Lost in the Funhouse (36 page)

He went on Merv Griffin’s show and Merv kept asking him about Tony Clifton. He told Merv in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t Clifton. He told Merv to invite Clifton on the show sometime so that Merv could see that it wasn’t him. He said he would even come on the show with Clifton to prove it. Merv said, “How come you never blink?” He said, “I don’t know.” Then he wrestled.

“When I win this, I think it would be nice if all you ladies out there get in the kitchen and cook a little meal for your man!” he said before the match on December 22, when he wrestled the finalist on
Saturday Night Live.
She was Dianna Peckham, whose father was an Olympic wrestling coach, and she wrestled him to a draw and it was mostly boring even though his boyhood hero who had started all of this with the strutting and the I-got-the-brains-bad-guy business—“Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers—was standing right there on the stage and had informed the world that he was now Andy’s wrestling manager and it was Buddy who held Andy’s watch and also Grandpa Paul’s robe during the match but it didn’t much matter because it was all very boring. And George would report:

Grandma Pearl died January 8, 1980.

And he was very disconsolate.

They buried her at the Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, Long Island.

She had given him Hubert’s.

Had taken him to the wrestling matches.

Had taken him to see Howdy.

Cut the kiddin’, Kid McCoy, she always said.

“I remember he was standing there at the grave site and he looked so pitiful,” said sainted former housekeeper Margaret E. English, from whom he had long ago hid in the back of Daddy’s car and then surprised Mommy and Daddy while the car crossed the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and, since they were already late for the formal dance in the city that night, they dropped him off with Grandma Pearl.

Papu Cy was buried there too.

And Grandpa Paul.

The Kaufmans and the Bernsteins were all going to be buried there together, since they always got along so well. Mommy and Daddy also had plots there. Everyone would be together. Eventually.

Anyway, he had not been to the cemetery for a very long time.

So he stood there and looked pitiful.

“He was so sad,” said Margaret.

Gregg Sutton always told him that it was Kutsher’s that had killed Grandma Pearl.

He immediately went down to see Grandma Lillie in Hollywood, Florida, where he found a JCPenney nearby and bought her a big color television set and also a home movie camera for himself so that he could take home movies of her watching her new color television set (and, incidentally, she did not approve of him spending such a ridiculous amount of money on her and did not understand why he set up his crazy camera to film every minute of every hour that they spent visiting).

He also filmed a nice visit they had with Aunt Esther Denoff
—

ANDY
: You watch
Saturday Night Live
when I’m on, don’t you?

LILLIE
:
Sometimes.

ANDY
:
You like that show, don’t you?

LILLIE
:
No.

ANDY
:
You only watch it for me?

LILLIE
:
Yeah.

ANDY
:
And what about when I wrestle? Do you like it then?

LILLIE
:
No.

ANDY
:
What do you think of it when I wrestle?

LILLIE
:
It’s terrible.

ESTHER
:
I never saw you wrestle.

LILLIE
:
You never saw him wrestle? You didn’t miss anything.

But he was her darling grandson and she played along with whatever shenanigans he wished, even when very late that night he kept his camera running while she fell asleep sitting on the sofa holding the remote control to her new television—he liked filming her sleeping very much—so there he was sitting beside his sleeping grandmother for a very long time before he took the remote control out of her hands and watched the television himself and then he woke her when he found the unseemly commercials for the not-very-nice things. “Oh, look! Grandma, look, look! Isn’t that terrible, what they advertise on television? X-rated motel? Isn’t that something? They put that on television? Look at that! Topless dancing places now! And men! Nude men dancers! Now, look at that! Look at that, Grandma! Only sexy things,
it says. On television! It’s terrible!” Grandma Lillie groggily agreed that it was all very terrible.

On March 1, he made a six-minute-forty-one-second version of
Uncle Andy’s Fun House
for a proposed experimental ABC-TV program called
Buckshot
on which little films made by interesting people would be featured. The network people said that if the little version of
Uncle Andy’s Fun House
was especially good, it could even become a weekly series. He was very excited. It would be a children’s show for adults, he decided. He had puppets made of Tony Clifton and of Knuckles, his prime creation, who was a moron, and he would interact with them. He wanted the show to look like it originated from the basement den on Grassfield Road, so he flew out Stanley and Janice, who would play themselves sitting upstairs in the kitchen and they would yell down at him in the basement and tell him to come upstairs and eat. He would have his own Peanut Gallery in the den with him and everyone in the Peanut Gallery would wear Uncle Andy T-shirts. And he would show viewers a twenty-four-second clip of Grandma Lillie sleeping on her sofa in Florida—which the network hated, but he insisted that it not be removed because it added to the magic of the Fun House. George said,
Andy gets locked into what he perceives as art and every inch and every second of a bit that he does, in his mind, seems to be perfect. He’s not flexible on changes.
In any case,
Buckshot
aired and Grandma Lillie was seen sleeping on national television and
Uncle Andy’s Fun House
never returned.

Stanley came to George’s office in Beverly Hills to discuss drawing up Andy’s will, since Andy didn’t have a will and the accountant thought it would be a good idea to make out one. Stanley said to his son, “Why don’t you leave something to the Mustang Ranch?” Andy said, “That’s a good idea! Why can’t I do that while I’m still alive?” George said that he could. George said that he could even have a room there named in his honor. Andy asked George to look into that.

Saturday Night Live
celebrated its one hundredth show and he made a tape in George’s backyard which was disguised as Andy Kaufman’s Wrestling Farm and behind him six women with whom he had recently mud-wrestled at Chippendale’s strip club could be seen grappling with each other and he apologized to the camera for not being in New York to help celebrate this momentous occasion and thanked the show for starting him off on his path to success. Unfortunately, the one hundredth show ran long and his tape, which had been a hit at dress rehearsal, was never broadcast.

The robots were ValCom-17485, which was him, and AquaCom-89045, which was Bernadette Peters, and they fell in love and he died at the end (lost battery power, really) before he could pass along life wisdom to the robot child they had made and he cried when he read the script and George told him he would get half a million dollars plus percentage points from Universal—which had now given him an overall deal because once the robot movie
Heartbeeps
was out of the way, they would probably start shooting the Clifton movie in the spring and also use him in other movies. George thought
Heartbeeps
had the makings of a classic, like
The Wizard of Oz,
only more deliberately artful, so he was very optimistic. The movie would take place in the futuristic world of 1995, when everyone had domestic robots tending chores in their homes. Much makeup would be required and it was designed by Stan Winston and applied in daily three-hour sessions by artist Vince Prentice and the process involved gluing pieces of a gelatinous mask (made from ground-up calves’ hooves) to the face, then adding eight coats of metallic paint, then dusting it with sparkly Pearl Essence powder (made from crushed seashells). Andy quickly bored of the ritual—he sent Linda to find tapes of Abbott and Costello and Amos ’n’ Andy and Brando and Bogart which he could watch to stem tedium—and his latenesses in the mornings became more frequent and more objectionable on top
of which he said that he needed to clear his bowels before going into makeup, which meant another twenty minutes wherein an assistant director would always have to bang on the bathroom door and ask, “Is anything happening yet?” and he’d scream “Get away from me!”

He coughed—before he sat in the makeup chair and while he sat in the makeup chair. It was a small, persistent cough. “Gee, what’s the matter?” Prentice would ask. “I don’t know,” Andy said. “It seems the longer I stay in L.A., the more I cough.” Prentice figured it was the rubbing alcohol he used as a thinner. “That would irritate anybody’s breathing,” said Prentice. Besides, Andy said that he had always coughed.

They had started filming in early June up in the redwood groves of Santa Cruz and, on extremely hot days, his gelatin face would melt and his cheeks and jowls would droop and he would age forty years. By the second week on location, he could not stand being without a female. A thirteen-year-old girl knocked on his hotel room door very early one morning and she wanted an autograph and he took her name and phone number and told George that he planned to stay in touch so that he could date her in four years. Out of boredom, he called the
National Enquirer
and told funny lies about how he and Bernadette were having fights and that the director Allan Arkush had thrown him off the set many times. The unit publicist didn’t think this was a great idea. The
Enquirer
published the story. Arkush, however, did once wield a gun in order to get him to come out of his trailer. “Look, either you’re on the set now or you’re a dead man and we’re recasting the movie,” Arkush told him half jokingly. “Andy thought that was hysterical,” Arkush said. Andy had Clifton call Arkush to tell him to lay off. One day, he stepped out of a very dramatic scene because he saw a candy bar on the set and he wanted it. Meanwhile, everyone thought the dialogue was too slow; the dialogue, in truth, was excruciatingly slow. George thought Arkush was
utilizing only ten percent of Andy’s comic abilities. By the sixth week of filming, back in Los Angeles, a Universal executive cornered George and proposed that if Andy would show up on time for two consecutive days the studio would install a hooker in his dressing room. Andy loved the idea and actually came early the first day of the challenge when the executive informed George that the studio brass couldn’t quite justify budgeting procurement of prostitutes. Andy took the news stoically. The Screen Actors Guild went on strike two days later. Andy went directly to Nevada to have sex.

He had looked at his ABC special again, in the makeup chair, on the same day the hooker thing was first mentioned. And he saw the old him on the special. And he had just read something that the critic Marvin Kitman had written about the old him being better than the new him. Marvin Kitman hated the new him. Like all those people who wrote the wrestling letters saying that he was a chauvanistic arrogant idiot asshole now. (George had told Linda to start collecting the letters because George envisioned a book of Andy Kaufman’s hate mail, which no publisher would deign to consider.) George told him that there were probably far more people who felt the same way and hadn’t sent letters. People thought that he had changed, George said. People didn’t think he was lovable anymore. He pondered this for a while and asked George, “Do you think I can still be innocent?” And he sounded a little more worried about it than usual.