Lost in the Funhouse (19 page)

And then
The New York Times,
in the person of critic Richard F. Shepard, came to witness both ends of the bill and, on July 11, a review was published under the headline SONGS AND A NEW COMEDIAN MAKE LIVELY CABARET. Praising the entire evening of entertainment, Shepard singled out “a new and brilliantly funny comic performer named Andy Kaufman,” declaring him “the star here,” whose work “defies categorization. He is more in the Sid Caesar tradition of prepared material rather than in the stand-up mode. He gives you no quotable lines, very few describable schticks, yet he leaves you laughing, loud and hard. He enters, speaking with a peculiar accent that could be Spanish, Greek, whatever, but it’s none of them…. He imitates Elvis Presley, does a bravura performance with vocal of a ‘folk song’ from an island in the Caspian Sea; it’s hilarious…. His manner is one of complete non-self-confidence. He falters, retraces his steps, and it is in this facade of uneasiness, marked by awkward yet eloquent gestures, that his talent for the comic shines.”

And then, one night shortly thereafter, Dustin Hoffman with his friend Murray Schisgal, the writer, and their wives happened to wander down East Fifty-sixth Street and into the doors of the Hippodrome just as a fellow with a peculiar accent walked onto the stage, and Hoffman, focusing an unparalleled actor’s eagle eye on the performance, was intrigued to notice that the fellow was very extremely nervous—“His hands were moving down by his sides, almost like he’s playing an invisible piano, and he’s wearing a suit that looked badly shrunk. I thought it must have been an amateur night. And, in the first ten minutes of his act, half of what was originally a half-full audience got up and walked out. At first blush, I thought,
Oh, this poor bastard.
And then suddenly he made that swing—right from poor bastard to genius. I’d never seen anybody do a bad act on purpose before. But he was so good that he appeared to be literally summoning up beads of sweat on his forehead, drenching himself in the embarrassment and being affected emotionally by the fact that they weren’t laughing. People had their heads down, as if the guy had lost his bowels or thrown up onstage—you had to look away, but you couldn’t. It was like watching a nervous breakdown in slow motion—and it was rhythmic! It had nuance and poetry and it killed me! I had never seen anything like it before. He was like a beautiful dandelion, so fragile that he might just blow away in the wind. Then he cried and worked the crying into the conga drums—
oh God!
The technique, with the originality and imagination of it! He was
fearless!”

Hoffman led his party backstage afterward to offer congratulations—“I remember being surprised at how big he was. When he did that character he was like the size of Woody Allen, and then you meet him and he’s a Goliath. And I remember how sweet and shy he was.” Murray Schisgal would recall, “He was very polite but also absolutely ebullient. He looked like the happiest guy in the world because Dusty came back to see him. He was really just floating.” Hoffman, in fact, was equally thrilled and began sending friends to the show and dragging others back with him and, on July 31, the syndicated columnist Earl Wilson reported, “Dustin Hoffman was at the Little
Hippodrome for the fourth time to see zany comic Andy Kaufman, described by one viewer as an anti-comic.”

One of the friends Hoffman sent forth to behold the spectacle was Woody Allen himself, who would remember, “I thought he was quite good, quite amazing in certain places—the Mighty Mouse thing and the Elvis Presley come to mind. What he did, he did in a talented way, no question. He came over to me afterward and asked if he could have a chat with me one afternoon. He was awfully nice, so I had him come to [my manager] Jack Rollins’s office. And I chatted with him for a while, but most of his questions were odd because—I’ll never forget this—somewhere he had gotten the impression that I was a Transcendental Meditationist. He had heard that I pilgrimaged to India every year. And I said that nothing could be further from the truth. I have respect for it, but I have no interest in it whatsoever. And he was explaining to me that he was very, very interested in Eastern religion and Eastern philosophy. Which was, uh, nice. Then we talked about show business for a little bit and that was it. But I found him quite amusing and, you know, very unusual.”

His first impact upon popular consciousness, the moment he was born unto universal memory, would come fifteen months hence and he would then seem to have materialized from nowhere, inexplicably, like a wraith. By then, he had rehearsed his craft for twenty-six of the twenty-six years he had thus far lived. When it happened, as it happened, he did not utter a word, he was silent, the fingers would twitch at his sides and his eyes would strobe and he would sip the water and wipe his mouth, as the Terrytooners exalted the mouse by way of the phonograph and he would wait for his three opportunities to step forward and heroically move his lips and it was just as it had been since he invented this particular exercise for little birthday children, but really for himself, when he was no more than fourteen. But now it would seem to glisten like new (unless someone had viewed his club work or glimpsed the Dean Martin debut). And every other sly transgression he would attempt before cameras from that point forward would seem
equally new, when in fact not much of it was, because the ideas had gestated in adolescence, then grew as he grew. And so the birth on record would be remembered as October 11, 1975—which was a Saturday night, which was the first Saturday night that NBC broadcast a radical live ninety-minute comedy and music insurrection that would change the way comedy and music would thereafter be experienced on television. Especially comedy.
Saturday Night,
unforgivingly beamed live as it unfolded from Rockefeller Center in New York (same building where Howdy Doody had worked), would come to be known as
Saturday Night Live
and it was designed for a new generation—edgily produced-written-and-performed by young turks for an audience of same—and its first years would become hallowed in retrospect, would be remembered as golden and culturally important and unmatchable in quality. Thus, all that transpired in its inaugural broadcast would be the stuff of time capsules, although no one could have guessed this when it happened. But there it was, all fairly indelible—the opening moments in which John Belushi played a befuddled immigrant (oh!) learning to speak English from writer Michael O’Donoghue by repeating,
“I would like to feed yur fingerteeps to de wolverines,”
before both collapsed in death; Chevy Chase’s first mock “Weekend Update” newscast; the first sketch involving costumed Killer Bees; guest host George Carlin’s first monologue (of three that he delivered during the show); fake commercials for Tryopenin aspirin and superabsorbant Mini-Pads; the short film by Albert Brooks; the offbeat playlet featuring new mutant Muppets created by Jim Henson; songs from Billy Preston and Janis Ian; the filmed drive-around-New-York segment in which pedestrians were bade to “Show Us Your Guns” and did; the nascent and grungily irreverent ensemble work of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, who were Belushi, Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Garrett Morris, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, and Laraine Newman; and the novelty act, as it was called, which appeared toward the latter moments of the show’s first half hour, in which a nervous man dropped a needle onto a phonograph and stood there waiting and received much laughter and applause and left.

To get to that night, more people had to keep discovering him and
he would keep doing what he did and had done—all of which happened as haphazardly as fate would decree. Quirky events along the path would accrue the heft of legend. Foreign Man would ditheringly appear on local television, making his hometown debut on
The Joe Franklin Show,
and the venerable Franklin would be rendered more disoriented than even Foreign Man. Not long thereafter, he was bumped at the last minute from
Midday Live with Bill Boggs
due to breaking news, then turned Cliftonian in his indignation and ranted at producers and refused to leave the studio premises until security came to handcuff him and escort him to pavement, about which he was inordinately pleased. On Columbus Day 1974, he gave Foreign Man a name—he wrote in his daybook
my name: Baji Kimran
—not that he ever told anyone, because he obviously needed to be Andy Kaufman in order to become famous. Later that month, Walsh booked him for a week at the Bijou in Philadelphia, where he opened for a young songwriter named Barry Manilow who was building heat around a new record called “Mandy” and Manilow would take the stage each night to find it strewn with debris which the audience had hurled at the opening act—“They just
hated
his guts,” Manilow said. “My whole job that week was to try to bring them back from the edge of revolution.” Andy also began a long association with a club called Pips in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, where he was actually paid and additionally got to consume all the ice cream he wished (preferably hot fudge sundaes in beer mugs for better mixology)—and where he regularly dragged the waitresses and Seth Schultz, son of the owner George Schultz, to Coney Island at two in the morning so they could ride the Cyclone with him. “He always made us ride in the last car of the Cyclone because he said it provided the full-whiplash effect,” said Schultz. In November, Walsh sent him to Fort Lauderdale to open for the Supremes (minus Diana Ross) at a nightclub owned by his friend Bobby Van and, after his first set on the first night, the manager of the Supremes forbade him to step onstage again. Walsh spoke with Andy on the phone afterward and told him, “Look, Florida is the wrong audience for you, I made a mistake in letting you go down there, but—since you’re there anyhow—when that Bobby Van
comes into your dressing room, I want you to do Crying Man.” (Van called Walsh forty-five minutes later and said, “Oh, Jim, I feel terrible! Poor guy’s having a nervous breakdown in his dressing room and won’t stop crying.”) There would be odd gigs in private men’s clubs and at the Continental Baths (whose largely gay male audience wore only towels or less) and at the Mr. Olympia Contest and at restaurants and niteries throughout the tristate area, in addition to dutiful nightly stops at Catch and the Improv, where the Friedmans had also hired him to emcee a weekly Sunday showcase of children performers. Silver Friedman remembered him arriving twenty-five minutes late on the second Sunday of the series and her saying to him, “Andy, next time you’re late, at least call us! We didn’t even know if you were coming!” And his eyes turned black and he countered,
“Don’t yell!”
“It was like my little reproach had stabbed him,” she said, “and suddenly he almost looked
menacing,
to the point where if I’d said another word he would have either walked out or killed me. Anger, I realized, was a very big issue for him deep down in there somewhere.”

By winter’s end, he and Walsh drifted apart as casually as they had come together, with no hard feelings, although Walsh had grown concerned over Andy’s mental well-being—“He had come up to my office on Lexington Avenue and he started talking about what he really wanted to do, which was to play Carnegie Hall and then take the audience the next day over to a deli to have milk and cookies. And then he said that when he became
really
successful, what he most wanted to do was to buy the Atlantic Ocean and drain it and build a city there. And this was now bordering on … I mean, if this guy’s serious we’ve got some problems here.”

Meanwhile, NBC had hired a bright young producer named Dick Ebersol from ABC Sports and saddled him with the task of creating a new live late-night comedy-variety program to replace the Saturday repeats of
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
The show—whose content was still a mystery to all, including Ebersol—was to be up and running in Studio 8H of Rockefeller Center by the fall of 1975. So, in the holiday dusk of 1974, Ebersol began cruising New York clubs for talent and it was at Catch a Rising Star that he spied
his first real quarry—“The first image I had of Andy will never go away—it was Mighty Mouse. I thought it was the damnedest thing I’d ever seen. It was like stepping into a whole other world—and I had no idea how many other worlds that I would ultimately go to with him.” Ebersol instantly befriended Andy, started riding regularly with him from Catch to the Improv, watched him spoon up the various parfait layers of his act, breakfasted with him and Elayne, all the while talking and talking about this new show which Andy would absolutely have to be part of. Around the same time, Ebersol convinced a young Canadian exile of rich comedic pedigree, Lorne Michaels, to come build and produce the show with him. Ebersol said of Michaels and their mission, “Our minds met in that the one thing we wanted to do was to take the language of young people and make it the language of television. We both had this philosophy that television was always at least ten years behind what was actually happening. Television was very risk aversive.” By March 1975, seven months before their debut, he informed his new partner of the first risk he wished to put forth—“I told Lorne that I had one guest booked for the first show—Andy Kaufman. Lorne had no idea who he was.” Michaels then went to Catch with talent scout John Head to see for himself, then went ten or fifteen times more, and was ever mesmerized—“It was as beautiful a thing as you could witness,” he would recall. “Aside from being funny, he wasn’t enmeshed in the show business of it—show business being that it was simply an act. There seemed to be some other commitment, something very pure and more personal about what he was doing. And it was simply arresting.”

Also that March, a wily filmmaker named Larry Cohen came to the Improv in search of someone with a “certain crazy look” who could infiltrate the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day Parade in police uniform—marching in line with actual NYPD cops, as though he were a member of the force—then appear to go berserk firing a phony gun at random, then pretend to be shot down, then fall to the ground, mouthing the words “God told me to,” and play dead. He quickly spotted a worthy candidate onstage and Andy said he would very much like to do it. He had, he said, some experience at wielding fake
guns and pretending to die. Cohen’s project was to be a made-for-television detective movie called
God Told Me To,
wherein various New Yorkers believe they hear the voice of God asking for bloodshed and they comply in accordance. (“Strangely enough,” Cohen would say, “this was before the Son of Sam murders, but Andy bore an amazing likeness to David Berkowitz, the real guy who heard voices and killed people.”) Cohen told him where to show up on the day of the parade, whereupon a police uniform would be provided for him. Cohen asked, “So, what size jacket do you wear?” “I don’t know.” “Well, what size shirt do you wear?” “Um, I don’t know.” “Shoe size?” “I don’t know.” Cohen said, “You’re a grown man. How can you not know what size clothes you wear?” Andy said, “I wear my father’s old clothes.”