Lost in the Funhouse (17 page)

Steve Allen, who would come to know Foreign Man well just a few years after that urgent hotel meeting, later turned his professorial eye to the character: “There is more to Foreign Man than just a heavily accented speech pattern that sounds funny to native American ears, such as Bill Dana’s José Jimenez,” he would write. “Foreign Man is also a creature suffering from cultural shock, future shock. His attitudes are hopelessly out of synchronization with those common in the time and place in which he has landed. He simply does not understand the American sense of humor, but thinks he does. He is so confident in this regard, in fact, that he’s willing to get up in front of nightclub audiences and try to do what Henny Youngman, Milton Berle, or Bob Hope does.” Indeed, Foreign Man was designed to brim with oblivious bravado. He was both tool and secret weapon, the irresistible career emissary dispatched to do the bidding of Andy Kaufman. He would be the foot in every important doorway. And, one way or another, he would always shove Andy Kaufman across every threshold.

He left Boston and returned home and, by September, the foreign kid began turning up on curbs outside of clubs, starting with clubs on Long Island, and the first sort of club there that permitted him onstage was a strip joint and he fumbled his way through eemetations before introducing the next naked dancing lady, then came back out to complain about his wife’s cooking before another naked lady shimmied forth—and he was not well received but the ladies felt sorry for him and were very nice, which was exciting, but ultimately not very
helpful. Then he auditioned for a popular Roslyn music club not adverse to comical acts, called My Father’s Place and, as with Al’s Place, his material glistened from the start and there was a standing ovation after his first set. “I felt like a comedian,” he later said, as though the notion had not previously occurred to him. “It was coming in rhythms, this laughter.” He returned again and again and became a dependable mainstay (give or take more than a few nights of wavering reception, the apogee of which was the night a hurled beer bottle bounced off his forehead) and frequently emceed for songwriter showcase nights. He began to experiment further and to perfect the complete arc of Foreign Man’s transformation into Elvis—“Anytime there was an Elvis Presley movie on television, day or night, he ran to the nearest TV set in the place,” said Eppie Epstein, who owned the club. Whenever possible, he led audiences into old and new coves of whimsy or deceit. At the congas, he would invoke the room to repeat the following nonsensical sounds
—oh-wah
and
ta-ta
and
foooo
and
lie-am
—and have them keep repeating with him as he quickened the conga beats until everyone realized they were shouting
Oh what a fool I am!
Richard Hersh, who helped manage My Father’s Place, would recall, “The audience loved it because they
were
fooled, they played right into his hands—and then he had their attention.” To quell serious stagefright—“He was very nervous before going onstage. It was like being bar mitzvahed every night, okay?” said Hersh—Andy began requesting time to meditate in silence for fifteen-minute periods before and after performing. “It was a very significant part of his theatrical presentation, almost to the point of mystique,” said Epstein. “He would come offstage and become a monk. You [couldn’t] see him—he’d be meditating. [Afterward he’d blankly say],
‘Um, hi … how are you? Oh, thank you …’
Like a different person.”

He made occasional forays into the city, got onstage downtown during amateur nights at the Bitter End, continuing his rounds until late December, when he returned to California for another long advanced-training TM retreat in Santa Barbara. There, he entertained meditators as Elvis and put out word that he was looking for a place to stay for a few weeks afterward down in Los Angeles. A young
TM teacher named Linda Mitchell, who aspired to classical guitar virtuosity (which was kind of like show business), offered her parents’ guest house in Encino, where many transient bliss people had been welcome. His two primary orders of business were to see if he could (a) get onstage at a new club on Sunset Boulevard called the Comedy Store, which he’d been hearing much about, and (b) get a chance to appear on the television quiz show
The Dating Game,
not necessarily to meet girls (although he enjoyed that possibility) but to insert Foreign Man into a very different cultural reality. “He wanted to do the show as Foreign Man,” Mitchell recalled, “and they just didn’t want Foreign Man.” Day after day, however, he stormed the production office unwilling to accept defeat and was finally auditioned on camera and was amusing enough to secure an
okay-we’ll-think-about-it,
which he took less lightly than the producers may have. (He called them every day for the remainder of his visit, just to see if a decision had been reached, which it had not.) Uncle Sammy, meanwhile, knew the veteran comic Sammy Shore and his wife Mitzi Shore, who owned the Comedy Store, where every nascent American purveyor of stand-up entertainment had begun to make pilgrimage in hopes of being discovered. Sam Denoff would remember: “I called Mitzi and said, ‘Listen, I have this guy, I’m not sure what he does.’ She told us to come over and we hung around backstage and then he went out and started to do one of his crazy foreign things with the audience. And, Jesus Christ, the people went
whaaaa?
And I couldn’t even look over at Mitzi, because I didn’t know what the hell she would think. He was unpolished, but he had this idea that he was gonna send the world up.” Mitzi Shore wasn’t sure what she thought either, but she noted that he held some unusual sway over the crowd, which was not the easiest thing to do in West Hollywood, where the rather jaded clientele generally resisted such silliness as chanting gibberish along with a boy beating a drum.

Back in Great Neck that February, the mission escalated. Fortified by chutzpah tested in Los Angeles, he would now audition in places that had previously only intimidated him. On his behalf, Eppie Epstein put in a call to Budd Friedman, the powerful starmaking
owner of the Improvisation. Friedman’s memory: “Eppie said, ‘You’ve got to see this guy!’ And that’s all he said. And for some reason I believed him.” Friedman told Epstein to send him in for open-mike night the following Monday, the twelfth. Meanwhile, Andy knew that regular Thursday afternoon auditions were held at a brand-new Upper East Side showcase club called Catch a Rising Star. So he loaded his various prop cases into his father’s car on February 8 and drove to the club, where he schlepped everything through the door, mystifying the talent coordinator Conan Berkeley and the house pianist Eddie Rabin. Then Rabin encountered him primping alone in the men’s room—“This strange guy asked me,
‘Are you de piano player? I will be singing de Elveece? You know de Elveece?’
And I thought, well, I guess he’s the real thing. I mean, there was no reason to put on a foreign accent for me alone in the men’s room. Then he went out and did the act and I realized I’d been had.” At which point, Berkeley, who was greatly impressed by the audition, would remember saying to him, “Can you come back and perform tonight?” And he went back into the Foreign Man and said,
“Oh! Yesss, I will be back yesss!”
Berkeley told Catch owner Rick Newman to specifically watch for this immigrant person that night, so Newman and his friend, the prominent young comic David Brenner, stood in the back of the room and witnessed Bombing as they had never understood bombing before. “He started speaking in a language that I’d never heard, that David had never heard,” said Newman. “Then he began crying.” And the conga-crying—“He never said a word of English for his first eight minutes!” said Newman—moved toward eemetations toward Elveece—“and then we lost it, just fell off our chairs!” The audience, meanwhile, was either ecstatic (per memories of Newman and Berkeley) or enraged (per Brenner); afterward he tottered to the rear, where Newman professed glee and gave insightful praise, inviting him back all weekend and whenever he wished to be seen, and where Brenner counseled him after such a dismal showing—“I said, ‘You know, you can’t go by what that audience did to you tonight. Don’t listen to them. Not only are you funny, you’ve got something no one
else has.’ I mean, he was a comedic con artist and that night he was breaking down barriers that nobody knew ever existed!”

He jubilantly drove back to Grassfield Road sometime before dawn and wrote a note to his family while preparing his ice cream:
Feb. 8 [really 9], 1973, Dear Mommy, Daddy, and Carol [Michael was now a Business major at Penn], I had a very prosperous day today. I auditioned at a niteclub of the type which I attended with Uncle Sammy in L.A. and was asked to perform tonite. The man who runs the show really understood my act much more than anyone else I’ve met in this business … and I’ve been asked to return this Friday and Saturday nites. Tonite’s show went well and Jackie Mason was in the audience. So it was a good day. And Mon. nite I am at the Improvisation and Wed. nite I audition at Dangerfield’s. So everything is going well. Thank you very much.
(He had now begun closing all family correspondence with Foreign Man’s signature stamp of gratitude.) And that morning, while he slept, his parents scrawled at the bottom of the note, “Great! There’s nothing we like better than to see you have things go your way—Loads of good luck.” They also told him to use the car as he needed it, which he did. The note that he left them the following night reported further onstage prosperity and news that people from
The Dating Game
had called and wanted him to be on the program in two weeks, but he had told them that that probably wouldn’t work out, so they had suggested he call them collect before his next trip—
So I made it after all
! On Sunday, he performed again at Catch and wrote afterward,
Boy, tonite was exciting. I met Doc Pomus, who wrote many many Elvis Presley songs and some Fabian songs and many more. He liked my act very much.
It was almost as though Elvis had been watching him, he thought. He also reported that both Rodney Dangerfield (whose nearby Upper East Side club would audition him on Wednesday) and Jackie Mason were there watching him as well.

Then, on Monday night, he walked into the all-important Improv, where Greg Garrison would find him fourteen months hence and put him on the Dean Martin summer comedy show, which would be the break that preceded all other breaks that propelled
him to where he needed to go. And Silver Friedman, wife of Budd Friedman, and possessor of certain mystical visionary powers, would remember his first steps into the club—“He was in a total state of discovery always. Everything he would look at, it was just as though he was seeing it for the first time. And so he stood there in the doorway, looking all around him—I mean, I don’t want to seem like too much of a witch—but I remember seeing a basement ceiling over his head, a low ceiling, and I saw carpeting and drums and him in this rec room … a den. He gave off a very strong energy. Then later we found out about him practicing in his Long Island basement all those years and I went
oooooo!”
And Budd Friedman would remember greeting him—“I said, ‘Where you from, kid?’
‘An island in the Caspian Sea.’
Okay. So he went onstage and the people were sort of laughing—I didn’t know what to make of him. Until he did his Elvis and I just fell on the floor. Who knew there were no islands in the Caspian Sea?” And that night he wrote—
Dear Mommy, Daddy, and Carol. They liked me at the Improvisation and I can come back, so I’ll probably be doing two shows a night—one at the Improvisation, and one at Catch a Rising Star. Thank you verr-rry much.

8

Like never before, this was their time. Those possessed of youth and hubris who stood alone with microphones, telling clubdrunks about their mothers fathers wivesgirlfriendsboyfriends lovetroubles neuroses ethnicities fears, sharing their Observations about life dating commercials hygiene pets fashion fastfood toiletseats politics movies doc-torslawyers agentsshrinks conveniencestores hotelrooms airlinemeals sexdrugsandrockandroll—it was their time to say
notice me
and it began a rush, then an onslaught, wherein more and more of them kept coming forth to display their singular/similar attitudes. And if it were not for this being their time, it could not have also been his time, even though he did not do what they did. He was theater whereas they told jokes—but he belonged with them; there was nowhere else to put him. It was the only context in which he made sense, not that he made sense, not that he ever tried. So the others, the joke people, they always stood in the back of the room, whatever room, to watch what he would do next. To them, he was spectacle and mascot, not a peer; scant few of them could ever manage what might resemble normal
conversation with him. He would not/could not drink beer with them or talk sports or chicks or news of the day with them; after his sets, he busied himself with the club’s supply of ice cream or chocolate cake, sometimes asking mommyish waitresses to spoon it into his mouth (“I had to feed him as if he were in a highchair,” said Zane Busby, who willingly indulged him at Catch. “Like
here-comes-the airplane-open-the-hangar-doorrrrr!”).
But they all watched him work—Robert Klein (revered elder statesman of young comics); Gabe Kaplan (bound for television sitcom); Jimmie Walker (also bound, who observed, “The foreign thing always amazed me because sometimes he actually communicated without speaking English…. People responded and you’d go, ‘My God! How is this working?!’”); Freddie Prinze (also bound); Richard Lewis (chief intellectual neurotic, who observed, “Andy was almost like Ionesco doing stand-up”); Richard Belzer (emceed at Catch, often helped lug Andy’s props into the club basement before shows, who observed, “I couldn’t believe the courage. Either consciously or unconsciously, Andy was challenging and educating audiences, stretching their imaginations…. He made other performers more daring—he had that effect…. He was a performance artist before the term existed”); and Jay Leno (attitudinal iron man, who observed, “Most of us thought he was very funny, but we worried that no one else would get him. We even felt sort of sorry for him…. He just behaved strangely, in order to get a reaction of any kind, even hostile. There were nights at Catch a Rising Star when he would lie onstage in a sleeping bag”). No comic ever wanted to take the stage once he departed from it, for he never left an audience the way he had found it—the room would be transformed, rendered giddy or dizzy or dumbstruck or irate. “It didn’t take very long to realize as a young comedian that Andy Kaufman closed the show,” said Lewis. “You couldn’t follow him unless you just ran around the room setting furniture on fire. I think he tried that, too. He was devastating in every sense, great but sometimes completely insane.” Of course, they all believed him to be crazier than they were; he believed it was just the reverse—but only whenever he gave it, or them, thought, which was not usually, not to be aloof no really.

So
The New York Times
came to take his photograph onstage at the Improvisation in May 1974—about a month after he taped his Dean Martin appearances and about a month before the appearances aired. He was wearing a feathered Indian headdress (his unspoken homage to wrestler Chief Jay Strongbow; he often wore it to and from the club, even on subway trains) and a yellow T-shirt with silkscreened palm trees swaying across his chest which was the sublayer of all other layers and it was the layer he wore when performing at conga the various “folk songs” from his home island of Caspiar to celebrate seasonal harvest. (One such song, “Aba-Dabbi,” was performed in native gibberish to the tune of “Alouette”—with perplexed audience sing-along always attendant.) And then the photograph was published in the esteemed newspaper of record on May 28—which could not have been more exciting—since his likeness was featured among pictures of legendary comics Mort Sahl and Shelley Berman and contemporaries David Brenner and Freddie Prinze. But the photos were assembled around a package of stories about the dark and craven lives of comedians, emblazoned with such headlines as
IT’S NOT A LAUGHING MATTER, BEING A COMIC THESE DAYS
and
DESPITE GAINS HERE, IT’S TOUGH TO EARN A LIVING
and
PSYCHOLOGIST FINDS FUNNY MEN ARE SAD MEN
. And the caption beneath his photograph mistakenly identified him as “Howard Itzkowitz, a young unknown trying out at The Improvisation.” And this was his debut in
The New York Times.
Moreover, he was mentioned in none of the articles therein—although he was rather pleased to have been excluded from the one about a dispiriting survey of fifty-five nationally known comics conducted by a psychologist who pinpointed a common thread of childhood trauma in all of the subjects. Meanwhile, the psychologist—one Dr. Samuel S. Janus—was described in the first paragraph as a former “song-and-dance man on the Catskills borscht circuit.” (Oh!)
Song-and-dance-man!
Well, there was the solution! Never, ever had Andrew G. Kaufman considered himself to be a comedian. And from that moment forward he would traverse great lengths to correct anyone who ever accused him of such. “I never claim to be a funny man, a comedian, or even a talented
man,” he would say always thereafter. “I’m just going up there and having fun. And if people want to join me, and watch me, have fun with me, then that’s … um, fine.” And he would conclude always, “What I am is a
song-and-dance man!”
He thought it sounded jauntier. Anyway,
The New York Times
said that he wasn’t Howard Itzkowitz in a correction printed two days later.

There had been this meditation girl whom he had met not long before leaving Boston and about whom he was crazy. Her name was Kathy Utman—she was a roommate of Prudence Farrow’s—and her spritely air and small mellifluous voice enchanted him completely. He had never met such a blissful being—even among all of the other blissful ones. Diminutive, childlike, she seemed to sprinkle love petals wherever she stepped; he often compared her to a pixie named Piccoli from some story he knew—“He said I was like this little fairytale pixie person who came to earth and her job was to make people love each other more and to especially teach all the little boys how to love,” she would recall, giggling. He also said that she reminded him of Little Eva from
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and sent her the book with all of the Little Eva parts marked up. He wrote her fanciful, delirious letters—signed them
I could just eat you up
or
MBFUA!!!
(“He said that was the sound of a kiss.”) She was a cloud; she loved him back like a cloud might love, couldn’t fully commit because she knew he couldn’t either really—“I was a little bit careful,” she said. But they would play together—when on park lawns he insisted they run in slow motion toward each other with open arms flapping—and she would come to New York early on to see his act at the Bitter End et al. and they maintained an understanding that she, as a cloud, would sweetly hover nearby throughout his life, which she in fact did, more or less, even when she married other guys and in between those marriages as well. “He always said we would live together when we were old. He also said that he heard bells whenever he stood near me.”

For this reason, Elayne called her Kathy Bells, not in a bad way, although maybe in an arch-bemused way, as would be her way. But then
Elayne was different, like no one else had been or would be—“I was twenty-one years old … street-smart, cynical, and a tough cookie.” He met Elayne Boosler not long after Budd Friedman had welcomed him to the performing fraternity of the Improv, where she was a hostess when not slipping onstage to sing, for her dream was to sing herself to riches. The night they connected he had just led the audience—in a bunny hop/conga line—out of the club and onto Ninth Avenue and around the block and back into the club. “I had to seat the whole damn audience again.” He was wearing a sweatshirt that said
I LOVE GRANDMA
—which was a new alternate sublayer. She told him, “You’re crazy.” He replied, not as Foreign Man, “Thank you very much”—and took her to a restaurant in Chinatown for breakfast, where “with a cool move” she signaled a waiter to bring them water, which he later told her was the reason he fell in love with her. She, meanwhile, loved his beautiful big blue eyes and the way he looked so strikingly handsome from behind.

She was brass like he never knew. She was also game and they became characters together—“I happily discovered that whoever he became, I had just the girl for him.” At Coney Island, she was the bitchy gum-snapping moll to his Tony Piccinini, “an overconfident, inept Romeo” who loudly promised to win giant stuffed animals for her, drawing large and larger crowds that watched him fail and fail until she stormed off while he called after her, “Sweetheart! Baby! Don’t do me like this—I love ya!!” He took her to Times Square porn parlors, where she would pruriently stare over men’s shoulders and
ahem
until the places were emptied. She would accompany Foreign Man to wrestling matches at Madison Square Garden, where he entertained their seating section whenever a behemoth took a questionable fall—
“Look at dat! Dat guy is so good, he knock de other guy down weethout even haffing to touch him!”
They perfected a volatility that was sometimes real and often not and few witnesses ever knew the difference. Silver Friedman watched one nasty imbroglio unfold late one night on the pavement outside of the Improv—“We heard some shouting and the next thing we knew she was hitting him with her purse. And he was shoving her. Then he grabbed her purse and whacked her with it. And they’re haranguing like two cats and didn’t care who saw it. It
was hysterical. But it was a lover’s spat and they were very involved in it. I
think
it was real. It lasted about six minutes.”

On nights when he didn’t have to return his father’s car to Great Neck, he stayed in her Greenwich Village apartment; Sunday mornings in bed he would read her the funny papers while eating ice cream. She studied his act and understood every nuance—“To listen to your own silence is an amazing secret of comedy,” she would observe (without ever having met Maharishi), “and most people are not brave enough to do that. But he could stand there the longest with nothing perceptible happening, and yet so much happened.” Whenever she sang at the Improv, however, he left the room; as such, he convinced her to become a comedienne. She had, after all, attitude to spare and had assisted him most splendidly with a character that he had begun developing who wasn’t him or Foreign Man but a guy very much like the foul lounge singer he maybe/memorably saw in Las Vegas—Tony Clifton was his name, although nobody in New York knew of him, so he decided to call his character Tony Clifton. (He privately admitted that Richard Belzer, the acidic emcee at Catch who bore no resemblance except in stage demeanor, also partly inspired the character.) Which meant that he abused everyone from the stage while warbling badly while dressed in a dark coat and clip-on bow tie (for now) and wore a little grease paint mustache while singling out some schlub down in front and berating him until this noisy hostess chickie got fed up and bounded onto the stage and climbed on his back and started whaling on him while he insulted her and told her to knock it off with the women’s lib jazz and said she oughta go back into the kitchen and raise babies like all chickies were meant to do whereupon she slugged him and he fell and begged for mercy until she left the stage in triumph and he started in again about how she should go back to the kitchen/babies and she moved toward him again and he said he was just kidding and everyone was furious and he would flee as hissing filled room as per busted steam pipe. Anyway, she
was
funny—could actually make him laugh (nobody else did really)—and so he counseled and coached her (quite incongruously) on how to
relate
to audiences
and break that fourth wall and “come down off the stage”; one night, in desperation, she offered gum to an audience and heard better laughter and she knew she was onto something. No one really understood their relationship, the yin and yang of it, the fire and ice cream of it, although Silver Friedman would note, “I think he released the child in her.” And everyone saw his influence when she took to arriving onstage while humming “The Way We Were”—just as Barbra Streisand did at the very beginning of the hit record—except Elayne never sang a word and kept humming and hummed the entire song; it got big, if unusual, laughs.