Lost in the Funhouse (24 page)

Foreign Man returned to
The Tonight Show
two nights before the second Midnight Snacks infraction and told Carson about it—
we have good time lots of fun and I sit at desk like you
—and also discussed his love life—
I have girlfriend but I cannot say her name because her boyfriend may get mad.
Then he went forth to display his Elveece for the first time on the program—reprising the songs he performed on
Saturday Night
—
upon completion of which he said, per custom,
tenk you veddy much
and Carson applauded with unmasked glee and cackled loudly and wiped a laugh-tear from his eye and that was the final canonization necessary to market the franchise. Mid-March, he traveled as the opening act for Sonny and Cher—now divorced but still working together—going to Honolulu (where the
Advertiser
reviewer, who referred to him as Al, wrote “I still can’t figure out if Kaufman is for real, or simply a bad joke”) and to San Francisco (where the
Chronicle
reviewer used words like
originality
and
hilarity
and advised readers, “Note the name”). Then he returned to Los Angeles to become the franchise.

George Shapiro and Howard West had sold him to the American Broadcasting Company with some ingenuity, and with a caveat, in that he would be the delightful Foreign Man on the network as and when needed, first in a sitcom pilot already developed to suit him and then as a guest performer on six variety specials hosted by other people (guaranteeing him $30,000 inside of one year at $5,000 per appearance whether or not he was utilized)—but, more importantly, he would be supplied a budget of $110,000 to create and produce a late-night special for himself, plus an additional $25,000 to write his own sitcom pilot. And the economics of it all meant nothing to him and he told George to call Stanley and give him the financial details, then and ever after, because he just wanted to focus on the work. On March 29 he fulfilled his first obligation and taped the pilot for a “futuristic” sitcom called
Stick Around,
in which Foreign Man was an android household servant (named Andy) employed by a most annoying family-of-tomorrow and it was an odorous endeavor beyond redemption, which the network instantly realized, opting not to turn it into a series, although the executives had liked his work as the robot.
Robot … oh … he would be a robot again … later … in three years … it would be a very bad thing … very very extremely bad thing … and the makeup he would wear … taking hours and hours to apply … he would look like lacquered fruit and, oh, the smell … and they said it would almost be like an art film … George even thought
so … but … oh….
Foreign Man then did de Redd Foxx variety special and was very funny interrupting de nightclub sketch and somehow ABC had no other variety specials for him to infiltrate for the remainder of the contract year and so there was thirty grand for a day’s work, not that he understood, though George and Howard and Stanley did. And, in June, Foreign Man went with George to the production offices of the game show
The Hollywood Squares
hoping to secure a celebrity square for him to occupy and the producers were amused at the outset of the visit but grew less so as the mask did not drop and minutes passed and the pidgin-dither continued and producer Jay Redack said finally, “Well, lookit—
shit
—we’re getting no place. Time is valuable here and so if you’re gonna fuck around …” And Foreign Man was truly stunned by the outburst and George yanked him out of the meeting then sent Andy back in and Andy was perfectly congenial but said nothing of what had just transpired and got his square and George whispered to Redack afterward, “That’s the first time I ever saw him break character like that!” And Foreign Man taped a week of shows for them, although he was never asked to return.

Uncle Andy’s Fun House
was what he wanted to call the ninety-minute special whose rehearsals would begin July 12 with taping to commence three days later at KTTV studios—but the
uncle
part seemed a bit presumptuous at this point, so it would be called
Andy’s Fun House
but the network would advertise it as
The Andy Kaufman Special
but the advertising part would come much later because network entertainment president Fred Silverman was much too terrified to actually broadcast it any time during his term of office. (It would be, according to Silverman, “too avant-garde” with its oddball pacing and sly/dry moments of dead/awkward air and it would frighten dim-witted viewers, who were the viewers he seemed to prize most.) Many weeks earlier, and twentysomesuch years earlier, Andy had started writing the show. But Mel would now help him, too, and where was Bob?
Baaab? Baaaaaaab?
Back in New York, Bob Zmuda had become the preferred Clifton stooge
(You’re Polish!? Hey, look at Polish here! How many Polish does it take to screw in a lightbulb, Baaaaab?),
especially
after the Little Hippodrome went belly-up and Zmuda hired on as a bartender at the Improv, where he was ever available for plant hijinks. (His comedy partner Chris Albrecht, meanwhile, became house manager at the Improv after Budd went west.) Andy had always told Zmuda that once he became famous he would want Zmuda to write for him because Zmuda was a prankster after his own heart and had big fanciful foolish dangerous dark
ideas
and was an expert, like Andy, at altering truth and embellishing truth and disregarding truth—he said “gotcha” a lot—and he was a very sweet guy and it was a shame that he didn’t meditate. “Bob is comedy
personified,”
Andy liked to say. But Zmuda had disappeared from New York and George finally found him that spring working as a short-order cook in San Diego, where he had fled with his girlfriend to rethink show business. “Kid,” George told him, “your ship just came in!” And so they plotted in late spring—Andy, Bob, Mel, George—and conceived a structure not unlike that of the Midnight Snacks shows in which Andy would preside at a desk even higher than before and turn Cliftonian when the cameras appeared to be off and abuse floor director Zmuda and he would reprise the Has-Been Corner with a cohort named Gail Slobodkin, who had been a child actor on Broadway in
The Sound of Music
(“Did you lose a lot of friends?”), and he would interview Cindy Williams, asking her if she had any hobbies or diseases or if she had ever been under the care of a psychiatrist and whether she was Laverne or Shirley and what her costar Penny Marshall was really like, then force her to sing “Mack the Knife” against her will. (Originally, she had rehearsed a monologue from Edward Albee’s
Zoo Story
which ended with her pulling a knife and stabbing him to death on the air—but then how would he finish the show?)

Foreign Man was, of course, required to open the show, sitting quietly in a stuffed chair near a television set on which the program was to be broadcast, and blink into the camera and welcome viewers and tell them that ABC gave him one hundred thousand dollars for the special
and they told me take thees money and you can do anything you want weeth it … so I went on vacation weeth de money … I spent all
de money, now I don’t have any of de money left …
and that basically there was no special …
eet’s not joke, I will just sit here for ninety meenutes …
and softly hum to himself to kill some time before leaning forward to say
now that we have lost the audience and only my friends are there, now we can watch my special.
Then Foreign Man began describing the special as he watched the television set on which Foreign Man walked onto the stage and did de act and transformed into de Elveece who wore a new and most extravagant white studded jumpsuit designed at a cost of approximately $3,500 for the show by Bill Belew, who had designed most of Elvis’s costumes—and this costume was made from the very same material Belew had once used for Elvis, plus the same gems and studs, which was exciting. (“Andy asked me a million questions about Elvis,” said Belew. “You could tell there was a very
pure
and
sincere
esteem, sort of an awe.”) After singing “Treat Me Nice” and tenking the studio audience, he said everything that he had done so far had been fooling and this was the real him. And later he would have the audience (whom he addressed as
boys and girls
throughout) sing “The Cow Goes Moo” with him and demonstrate for them how to prepare an ice cream snack and again he would sing “It’s a Small World” with the Van Dyke conga players (whose name had become the B Street Conga Band) and he and Little Wendy would sing “Banana Boat” and Nathan Richards would perform “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” (which would be edited from the show) and Tony Clifton would summon from the audience Miss Jones, his former elementary school teacher, and confront her—“
You useta tell me that I was never going to amount to anything! You always useta ridicule me in front of the class! Well, I kinda amounted to something, wouldn’t you say? Wouldn’t you say, huh?! How much money
you
makin’?”
(And this, too, would be cut.) And, in the end, all participants would lock arms and sway and sing “This Friendly World.”

But the emotional zenith of the project was the appearance of special guest Howdy Doody, who was the
real original
Howdy Doody, although a second newer Doody called Photo Doody (because he photographed well) would be brought in also and it was Burt Dubrow from Grahm who made all of this happen. Andy knew Dubrow was
pals with Buffalo Bob Smith, who of course was Howdy’s best pal. So Andy called Dubrow and said, “You gotta do me a favor. You gotta get me Howdy.” And Dubrow convinced Buffalo Bob to play along, which meant Buffalo Bob flew in to record Howdy’s voice, which kept dislodging itself into phlegmy coughing spasms during the sound recording session, which frightened Andy—especially when Buffalo Bob gagged at one point and blurted, “Could I have a drink of water? My fuckin’ throat is killin’ me!” “Andy was mortified,” Zmuda would recall. “And he wanted to get the hell out of there. This whole imaginary world he loved was being destroyed right before his eyes.” And there would be the story of another scare when Andy thought he was about to meet Howdy for the first time prior to rehearsals and was so excited that he couldn’t sleep the night before and then he kept asking crew people who had seen Howdy, “What’s he like? What’s he like?” and then he nervously approached the puppet which was not a puppet to him at all and he suddenly screamed, “That’s not Howdy! That’s a phony! That’s Photo Doody!” And he ran to his dressing room and locked the door through which people heard sobbing and objects crashing and … Well, Zmuda always liked telling that story. According to Dubrow, who heard it directly from original Howdy puppeteer Pady Blackwood, who was there to operate Howdy for the special, Andy announced to all present at the outset, “Please don’t show me Howdy. The first time I want to see Howdy is when we’re taping.” So he rehearsed with Photo Doody until the moment when cameras rolled, which was when he at last met his childhood hero, “the first star that I was ever aware of in my whole life,” and there they were together in tender union with Andy not simply talking to the puppet, but delicately
relating
with it and sharing the most elemental part of his soul in the process—“Howdy, I just want you to know I’ve looked forward to meeting you and being able to talk with you like this all my life. And I’m finally able to and I just want you to know that I, um, love you and I can’t get over what’s happening right now at this moment. I can’t believe it. I’ve wanted to do this my whole life and I wish we could talk for eight hours. I just have so much that I’d like to tell you. There’s just so much to say….” And his eyes seemed to mist over
during much of their long, earnest exchange in which Howdy spoke of living in a box for seventeen years (“Wow,” said Andy, “isn’t it boring?”) and thanked Andy for his countless warm sentiments and explained that Buffalo Bob couldn’t be there tonight because he had some other show to do—which Andy privately believed was just as well. And at the very close of the special, Foreign Man, in his review of all that had transpired, noted,
To have de Howdy Doody … oh! dat was touching you know because then you think you have Howdy Doody and eet’s going to be funny but eet’s really serious I think eet was brilliant and Has-Been Corner, eh, dat ees bad taste, went a little too far … but you know lots of show ees very stupid but lots of eet was very good….

Mel would remember the coughing, how Andy coughed a lot during the rehearsals and the tapings. “He said it was nothing, just a little cold or something. But it wasn’t going away and it didn’t go away. I said, ‘Andy, you’ve got to go to the doctor.’ He said, ‘I don’t really go to doctors—I go to holistic practitioners.’ He fought me and fought me on this.” Anyway, he had always coughed. Everyone knew he always coughed. It was like a habit kind of. And the Crying never really helped matters—with all the bleating esophageal contractions, which were sort of brutal, so as to make the loud rhythmic
eeeeeeeppppp-eeeeeeeppppps
that took him to the drums. But it was, of course, nothing. Everyone knew. It was, um, just a habit.

Fred Silverman said
noooooooooooooo way
would ABC broadcast that thing, even in late night, and so it just sat there and this became desperately depressing to all involved but to none more than Andy, who could not understand the concerns. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not political or dirty. I tell people at the beginning to shut off their sets, but that cannot be the reason…. Everything I do is very innocent, very G-rated. My special could be shown on Saturday morning and appreciated by little kids…. Everybody tells me the Howdy
Doody piece is too long. But I loved it. Howdy Doody is my friend.” But it was, they/Silverman said, too off-the-wall and too far-out and too whatever else and George eventually took it to NBC and Lorne Michaels wanted to run it in the
Saturday Night Live
time slot and it was all but a done deal when suddenly Fred Silverman became entertainment president of NBC and said
noooooooooooooo way
would NBC broadcast that thing. But by this time he was Latka on ABC and the new entertainment president there, Tony Thomopoulis, decided to just put it on the air, almost without warning, at eleven-thirty on Tuesday, August 28, 1979—and more than two years had elapsed since it was made—and it actually slightly outrated
The Tonight Show
on NBC. And the critics who wrote about it seemed to mostly admire it although lots of them also seemed a little worried about Andy. Janet Maslin in
The New York Times
called it “a generally crisp, often very funny program that in no way endangers Mr. Kaufman’s comic elusiveness. When any of the several characters Mr. Kaufman impersonates here suddenly proclaims himself ‘the real me,’ rest assured that he is lying.” But then Marvin Kitman in
Newsday
called the Howdy segment “embarrassingly private” and said the show was “vintage 1977 Kaufman, before he started to turn.”
(Oh!)
But then Kay Gardella in the
New York Daily News
called him “a comedian whose star is rising faster than his comedy repertoire…. You get the uneasy feeling when you’re watching him that he’s going to run out of gas before the show ends…. What he needs is more material.” But then Howard Rosenberg in the
Los Angeles Times
said it was “absurdity carried sometimes to the point of brilliance, sometimes to the point of tedium…. Watching this for a while, it becomes obvious … Andy Kaufman should be wearing a straitjacket.” But, of course, they were saying those things more than two years later.