Lost in the Funhouse (45 page)

Budd Friedman needed him in Los Angeles on November 7 to perform for the Improv’s twentieth anniversary taping, and so he came back and stayed in Linda Mitchell’s small apartment, not far from the club, to prepare his material. He remembered something that he had never used before but had always meant to, which was “Cash for the Merchandise”—the labyrinthine spoken-word multivoiced opening number for
The Music Man,
in which a train car full of nattering traveling salesmen bandy about the nuances of hucksterism in impossible syncopation. He practiced and practiced with his conga drum in Linda’s tiny guest bedroom/den—
and this felt familiar….

At the taping, he had a portable clothes dryer waiting for him onstage. He carried a load of laundry up and threw it in the machine, then pressed the start button. He went to the conga and established his beat and sang the Elvis song “Paralyzed” in his own voice, which was something he had never done before. Then he launched into “Cash for the Merchandise”—which he had transformed into a dizzying spectacle of recitation, a performance piece both thrilling and stupefying. The audience cheered more forcefully than any that he had experienced in a very long while.

He then brought out Little Wendy—with whom he had mended because she was an important part of his world and he was never very good at estranging himself from people who meant something—and he ventured into a new veiled autobiographical fantasy that had been itching to surface. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “you know, when I was about fourteen, I was in junior high school, and my first girlfriend—I got her pregnant. And had a little girl—who I have hardly
seen, because we gave her away—or
she
gave her away for adoption. And for about twenty years, I have lived with the thought that somewhere in the world there’s a little Andy Kaufman running around. So, just recently—a few weeks ago, I was contacted by an agency called Children Anonymous. And that’s an agency [to aid] adopted children looking for their natural parents. So, because of that agency, I’ve spent a very delightful week with my child. Whose name is Wendy Dalton … and this is her. She’s nearing her twentieth birthday.”

And he instructed her to speak with him just as they did when they had been reunited and he asked her questions about her adopted family and about what she thought of his wrestling (“I hated it”) and they sang a song called “The Muleskinner Blues” and then she retreated and he performed an anguished dramatic monologue from a play that he made up in his head while he spoke and was heckled by a plant throughout and it all exploded into a mess and he conga-cried and then left the stage with his laundry as the theme from Fellini’s
8 1/2
echoed through the club.

On the first night that he came to Linda’s, they decided that he would split her monthly rent so that he had a place to stay when he had jobs in Los Angeles. They had gone to dinner at Inaka, his favorite vegetarian restaurant on La Brea Boulevard, and apropos of nothing she asked, “What would you do if you had six months to live?” And he said, “Go somewhere and finish my book. What would you do?” She said she didn’t know.

“Within a week,” she would recall, “he was coughing. He’d always coughed. But this was a really bad cough.”

It would have been a good time and an important time for him to go gather deep silences and he felt it, he felt the real need for it, and there came word of a teacher-training course that had been abruptly scheduled for December and he had just sent a five-hundred-dollar donation and was looking forward to going and he was at Linda’s when
he heard that they didn’t want him to come. This had happened before, even though he was a TM governor, because sometimes bliss people didn’t understand that what he did when he performed was only fooling in fun, and someone in the movement would then make a call on his behalf to someone else and he would get to go. But now he learned, vaguely, that a new and powerful woman administrator—who had long hated the wrestling-with-women business—declared that his was not the behavior of a teacher and that his presence was not welcome at this particular course. And he called and called his influential peers in the movement and none of them could do much to reverse the decision. He even called his friend Jerry Jarvis, who had up until recently presided over the entire American TM hierarchy because he knew that Jarvis appreciated his dedication as few others could—“Andy had a more profound understanding of Maharishi’s teachings than many people I had ever come in contact with,” Jarvis would recall. And Jarvis now spoke with him at length and calmed him and told him that it was a misunderstanding and it would eventually be cleared up by the time of the next training course. But there was nothing to be done about this one. And so he felt hurt and the hurt touched his spirit, which had always been sustained by meditation. He felt betrayed inside his secret soul. “Who are they to tell me how to run my career?” he said over and over. Linda was there while he digested the hurt. “He didn’t smash anything or throw anything,” she said. “He was angry and then very sad. But he didn’t stop meditating.”

He and Lynne went back to New York for the one-night-only showing and/or premiere of
My Breakfast with Blassie
at the art theater the Thalia.
(Variety
deemed it an “effective no-budget conversational comedy” with limited home video potential.) A few nights later, on November 17, he reported to David Letterman that the Thalia audience was “rolling in the aisles.” He then showed a clip from the film
The Big Chill,
because, he said, “I saw it yesterday and I liked it.” Later, his three sons reemerged to display newly acquired trade skills. Andy said, “The adoption papers are now actually legal.”

Thanksgiving on Grassfield Road during which, as per custom, everyone around the table performed for their supper—

Lynne, as a newcomer, observed, “It was a Kaufman family tradition at Thanksgiving. And they were very serious about it. Everyone had practiced their little routines for days.” So, with trepidation, she would sing her special version of “I’m a Little Teapot,” which Andy loved because she changed the words so that it was about being a little rib from inside Andy. “That came from him always saying, ‘I’m the man, you’re the woman, you came from the rib!’”

Andy, also as per custom, recorded the festivities on tape.

When his turn came, he said, “Should I read my poetry or do my routine?” Michael said, “Whatever you think better exemplifies your talent.” Andy said, “Okay, well, my poetry’s from when I was fourteen, so we won’t do that.” So he elected to perform “Cash for the Merchandise” sans conga and he was spectacular, if a little breathless, and when he finished he was gasping for air. And Stanley teased, “I wanna tell you something—you are so outta condition, it’s pathetic! You are really out of condition! Feel his heart. I bet it’s pounding!” Andy checked and, still winded, said, “Heart isn’t pounding. It’s hardly even pounding.” Stanley said, “How come you’re out of breath? You used to do something like this without even … But wow!”

“I gotta jump rope more, right?” he said.

But they were all flabbergasted by his virtuosity.

Lynne said it had also been hypnotic with the conga weeks earlier.

Stanley said it was too damned good for the Letterman show.

Janice could only smile proudly.

He had repeated coughing fits that night.

Maybe, he said, he was coming down with something.

Needed vitamins.

Whenever he left rooms that were meaningful, he would always tell the rooms goodbye. He never left the house on Grassfield Road without
wandering into every room to say, Goodbye, room, and he would give the room a little goodbye wave. He went downstairs before leaving again for California. He waved goodbye to his den just as he always had. Goodbye, den, he said.

Lynne returned to San Francisco and he returned to Los Angeles and to Linda’s apartment and he kept coughing. Linda said he had to go to the doctor, which he had known for weeks but for some reason hadn’t done it. Hypochondria had never been a stranger to him. But he usually believed that his holistic-macrobiotic-bean-weed-mulch-vitamin-meditation-sleep regimen (chocolate notwithstanding) sufficiently warded away all dark things. Plus, he had gotten a clean bill checkup six months earlier.

He had been waiting for the cancer.

He saw something oddly romantic about it.

He was going to use cancer to save his career.

Cancer was how he would fake his death, he told them.

“He had a very strong mind,” Lynne would say. “Sometimes I wonder if he just talked himself into it. Because he used to always think he was gonna get cancer. I remember saying one time that I had known a lot of people who died of cancer, and he said, ‘Yeah, you just wait and see—I’m going to, too.’ I said, ‘Well, don’t say
that!
That’s
terrible!’
And every time he went to the doctor he’d say, ‘Well, do I have cancer?’ He was just determined that he was going to get it.”

Second week in December: Linda drove him to see Dr. Rubins. Dr. Steven Rubins had an office in Beverly Hills. He had been Linda’s doctor and then, when the hepatitis hit him after the Huntington Hartford, Dr. Rubins became Andy’s doctor as well. He told Dr. Rubins about the cough and said his left arm hurt, too. “We did a chest X ray,” Rubins would recall. “And we saw a lesion in the
left lung on the left-heart border. And that was suspicious.” And Rubins knew what it was and sent him and his X rays to lung specialist Dr. William Young, who also knew what it was—“It was just a question of confirming the diagnosis,” said Young. They stuck a camera down this throat—an endoscopy of his trachea and bronchial tubes—and the camera saw the tumor and they sent a needle down his throat to remove a tiny piece of the tumor and they looked at the tiny piece and knew precisely what it was. “Unfortunately, it came back large-cell carcinoma,” said Rubins, “which is a fairly highly virulent cancer of the lung that can occur, sporadically, in nonsmokers.” In patients under forty, Young would see it approximately once every two years. The tumor was blocking a bronchial tube, which had caused pneumonia, which had caused the cough.

The malignancy had already begun to metastasize.

Which meant that it was now crawling through him.

It swam in his blood.

It was eating his arm in half—a bone lesion, they called it.

An expansile lytic lesion of his left humerus, specifically.

Which was what made it hurt.

Radiation was recommended.

“Upfront, we told him that it was palliative, probably not curative,” said Rubins. “And that there were no guarantees. Frankly, it was his option. We thought that maybe it would buy some time.”

He heard the word
inoperable
but not the word
incurable.

That was all that he heard.

It was difficult to understand anything that he heard.

“He didn’t know that there wasn’t a difference,” said Linda. “He had no idea. They said, ‘We aren’t going to operate.’ And so Andy said, ‘Fine. Great.’ He didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t ask anything. He thought, ‘They aren’t going to operate—that’s a good thing.’ He didn’t know it was terminal lung cancer. Andy didn’t know what that was.”

George had come to Cedars-Sinai to hear the diagnosis and sat there with him and they heard. “He said, ‘George, you gotta get me on the Letterman show after Christmas so David could ask me, “Andy, what did you get for Christmas?” and I could say, “Cancer.”’ That was the first thing that he said to me after the doctor told him.”

He called Lynne in San Francisco: “He called me and said, ‘See? See? I told you. I’ve got cancer!’ You know, it was that type of thing. He knew he was gonna get it and I hadn’t believed him. It was like, ‘See, I told you so….’”

He wasn’t afraid because it wasn’t going to kill him because he wasn’t going to die because he would do things and eat things and try things and make it go away, so he was, um, fine.

He wanted no one else to know, especially his family. Since he was not going to die, there was no reason to alarm anyone. Lynne came down from San Francisco and moved into the little bedroom with him at Linda’s. He did not want the radiation. He drank herbal sludges instead. The arm felt better; then the arm felt excruciating. They went to Dr. Irwin Grossman in Beverly Hills who gave the arm radiation and the pain stopped. “He became my immediate best friend,” said Grossman. “He was very sweet, very appreciative.” The radiation helped the pneumonia as well, since it shrunk the tumor blockage, thus lessened the cough. Eventually, he would see Grossman every day, receive a one minute dosage of pinpointed radiation and leave. Nausea was ever attendant. He once threw up in Linda’s car on the way home. He decided to call and tell Michael on Christmas Eve. Michael heard his brother say the word
malignant;
like his brother, he chose not to fully grasp
what that meant. Andy swore him to secrecy and Michael said nothing to anyone.