Lost in the Funhouse (18 page)

And they were together, more or less, until he had to leave for California a couple of years later and often he taped their conversations before and afterward, because he had recently begun taping conversations with everyone—street people, cab drivers, old people—and he gave her one tape they made together on which he lectured to her about the semiotics of a performer’s fortitude in the face of defeat and she would poignantly play a piece of that lecture (which was a piece of him) near the end of one of her HBO stand-up comedy specials many years hence when she was famous and there was his voice, insistent and helpful—“… You’re on a railroad train, you go through a tunnel. The tunnel is dark but you’re still going forward. Just remember that. But if you’re not gonna get up onstage for one night, because you’re discouraged or something, then the train’s gonna stop. You’re still in the tunnel, but the train’s gonna stop. [So] you [have to] just keep going…. It’s gonna take a lot of times going onstage before you can come out of the tunnel and things get bright again. But you keep going onstage—go forward! Every night, you go onstage.”

Every night, he went onstage and most nights received no pay other than spotlight and, with luck, applause—for this was policy at the Improv and at Catch a Rising Star, although Rick Newman graciously permitted performers to order from the menu, which in Andy’s case meant dessert, preferably chocolate. And because he went onstage every night on as many stages as would have him, he was pitifully
broke most of the time and was forced to consider a life in the theater and began filling up his daybook that spring of 1974 with times and locales of open casting-call auditions for chorus members and male lead singers and male dancers (he
was,
after all, a song-and-dance man) for such Broadway and road-company and dinner-theater productions as
Grease
and
Pippin
and
Kiss Me Kate
and
South Pacific
and
I Do, I Do
—and he was, of course, uniformly dismissed as hopeless in each instance. He also failed at an Equity chorus call for
The Music Man,
even though he was every bit the blithe and sly con man that Professor Harold Hill was—had even been deeply
inspired
by Professor Hill as played by the actor Robert Preston; had even taught himself
two years earlier
all five parts of Act One, Scene One, the convoluted multivoiced “Cash for the Merchandise” number, in which the traveling salesmen in the train car natter on in oddball synchopation about their desperate racket. (He had practiced
all five parts
with congas and thought he might at least put the piece in his act one day.) Meanwhile, Foreign Man was now getting so much exposure in the clubs that he needed fresh inept material to provide further journeys into the pathos, so he came up with new, um, jokes—like the one about a little boy named Jesus
—not the same Jesus that live in de church, you know
—whose mother sends him to the market for a quart of milk and a pound of butter but Jesus
he say but Mommy I don’t know how to go to de market and she say don’t worry just follow de people
but it was Sunday
so de people was going into de church
so Jesus followed them into the church
and he see de man on his stage go, “Oh Jesus! What do you want?” (So, vait-vait until de punch!) So de little boy he say, “A dozen eggs and a pound of butter—” (Oh, oh no I am sorry.) He say, “A quart of milk and a pound of butter!” (You know, because he thought that de church was de market, and that de man was talking to him, you know, because de man say Jesus and de little boy his name was Jesus. Do you understand?) Tenk you veddy much.
And then there was the one about the four men on
de aeroplane and it was going to, um, sink,
so the men needed to get out and so the first man, from Texas, jumps and, as he does, he says “Remember the Alamo!” And the next man, from France, jumps and says “Vive la France!” So
eet
was only a man from England and a man from New York. So de man from England push out de man from New York. And as he push him, he say … eehh, something dat was very funny, but I don’t remember what eet was. But but eet was very funny. Tenk you veddy much!

On May 23 (2:00
A.M.
), he had begun to diagram on five-by-eight index cards many strange and ambitious new ideas for the act, first inventorying the plethora of people who lived within him and his various plans for each—
BRITISH MAN (reads book, is interrupted by dissatisfied audience, continues reading, is humiliated, closes book); TONY CLIFTON (raps, “funny” stories, sings Charlie Brown, women’s lib argument, threatened by husband, punched down by lady); LAUGHING MAN (comes out, laughs, tries to speak, raps about kids these days, takes encores & begs off); FOREIGN MAN (tells jokes, stories, Mighty Mouse, Conga Drums, retires from show business > Crying—OR becomes Elvis); BLISS NINNY (talks nice—I love you all, etc., repeat after me:
Hello trees,
etc.,
Oohhh);
DUMB MAN; PRESIDENT (?); SLEEPING MAN (?); BORED ANGRY MAN; NEBBISH MAN (funny pathetic voice); PARANOID COMEDIAN; SOUTHERN MAN (cowboy country singer); DRUNK (?); WRESTLERS; CRYING MAN; NERVOUS MAN (wears earplugs, can’t stand noise); CRAB (cigar-smoking, thick-lipped grouch); THE TELEVISION (have a TV character pop out of screen and become live—maybe the bad guy
). This last would require greater technical advancement than had been developed by 1974, especially for nightclub stages—but a mad visionary appeared to be at work. And for the next three weeks, in the hours just before sunrise, he drew up plot-twist scenarios that placed these people onstage, one after the other, and sometimes all at once, and sometimes all of them coming through the television screen, and sometimes getting into wrestling matches with each other, or appearing on a mock
Dating Game,
and there would be
Applause & Reaction
signs that lit up (at inappropriate times so as to goad audiences) and an anticlimax
wherein character unresolved yet forgotten (possibly disliked by audience) returns to be resolved
, or else there could also even be an onstage
Tornado changing everyone’s lives in the middle (or maybe end).

Certain people inside him had been showing up in clubs by now—
not with him or anywhere near him, because he wasn’t there when they were, which came to be understood when they did not respond to conspiratorial winks or
hey Andys.
Tony Clifton was making himself known, as was British Man, whose clipped accent faltered as often as his starched readings
of The Great Gatsby
—British Man was, for reasons unknown, a proponent of Great American Literature. “He would start by reading all the copyright information and small print in the front of the book,” said Rick Newman. “The crowd would seem amused at first, then as he kept reading and got two pages into the first chapter, some people would get up to leave. But he wanted that.” A protracted negotiation with the audience ever ensued, during which a rattled British Man always tried to press on through the indignation—“Everyone would go
booooo boooooo,”
he later explained. “And I’d say, ‘Now, look! If you’re not quiet, I will have to close the book and forget about the whole thing!’ And there would be cheers. Um, you know, I would just do it for their reactions.” (Years afterward, a false legend circulated that he had read the entire book to an audience in Fairfield, Iowa—home of Maharishi International University—because the Midwestern bliss people were simply too polite to leave. In fact, he rarely finished the first chapter anywhere, much less two pages. But he liked telling that story.) Sometimes, if he disliked an audience—“like when they would be so terrible and rude and I felt no satisfaction performing my regular act for them”—he would open the book and begin reading in his own voice. At Catch, he once sent Sleeping Man forth to try it—“He took the book, the microphone and a flashlight with him into his sleeping bag,” said Newman, “then read it while zipped up inside. It looked like a talking sandbag onstage.”

Meanwhile, he had begun cross-breeding Laughing Man with Bliss Ninny (adding a dash of Clifton) to create Nathan Richards, perhaps the happiest and most unctuous entertainer ever to tread boards. Dennis Raimondi, a TM follower who had become a close friend through Kathy Utman, observed Richards in early club development—“He was the kind of guy who bounced onto the stage and just gushed:
‘Hey, ho ho ho how ya doin’ it’s great to be here you’re such a beautiful audience you are beautiful people and I’d like to sing for you
because you’re just so special to me….’
He would just be, you know, a little bit too blissful. And he’d wander through the audience and sing to them
—‘I have often walked down this street beforrre thank you thank you’
—and kiss the women, most of whom just pushed him away. And he’d say,
‘Come on, you love it and you know it, baby!’
Then after the song he’d say,
‘Gosh, I’d love to stay and sing for you all night, but I have another gig.’
Then he’d run offstage to no actual applause, then come back and say,
‘All right, I’ll do another song just because—’
He would do that like ten times. Some people were ready to throw dynamite at him. Then again, other people actually believed he was for real and
enjoyed
him. Once, we were out in front of Catch a Rising Star afterward and a lady came up to tell him, ‘Nathan, you really have a beautiful voice!’ And Andy looked at me after she left and said, ‘Sometimes I think they’ll
never
understand what I’m doing.’”

There were those who did and some of them would provide new avenues of pursuit. A New York businessman named Jim Walsh, who had launched various entrepreneurial ventures with football star Joe Namath, took a particular shine to him one night at Catch—“I thought what he was doing was creative genius and told him so”—then informally offered himself up as a quasi-manager. They had brainstormed frequently since early winter (usually in macrobiotic restaurants as dictated by Andy) and Walsh placed calls that eventually led to little bookings at little events around town and thereabouts, including a quick stint refereeing a hamburger-eating contest at a midtown Burger King, all of which meant a couple hundred dollars here and there—plus Eppie Epstein always found ways to throw him small change at My Father’s Place. So he was amassing some meager proof for his family that he was making headway. Then, as the airing of his Dean Martin shots approached (for which he received two five-hundred-dollar checks), he met the comedy team of Albrecht and Zmuda, who were Chris Albrecht and Bob Zmuda, a pair of young out-of-work actors fresh from Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh who had come to the big city to starve. They had been scraping by on the fringes of outer
Off-Off-Broadway before hooking up with the owner of a failing mid-town dinner-theater called the Little Hippodrome, where they initially hired on to do carpenter labor and waiter work. As business grew more dire, Albrecht was made a floor manager and Zmuda became a chef and, as their paychecks bounced regularly, they were given license to live on the premises and, whenever opportune, pass themselves off as co-owners of the place. And so, that May, when Zmuda quite accidentally stumbled into the Improv—and experienced the epiphany of stand-up comedy, which he instantly saw as the future—he let it be known that he and his partner were not only theatrical impresarios but also budding comedians (neglecting to mention that they had no act). “I figured this was our only shot at becoming real operators, if you know what I mean,” he would recall. So he fed Budd Friedman this enterprising line of canard and somehow secured stage time for their new act—Albrecht and Zmuda, Comedy from A to Z—which boasted much visual hokum, as written up with great haste by Zmuda. Among their bits was a sideshow lampoon: “I would swallow a sword onstage and bleed everywhere—people thought I was actually bleeding. It was pure gross-out kind of material.” Andy saw and liked this gag very much, as did Foreign Man, whom Zmuda enthusiastically approached after the first time he watched Foreign Man work, whereupon Foreign Man complained about haffing a bad back and asked Zmuda if he would
please-tenk-you
load his props back into his car for him—which was the first of hundreds of times Zmuda would do just that—and then, according to Zmuda, as the car pulled away, Andy (not Foreign Man) was heard to holler into the night,
“Sucker!”
Thus was begat a most significant bond of brotherly humbug.

Zmuda, for his part, was a keen student of grandiose imposterism and artful fakery. An affable native of Chicago’s Northwest Side Polish community, he had cut his teeth as part of a local guerrilla street theater troupe whose finest stunt had ensemble members positioned along a Chicago Transit Authority bus route, where they would board a bus in small clusters at each stop, then begin gagging and wheezing along the way until the bus was full of passengers complaining of toxic fumes, forcing the driver to abandon his route and call for emergency
assistance. They did this repeatedly. He enthralled Andy with such tales and other ones from his brief tour of duty as assistant to the legendary renegade screenwriter Norman Wexler
(Joe, Serpico),
whose supposed eccentric furies and quixotic adventures had makings of further inspiration for Tony Clifton. “Andy’s eyes would just bug out when I told him this crazy stuff,” he recalled. Zmuda and Albrecht had, meanwhile, instituted a cabaret policy at the Little Hippodrome and began recruiting acts from the Improv. By mid-June, Jim Walsh had hatched a deal through them to stake Andy as the headliner of a nightly showcase to run the length of summer—with handbills hailing him thusly:
FROM THE DEAN MARTIN COMEDY HOUR, NEW YORK’S MOST HILARIOUS ENTERTAINER.
The late night showcase—which followed a musical revue staged earlier in the evening—also featured several complementary acts, including Walsh’s only other client, a chanteuse named Tina Kaplan, and the antic stylings of Comedy from A to Z. “Sometimes there’d be no more than twenty people in the audience,” said Walsh, “but they were wonderful people like Marlo Thomas and the playwright Herb Gardner. And they would bring their friends to see Andy over and over again.”