Lost in the Funhouse (30 page)

And so: Guards roughed him all the way to the studio gate with George scurrying behind decrying the violence while reporter Knoedelseder endured harassment because security wanted to take his camera which he had dutifully kept shooting until Bugsy Meyer strode forth, feigning higher authority, and confiscated the camera and ran with the camera in the opposite direction to another edge of the Paramount lot and handed it off to an accomplice who sped away to safety because Andy wanted those photographs protected and later had George get copies of the negatives from Knoedelseder whose camera was quietly returned after the incident. Meanwhile, Ginger
Sax had collected Clifton in the pink getaway vehicle and deposited him down the block at Nickodel’s coffee shop, where he immediately used the pay phone to call Weinberger in his office. “My secretary said Andy Kaufman was on the line, so I picked up and he said, ‘Ed., is anybody there listening?’ I said, ‘No, just you and me.’ He said, ‘I’m calling from a phone booth and I just wanted to say that you were brilliant!’ And I said thank you and he said he would see me in a couple of weeks when Latka returned and that was the end of the conversation.” Clifton, however, was banned from ever setting foot on Paramount property again which was, um, fine.

So now I’m driving home, feeling pretty good about the day. We got away with a crazy thing. Why we did it, I don’t know. It’s Andy’s craziness. It was nourishing Andy’s insanity. And I was supporting it and so was Ed. Weinberger…. Andy called me when I got back to the office after this incredible escapade and he was totally exhilarated. He was thrilled. He said, “Wasn’t it great! Wasn’t it fantastic! I think this is fantastic! It was a part I always wanted to play! It gave realness, a validity to Tony Clifton’s character and I think this is going to be good for his career. I think he’s going to get other jobs.” And he was as high as a kite. So I allowed him to be high. I told him one thing, which I felt was very true: What he went out to accomplish, he did. He really acted out a role he wanted to play. As crazy as his goal was, he did reach it. And that’s okay with him and that’s okay with me….

Incidentally, I was told that Andy Kaufman is scoring tremendously as the character Latka Gravas on
Taxi.
They have a rating system for likability and he’s going through the roof….

The triumph was such that nobody cared except him and also Bob and, although George was happy for his client, George could live without this
tsouris
to be sure—and mostly everybody who witnessed it wanted to forget it (at least for the time being). Army Archerd, the
columnist for
Variety,
got wind and thought about running an item, but Ed. told him that Clifton had a serious drinking problem and the less said about it the better. And Andy wanted to take out an ad in the trades to trumpet Tony’s mistreatment at the hands of Paramount and
Taxi
personnel, but Ed. told George that the less said about it the better. And Danny DeVito would say, most diplomatically, “There were some bad feelings toward
… Tony.
We all felt it was a big waste of time. It was a very strange game.” Knoedelseder, meanwhile, met Clifton two nights later—on the very night the “Brother Rat” episode was filmed without him—for a private deposition in Clifton’s room at the Sunset 400 Motel in Hollywood. (Andy had checked in the night before to call Knoedelseder, as Clifton, and arrange the interview.) For the occasion, Clifton’s face had once again been shellacked by Ken Chase. And Knoedelseder found him in the dank smoky motel room where Sinatra music played and closed-circuit porno flickered on the television and skin magazines were splayed across the rumpled bed littered with empty whiskey bottles. (Bob was supposed to have had two more hookers there but couldn’t convince any to play along at the offering price.) Then, after visiting for a while amid the grim detritus, Knoedelseder took Clifton to a bar across the street, where Clifton drank much Jack Daniel’s—Knoedelseder tasted it to make sure it was the real thing—while abusing the female bartender and then he legitimately picked up a Hollywood waif who had wandered in and, eventually, Knoedelseder deposited the lounge singer and the girl back at the motel and fled. When his
Los Angeles Times
piece ran two months later—THE IDENTITY CRISES OF ANDY KAUFMAN—there would be no mention of this night with Clifton, although the
Taxi
imbroglio was covered in a small sidebar that featured one photograph of Clifton being thrown off the set.

And, one week after the firing, on a flight to a college engagement in Albany, Bob let it slip to Andy that all of the actors at
Taxi
had been told early on that Andy was playing Clifton and were urged to just go along with it and this news crushed him and he felt betrayed and became enraged and he called Linda Mitchell to scream and then he called George who calmed him somewhat before he could scream
very much. And when he returned to Paramount a week after this, Tony Danza had brought in a projector to show the movies he had shot of Clifton’s final day and everyone gathered in a room above the stage to watch—“And we’re laughing—you know, laughing at ourselves and at him and at the whole nightmare of it. And then Andy walks in and he stands there staring at the screen. And everybody sort of nervously takes this mass gulp. Finally the movie runs out—and there are a few beats of silence afterward. Maybe too many beats. And then he clears his throat and says, ‘Gee, who was that asshole?’ And with that, he turns and leaves the room. End of story.”

He kept telling George Carnegie-Hall-Carnegie-Hall-Carnegie-Hall and George kept saying I’m-trying-I’m-trying which he was and finally, rather suddenly, definite headway was made—with the help of Marty Klein and the team of other agents at APA who found a New York concert promoter named Ron Delsener who thought it sounded like fun—and a date for the following spring was mentioned and it now looked very extremely likely … oh!

George’s partner, Howard West, had a dream that month. He dreamt that he throttled Tony Clifton, that he took Clifton by his profane fictitious throat and shook him senseless. Andy had recently tried to teach Howard to levitate from the carpet of the Shapiro/West offices in Beverly Hills. Andy liked to waste Howard’s time like that; Howard thought Andy was cute but also fucking nuts. Whenever possible, Andy would eagerly discuss his levitation skills of which he actually possessed none but still. He told people at
Taxi
that he had levitated eight feet in his dressing room. They told him that if anyone could do such a thing, it would be him. A woman friend of George’s also had a dream that month and, in her dream, Clifton completely overtook Andy and there was no more Andy and Andy was gone forever. George was mostly impressed that Andy found his way into people’s subconsciouses.

He finished a two-hour college show in Tampa and told the audience, “I want to thank each and every one of you.” Then he walked down off of the stage and shook hands with each and every one of them. It took the better part of another hour to do this. He said “Thank you” every time.

At the end of October, George said this into his tape recorder-
Andy told me that he really hates performing on
Taxi.
He is very frustrated by the limitations that he endures playing one character. He wants to do variety shows; he wants to create his own shows and his own characters. We agreed, he and I, that he will do only the fourteen shows contracted and no more.
By now, ABC had extended the series to a full twenty-two shows per season; the producers would work around Andy’s newest disregard; they would agree to the same demands the following season—and other demands—and said they would hire a stand-in to perform his rehearsal duties during the week. He would show up only on Tuesdays for initial run-throughs and then on Fridays for final dress rehearsal and filming. “You really didn’t have to rehearse with Andy,” said Jim Burrows, who directed most episodes. “Andy knew what he did and he never once missed a line on camera—which was, of course, remarkable.”

Friday nights after filming, the
Taxi
people threw great parties which he would almost never attend. “I just come in, do my job and leave,” he told the tabloid
National Enquirer
in a story titled andy kaufman: i’m not a part of the “taxi” team. (He had no misgivings about trucking with yellowish press because those reporters always printed exactly what he wanted them to print.) “I don’t drink or smoke. I don’t go roller-skating or do any of the things those people do. They’re very nice people, but I don’t socialize with them. I’m not a part of the team.” Then, in another interview shortly thereafter, he declared,
“Taxi
is just a commercial for me. It’s a means, not an end. I purposely keep my part real small. I am more interested in my
books and big concerts.
Taxi
is good only in that it is a way of me doing those things. It advertises me to the public.”

And, of course, they had to resent him and they also had to respect him and no one could argue that his performances were less than golden. The show, meanwhile, kept garnering serious acclaim, would go on to win the Emmy award for Outstanding Comedy Series during its first three years on the air. And he did not care in the least. “Jesus, you know,
every week
he got big laughs,” said Jim Brooks. “He heard an audience really
laugh
at him. And then there were the reviews! But he was
not
seducible. Because if you’re gonna get
seduced,
you get seduced a little by that! This was
intelligentsia,
the highest kind of respect. This was not slumming. And he didn’t traffic in it at all! He stood outside of it.”

Clifton opened for Rodney Dangerfield at the Comedy Store on December 1 and 2. He was twenty minutes late on the second night because the parking attendant wouldn’t let him leave the Cordoba on the lot. Dangerfield fumed backstage—“He’s fucking with me! He’s fucking with me!” Clifton finally burst in through the backstage door hyperventilating
—“You know what he did to me?! You know what he told me!? He said I’m not the star of the show and I can’t park here!”
Dangerfield instantly lashed into him—“Andy, what the fuck are you doing? We gotta start the show!” And Dangerfield would recall, “So he talks to me like Tony Clifton
—‘I’m sorry, Rodney, I couldn’t help it, it was that guy in the parking lot!’
And I say, ‘Oh, stop that will you, for crying out loud!’ And even though I was angry and kept hollering at him, he stayed in character, he wouldn’t break it!
‘Ehhh, don’t worry, Rodney, it’ll be all right!’”
And Clifton went onstage after the no-smoking announcement and sang “You Light Up My Life” and smoked while he sang it—Rodney thought that was a terrific touch—and, after the show on both nights, he stood in the lobby selling xeroxed photographs of himself for twenty-five cents apiece and, at one point, Steve Martin approached him and requested that he sign one “to Steve” and
Clifton began signing and asked,
“What’s your last name, Steve?”
And he was told it was Martin and he finished signing and said,
“That’ll be a dollar.”

The reviews were not kind.
Variety
noted that this had been “the first time [Clifton has] performed for someone other than his alter ego, comedian Andy Kaufman … it’s an act that is beginning to get a little stale.” And
The Hollywood Reporter,
meanwhile, lifted the veil further, openly referring to Clifton as Andy in disguise—“Kaufman, on for almost an hour, never got anywhere.” Andy phoned both reviewers after reading what they had written and strenuously complained about having his name linked with Clifton’s. “I treat the situation like a magician and I don’t appreciate being called Tony Clifton’s alter ego,” he told the
Variety
critic, who signed his review “Pollack.” Then he angrily asked the
Reporter
critic Don Safran, “Who told you that I was Tony Clifton?” Safran allowed that many people had averred as much. Andy told him, “I don’t mind you giving
me
a bad review for
my
work, but to put my name in a review of a Tony Clifton performance is unreasonable and unfair!” He went on to admit that he had played Clifton before at the Comedy Store, but this time it had been the
real
Tony Clifton onstage and, moreover, he said that the real Tony Clifton would soon appear onstage
with
him on December 16 and 17 at the Huntington Hartford Theater in Hollywood and that Safran should come to see for himself and Safran said he would very much like to witness that miracle and Andy felt better afterward.

Six days before the first Huntington Hartford show, Bill Knoedelseder’s piece appeared in the Sunday Calendar section of the
L.A. Times
and Andy was quoted further on the matter that was plaguing him so unfairly and he couldn’t understand why people had to keep talking about this travesty—“I am
not
Tony Clifton,” he said. “We are two distinct personalities. I’m
not
like that. I never meant for it to get out of hand like this.” And his real feelings were on the mournful agitated order of try-to-help-a-guy-out-and-look-what-happens. Clifton
was—well, gosh, he hated to use such words, even inside of the private whistling curved corridors of his head—but Clifton was a bastard, he was a fucking bastard, he was a motherfucking goddamned sonofabitching fucking bastard was exactly what he was. But he looked forward to working with him again soon.