Lost in the Funhouse (40 page)

They welcomed him into their fold in June and took him backstage, where he made taunting tapes to broadcast during wrestling programs that would rile the women enough so that they’d want to come whup him when he returned. It was then decided that from that point forward he would (very legitimately) bill himself as the World’s Intergender Wrestling Champion—he was, after all, undefeated in over three hundred contests—and everyone thought the title had a perfectly highfalutin ring to it. So the date was picked and it would be Columbus Day and now here he was on that very day in October and they threw a handful of girls at him and he loved the size and the stomp and the roar and the smell of this Coliseum where Elvis had performed and where he now rubbed to his longjohns’ content. And none of them could pin him but he pinned most of them. And he brayed at the sea of twisted faces and made his usual affront with the washing-scrubbing-peeling et cetera. And, suddenly, he had become a fully accredited Tarheel! “He had that heeled sense about him and that little prancy, insipid way that he strutted around that ring,” said Lance Russell, who called all matches at the Coliseum. “I never saw anybody who loved it any more than he did. He was just great. And, oh God, he wanted to come back!” Afterward, he made some more ornery tapes and said he would return on November 23 and he really couldn’t wait.

Budd Friedman asked him to host his syndicated television showcase,
An Evening at the Improv,
on October 29, but he would have rather been wrestling back down in that colossal arena, because he
hadn’t stopped thinking about it, but he couldn’t wrestle now anyway because of the cyst on the back of his neck which had gotten so big and so ripe in the last couple of weeks that the doctor wanted to lance it but instead he told the doctor to wait a few more days because he wanted to try something new in the realm of audience participation. Linda made them wash their hands with the hot towels first. They came up one at a time. He told them not to press it too hard, just touch lightly. And he didn’t do it to be funny, either.

Lawler came to the airport to pick up Andy and his brother Michael when they arrived for the November event. Michael had come along to see the thousands clamoring for Andy’s blood. They would be joined by Sherry Tuseth of Jonesboro, Arkansas, an art-school student whom Andy had arranged to meet on his June excursion (beguiling fan letter) and who had kept him company during his incipient raids upon Memphis. They went to the Coliseum, where four women wanted a piece of him. He waved the fistful of grand at them and said, as usual, “Any woman that will beat me, as an extra prize, she will get to marry me!” Lawler stood at ringside and watched the first three go down quickly—“So the last one was this heavyset black girl named Foxy Brown—I’ll never forget her,” he said. “She was the first one that really gave Andy a contest that night. They started the match—and she runs across and grabs Andy and picks him up in the air and drops him for a body slam. I mean, the roof came off the Coliseum! All of a sudden, here’s this big mouth getting what he deserves, you know? And he starts scrambling, trying to run out of the ring—and she’s pulling his tights down, holding him in the ring. It was just classic.” And it was a draw.

Which was when Lawler decided to demand a rematch for Foxy Brown wherein he would become her coach and trainer. Andy loved this idea and immediately made broadcast tapes for Memphis television to say just how much he hated this idea—“I don’t know why Jerry Lawler’s getting his nose into it! He should keep his nose out of my business! Mr. Lawler, you think you can teach this woman how
to wrestle? I will destroy her no matter what you say you can do! Mark my words, Mr. Lawler!” And both men tucked away their secret smiles and waited a week to advance a notion that would grow into a spectacle that was to be theirs alone.

That Foxy Brown went limp and was pinned in eight minutes thirty-five seconds during the November 30 rematch was irrelevant. Andy just sat on her after he won and gratuitously pushed her face into the mat and kept on pushing like the heel that he was supposed to be. And that was when Lawler was compelled to step into the ring and begin his new destiny—“So I just reached down and pulled him up off her. And he flies clear across the ring, falls over, then jumps up. And all of a sudden his eyes get big and he starts screaming at me.” And he kept screaming and then Lawler pushed him down again and Andy leapt out of the ring and grabbed Lance Russell’s ringside microphone and played his part—“I WILL SUE YOU, LAWLER! I WILL SUE YOU! YOU DON’T TOUCH ME! I AM FROM HOLLYWOOD! I’LL GET HOLLYWOOD AGAINST YOU, BABY! I DON’T WRESTLE MEN! YOU DON’T TOUCH ME, BABY! I’LL SUE YOU FOR EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT!”

And now that they had established themselves as mortal enemies, they started to think of ways to elevate their feud and sell more tickets and figure out how the fellow in longjohns wasn’t going to get hurt. Several meals were shared in the process of discussion. Lawler’s wife liked to cook. George, meanwhile, would think it was fortunate that reports of this last occurrence did not filter anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Heartbeeps
opened December 18, one year after its haphazard completion following the SAG strike.
Variety
noted, “Each moment passes like hours waiting for this slumgullion to slide by.” Roger Ebert of the
Chicago Sun-Times
wrote, “It’s a mystery to me why this film was made.” George reported,
Of all the films that opened at Christmastime, it did the worst. Absolutely embarrassingly
bad at the box office, which is a setback for Andy’s motion picture career quite considerably.

They were saying he was poison.

They were saying he was impossible.

Simka returned to Latka during the first week of 1982, when the eighty-first episode, “Simka Returns,” was filmed and Andy was exceptionally late for an important rehearsal that week and Ed. Weinberger called George and screamed—“Who the hell does Andy think he is? I’m completely fed up with him!”

Taxi
had been struggling in the ratings ever since the season before when the network moved it from Tuesdays to Thursday nights. It would rank in the lowly fifty-third position by the end of this season, its fourth, and would be canceled by ABC on May 4 but then rescued (for its brilliance and integrity) on May 21 by NBC, where the series would be permitted its fifth season, which would also be its last.

Simka, meanwhile, had returned to save Latka from his multiple personalities disorder. In addition to the playboy Vic Ferrari, he had also become, in varying measures, Arlo the cowboy, Sir Geoffrey Hypen-Hill, who was British Man, and Alex Reiger, wherein he emulated the Judd Hirsch character. With Simka, he gave them all up for love. They would marry six episodes later.

He returned to
Saturday Night Live,
where it had been more than two years since he wrestled and disappeared from the show. Dick Ebersol had been brought in as executive producer not long after the Charles-Rockett-fuck incident, which had prompted in part a creative house-razing and a fresh start with new personnel. Andy had wanted to host, but Ebersol said no; Andy had wanted Clifton to appear, but Ebersol said no. Elvis appeared, instead, on January 30; he wore a wig now because of his thinning hairline; he also wore a stunning cerulean studded jumpsuit that Bill Belew had recently designed. Elvis lip-synched to the old chicken opera record—which
was funny but a desecration—after which Elvis picked two girls from the audience to be brought to his dressing room by Elvis’s bodyguard Red West (Zmuda). The cameras followed them inside, whereupon Elvis instructed the girls to rassle—“Whoa! Wait a minute,” he said as they began. “Take off your clothes, but leave the panties on.” And as they moved to do this, he stopped them and removed his wig and addressed the camera—“Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to just say something right now. Um, what I just did was based on that book by Albert Goldman about Elvis. And, uh, I would just like to say, all my life I’ve been a fan of Elvis Presley and, uh, I disapprove of that book and also I disapprove of what I just did.”

David Letterman returned to NBC with a new talk-and-comedy show called
Late Night with David Letterman,
which took the place of
The Tomorrow Show
immediately following Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show.
Andy made his first appearance on the program in its third week, February 17, and proudly showed clips of himself wrestling and berating women in Memphis—after which Letterman said, “Andy, you’ve turned out to be quite a fine young man.” He then displayed his brand-new World Intergender Wrestling Championship belt, claiming it was really real. “He’s not kidding,” said Letterman. “This is molded plastic.”

Clifton went on the show the next night. Letterman said, “So there’s no truth to the rumor that you’re actually Andy Kaufman?” Clifton said, “There’s no truth in that whatsoever! That’s a total fabrication on your part!” He also boasted, “I’ve been removed from almost every major motion picture set and TV studio in America!” Andy thought Bob did a wonderful job. Nobody at the Letterman show knew the difference.

Lawler wanted him to send tapes from California. Los Angeles wrestling promoter Larry Burton, who had orchestrated many of Andy’s more surreptitious matches around Orange County, invited
Andy and Zmuda to come down to Anaheim, where they borrowed the backyard poolside of one of Burton’s neighbors. They shot a great deal of footage there in which Andy—wearing Burton’s gold chain around his neck and Burton’s rings on his fingers—threatened Lawler with countless law suits and attacked the South in general and
Meeyummmphissss Teeeyennnuuhhhsaaaayyyy
in point and called Lawler a hick and reminded him ad nauseam that he, Andy, was from Hollywood and that he had the brains. Burton found a six-foot three-hundred-twenty-seven-pound woman at a local hardware store and Andy wrestled her on the poolside patio and slammed her head into the concrete repeatedly until she appeared unconscious. “That’s what’s gonna happen to you, Lawler!” he screamed. “See, I could do anything I want! I’m gonna wipe the floor with you, Mr. Lawler!”

Lawler, for his part, made his own tapes in Memphis with Lance Russell and called Andy a wimp and said to Andy as well as local viewers, “We can settle it two ways, Andy Kaufman. We can settle it in court—which in your case is a joke [since] I barely pushed the guy. Or what I would propose and what I think everybody would love to see is Andy Kaufman come and get in the ring with a real wrestler and let him see what it’s like to really wrestle.”

The video baiting continued for weeks and they eventually secured the Mid-South Coliseum for April 5, whereupon the grudge match would unfold—smack in the midst of Andy’s first club and college tour in more than two years.

George told him that they had lost the engagement in Denver. Only 270 tickets had been sold for an auditorium whose capacity was 2,600. They also lost the Minneapolis engagement—250 tickets sold for a 2,700-seat theater. It was, George knew, the wrestling. Plus, Andy had no new material. Although he did try a couple of new things on March 26 at the Park West Theater in Chicago—he made a telephone call from the stage to someone who had written him a particularly vicious hate letter. Also, the Masked Magician hypnotized plants from the audience. Andy’s sister Carol, who lived in Chicago, feigned a trance in
which she became Carol Channing and sang “Hello, Dolly!” A stripper from Boston named Princess Cheyenne, of whom Andy was quite fond, feigned a trance and removed all her clothes prompting a calamitous police raid that seemed very extremely real.

On April Fool’s Day, he announced the Lawler match on the Letterman show and then returned two nights later to repeat the announcement in case anyone had missed it the first time. He showed clips of them baiting each other. It was very exciting. To him.

He and Zmuda and Sherry Tuseth went to the home of referee Jerry Calhoun two nights before the match. Lawler was there as arranged and proceeded to demonstrate how Andy would survive a suplex and a piledriver because that was what he was going to do to him in the ring and this was a simple matter of remedial choreography and nothing else. The suplex, he explained, would involve Lawler lifting Andy vertically over his shoulders and falling backward together hard—like a pair of toppled trees—which would impact the back of Andy’s head. The piledriver, which was illegal in Memphis, was generally performed on opponents who had been rendered limp; the victim would be lifted by the legs and turned upside down and his head would nestle between Lawler’s thighs as he fell into a thudding sit. So there on Calhoun’s den carpet Andy submitted to Lawler dangling him by the ankles as Lawler talked him through each maneuver—“I told him, ‘You know, we’ll just keep the match very simple and very basic. You know how to get a headlock around me, don’t you?’ And he said: ‘Oh, yeah, I can do that.’ And I said, ‘Well, just get a headlock on me, and we’ll just go from there. Because I may do a move on you like a suplex from the headlock. If I do, just tuck your chin and try not to let the back of your head hit the mat and you’ll be all right, I’ll take care of you.’ And the move that I’m famous for, if I get a chance, is the piledriver. It’s funny—I remember I said, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t break your neck or anything.’ But I told him that not
much of the head should make contact with the mat, just a little bit. I mean, you could do it and try to protect somebody, or you could do it and make sure their head did hit. It just depends on the placement—on how far you stick their head down between your legs. I showed him how I would keep his head way off that mat.”

They went through this a couple of times that night and Sherry Tuseth was struck by Andy’s respectfulness toward Lawler and how he relinquished all control to him. “He was pretty much in awe of him all the time,” she said. “But what was real surprising to me was just how quickly they could rehearse something like that. It took about five minutes.”

George flew in because. Andy had given George assurances, but still. George had not known of the extent of the choreography, so therefore. George was not thrilled. George was very extremely concerned. Zmuda told him not to worry. George sat ringside next to Sherry. George recollected afterward—
He wrestled Jerry Lawler. All the pre-interviews seemed to indicate that Andy was very worried about this guy…. There was a guy, Woody Something, from Associated Press, who interviewed Jerry Lawler and he told me that Jerry wasn’t kidding around with this wrestling match. Andy went into the ring at the Mid-South Coliseum to a tremendous chorus of boos. For the first five minutes after Andy went into the ring, he was dancing around, jumping around like a monkey, got out of the ring to protect himself, and after five minutes Jerry Lawler offered to let Andy put him in a headlock. So Andy got Lawler in a head-lock. Lawler picked him up and threw him right on his back on the canvas. He hit pretty hard. Then Lawler grabbed him and gave him a piledriver, which is an illegal hold…. He did this twice. It looked like Andy’s neck was broken. He was out for a couple of minutes. Then he woke in a lot of pain and the audience was hooting and cheering and really happy that Andy was hurt.