Lost in the Funhouse (27 page)

Before he resumed his American character and moved to a set of cymbals on which he accompanied his own otherwise a cappella rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from
Carousel
—received with muted shock—he was forced to allow Mike Douglas to disrupt his excellent flight of new disregard. Douglas, in actual sincerity, wished to pass along information that Andy had never heard before and it was perhaps the most important information that he had ever heard in any of his lives. “I wanted to tell Andy something that has nothing to do with comedy or anything,” said Douglas. “I was recently with a man named Jerry Weintraub, who handles, among others, John Denver, Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra. He also booked Elvis Presley on all of his engagements before he passed away. And he told me that Elvis told
him
that of all the people who did impressions of him—of Elvis—he enjoyed
you
the most. And I thought you’d like to know that….”

(Oh!)

And he was in the midst of being an asshole when he heard this.

And he didn’t break asshole character even as he heard this.

And he seemed to be completely unaffected by hearing this, even though the audience applauded most rousingly—they were proud of him!—and so did Carol Channing and Goulet. But he could only momentarily glaze in a fashion that no one but his intimates would recognize as a chink approximating humanness/humility/happiness before telling everyone that it would be better if they forgot that he was this new self and believed that he was really his American self because the song would work better if they forgot the other
—“Please make believe,”
he said—and it was very extremely poetic that he sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone” at that particular moment (since the lyrics were about triumphantly walking through the storm and holding your head up high and not being afraid of the dark et cetera which was all very metaphorical), although this would not occur to him, because that sort of thing never really did.

(Well, he certainly knew that Elvis had recorded the song eleven years earlier and it was released as a single on Easter of 1968 and it didn’t do very well, but it sounded really inspiring when sung only with battering cymbal accompaniment the way he was doing it now. Also, he tried to sing it with soaring gospel inflections just the way Elvis had.)

It began in earnest on April Fool’s night in Tucson, Arizona, whereupon they had discussed the possibility of trying this before, but now—because they were on the road and it would offer new means to interact with women—they decided that the time was right. He wanted to rub against a body onstage, he told Bob. About an hour into the act, the gauntlet was thrown. “We decided to offer five hundred dollars—make it really big, so as to get the women up there,” he said. He had adopted Clifton’s appraisal of the feminine species to goad them toward entwining with his body. They were, he hectored, only good for raising the babies and washing the carrots and peeling the potatoes and such. He would wear white long johns with black shorts pulled over them, since Bob told him he should never do it bare-chested, what with the acne on his back which Bob said was disgusting. Anyway, he picked one—they
hated
him, the ones who had come onstage for the money and the challenge—and he pinned her certainly but while they were rubbing he told her to come backstage after the show. And it would always work this way.

Only one of the characters would be a career cab driver and the others would be different things but they drove cabs to make ends meet—there would be a boxer and an actor and a transplanted country bumpkin and an art gallery receptionist (the only female)—and then there would be the dispatcher who was a little rat. Also, there would be the mechanic who always wore coveralls and spoke in his own indiscernible language and was relentlessly innocent and adorable….

He purified himself in every way. The diet, of course, was full of mulches and grains and weeds and sprouts and broths and curds and juices and herbs—all of which certainly balanced and purged the chunks and mounds and nuggets and bowls of chawwklitt … he called it chawwwwwwwkkklittttttt and his eyes would dance at the sight or mention of it. He washed his hands rather obsessively, too. The more
famous he became, the more people wanted to shake hands with him (he was never very good at this, kind of a limp grasp) and he would never touch food if someone had touched his hands, so sometimes in restaurants where people would come over to greet him repeatedly, he would have to keep getting up from the table and going to the bathroom to rewash his hands before he could eat again. And always in restaurants he dipped his utensils in his glass of water and rubbed them vigorously with his napkin before deigning to eat with them. He tried to will his bowel movements never long after eating; he sat and waited for results no matter the duration of digestion. (People got annoyed about this.) He took lots of vitamins before meals (like Mommy taught him) and he would line up the pills in careful meticulous rows then consume them in special order. He did this with almonds and cashews as well—lined them up, ten at a time, and ate them accordingly. (Nuts were sort of sacred.) He liked order just like Daddy did, really. He liked things to be exactly where they were supposed to be. He would scream if somebody moved his pen. He used a different toothbrush for every day of the week except Sunday. He did not like anyone to come into contact with his beddings unless the person was unclothed—the female person, of course—because clothes carried contaminants. (He said this but his motives were clear enough.) Sex was a problem because he loved it with an ardor unmatched—he and Bob sniffed for it on the road like desperate bloodhounds—but he felt that it darkened his spirit and tainted his innocence. To combat the creeping impurity of his powerful urges, he sometimes sent Foreign Man to prostitutes in West Hollywood—there was this storefront setup on Santa Monica Boulevard near Crescent Heights that he knew well. He once even had Little Wendy drive him there and go in with him while Foreign Man negotiated—this was a very pure idea, he thought—then she waited to drive him home afterward and Wendy would remember that the prostitute was not amused in the least by Foreign Man and he emerged worried for his enlightened soul in any case—“We went back to his apartment and he lit incense and did a little TM puja ceremony to cleanse his spiritual self.” Anyway, he had scheduled to go on a long Age of Enlightenment Governor Training Course in San Jacinto,
California—from April through much of June. And there he would rekindle his purity and become an actual Governor in the TM hierarchy and he would learn yogic flying, which was kind of like levitating, but more like hopping while seated in lotus position, and it created the most positive energy waves imaginable, and he needed to be positive since he was going to begin work on this television series immediately after the Fourth of July, and he was not at all thrilled about it.

From the start, he kept his distance. He showed up at Paramount on the fifth of July for the first read-through of the first script of the first episode and the actors—they were a lively collegial bunch making with the nervous well-meaning jokey backslapping camaraderie of nascent team endeavor—couldn’t get a fix on him. They pumped his fishy palm and searched in vain for connective light in his eyes and gathered the full spectrum of his social grace—
um oh hi fine very good thank you
—which was further strained by the fact that he wore headphones that first day and seemed to be listening to something on a portable tape machine. (Danny DeVito, who was cast in the role of the Napoleonic cab dispatcher, Louie DiPalma, was the only one who ventured to ask what he was listening to and Andy passed him the headphones and DeVito heard tribal chanting.) Foreign Man had been named Latka Gravas by the consortium of Brooks-Weinberger-Daniels-Davis because they, as producers/creators, thought it would be funny and yet not unbelievable. And so it was and he accepted this without any greater qualm than the overriding qualm of having taken this job to begin with. (George said he would get $10,000 for every episode in which he deigned to appear and the money would increase if the series continued.) Latka, meanwhile, was conceived to be something akin to the grease-monkey mascot of the Sunshine Cab Company garage, the concrete crucible of
Taxi
from which all witty twenty-two-minute morality plays sprung forth. His specific heritage would remain unidentified—he would refer to his country frequently without giving it name or locus. He would appear in the first episode, “Like Father, Like Daughter,” at the top of
the second act, trundling down the garage staircase to ask Alex Rieger—the patriarchal career cabbie played by Judd Hirsch—for help with English lessons. And his arrival was scripted in such a way as to merely navigate him:

And thus was established the foreignness and the cuteness and the spunk—whereupon Latka moved to Alex who was using the pay phone and Alex said it was not a good time to work on the English lessons (
LATKA STARTS TO WALK AWAY DEJECTED.
DEJECTED
ISN’T THE WORD—HE HAS TAKEN VULNERABLE TOO FAR
), then Alex reconsidered and Latka eagerly read aloud from his phrasebook
“‘Lesson twelve: tenk you chambermaid for your excellent serveece, I am glad I don’t require medical asseestance’”
and then he shuffled to a bench to sit beside new driver Elaine Nardo (played by Marilu Henner) on whose shoulder he innocently rested his head
(THIS GIVES HER PAUSE, BUT HE IS SO SWEET … THEN … LIKE A LOCKSMITH PICKING A LOCK, HE BEGINS SLOWLY PULLING THE ZIPPER OF HER BLOUSE DOWN
), and, shocked, she pushed him away and he said,
“No bed?”
and she firmly replied, “No bed.” And this would be the debut of Latka Gravas, as
seen in the series premiere Tuesday, September 12 at 9:30
P.M.
(Eastern Standard Time) over the ABC television network which still had no interest in broadcasting his special and now here he was again not only as Foreign Man but as Foreign Man reborn according to the whim of others who had relieved him of the character’s creative custody and who would dictate the character’s inner life and motivation and destiny. Foreign Man was no longer his, but theirs. It was part of the package.

Resigned to this reality, he did what was required of him as best as he could from the remove he required himself to maintain. The producers, meanwhile, respectfully gave him leeway the other actors quickly began to resent. He came late for rehearsals, when he elected to come to rehearsals, which he would soon stop doing altogether, because he didn’t need rehearsals because he had a photographic memory and always knew his lines cold. When present, he regularly disappeared to meditate for long stretches, often in his car, where production assistants would be sent to retrieve him. Everyone was made to wait for him and then he would wander back to rejoin the enterprise and pretend not to notice all the glowering. “I defended him strong to the cast,” said Jim Brooks, “but the cast did not like the way he monkeyed with them. They were really furious. It would bubble up. I remember defending him by always saying, ‘But he’s an artist.’ And they would respond, ‘An artist doesn’t piss on other artists!’” Jeff Conaway, who played the role of struggling actor Bobby Wheeler, came to openly hate his guts—“I didn’t see the big deal about this guy. The producers were obviously crazy about him. I thought he was like a José Jimenez ripoff.” Tony Danza, who played boxer Tony Banta, had the same initial misgivings—“I always liked to say that he wouldn’t have lasted long in my neighborhood. He was
so
bizarre—I wanted to know who this guy was and he would give you nothing. Sometimes he wouldn’t even acknowledge you to your face; he’d look right
through
you.” Danza once greeted one of his late arrivals by accosting him with a fire extinguisher—“I figured I’d shoot him, get him aggravated, and maybe we could have it out, you know? I could say, ‘Why don’t you just join in with us here!’ So I take the fire
extinguisher and start spraying him near the dressing rooms. And he just stands there. He doesn’t say a word. And I continue to shoot and just empty the thing. And now I’m the maddest guy in the world—
because he never even reacts!
I didn’t get
any
reaction. It drove me nuts. Jim Brooks had to take me aside later and tell me, ‘Hey, Tony, no soaking the actors.’”