Lost in the Funhouse (16 page)

As was by now obligatory—and as it would be for at least the next four years—he entered as Foreign Man (never mind that his actual name gave whiff of Long Island; somehow he
was
an immigrant of varying nonspecific origin). Thus he shambled out in front of the legendary brick wall wearing one of the two Foreign Man uniforms that would never be replaced—tatty ill-fitting blue-olive-tan checked sport coat (formerly Stanley’s, as was the pale pink jacket he sometimes opted to wear) over blue oxford shirt over black turtleneck with gray flood pants and white socks and brown loafers. Hair was slicked into an oily wave. Arms were rigid at sides, danglefingers ever tapping at air as though he were vertically typing invisible words. (With the finger movements, he innately counted his rhythms—his memory banks were wired to his digits, a small secret he rarely shared and barely understood himself.) Fear screamed in cerulean blue eyes. Pinched uncertain adenoidal voice quavered and—right there on very same network air which Howdy Doody breathed, sort of
—“I … I am very nervous because ees my first time on TV. So, you know, last night ees very hard to go to sleep….”
Point here was to engender empathy by being, well, deeply pathetic—so very bad and so very sweet; so desperate to be in show business, thus so desperate for love. There ensued what he privately called Bombing, and Foreign Man had always Bombed with a pure and pristine magnificence that built the
first wall of oddness that led to the next wall of proficiency (odder still) and all that occurred betwixt was plain tragic fumphering. So he launched into the already long-employed misbegotten tale of the two boys and the one girl who hauled a cannon over the mountains of Spain and discovered that no one had a cannonball to fire at the castle
(“Don’t look at meeee.”)
and the requisite audience discomfiture came as ever. Then he attempted just one
eemetation,
that of
de President Neexon,
droopfaced and rigid, shooting both fists skyward into victory Vs—receiving laughs before opening his mouth—
“vait-vait until I give you de punch!”
Then, with voice unchanged—
“Let me make one thing perfectly clear … um, I am de President of de United States, make no mistake about that! Tenk you veddy much!”
Wordlessly, he next walked over to his phonograph, dropped the needle on the turntable, and Mighty Mouse played and he precisely lip-synched only to the rodent tenor’s infrequent seven-word braggadocio
—Here I come to save the day!
—absorbing all intervening moments of chorus by standing and fidgeting, eyes darting, pouring himself a glass of water, sipping the water, waiting through silences most cavernous and impressive, clearly incapable of saving any sort of day but then again
… maybe.
And then the record ended and cheers came like they always had and he bowed repeatedly.

The next day, he drove to the Playboy Club Resort in Great Gorge, New Jersey, where he performed poolside under spring sunshine for the
Comedyworld
cameras again as Foreign Man. (He had to place his guitar case and prop valise and tape recorder—the act always required serious
lugging—on
a chaise lounge behind him. Congas, as ever, stood to his left.) This time Comedy Correspondent Barbara Feldon read the cue-carded introduction—“… I can’t think of a single performer I’d rather be watching than this absolutely
adorable
young man from the Caribbean Islands….” Then more gentle Bombing ensued—
“Tenk you veddy much I am veddy happy to be here tonight, er, today, but you know there is vun thing I don’t like about thees place ees too much traffic. You know today I had to come on de highway there was so much traffic eet took me an hour and a half to get here. But talk about de terrible things, my wife, take my wife
please take her. No, no, I am only fooling I love my wife but she don’t know how to cook…. Her cooking ees so bad ees terrible….”
He began his eemetations—Nixon again and Ed Sullivan
(“Tonight we have de r-r-r-r-r-r-really beeg show!”)
and then he segued into that which was by this time the signature opposite wall of the Foreign Man repertoire except only now a larger population would begin to know it and once it was known it would become expected and once it was expected it would become a burden that defeated the elements of surprise and incongruity that he cherished. But that would come later because now he was brand new, a bright oddity possessed of rehearsed naïveté and true charm making a small but significant step forward from the swirl of obscurity, and so he said,
“And now last but not to be de least I would like to eemetate de Elveece Presley!”

For Elvis, he wore hidden layers, like he used to wear to school not to be funny. He turned his back to the audience, as dictated by professional impressionist law
(must-make-metamorphosis-mysterious!),
and bent over the chaise to switch on the tape that played the momentous recorded opening strains of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” which would swell into the raucous chords of “See See Rider” (all lifted directly from an actual Elvis Las Vegas concert album), during which he shed his checked coat and his oxford shirt to reveal a yellow silk blouse which he then covered with a teal tuxedo jacket and, still facing aft, he combed back his hair in pompadourian fashion, strapped on his guitar, swiveled to the music, then peeked out over his shoulder to display the perfectly cocky sneersmile that belonged only to Elvis Presley. He spun forward and
was
Elvis, prowling the pool patio with mock lascivious intent, slack babyface cheeks jiggling, sinewy legs jangling, and then the recorded intro music stopped as he stood fully transformed at the microphone and the audience applauded—and just before he would now speak in the voice of Elvis Presley, no longer Foreign Man at all, and say
“Thank you thankyouverrrmuch!”
and continue his Elvisian patter and launch into sublime replication of some familiar Elvis hit and radiate crackling ions throughout, after which he would throw articles of his costume into the audience and heave winded breaths while trying to
regain composure and then finally speak in the voice of Foreign Man, no longer Elvis Presley at all, and say
“Tenk you veddy much!”
and meekly ask for his clothes back, one of Greg Garrison’s videotape editors abruptly cut elsewhere because of broadcast time constraints. He would not know this until he watched the program in June, thus realizing that he had been left at the microphone hanging—stranded mid-feat in the silence that preceded the true tricks that were his unique currency. And he was heartily disappointed, which was fine no really, because at least it happened on network television, on his
second
appearance on network television in
two weeks
no less, and he would have another chance soon enough because things were really only starting now and it had taken him so long to get this far.

And so, back in 1971, Maharishi had regarded the boy in Spain as a puzzlement what with all of the crazyman talk and thereby discouraged bliss hierarchy from indoctrinating him just yet as a teacher. “People there thought Andy was very unstable, found his behavior kind of peculiar, asking the Maharishi about
humor,”
said Don Snow, a training cohort who had been made a teacher on the Majorca trip. “It’s considered very disruptive to have somebody who’s emotionally unstable on these advanced-training courses.” Andy, however, disagreed with this assessment and sought out His Holiness two months later in Massachusetts and pleaded his case and was then given status as a teacher. He had not returned to Great Neck after Majorca and would only make periodic visits home until autumn of 1972, when he would reclaim the den as headquarters and borrow family cars to hawk his act in the city and elsewhere. Until that time, he hired on at the Student International Meditation Society (SIMS) in Cambridge, where he did clerical work and dispensed mantra and initiated newcomers to enlightenment and also performed at TM parties as well as at Al’s Place and was allowed to return to Grahm to make a sample tape of
Uncle Andy’s Fun House
to send off to television stations but the taping was disastrous—he was disorganized and then he accidentally smeared chocolate cake on the white cyclorama studio partition,
which incensed student director Marc Summers, who would later host game shows and who then threw his headset at Andy in disgust. “I told him how unprofessional he was and then I was out the door!” said Summers. “I thought this guy should probably be in a mental institution somewhere.” Jimmy Krieger of Great Neck was now Jim Krieger of Boston University, where he studied film and made student films for which he recruited his childhood friend as star and they were artful little sixteen-millimeter films smartly shot in grainy black-and-white. Among roles he essayed in the Krieger cinematic oeuvre were a flower thief loosed upon Copley Square, a hapless fellow evicted with his young wife from a tenement and forced to wander Cambridge in bathrobes, Elvis Presley musically lamenting a leak in the roof of an apartment, and a fully frocked priest engaged in passionate necking with a nun on various public park lawns as Bostonians gawked in horror. Of the young woman who wore the nun’s habit, Krieger recalled: “Andy really loved this girl, was crazy about her. But she was serious about becoming an actress and wanted nothing to do with him. And he would constantly say, ‘She’s gonna regret it. I’m gonna be very famous one day and she’s gonna regret not knowing me!’” By all accounts, he would say this about many women. He once led Parinello and a group of guys down to a bus terminal where he promised to make irresistible moves on each girl that alighted. They watched from a distance as he moved toward girl after girl, issuing strange noises from the corner of his mouth
—schkk-schkk,
as one might urge a horse to giddyup—then asking, “Hey, baby, you doing anything today?”
Schkk-schkk.
“One by one, these girls would tell him, ‘Get away from me! Get away from me!’” said Parinello. “Then he started getting hit with pocketbooks and handbags. He just looked at us and vowed, ‘Okay, I’ll get the
next
one!’” Later he said that these women, too, would all be sorry one day.

He was a confirmed nomad at this point, cared little where he slept, had no place of his own, crashed either with Krieger in nearby Somerville or wherever a bliss person had an empty couch—vagabondism suited him and always would, even when very or somewhat famous. As long as he could meditate for two hours per morning
in complete silence—“He didn’t want a pin to drop,” said Krieger—and again at night and could prepare his newfound macrobiotic diet (brown rice and raw beans and similar flavorless purities) and could stow one daily carton of Häagen-Dazs ice cream in a freezer (could not sleep without first devouring a full pint), he was fine. Meanwhile, his professional devotions continued to burn brightly. That November, he had dragged Peter Wassyng to see Elvis perform at the Boston Garden—“We sat there in the balcony and it was like watching someone worship Jesus!”—and the following June in New York he dragged his sister to Madison Square Garden for another Elvis concert, after which he made her run with him all the way across town to the Plaza Hotel, where he mistakenly believed Elvis was staying. The very next week, he became Elvis again, albeit in a completely different fashion than ever before. Quite momentously, it was for a
real
television program on Chicago’s powerhouse ABC affiliate, WLS-TV, where Burt Dubrow was now producer of the talk show
Kennedy-at-Nite,
hosted by popular broadcaster Bob Kennedy. Elvis had just played the Chicago Stadium and, to capitalize on lingering local frenzy, Dubrow had flown in his former Grahm foil to actually be interviewed as though he
were
Elvis. For
thirty
televised minutes! Kennedy, who had spent time with him before the show, quickly gave away the conceit in his introduction—“It’s almost more like talking to Elvis than, frankly, talking to a fellow by the name of Andy Kaufman….” Andy had brought along piles of personal Elvis memorabilia to display on camera and wore a white tuxedo jacket and allowed his hair to be teased into a minor bouffant. What he was not allowed to do, however, was to actually sing as Elvis. Instead, he was directed to lip-synch along with Presley records and, as he did so (committing several flubs, since this was not what he really did in his act), he was half the Elvis that he had ever been. Confined as such, he still acquitted himself nicely during interview segments, employing a relaxed drawl and many sly lipcurls, while improvising his way through the mind of his hero. Only when a caller to the program asked how he maintained such a sexy body did two lives blur—“Well, ah tell-you-what—ah do yoga every day…. It’s
called Transcendental Meditation. Ah started a few years ago and found it to be a verrrbig help to me…. Helps to keep me young. Makes me feel better and it’s the easiest thang in the world to do.” (Elvis Presley, for the record, was a yoga enthusiast, but had no truck with Transcendental Meditation. That, he believed, was the province of the Beatles.) Nevertheless, Andy saw the experience as a suitably untraditional local television debut.

Two other notable strides had been made in the first half of 1972: In February, he was hired—by dint of a blind referral—to actually perform as the opening act for a Temptations concert in Northampton, Massachusetts. The predominantly black audience was, according to his subsequent reports, completely offput by Foreign Man and made it vociferously known and so he wept and wept onstage and pulled out his large cap gun and walked off into the wings and fired the gun into a microphone and thudded to the floor and the room went silent and the Temptations sang extra hard that night to make up for it. Then, in late May, one of his television idols, Steve Allen, came to perform with the Boston Pops Orchestra; Allen’s comic cohort Louis Nye was also on the bill, and Andy discovered that both men were staying at the nearby Sheraton Hotel. Because Uncle Sammy had written for Steve Allen, Andy believed this entitled him to a meeting in which to seek advice from the innovative television host. So he went to the hotel and used the house phone and—“A young fellow with a teenager’s [he was, in fact, twenty-three] unsteady voice was calling,” Allen would later recount in his book,
Funny People.
“‘Mr. Allen,’ he said, ‘I’m Sam Denoff’s nephew … I was wondering if I could come see you.’” Allen finally relented, since he saw no way out of it, and invited him to his room, where Nye was lounging. “He impressed both Louis and me as socially awkward, incredibly ill at ease, a bit awestruck, and somewhat offbeat. To this day I don’t know whether there was the slightest element of put-on in our first conversation, though I doubt it.” He stammered out an explanation of his accomplishments and dreams and Allen, to the best of his recollection, told him to keep doing what he was doing but to try doing it in some of these new audition-style showcase nightclubs, like the Improvisation
in New York or any such place in Los Angeles, so as to be closer to talent scouts. That, of course, was something he already knew and he would be doing just that within months, exhibiting relentless drive, foisting himself in deft foreign disguise upon unwitting club owners, never making the approach as a scion of Great Neck, never being who he was, always being who he wasn’t, hoping that which forced audiences to indulge him with pity would work as well on the gatekeepers of certain spotlit stages.