Lost in the Funhouse (32 page)

Then Jeff Conaway hit him. This was after the Golden Globe Awards ceremony which was held January 27 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and Andy came late to the ceremony even though he had been nominated for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series (as were Conaway and Danny DeVito) and, by the time he arrived, the award in his category had already been presented to Norman Fell of
Three’s Company,
which didn’t matter at all to Andy who showed up only to be polite. But the
Taxi
people—who were excited to have won the Best Comedy Series award (right in the middle of their first season, no less)—begged him to come to a private celebration afterward at Trader Vic’s, also in the hotel, but he didn’t want to go but they made him so he went. He sat at the end of the long table commandeered
by the group and noticed that bits of food were landing on him as if thrown and he looked up and saw Conaway smiling devilishly and Conaway said, “How you doing, Andy?” And Andy said that he was um fine, then went over to visit with Judd Hirsch, who was sitting across from Conaway, and Conaway, who was a little drunk, decided to further engage Andy at that moment. “I thought maybe if I talked to the guy, I could break the ice and get to know him, you know?” he would recall. So, according to what Andy told George immediately afterward, Conaway said,
“Andy, let me ask you a question. Do you have any respect for us?” Andy said, “Of course I do, Jeff. I respect everybody in this cast.” And Jeff said, “Well, you don’t show it. You don’t show up to rehearsals at all, you don’t come through for us, you don’t seem to give a damn about us.”
And, per Conaway’s memory, Andy “got right in my face, like spitting in my face, and screamed,
‘I don’t give a fuck about any of you!’”
And, according to what Andy told George, Andy said nothing of the sort but turned to walk away and
when Andy started to leave, Jeff said, “Your work habits stink!” Andy then explained that there were other things in his career and Jeff said, “What career?” And Andy answered, “I’ve had a career for ten years.” And Jeff said, “What do you do in your fucking career?” Andy said he does nightclubs and concerts and Jeff Conaway said, “Your career is nothing! I’ve been in this business for nineteen years!” Andy started leaving again and Jeff actually pulled him down.
Per Conaway: “I didn’t think about it, I just hit him.
Boom!
Square in the jaw. And I got up and hit him again. And he went down on the table and I jumped on top of him. And the drinks and food were flying everywhere. And I’m pounding him and screaming like a drunken Irishman. This was like months of frustration coming out. I figured that he dared me by saying he didn’t give a fuck about us, but in a million years I’m sure he never thought I was gonna belt him.” Per Andy, per George:
He started to swing and Andy told me that Tony Danza and a few of the other guys held him back. Conaway was screaming, “I want to kill him! That goddamned guy is never at work! I want to kill him!”

Anyway, he left and Conaway called him at home a few days later and apologized and said that he had been drunk and way out of line and Andy told him that it was okay and that he knew Conaway was drunk and thus not in control of himself and Andy suggested they get together soon to talk it out. And Conaway was flabbergasted by his benevolence—“He was so forgiving and so understanding. And he apologized, too, for provoking me. I thought,
This guy’s amazing! What a guy!
And so after that we got friendly.”

To get to Carnegie Hall:

That February, Foreign Man taped a Cher special called
Cher and Other Fantasies
and he played Adam in the Garden of Eden and Cher played the serpent with the apple and also Eve but Eve as a New Jersey harridan in cat-rimmed eyeglasses. A week later in New York, on February 24, he was himself again, as such, on
Saturday Night Live,
where he performed “I Go Mad When I Hear a Yodel” with the B Street Conga Band, as he had done on the Van Dyke show, and he was as good as ever although there was not much laughter from the audience which was understandably rendered agog (arty juxtaposition et cetera). Lorne Michaels, meanwhile, had begun to detect some change taking place which became more and more apparent with Zmuda now fastened to his side. “With success, there were now people around him that seemed opportunistic. I hadn’t much liked Zmuda, perhaps wrongly, for that reason. After Andy went out to California, I also think he felt this pressure to get more astringent in what he did on our show, so that his stand-up had less of a desire to please, because he was doing that professionally on
Taxi.
Suddenly, he wasn’t getting laughs and didn’t mind. Andy, who had been this benign artistic presence and had happily done two or three minutes at a time on the early shows, now wanted to do six or seven minutes. The feeling around
Saturday Night
—particularly as the cast’s popularity heated up, and particularly with John Belushi—was,
Why was he still considered untouchable?
It wasn’t that anybody—John
included, and maybe even John most of all—ever questioned him while it was still in this
innocent
thing, for lack of a better word. But it got a little slick, a little more West Coast, a little more show business. It was now less innocent and I was surprised.”

And then he toured again and his touring life, especially on college hustings, had now become a cockeyed caravan bent on fleshly pursuit and serial idiocy. He missed planes constantly and would only step on a plane with right foot first (superstition) and, once on the plane, he and Bob improvised altitudinous hijinks—he would weep uncontrollably or feign panic attacks and Bob would slap him loudly or chastise him loudly and it was great fun for an audience of two, meaning themselves and/or each other. He liked to carry a toy gun in his suitcase and, on March 14, American Airlines caught sight of it in the X-ray detector and guards pounced on him and he tried to explain that he always carried his toy gun, for ten years he had carried his toy gun, and they roughed him up anyway and he missed that plane as well. And Bob, of course, found him to be a complete pain in the ass on the road, no matter that he loved him like a brother, and came to abhor playing the role of caretaker, shepherding him to engagements, feeding him phony rehearsal times and phony departure times (two or more hours earlier than they were actual, because he would always be at least two hours late for such irritants), then keeping him company at asinine day-parts and night-parts and dawn-parts, having to check under his hotel beds and peek into his hotel closets to make sure that the boogeyman was not lurking therein, and never being able to go get properly loaded, since “Koughman”—as Bob liked to call him—would not indulge in anything stronger than chocolate. And so Bob learned ways to ditch him, to shove him off on other poor bastards and this was most easily achieved in college scenarios because there was always some kid in charge of getting them to and from wherever the hell they were supposed to go.

Best/worst/standard example in ditch-Koughman history: March 21, 1979; York College; York, Pennsylvania; poor bastard—kid
named Terry Cooney, age twenty, soon-to-be-amazed. The show went well; Andy wrestled mannish girl, won, not his type, wanted other options; back to Ramada Inn, Cooney driving Andy, Bob, in his own Ford Pinto; at Ramada, Bob handed Cooney twenty dollars and said, “Take Andy out to get something to eat.” (Ditch was thus completed.) They drove, Cooney, Andy, no Bob, to three places, in each of which Andy questioned management as to whether the fish was fried or broiled; he wanted broiled; it was always fried; he settled for a Bob’s Big Boy; ordered himself fried fish and two chocolate shakes (Cooney: “I’ll never forget that he had
two
chocolate shakes”); he accidentally-no-really spit some shake on their waitress (“The woman was horrified, she was fuming”); then it was okay because somebody recognized him as Latka; back in Pinto, Cooney asked, “Back to Ramada?” Andy said no; said, “Let’s do something”—as in females. They drove to another nearby college, to Lancaster F&M, to a frat party Cooney knew of; on the way, Andy rifled through Cooney’s glove box; Cooney worked college security, kept handcuffs stashed in box, just in case (“I couldn’t see what he’s doing and the next thing I know I heard
click-click”);
and now they were handcuffed (“I said, ‘Oh God, Andy! I don’t have the key! It’s back in York, thirty minutes away, on my dresser!”). They went to the frat party handcuffed; they danced with women handcuffed; women threw themselves at Andy and they felt up the women handcuffed (“Wherever Andy’s hand went, my hand followed. I was living vicariously through Andy—two guys’ hands, one girl at a time”). By 4
A.M.
, they returned to the car; Andy wanted food again; they entered an all-night joint handcuffed; at the table they hid connected hands under napkin (“I’m turning different shades of red”); they both ordered food that required knife and fork; they took turns with utensils (“We were constantly borrowing each other’s hands to cut things”). It was nearing 6
A.M.
; Andy was not tired; Cooney said his roommate’s ski club was having a sunrise breakfast party before early skiing at nearby Round Top mountain; they went and nobody wanted to ski because Andy had come; a girl there professed love for him, urgent love, very extremely, and invited him to her sorority house; Andy, Cooney went handcuffed to sorority
house at 9
A.M.
(“At one point I was sitting in the hallway with my arm stuck inside the girl’s bedroom door and that was when my hand had the best time of its life”). They had sex with the girl handcuffed, with Cooney outside the door, with Andy en flagrante inside the door (“I just used my imagination because I was trying the best I could to be a gentleman while handcuffed to this maniac”). Finally, they returned to Cooney’s apartment and detached themselves and then Andy jumped on top of the bed of another Cooney roommate and bounced until the roommate awoke and thought the world was ending. Near eleven, twelve hours after their special nocturne began, Cooney deposited Andy back at the Ramada Inn where Bob awaited, refreshed. A friend of Cooney’s later that day asked him what Andy was like. “And I said, ‘That’s the problem. He had different personalities all through the night. I didn’t know which was the real him.’”

He wanted one of the tall blond hookers that dallied with Clifton at
Taxi
… the one who was originally from Denmark … whose name was Anna … he wanted Anna to come to New York for Carnegie Hall…. Andy told George that she was beautiful and very nice and good at sex…. When Andy had had sex with her before—as when he had sex with most hookers—he had asked people to look into his eyes afterward…. He had asked Kathy Utman or Linda Mitchell or Wendy before she quit to look very deeply into his eyes and he would say, “Did I lose my innocence?” and usually they said he didn’t but sometimes his pupils were kind of opague … not as full of light as at other times…. (He had this ongoing argument with Linda—he thought prostitutes were the wisest women in the world because they understood men; Linda would always disagree. “He would call me in the middle of the night sometimes and start the argument all over again,” she said. “He couldn’t stand me to disagree.”) Anna said she would fly to New York on Thursday, April 26, which was the day of the night of the concert, and would stay with him until Sunday…. Andy sent George to her apartment a week before the show and George gave her her plane tickets and hotel information
and two hundred dollars for her first night of sexual service with Andy and confirmed Andy’s proposal that she would get another three hundred if she spent the rest of the time with him and George was also impressed by her sweetness and saw nothing wrong with any of this because there was nothing wrong because Andy never made it sound very wrong…. Anyway, at Carnegie Hall, she would watch the concert perched in the gilded filigreed honor box above the stage, seated next to Stanley and Janice who also thought she seemed like quite a pleasant young lady….

There would be twenty school buses to accommodate the 2,800 people who would come and this was a problem because to have twenty buses idling beside Carnegie Hall after ten o’clock on a Thursday night conjured the promise of midtown traffic tangles most horrendous. So it was decided that he should give special patronage to local law enforcement which was why on Sunday night he had appeared at a swank Shubert Theater benefit to help provide bulletproof vests for the New York Police Department. He did three numbers (two were Elvis ones), and he performed on a bill that included the likes of Robin Williams, Lauren Bacall, Marlo Thomas, Chita Rivera, and Sarah Jessica Parker, the twelve-year-old star of the Broadway musical
Annie,
who noticed (as only a twelve-year-old might) that both Williams and Andy were awkward and sweaty and skittish offstage. Of Andy, she recalled, “He didn’t seem like a confident man. And his eyes were so, you know,
wet.”
Gregg Sutton, who accompanied him on bass guitar that night and who would conduct the orchestra on Thursday, watched the effete theater crowd display pronounced disinterest in Andy—“They didn’t get him. It started to make us feel a little nervous about Carnegie Hall.” Meanwhile,
Good Morning America
correspondent Joel Siegel brought a camera crew to 21 Grassfield Road in Great Neck, where Andy led a tour of the cradle of dreams that was the Kaufman basement and introduced Janice to the camera people and the viewer people—“This is my mom. Her name’s Mommy. And she’s very embarrassed,
aren’t you, Mommy?” Janice
(pinkening):
“Yes, I am.” Siegel: “How do you react to the things you see Andy do on television?” Janice: “I love it. I love it all. I’m one of his best fans.” (Of course, the wrestling and the Tony Clifton business she could do without, but this wasn’t the time for mentioning that.) Andy then told Siegel about the little girl in seventh grade with whom he fell in love but never met and said that everything that he had done for the last fifteen years was to earn her attention, especially Carnegie Hall—“It’s only so I can get more confident and become more famous so I can meet this girl.” Siegel: “You’re telling me the truth, right?” Andy: “Um, yeah.”