Lost in the Funhouse (46 page)

He slipped in and out of Cedars-Sinai for tests. He wondered sometimes what they were testing for. Some days, he drove himself to his appointments; some days, he was driven. He often made Rubins and Young wait before entering the examination rooms to see him, because he was meditating—“You waited for him,” said Young. “Doctors, you know, are not used to waiting.” Some days were very extremely angry days. He avoided sadness, however, for the most part, since there were alternatives. “Andy didn’t want to hear bad things,” said Rubins. He researched alternative treatments, and so did Lynne, and so did Linda. “He was not a person who gave in to failure,” said Young. “He believed that, through his spirit, he was gonna win, that he was not gonna die.” He listened to visualization tapes constantly and wrote out affirmations—“I’m getting better and better every day.” He wrote
better and better
over and over. He also wrote, “I’m not my Papu Cy, therefore I can’t have cancer.”

“These things are really proven to be chromosomal,” said Young. “It’s all about just having the wrong genes.”

George started talking into his tape recorder again on New Year’s Day. On January 7, he reported,
I went to bed at 1
A.M.
and slept restlessly until 4
A.M.
and couldn’t sleep after that. I cried my eyes out this morning for the first time since learning of Andy’s cancer. It was probably triggered when I became aware that the doctors are giving him only three months of life. I love him so much. He’s just like my kid brother—my crazy, creative, unique, lovable kid brother.

Andy walked into the Shapiro/West offices two days later and made calls to nutritionists and to whoever else he could think of who could help him. He called a macrobiotics clinic in Boston.
Andy looked pretty good, although he’s confused, as he’s talking to so
many people…. He expressed concern that if it got out [that he has cancer] he’d have trouble getting work. I do not feel it would affect the college lecture dates and David Letterman would certainly like to have him.
Meanwhile, he looked pretty good.

He told Zmuda on January 10. Zmuda came over to Linda’s and Andy told him. Andy smiled nervously when he said the words. Zmuda waited for the
gotcha
but knew there would be none.

He called Gregg Sutton and told him. Sutton laughed and said, “That’s hilarious!” Andy said, “No, no, I’ve really got cancer.”

So many of them would laugh when they learned. He liked that part, but it got a little tiring. No really no really no really no really. At least, he had acquired much practice at this.

The family knew nothing, except for Michael, and they went as usual to their winter condo on Singer Island in Florida. Janice’s speech had been improving somewhat. Michael sat near her by the pool and she stared ahead into nothingness and into sunshine and two words escaped her lips. “Poor Andy,” she said. And that was all she said.

“It was almost like a mother’s intuition,” Michael would say. “This was a month before she knew anything, but she already knew.”

He turned thirty-five on the seventeenth. George brought over a photo album full of pictures from the
Soundstage
taping in Chicago when he had snapped at Foreign Man—“What do I have to be scared of?”

His left eye hurt, he said. It was now inside his head, where all of his other selves lived.
Dhrupick’s left eye hurt and it was now inside Dhrupick’s head, where all of his otherselves lived.

George got him an offer the next day—to host the pilot for a syndicated music-video-and-performance showcase called
The Top;
it wouldn’t require anything more strenuous than taping introductions to various segments of the program. He could even pretend it was a children’s show and call the home viewers boys and girls. “I wanted him to do this,” George would recall. “Because performing gave him positive energy which would distract him from focusing only on his sickness.” Andy said he would do it and he did, on January 22; a limo collected him with Lynne and Linda and took them to the taping. “All of a sudden, we were out in the world again and it was so bizarre,” said Linda. “We were all very nervous. The doctor told me his arm could break if anybody even bumped it or grabbed him to say hi. So I stood there the whole time, next to his arm.” George was there to oversee—
The production was quite disorganized technically and Andy was off on his timing and lacked energy at times. On some takes he did well, but he was a far cry from his normal exciting energized self. He was unsure of himself and goofed up several times. I do feel that with sharp editing, the show will turn out quite good. It will be telecast this Friday, January 27. This will be Andy’s last show for a while or until he gains his strength.
“He did the show and we went home,” said Linda. “He was exhausted.”

Life and strength drained as radiation blasted. He stopped the radiation for a while, then felt worse. Often he couldn’t move. Lynne and Linda prepared and brewed his placebo gruels for hours at a time—mashes of millet and burdock root and squash; broths of fresh ginger. They shaved piles of ginger scraps to dump into Linda’s bathtub, which would be filled with scalding water, where he would steep himself for forty-five-minute purges. “One night he was too weak to get out of the tub,” said Linda. “So we had to pull him out, but he was all slippery from the ginger. He kept sliding out of our hands—we couldn’t get him out. Suddenly, out of frustration, she and I just
burst out laughing. This had all just gotten ridiculous. He was pissed.” They tried to explain that the strain was sapping them as well. He yelled, “The only strain that I’m aware of is that I can’t have chocolate cake!”

He saw only one reason that this was happening to him. “It’s the chocolate,” he told them. “Too much chocolate.”

George said industry people were starting to hear about it on the streets. On February 10, he insisted that Andy tell Stanley before it turned up in the tabloids. Andy refused, said not yet, because he might get better. George called Michael and urged him to tell Stanley. Michael said he would try, but then he couldn’t quite do it, either. “He didn’t tell his family for two months,” said Lynne. “Finally, I just snuck off to the phone and called his dad and said, ‘You better get out here. Andy’s sick.’ A day or two later, his mom walked into the bedroom-Andy had no idea they’d been told—and he got mad at me.”

It was by now the third week of February. Stanley said, “When we saw him for the first time lying on this mattress on the floor, it was devasting. He was already just about gone. He had no use of his arm. Sometimes he couldn’t walk or talk. It was a disaster.” They hastened him back into radiation. Stanley would lift him up the three steps onto the linear-accelerator table, as Grossman witnessed with overwhelming sadness. “I cried—I mean, there were tears in my eyes. I had to leave the room. It was so sad, seeing a father have to pick up his kid and put him on this table….” Janice would hold his hand every night until he fell asleep. George, Stanley and Linda saw Rubins a week later and Rubins said it could be anywhere from two weeks to a few months.

Andy called psychologist John Gray, whose love seminar he had attended just over a year before, and asked for counseling to help him
and his family understand what was happening. “He wanted to say goodbye to his family,” said Gray, whose work with relationships later manifested itself in such books as
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.
“He gave them a chance to share feelings and to talk about their life together. Andy was very open to role-playing, which creates a context to express and understand different points of view without aggravation. He responded very well to it.” They went to Gray’s home office in Brentwood for a few days and in different groupings. Stanley loathed every minute of it—“We called them ten-Kleenex-box sessions. His success was based on the number of Kleenex boxes the clients used. He was trying to bring out our anger toward each other—that we were angry with each other, that we didn’t love each other. He wanted hatred and anger to come out, and boy, he wouldn’t take no for an answer. This was meant to please Andy because if there was no emotion, then Gray wasn’t cleansing our souls. And he had Janice there—who could hardly speak, knowing that her son was in such terrible shape—and he had to make
her
cry! It was cruel.” Said Carol, “I remember how awkward it was watching Andy—who had swelling on the brain that day—so he couldn’t talk. And my mother couldn’t talk. They just looked at each other. It was kind of heartbreaking.”

George attended a session with Michael, Lynne and Andy.
In the session, Andy expressed his resentment toward me when I didn’t support some of his artistic endeavors like his wrestling, Tony Clifton, his novel, Howdy Doody et cetera. He opened up his feelings, and during an exercise I played the role of Andy expressing his feelings toward George, telling him I didn’t feel enough support from him in my creative efforts as an avant garde entertainer. It was stimulating for both of us. I felt great afterward and so did Andy. …

He heard about the healers who pulled clumps of disease out of bodies by magic. He and Lynne found one in the California desert; some clumps were extracted which looked like animal intestines, but also like red stringy globs of, um, cancer; there was no scarring; he knew it was magic and he believed completely. A woman there told him of the miracle
man of Baguio, which was a small town two hours outside Manila, in the Philippines. The woman said she could make the arrangements. They would go March 21 in search of psychic faith-healing miracles.

Stanley rented him a nice house in Pacific Palisades, just steps from the beach, at 300 Lombard. He would be able to watch sunsets on the ocean and have more room to breathe. His family headed home a week before the Philippines quest—about which Stanley banked no optimism—and they would return once he had completed his journey. The night before Andy and Lynne departed, there would be a
Blassie
premiere at the Nuart Theater in West Los Angeles. He would go with some trepidation, for he resembled a wraith, gray and emaciated; he had lost more than twenty pounds and most of his hair and much candlepower in the eyeglow. Lynne shaved what remained of his hair into a renegade mohawk and Gregg Sutton loaned him a studded black leather vest—so he would inhabit one last persona with which to confuse them all. At the Nuart, Lynne and Linda flanked each arm to discourage overt approaches from boisterous friends. Robin Williams came, as did Marilu Henner and director Harold Ramis and Budd Friedman and Elayne Boosler, who fled to the rest room in tears when she first saw him. (Little Wendy followed her in and told her it was cancer.) Afterward, Budd took George aside and said, “Do you think Andy would like to have a little bon voyage party upstairs at the club with some friends and chocolate ice cream?” So a big troop of them repaired to the Improv and the ice cream was plentiful and Andy was happy for the first time in many months and George and Zmuda stoked the room with an effusiveness so relentlessly upbeat as to distract everyone from believing the worst, which they did anyway. “It was like having a wake with the corpse in attendance,” said Sutton.

I went to the airport to see Andy and Lynne off on the their trip. The flight was 7:15
P.M.
Andy had to use a wheelchair because his leg was hurting and, as always, it was a long walk at the airport. A photographer
took Andy’s picture in the wheelchair. He
jumped
out of the wheelchair and screamed, “What the fuck are you taking my picture in a wheelchair for?! You fucking leech! You leech!” Andy chased the guy, trying to get to the camera, but he ran away. Bob Zmuda and Elayne Boosler chased the guy to no avail. Andy said it felt great to get so mad. He loved it. Johnny Gray and Linda Mitchell also saw Andy off. I hugged and kissed Andy several times and wished him a good and healthy journey, and asked him to come back well, as we have a lot of good, creative things to do. Andy hugged and kissed everyone and thanked us for coming. It meant a great deal to him and he expressed this touchingly to us. He had shaved his head completely (actually, Lynne did it), and he removed his hat at the departure gate. This cute, loving, bald-headed guy started to board the plane, holding his jacket in one hand and waving goodbye with the other. It was somehow a very touching and beautiful picture.

The April 24 issue of the
National Enquirer
published the wheelchair photograph with a story headlined “
TAXI
”
STAR TELLS PALS: I’M DYING OF CANCER
. It was the first time the tabloid had ever run a story about him that he hadn’t invented and phoned in himself.

The trip took fifteen hours by air and they stayed nearly six weeks in the largely impoverished town of Baguio, where the renowned faith healer and local politician Jun Labo presided over the unadorned clinic in which patients waited in a queue and stepped forth, one at a time, to receive salvation. Andy received the treatment twice a day. He wore only Jockey shorts and took his turns climbing on and off the operating table on which Labo performed spiritual sleight-of-hand—first dipping his surgical hands into water, then inserting them into a folded towel to dry, then quickly pressing them to Andy’s skin and producing the entrails of disease (and/or poultry). Each miracle lasted less than one minute at a charge of twenty-five dollars per. Labo would pluck wet darkness from Andy’s brain and arm and chest
but mostly from the towel with which he wiped his hands. “He actually seemed to be getting better at first,” said Lynne. “He believed it was magic. He was eating, we were taking walks, everything was going great. But then, all of a sudden, he just went down.” Zmuda flew over at right about that time to surprise them, which worked, and Andy was buoyant, then faltered again. Zmuda would recall, “Lynne and I told him at one point, ‘Why don’t you become Tony? Tony couldn’t be sick.’ And he summoned whatever energy he had left and Tony stepped out of the wheelchair—‘
Hey, how’re doin’? Where’s the chickies….’
And then he collapsed again. For a minute there, we thought Clifton had cured him.” Convulsions started a few days later and Lynne said it was time to go home.