maybe there had been so many negative things happening to him that maybe he needed to be reminded about love. He told Lynne about one of the exercises where you have to reveal to the person you’re partnered with, which was Kathy, the worst thing you’ve ever done in your life. He said the worst thing that he had ever done in his life was picking his nose when he was alone in the bathroom. “He was completely serious,” said Lynne. The workshop also taught him that masturbation was not good for relationships because it drained energy and made one less present with other people. He did not like learning this—he had never liked learning this—since he was a frequent enthusiast of the practice. (“That’s one of the reasons he was late sometimes,” said Kathy.) But he did stop for a while and people said his eyes became more present and more clear.

On the seventh day of 1983—which was ten days before his thirty-fourth birthday—he returned to Rockefeller Center, where his banishment from
Saturday Night Live
still hung thick in the air, and visited the Letterman show to demonstrate his new loving nature. He hugged Letterman and bandleader Paul Shaffer and the producers and audience members and said that he loved each one of them and then he called his parents from backstage and announced, “This is Mommy and Daddy.” And he addressed them—“Mommy and Daddy, I never told you this before, but I just want to say that I love you both very much. And I’m sorry for if—I know I was a hard kid growing up—I gave you hard times. And I’m sorry for all the hard times I gave you…. And I really appreciate you. I’m very grateful to have you both as my parents….” And he hugged them both and Stanley said that they loved him very much, too, and Letterman said, “It’s a little like
Queen for a Day
out here.” Then they all sat down and Mommy and Daddy told stories about Andy and about how he stood up in the crib and played the records and about how he entertained the little children at birthday parties.
Mommy also said she hated the wrestling with women and Andy pointed out that it had embarrassed her so much that she was afraid to go to the beauty parlor for fear of what ladies would say. And Stanley said he was still incensed at Jerry Lawler and then they called Grandma Lillie on the air and Andy said he loved her, too, and the whole family, including Lillie, sang “Row Row Row Your Boat” for all the nice viewers. And if there was a put-on at all during the visit, it was that this was not the first time that Andy had told Mommy and Daddy that he loved them. He said that all the time always. It was just that maybe 195,544 certain people who watched
Saturday Night Live
might not have known what a lovely fellow he truly was.

He sent the real him onto a television program hosted by a psychologist named Tom Cottle who asked him all about him no really and he told Cottle about the sad little boy who stared out the window when the grandfather died. He told about the boy with the cameras in the wall and the boy in the woods by the playground. He told about the meditating that saved him from becoming a wino in the gutter. He promised that the mean things he said about the women he wrestled were only fooling in fun and that he believed professional wrestling was really real after being thrown on his head three times. Cottle asked him how he felt when Elvis died and he said, “I was sad and, you know, like everybody else, I was a little doubting whether it was true or not, you know? It was a sort of unbelievable thing.” He coughed quite a bit while he did all of his telling.

He was a guest referee at the Chicago Amphitheater when Lawler wrestled there on February 12. They yelled at each other in front of everybody. They pushed each other around and he got to do his screaming. He was happy to see Lawler again. The crowd was like thunder, which was exciting again. The media ignored the fact that he was there. He hadn’t told many people that he was there, anyway.

Latka Gravas donned his coveralls for the last time on earth. The one hundred twelfth episode
of Taxi
was filmed at Paramount Stage 25 on February 18, and it was the final time they would all do this together. Danny DeVito would say, “Everybody was very emotional due to the fact that we were all splittin’ up and we knew it and we didn’t want to.” Tears were easy for Andy, always were, and he shed not one that day. He always felt that he had done his best work as Latka five years before there ever was a Latka.

Five days later he told Letterman that he wanted to film a remake of the Laurel and Hardy classic
Sons of the Desert,
starring himself and Fred Blassie, who sat to his left. Blassie demonstrated—“You’ve got us into a fine mess again, you pencil-neck geek! Now you’re crying again! You hearing that pencil-neck geek crying again?” “Well,” said Letterman, “I know people will look forward to that!” Andy also announced that he would be appearing in a legitimate Broadway play called
Teaneck Tanzi,
which would begin previews in April. Letterman teased him—“No wrestling in this?” Andy said, “Um … actually, I’d ra—Hmmm. It’s hard to—No, I don’t know.”