Lost in the Funhouse (23 page)

And his boyhood yearnings for women and their supple flesh had grown exponentially in California (along with his early television renown) and he dated as many women he could attract with his innocence and his awkward lovability and, though he preferred being some form of himself as he won their affections, there were instances (he said) in which he spent nights or weekends of carnality without shedding the cloak of Foreign Man. He squired various TM women or actresses, taking them to see late showings
of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(which he loved) and to vegetarian restaurants and to Chinese restaurants and to Duke’s coffee shop for chocolate cake and to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm to repeatedly ride the roller coasters—and, because he didn’t have a car, Little Wendy usually chaffeured obligingly. “As soon as he started going out with a woman, he would say, ‘Now, don’t get serious!’” she would recall. “Some of them got really insulted. He also liked to tell them that he was really special and that he couldn’t have a serious relationship because he had so many big plans. He once told me that
this much tongue
—like a half inch—makes all the difference. In other words, once he put that extra half inch into a kiss, it changed the whole dynamic of the relationship. He
hated
that he needed to be with women, because he
didn’t like the mind games they played with him. Which I guess was sort of ironic, wasn’t it?”

Cindy Williams, the actress who had just begun acquiring fame as Shirley in the ABC-TV sitcom
Laverne and Shirley,
met him at the Improv that autumn and had already been smitten with his work on
Saturday Night.
“From the moment I first saw him [on the program], I just wanted to be a part of whatever that mirthful wonderful magic was that he did,” she would recall. And he was not opposed to letting her peek behind his facades (because, after all, she was getting famous too and was very extremely pretty) and they began a casual mirthful affair over the course of weeks that grew into an easy friendship and she would drive him to the Improv and he would meditate in her car and sometimes he would get into Clifton character at her home before going to the club, which never thrilled her. “I couldn’t
stand
Tony Clifton,” she said. “He’d say, ‘Once I’m this character, I’m not going to come out of it.’ There was a tinge of scariness about that. I couldn’t find the delineation and he wouldn’t betray it. I’d threaten him—‘You either stop being Tony right now or I’m not giving you a ride or I won’t go grocery shopping with you! That’s it!’ I hated it.” She would pull his hair and once punched him in the stomach to make him stop. “He could get a lot more out of me if he’d be Elvis. His private Elvis made me melt—it just superimposed itself over him. I’d say, ‘Let Elvis try to seduce me.’” But he brought her to the club on New Year’s Eve to heckle Clifton—“Oh! And I want you to do it with your French accent,” he instructed, “and when you jump on Tony’s back, you should bite his ear”—and she did as told and shrieked from her table “in this terrible French accent” and called him a
muzz-aire fuck-aire
and pounced and bit and was so grotesquely shrill that the audience hated her more than they hated him. “When it was over, Budd Friedman took us aside and said, ‘Out! Both of you! Out, now!’” Shortly thereafter in New York, he enlisted her to go-go dance behind him at Catch a Rising Star while he sang “Oklahoma”—whose execution he had recently perfected by performing it while bouncing up and down and throwing his fist into the air slightly ahead of and behind the relentless beat, which elicited
laughter that had/had not surprised him. Anyway, the supplementary effect of a go-go dancing television actress—“doing the jerk and the hitchhike”—seemed to overwhelm the crowd. “They were,” she said, “like, stunned.”

So they wanted Foreign Man so they got him.
Van Dyke and Company
was gone, but he was not and, throughout 1977, the ingratiaton crusade marshaled itself across the landscape without mercy, beginning by way of bombardment. He returned to Philadelphia to appear with Mike Douglas and cohost Bernadette Peters on January 12 and Douglas introduced him to viewers with reference to the Van Dyke show as “a visitor in our country” and he sat down, still draped in his makeup bib, and indicated that he had seen the horror film
Carrie
the night before—
thees little girl nobody like her and at de end they make fun of her and but then she kill everybody
—and he read aloud from a children’s Dick and Jane book, as Douglas helped him with difficult words like
funny,
then discussed his way with women, telling Peters,
If I went with you I would open de door,
and he performed Mighty Mouse. Three nights later, he was back at last on
Saturday Night,
now well into its second season, and announced after eemetations of President Carter
(Hello I am Meester Carter President of de United States)
and of his Aunt Esther
(You come eento de house right now)
that he would do de Elveece, which he had never done on the program, the mere mention of which drew approving hoots and yays from the audience, which was an altogether new phenomenon (nightclubs notwithstanding). He wore the sleek new rhinestone-studded black jumpsuit with vast white winged collar that had been designed for the Van Dyke appearances and he sang “Love Me” and “Blue Suede Shoes” and summoned to the performance an altogether taut electric precision rarely deployed in earlier outings and George said it was his best televised Elvis ever and would always maintain that opinion. And the following Monday, his second appearance on the daytime talk show
Dinah!
aired, wherein he was oddly introduced by Dinah Shore as Andy
Kupman
visitor-from-another-country
(she greeted him on the first occasion by gasping, “My, you have such startling blue eyes!” to which he replied
tenk you veddy much).
For this appearance, taped a month earlier in Las Vegas, he unseated Marvin Hamlisch at the piano, where Dinah gathered with Bob Hope and Sammy Davis, Jr., and performed a “love song”
(Give me a keess keess keess, vy do you do me like thees thees thees?)
and made smooching noises into the microphone during which Dinah and Hope and Sammy exchanged wary glances before he became de Elveece, which forced Sammy to bend over, as was his inclination, to convulse gleefully.

And that Friday—because certain walls had tumbled, thanks to Van Dyke—Johnny Carson welcomed him onto
The Tonight Show,
noting, “This is the first time we’ve really met,” and indulged him with a kindly measured patience usually reserved for minors or the elderly. But there he sat beside the king of the night and Grandma Pearl watched in New York and Grandma Lillie watched in Florida and Stanley and Janice watched in Great Neck and, if there had been any lingering doubt about their boy and his eccentric dreams, it vanished in this seismic moment. No showcase in America—it would be forever understood—mattered more than this showcase when Carson presided over his own program. And so he had meditated long and hard in his dressing room (with Do Not Disturb warning posted on door) before he stepped out to bask in the evanescent shimmer of great opportunity. And he was flawlessly flawed as necessity demanded. Carson asked, “Where are you from originally?”

FM:
From Caspiar. Eet’s an island.

JC: Caspiar?

FM:
Caspiar.

[One audience member applauds as though zealous with native pride. Carson casts a surprised withering eye toward the assemblage.]

JC:
That’s
a first in show business!

Which provoked a large laugh among all, perplexing Foreign Man, who clearly perplexed Carson, especially when he did not drop character during the commercial break, before which the geography of Caspiar was explained and after which came discussion of his quest
for American citizenship and reading skills—he demonstrated again with a Dick and Jane recitation as Carson helped him with the word
funny.
Then he performed jokes and eemetations, losing his place with de Ed Sullivan, starting over again before chanting a cappella the Caspian harvest song and Carson said, “That’s very good, Andy. Very, very amusing. You’ll have to come back with us again sometime.” And after the taping, Carson stuck his head into Andy’s dressing room and said, “You’re very funny, kid. I don’t understand how you do it, but you’re very funny.” And Foreign Man responded
tenk you veddy much.
And Carson shook his head and winked anyway.

A week later Freddie Prinze shot himself in the head and died within forty-eight hours and fellow comedians grieved and Andy did not want to think about it and chose not to attend the funeral—where fellow comedians flocked—because he did not want to think about it. He had by this time become a boarder in a big house above the Sunset Strip owned by actress Joanna Frank, sister of rising television writer Steven Bochco, and he took a bedroom next to Joanna’s and people came and went—TM people predominantly, since Joanna was one as well—and Joanna’s exparamour Richard Beymer, the actor who played Tony in the film
West Side Story,
lived in the basement. Joanna Frank experienced Andy as an uncommunicative narcissist unwilling to give more than passing nods; she fully engaged his interest only once, when he quizzed her about a cleansing diet she had begun—“He was fascinated with the way the bowel movements happened and what came out.” She would remember another conversation—a soliloquy, really—in which he told her, “I always knew that I wanted to be in the entertainment field. And what I was looking for was a place where no one else was doing what I was gonna do. I didn’t want competition. I knew that I really couldn’t compete. I had to find something that was not being done.” Ultimately, she could not find humanity behind his eyes—“I don’t think Andy’s heart was very developed at all. His mind was developed and he was crafty. He had this total single-pointedness, this obsession with himself, with his work—he didn’t have any off-moments like normal people do, when you’re just a person. He was always
on,
he was always doing
The Andy Kaufman Show no matter where he was. And he was always using people for his end result.” So he would have Mel and Little Wendy come over to the house, because he wanted to try something completely new, he wanted in fact to mount his own talk show at the Improv, in which he could do what he most desired and experiment with personae, and he convinced George to make a deal with Budd Friedman to let him take over the club for three successive Saturday nights, beginning at two-thirty in the morning, and perform a faux broadcast for club patrons only, and the show would be called Midnight Snacks (since it would be nearly midnight in Hawaii and parts of Alaska, which was the pretend target viewership). Richard Beymer, who was a fledgling filmmaker among other avocations since his acting career had somewhat stalled, agreed to videotape the shows as well as loose rehearsals at the house and Joanna agreed to be a guest on one show and Mel would direct and aspiring comedy writers Merrill Markoe and Cheryl Garn asked if they could help and were made “producers.” Said Markoe, “I certainly wasn’t writing for him—nobody could write for Andy Kaufman. You could
suggest.
But he had to just ad-lib and do his own thing.” Everyone would receive one dollar as payment for their participation, since George said that would compensate for all binding rights to the material just in case anything of value grew out of the exercise.

Midnight Snacks began on the last Saturday in February and concluded its run on the second Saturday in March and played to packed predawn crowds and Foreign Man would do twenty minutes at the start until Andy blinked him away and stated in his own voice, “Ladies and gentleman—so far everything I’ve done for you, really, I’m only fooling. This is really me.” And during false commercial breaks, he purposely turned monstrous and snappishly Cliftonian (minus disguise) and berated Mel Sherer—“This is Mel, our floor director. Hey, Mel, why don’t you bend down and show everybody your bald spot! Come on, get down there and kiss my feet! Get down on your knees, Mel!”—and Mel would sheepishly acquiesce until the break ended and Andy would resume blissful unctuousness at his interviewing desk, which was noticeably several inches above the guest chairs
which were peopled with his revolving platoon of plants whom he either ignored or forced to wrestle with each other (Markoe and another woman grappled, much to his delight, in the second show) or humiliated or openly flirted with or instructed to take naps. “You know,” guest Joanna Frank told him onstage, “in all the time I’ve known you, this is the first time I’ve ever really been able to sit and talk with you. I just feel like you ignore me all the time. It’s like your eyes get all glazed over and you twitch your nose whenever I look at you.” (He squirmed and barely defended himself and later said that he liked this exchange a great deal.) He also introduced a segment called Has-Been Corner during which he cheerily questioned alleged show business failures so obscure as to be believable—“How did you know it was all over for you?”—the first two of which were made-up characters but, on the third show, Richard Beymer consented to withstand the embarrassment. “Well, tell me,” said Andy, “how does it feel to be up in front of lights after fifteen years of doing nothing?” And Beymer replied, “You’re really sick, you know? You come out here and do jokes at other people’s expenses! I’m
not
a has-been!” And as the finale of each show, Andy beckoned his cast to link arms onstage and sway to and fro and sing Fabian’s “This Friendly World” with him (just like he had envisioned as a boy) and, when the singing had stopped and business was done, he would turn nasty again and pat Mel’s stomach and say, “Hey, what are ya growin’ in there? Kiss my feet, Mel!” And it was a secret to no one who knew him (as well as he could be known) that he cherished the old Elia Kazan film,
A Face in the Crowd,
in which Andy Griffith played the beloved broadcast entertainer Lonesome Rhodes who shucked-and-grinned in public and was a loathsome horror in private—and he really wanted extremely badly to star in a remake of the film once he was really extremely successful.