Lost in the Funhouse (28 page)

He kept his walls erect always. On Friday nights, when the show would be filmed before a live audience in bleachers, he sealed himself inside of Latka, interacted with cast and crew only as Latka, took notes from the producers and from director James Burrows and afterward told them
tenk you veddy much.
Marilu Henner would recall, “If someone in the audience asked him to do Elvis Presley, he’d do Latka doing Elvis Presley:
You ain’t nutting but a hound dog.
Andy was nowhere to be found.”

Amid the new sitcom lifestyle, he started work late that summer as a part-time busboy at the Posh Bagel on Santa Monica Boulevard. He reported for duty only on Monday nights at eleven, whereupon he donned his apron and began pouring coffee and carting trays until closing. He had not bussed tables since his employment at Chop Meat Charlie’s in Great Neck when he was sixteen—but he had been eager to return to just this sort of solid finite labor. It was, he believed, part of his roots. Plus, he could do funny things in the course of a shift not to be funny no really. The Posh Bagel hired him on the recommendation of this girl Beverly Cholakian who was a part-time hostess there and whom he had met five years earlier in New York when she was a Revlon model before she moved to Los Angeles to become an actress and got cast as one of the incidental high school kids on
Welcome Back, Kotter
and that was when she began a kind of tortured and volatile affair with Andy, whom she loved deeply (sometimes, per him, a bit too deeply). (He did not want the games of love, just the fruit, and she played the games, which made him yell a lot, and she would call him a big baby and storm off and then they would mend and play until it happened again, and again, and again, but she
was very beautiful and he could not stop himself from wanting to be with her, even though his brother Michael had now come to Los Angeles for a long visit and he tried to urge Michael to date her in his stead, but that never quite took, and he did love her, in his way, but that did not stop him from lusting in every other direction, like when he flirted endlessly with a pretty Posh Bagel customer and Beverly interrupted them and said something to ruin his chances and, as Beverly would remember, “Andy went beserk and screamed, ‘How could you do that to me! I could have gotten laid!’ I mean, can you believe that? He had never talked to me like that before. So I ran to the back of the deli and locked myself in a room while he kept screaming. Then we saw him drive off in a rage, swerving and screeching like a madman.” And, of course, they mended again, for a while again, since she wanted to marry him and all.) Anyway, he was what he liked to call an
overzealous
busboy, in that he liked to remove people’s food before they had finished eating it and often before they had even touched it. “They would get very upset!” said Beverly. “They would want the food replaced. Many times I’d have to say to him, ‘Okay, you’ve done enough tonight—you can leave now.’” And Gregg Sutton would remember dropping by to say hello on a night when the actor Richard Gere was seated in a back booth with a beautiful woman—“And Andy wouldn’t leave them alone. He kept coming by and asking, ‘Would you like more coffee?’ Over and over and over again. Gere said, ‘Quit bugging me!’ But Andy comes over again anyway and starts pouring the coffee while looking away, like somebody had called him, and the coffee starts overflowing all over the table and Richard Gere is flipping out in his Armani suit. If he knows who Andy is, he doesn’t care at this point. He’s screaming,
‘What are you doing, you stupid idiot!’
And Andy’s saying oh-gosh-I’m-sorry and trying to clean up but only making it worse, pushing the coffee all over them. It was hilarious.” And then some reporters found out he was working as a busboy and he would tell them that he did it “because it keeps me in touch with people. Because no matter how famous I may become from show business, I always hope that I could keep my head out of the clouds and remain, you know, just a
regular human being. I’m just a human being. And working as a bus-boy reminds me of this.”

August ended and Little Wendy quit because she was sick of being Little, of being diminutive in his eyes, thus patronized, and of having to go along with his weird whims at weird hours and withstand his erratic cruelties, so they had this big eruption in front of a restaurant in Chinatown, and they shoved each other back and forth and she told him to go fuck himself in a new voice that wasn’t at all Little and he told her the same thing and she stomped away. (Such adrenaline he felt! He wondered why he liked confrontation so much.) So he sought a new assistant in his old TM friend Linda Mitchell, the classical guitarist in whose parents’ guest house he had stayed when he came to Los Angeles and tried to get Foreign Man onto
The Dating Game,
and as it turned out—right now, more than five years later—he was actually on his way over to do
The Dating Game
as Foreign Man at last, so he called Linda and told her to meet him and Beverly there. He would be Baji Kimran (which was the previously unspoken name he had created for Foreign Man four years earlier) who was Bachelor Number Three and some people in the audience recognized him and screamed for him to do Elvis but he gave no acknowledgment because the Bachelorette, whose name was Patrice Burke, who would be asking the questions of the three potential mystery dates, had no clue as to who he was, not that she saw him, because she would ask her questions from behind a separating wall with host Jim Lange presiding. And she asked him the first question—“Bachelor Number Three, it’s the holiday season and I’m Santa. You’re on my lap. Little boy, take it away.” And he said: “Vhat? Vait a minute! Vait. I don’t know vhat she look like. Could I see vhat she look like?” And Lange told him no, that was part of the game—“But I don’t know who she ees!”—then he said she didn’t sound like Santee Claus but finally said that he would ask her for “ehhh, a television and eh, eh, record player … and food.” Anyway, she finally chose Bachelor Number One over the protests of Baji Kimran—“You mean I did not vin? No, I von, I von! But I answered all de questions
de right way! No! I did not lose!”—and he came out to meet her with tears in his eyes and, in truth, he was very angry about losing and Beverly was angry that he was angry and Linda would start work within the week.

New York
magazine, meanwhile, had sent writer Janet Coleman out to do a major profile of him that would be published the week
Taxi
premiered and this article would be entitled “Don’t Laugh at Andy Kaufman.” So he invited Coleman up to the La Cienega Towers and Kathy Utman served snacks—Coleman wrote, “We were having this menu: four pints (two chocolate) of Häagen-Dazs ice cream, a box of cookies (chocolate chip), a box of cookies (chocolate-covered mint), two double boxes of Mallomars, a bag of Lidos, a jar of Ovaltine, a can of Quik, and milk.” Andy said, “I don’t usually have this much chocolate. I’m trying to cut down.” Then he told her about his life and about his dream of hosting a talk show where celebrities only discussed the weather and he showed her his novels
—God
and
The Hollering Mangoo
and the beginnings of
The Huey Williams Story,
which he saw being made into “a four-hour epic, like
Ben
Hur”—and he spoke of his influences (Fellini, whose
8 1/2
he had seen “between thirty and fifty times,” and Hubert Selby, Jr., and Kerouac and Steve Allen and Abbott and Costello on television only) and of his personal disdain for Tony Clifton. Coleman wrote that he “would ask me several times to refrain from even mentioning someone so unsavory as Tony Clifton in this piece” and that “he was sorry he had ever hired the guy” for the Comedy Store gigs. And she wrote that George Shapiro told her that Clifton “would be better and very soon advised to consider retiring from show business altogether.” But she also wrote very incisively of Andy’s work: “He manipulates the audience the way the bullfighter would taunt the bull, maddening them with artfully calculated veronicas until they boo him off the stage, then cajoling them back in for the laugh, i.e., the ‘kill’ in comedy. He is simply not afraid to die.”

The tenth episode of
Taxi
was the one that they agreed would feature guest actor Tony Clifton, who would play Louie DiPalma’s
card-shark brother Nicky from Las Vegas. The episode was titled “Brother Rat” but would be changed to “A Full House for Christmas” by the time it was broadcast in December and, by then, all traces of Clifton would be long gone except in the memories of those who had witnessed the debacle of its genesis. Rehearsals would commence Monday, October 2—three weeks after
Taxi
had debuted to glowing notices from critics who reveled in the program’s emotional texture and intelligence. “There has never before been a sitcom written with the dramatic depth of this one,” Frank Rich declared in
Time,
adding that
“Saturday Night Live
Regular Andy Kaufman brings a saving sweetness to the garage mechanic who speaks his own variety of fractured English.” Dean of TV critics Marvin Kitman enthused in
Newsday,
“What an inspiration it was to make Andy Kaufman a regular on a sitcom. It’s something to look forward to every Tuesday night. The whole country will be doing their Latka Gravas imitations by next month.” After the series premiere, Andy had briefly returned to the road, performing a college engagement in Macomb, Illinois (his contract now carried a new rider stipulating that he would/must wrestle female audience members no matter what anyone said or thought), followed by two shows at the Park West Theater in Chicago. While away, he had Michael oversee the purchase of a brand-new Chrysler Cordoba and this would be his first new car ever, a big-sprawling-cabin-cruiser-of-a-car—long and wide and white with sunroof and blue interiors including, certainly, the fine Corinthian leather upholstery.
Andy did ask me through his brother if I felt it was too ostentatious,
George reported in the taped diaries of his special client’s career progress which he began privately recording two weeks earlier.
It’s a nice car, it’s sporty, and it’s not like driving a Rolls-Royce or a Mercedes or a Cadillac. I think he should have a car that he is going to enjoy. He’s worked hard, he’s paid his dues, he earned it. So why not, right?
Anyway, before Clifton befell
Taxi,
Andy returned to Paramount Stage 25 to film two more episodes, including his first prominently featured show, “Paper Marriage,” in which Latka foils immigration officials seeking to deport him by
marrying, in name only, a prostitute (oh!) whom Alex Rieger hired to save him. (Upon learning there would be no conjugal wedding night after the ceremony, Latka laments,
“Boy, America ees a tough town.”)

On Thursday, September 28, scripts of the “Brother Rat” show—which had been written solely to facilitate the Tony Clifton contract—were distributed among the cast and all of them wondered who this Tony Clifton was and why he was playing this role. George had gotten a call later that day, he reported, from
Taxi
casting director Rhonda Young, who was on the set when the questions first arose:
The full cast was sitting around the table and Judd Hirsch asked, “Who is Tony Clifton?” And Rhonda said, “He’s a good actor, he’s like Danny DeVito’s character—he’s a mean and coarse kind of a guy, a real rat. That’s why he got the role.” After the meeting was over, Rhonda went over to nudge Andy and said, “Hey, I did good, didn’t I?” As if to say, “I covered up pretty good, didn’t I?” And Andy said to Rhonda, “Oh, no, the real Tony Clifton is going to be here. I only imitated Tony Clifton. I know you came into the Comedy Store and saw that performance, but I’m not going to be here. I’m going away for three weeks. Next week, the real Tony Clifton is going to be here to play that part.”
And no one would be especially fooled because Ed. Weinberger—who had been sworn to secrecy by Shapiro—soon began taking the actors aside, according to Randall Carver (who played yokel cabbie John Burns), to tell each of them “that Andy wasn’t going to be in the next episode, but this lounge singer from Las Vegas who might
resemble
Andy, but
wasn’t
Andy, would be there instead. And we all kind of scratched our heads.” Thus the word spread and the concerns simmered. Danza: “‘Don’t talk to him as if he’s Andy’—that’s what we were told—‘buy in!’” Henner: “We heard, ‘It’s Andy but it isn’t Andy—just play along.’” Conaway: “I said, ‘You gotta be kidding! Everything’s always revolving around this guy, because he’s always making us wait for him! And now you’re saying we have to talk to him as somebody else?’ I was the last one to agree to go along with it.” (Weinberger would recall telling them nothing more than a new actor had been hired to
appear in the next show and their patience would be most appreciated.)

Clifton, meanwhile, required greater measures of obfuscation. Now, more than ever, Andy could be nowhere in plain sight. Zmuda arranged to employ the talents of makeup artist Ken Chase, who had done memorable work for the television mini-series
Roots,
and Chase would design new and appalling facial prosthetics contoured to transform one enigma into another. They went the week before—Andy and Bob and Linda Mitchell—to Chase’s home studio in Tarzana, where a cast was made of Andy’s head. “He meditated in his car for one hour before he came in to let me take the cast,” Chase said. “Then the girl would hold his hand and count out loud while the impression cream was hardening. He was very eccentric.” Foam-latex applications were then created to approximate ruddy cheeks and fleshy jowls and bulbous nose—“Our intent,” said Chase, “was to make him as physically obnoxious as possible. The cleft in the chin was my idea. Something about a cleft on a guy like that seemed particularly repulsive.” Chase also supplied ungainly sideburns and a cheap toupee (“purposefully obvious”) and a big “Burt Reynolds” mustache and Linda had gotten the unspeakable salmon-hued embroidered tuxedo with black lapels and piping
(“That
was a
find,”
she said, having plucked it from the racks of “a cheesy men’s store on Sunset”) and also the turquoise ruffled shirt which was to be worn over padding to barrel out the gut. And so they would report to Chase’s home each morning before Clifton and entourage headed for the set and the application process would take just over two hours—“Before he would let me make him up, he’d blow his nose twenty, thirty, forty times. Very kooky. And the minute the makeup was completed, his personality changed. Andy didn’t exist anymore.”