Lost in the Funhouse (41 page)

Lawler recollected after many passing years:

“We went five to seven minutes before we actually even touched. So I offered him the free headlock and, just as I told him, we went into the suplex. But funny thing was the suplex knocked him out. It really did knock him goofy and he could not get up. I’ve watched the tape a thousand times. And even though he tried to tuck his head, his head still hit real hard. I mean, if it had been any of the other wrestlers, you wouldn’t even have thought anything about it. But Andy wasn’t accustomed to taking that type of abuse or whatever. It just knocked him goofy there for a minute. And I had hoped to have a little bit of a match. So I went straight to the piledriver, which meant it was already a disqualification. But now I’m thinking to myself, Oh my gosh—this has probably been a minute and a half’s worth of action for these 12,000 people here. I figured, man, I need to do
something
else. We’ve cheated ’em out of a wrestling match. And so that’s where the second piledriver came into effect. I gave him another one. I mean, I’ve taken probably five hundred piledrivers in my career. You just brace yourself for it, that’s just part of wrestling. All of the stuff hurts to an extent, but it’s not like a big-injury-type thing. And so I’m telling him while the crowd’s screaming, ‘Don’t worry, you won’t feel anything.’ Later on he said, ‘First of all, the suplex knocked me out. Then both of the piledrivers jammed the heck out of my neck.’ And I said: ‘Well, you didn’t hit, did you?’ He said, ‘Yes, my head hit both times.’ I mean, the wrestlers just don’t think anything about it. But not being accustomed to that, he thought: Oh, my gosh, this is really hurting big-time.”

He was released from the hospital on the eighth and went home to Great Neck to celebrate Passover with his family, all of whom were mortified and Stanley actually did want to sue and Andy shrugged and happened to tune in
Saturday Night Live
on the tenth, most of which was devoted to a live viewer phone-in poll wherein people were casting votes as to whether or not a lobster named Larry should actually be boiled on television. Larry’s life was spared—239,096 votes to save versus 227,452 to boil. He liked this bit very much.

He wore the neck brace in public for the next five months.

He repeatedly announced that he had now officially retired from wrestling, but contended that at least he remained the undefeated in-tergender champion. He also said, “I just realized after this happened what a delusion I’ve been going under for the last four years. Just because I’ve never lost a match, then they gave me this belt—The Intergender Wrestling Champion of the World—I started thinking I was a sports hero. You know, I’ve just been under this macho delusion that was building up to the point where I could actually seriously think that I could beat a Jerry Lawler in a wrestling match. I mean, that’s stupid. I was just stupid.”

He was quite gleeful really. As was Lawler.

Lawler told the media that he was glad that he had injured that
wimp and that he was not at all sorry and that he wished that he could do it again.

Then Andy went on the Letterman show five weeks after the match; he went on the program to maunder pitifully—with chin nestled in his woeful brace—and to stammer contrition and welcome empathy. He tried to address the camera to send a heartfelt message and quavered—“Can I say something? Mr. Law—Well, I hate to be hokey about it. But, Mr. Lawler, if you—I wish—Well, I just wish he’d apol—you know … I don’t want to see anybody suffer. I think he’s suffering now enough from people hating him so much for what he did…. And
I
forgive him … And I think he should vindicate himself …” And Letterman nodded along sympathetically and then said, “What about a song, Andy?”

On July 28, they would reunite on
Late Night
—although according to Andy’s datebook he had quietly stolen back to Memphis during the last week in June. But they would now appear together publicly for the first time since the night of suplex and piledrivers and sirens and jeers. Andy had called Lawler when the date was confirmed and they both took rooms at the Berkshire Place and went separately to meet with talent coodinator Robert Morton to roughly strategize what would occur on the program. Morton told Lawler, “Andy wouldn’t come in if you were in the same room, so we’ll just do this individually.” The plan was that they would appear in two segments interrupted by one commercial break. In the first segment, Morton said, footage of the Memphis match would be shown and it would be good if he and Andy were antagonistic toward each other. Lawler said that would be no problem. Then, in the second segment, they would finally apologize to each other and Andy said that he would then want to sing “What the World Needs Now (Is Love, Sweet Love).” And Lawler smirked and said fine and went back to the hotel where Andy called him.

Lawler would remember: “So he asked me what I thought about the idea—the apology and the song. I said, ‘Well, you know, it’s okay
with me.’ I figured I’m in his arena now, so I’m not making any suggestions, right? So he said to me—and I’ll never forget the way he put it—he said, ‘I wonder what would happen if you hit me instead? If you just slugged me?’ I said, ‘You mean
on the show?’
He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Well, since we’re taping it, they probably wouldn’t even broadcast it. And, second of all, they’d probably have me arrested.’ He said, ‘No, I would have to be the one to have you arrested.’ I said, ‘I don’t know, Andy, that’s pretty strong.’ He said, ‘I know—but wouldn’t it be great?’ But I could tell that’s what he wanted to happen. He didn’t want to come right out and tell me to hit him. Because he never wanted to tell me what to do. He was always kind of shy around me.”

They arrived at NBC Studios separately and stayed apart in the makeup room and also in the greenroom and did not actually see each other until Letterman introduced them. Andy timidly skulked out behind Lawler and they sat at the panel and Andy pulled his chair away from Lawler’s chair. And Letterman asked right away whether he still needed his neck brace and Andy said yes he did and Lawler smirked. But Andy tried to be friendly about the whole mess and they looked at the footage—“I was just teasing in fun,” he said about his hectoring Hollywood tapes—and Lawler grumbled and stated, “I don’t want to sit out here and pretend that I’m friends with this guy, because I think he’s a wimp.” And it was very uncomfortable and the first commercial break came and Andy left his chair to gain more distance and Letterman asked Lawler questions about wrestlers Dick the Bruiser and Bobo Brazil. Then the show resumed and Andy admitted that he had been wrong to wrestle Lawler and said that he now felt Lawler owed him an apology. “I don’t think I owe him an apology,” Lawler responded, adding that he didn’t know whether Andy was wearing a neck brace or a flea collar.

Lawler would recall: “If you watch the tape, you can see Dave’s face is like,
Uh-oh, where are we going here?
Because Dave was expecting the apology from me. So he gets a little worried and I could
tell that he was gonna force the next commercial break early, right? And then Andy starts turning toward me and tries to goad me—‘Whattsamatter, Lawler!’ And he starts talking about lawsuit again or something. So Dave said, ‘We’re gonna pause here for a commercial and get out the hoses….’ And right up to that point I didn’t know what I should do, but when I heard the music start playing, I knew. I thought, if not now, then never. And Andy gave me this mean look, like he was waiting for something. So I just stood up and slapped the crap out of him, openhanded right across the face, as hard as I could….”

Andy spilled out of his chair to the floor and pandemonium ensued and nobody knew what to believe and Robert Morton rushed forth and Letterman stepped away and the show went to a break—“It was like the President had been assassinated or something,” said Lawler. The break would last almost twenty minutes, in which time the studio lights were dimmed and a security guard came for Lawler and escorted him to the greenroom, which had been emptied of its many previous occupants. Lawler said, “I could hear through the door out in the hallway people crying and screaming. And I’m thinking, I just really screwed up here. And then I hear Andy screaming and cussing—
‘I want him arrested! Call the cops!’
Je-sus. And I had already told this goof that if I hit him I’d get arrested! So I’m thinking I’m getting double-crossed here.”

And Robert Morton would recall: “During this enormous break, Andy came over to me in the middle of his ranting and kind of whispered,
‘Am I taking this too far?’
I said, ‘No, absolutely not. Just keep going. It’s entertaining as hell!’ So he just picked up where he left off with his performance. I mean, Andy
knew
that he was performing. He saw that there was entertainment value in this. Whether or not he was surprised by the slap, I never knew. But it was just electric.”

Lawler was finally brought back into the studio—“Now the whole audience boos, right? All of a sudden they’ve turned into a wrestling crowd! So I sit down and everyone is trying to get their composure. Dave is not even looking at me. Andy is over by the studio door, where everybody comes in and Dave says to him, ‘Andy,
do you want to come back here and sit down or not?’ And he said, ‘No! If I come out there, I’ll say words that I can’t say on television!’”

And so the cameras relit and Letterman welcomed viewers back and said, “Andy, are you coming in here again or—” Whereupon, he burst back into the studio and began leaping up and down behind Letterman’s desk as he addressed Lawler with a diatribe that would resonate in broadcast history, largely for the number of expletives that were obscured by
coo-coo
noises—“I am sick of this
bull
shit!”
he began. “You are full of bullshit, my friend! I will sue you for everything you have! I will sue your ass! You’re a motherfuckin’ asshole!!!!!!!!! As far as I’m concerned!!!!! You hear me?!!!!! A fuckin’ asshole!!!!!!!!! Fuck you!!!!!! I will get you for this!!! [He stormed away, then instantly returned.] I am
sorry,
I am
sorry
to use those words on television. I apologize to all my fans. I’m
sorry,
I’m
sorry.
But
you
—you’re a fuckin’ asshole!!!!!!!!!!!!! You’re a fuckin’ asshole!!!!!!!!! [He slammed his palms on Letterman’s desk.] You hear me!!!!!! A fuckin’ asshole!!!!!!”

Which was when he took Letterman’s coffee cup and sailed its hot black contents in Lawler’s direction—“You know,” Lawler would say, “if you watch that closely, you can see him make the move to the cup to let me know what he was fixing to do. He threw it so I could get out of the way. It barely went on my left shoulder.” So Lawler leapt and Andy scampered out and Letterman said, “Uhh, I think you can use
some
of those words on TV…. But what you can’t do is throw coffee. I’ve said it over and over again….” And the segment ended.

Lawler was accompanied to an elevator by the same security guard who saw that he was safely out of the building before asking him to autograph a wrestling magazine. Andy, meanwhile, went upstairs to the
Late Night
production offices to hide from view and to think about what he had done. After the show, Letterman found him up there and Andy eagerly asked, “What did you think?” And Letterman wearily glanced at the neck brace and sighed, “Next time wear a tie.”

12

The brace had browned from sweat and folly. He wore it and wore it and kept on wearing it and it became a wreath of perpetual martyrdom—and martyrs, everyone knew, were supposed to die. Of course, he had been giving it serious thought. Most certainly, it was on his mind. The idea excited him very much. He had discussed it with eminent hoaxer Alan Abel, who had managed to do it but then called a press conference immediately after his obituary was published. Abel had not properly lingered in death. Elvis, he liked to believe, was doing it well. He had a theory about Elvis, which he shared with a magazine writer named Judd Klinger just one year after Elvis had been gone: He believed that there may have been four Elvises, beginning with the original, who had disappeared in 1958. “The managers saw that he was getting old so they got rid of him. And then from ’58 to ’60 they didn’t have anybody, so they said that he was in the
Army. In 1960, they got a new guy who played the part of Elvis Presley until ’69—this guy, you noticed, didn’t look at all like the other guy, didn’t have the sideburns or anything. Then, when they saw that his movies were falling off at the box office, they came up with another guy and
he
looked different! He played the part until ’73, until they got
another
guy and this guy was overweight, but then they saw that business was
really
falling off—the concerts and the records weren’t selling. So they got rid of that guy and they said that Elvis was dead. That was just so they could sell a lot of records, which worked. And in a few years, they’ll get another guy and say, ‘We were only kidding—Elvis is alive!’”

Well, it was a theory. And, denial notwithstanding, it was a theory of rebirth; it was about returning anew from nadir, about reinvention and rising from ashes. Lately, he could not help but smell smoke, even if he wished to believe otherwise. The slap had resonated across the land and telegraphed excitement and stirred legitimate sympathy. But it had also stirred a deeper concern for his (apparent) wayward psyche; he was
dangerous
now; he was out of control; he had last been glimpsed
raving
on television, which was an uncomfortable image to have pressed into collective memory. Certain people—ones with power—preferred, more than ever, to aggressively avert their eyes from him. George’s chagrin was evident when he did not bother recounting the Letterman incident to his tape recorder; in fact, George had been speaking to his tape recorder less and less in the past year, as woe and concern overtook excitement and wonder. By October 1982, he would give up the career chronicling altogether. From that point forward, his foremost responsibility would be that of tending to damage control and soliciting offers that did not often materialize—plus Andy would begin doing things he did not tell George about, such as plotting his own death, which was nothing if not the penultimate bombing.

Earlier in the year, there had been a
Fridays
party at the home of co-producer Jack Burns and, there, Andy took Burns and John Moffitt aside—“He said, ‘I want to talk to you,’” Moffitt would recall. “So we went down to Jack’s basement rec room and closed the door, figuring
he had a new big idea for the show. Then he told us, ‘Now, what I want to do the next—within the next year or so—is to pretend I’m dead. I want people to believe I’m dead and so I’m going to disappear. Then a few months later, I’m going to reappear again—hopefully on the show. And I think this is gonna be the best thing I’ve ever done—this is gonna be the biggest!’”
(Fridays,
however, would be canceled that fall and, anyway, Moffitt and Burns thought he was probably, almost certainly, kidding about the whole thing.) Then, later that summer, after the slap, he met with
Saturday Night Live
producer Bob Tischler and writers Barry Blaustein and David Sheffield to discuss possible ideas he wished to execute in the new season—one of which was to issue a “comedy challenge” (à la wrestling) to Bob Hope, wherein if Hope could get more laughs than Andy in some kind of contest, Andy would have his own head shaved; conversely, if Andy won, he would be called “Mr. Bob Hope” for a week. (Andy quickly reneged on the idea—“I don’t think I can win, ’cause I’m not funny,” he said.) Tischler recounted, “But then he told the three of us, ‘You know, the hoax I’d really like to pull off is my death. But I’m afraid of doing it—because when I do these things, I do them for real, and so I wouldn’t even be able to tell my parents. And I wouldn’t want to hurt them.’” But throughout the next year he would posit the idea to other people—to Zmuda, certainly, as well as his sister and his brother and also Mimi Lambert. “He said, ‘What if I pretended to have cancer or something?’” Lambert would recall. “I was horrified. I said, ‘Forget it, Andy. That’s revolting, it’s not good karma!’” Anyway, by that time she would be more concerned with the fact that he had this cough.

He wanted Latka to wear the brace, too. Ed. Weinberger adamantly refused. He removed the brace before the filming of the first episode of the season and put it back on after they all took bows that night. Cast members just rolled their eyes. He pretended not to notice.

George did not want him to do
My Breakfast with Blassie,
which was an hour-long videotaped movie in which he would eat breakfast at a Sambo’s in Hollywood with bombastic former-five-time-heavyweight-wrestling champion, silver-headed bad guy Freddie Blassie, who enjoyed calling people pencil-neck geeks and had made a novelty record called “Pencil-Neck Geek,” which Andy admired as much as he admired Freddie Blassie himself. The man who wrote and produced Blassie’s record, Johnny Legend (whose real name was Martin Margulies), now wanted to make a very cheap parody of the art film
My Dinner with André,
which Andy hated as much as he respected Blassie. Legend asked Andy if he wanted to do it and Andy said that he did despite George’s protests. (George thought that Andy’s involvement in anything that smacked again of wrestling—including a boring movie about having breakfast with a crazy wrestler—only invited further destruction. He told Linda Lautrec—who co-created the film with Johnny Legend—“I hope you sell it in a foreign country and everybody makes their money back and no one here ever sees it.” But he meant it in a nice way.) So, on August 9, the movie was shot at Sambo’s and there was no script because it was going to be an extemporaneous exercise in which the two men—one in a dirty neck brace, the other carrying a cane—discussed life and geeks and fastidious hygiene. “I want my hands to be like a surgeon’s when I eat,” Andy told Blassie. Both men agreed that it was unwise to shake hands with people in restaurants and then this girl from the next table came over to shake hands and ask for an autograph and at her table were three other girls, and they were all plants, and one of them was Linda Mitchell (who would also play classical guitar on the sound track) and another was Johnny Legend’s younger sister, Lynne Margulies, whom Andy had not met until that very moment on camera. And he thought she was very attractive and flirted with her instantly, right there on camera, and she was unamused and truthfully said that she had never seen him on television. “I’m a famous star,” he told her, and she said, “Oh.” He demonstrated tenk you veddy much for her and said, “When you first walked in, I noticed you right away. And I said to myself, Now, this is somebody who I would give my time to. ’Cause I don’t give my time to just
anybody. But to you, I would.” And he kissed her hand and tried to get her phone number and Linda called him obnoxious and, later, Zmuda came over to the table and pretended to be a hostile fan and pulled several befouled drinking straws from his nose and laid them on the table and also vomited (ice cream) and Blassie said, “I’m ready to puke in that asshole’s face!” And Andy also spoke of his late wrestling career and asked Blassie, “Do you think I’m a has-been now?” And Blassie said no, but also said, “It’s better to be a has-been than a never-was.”

He reclaimed Clifton for himself one more time. Clifton performed a medley of songs with a troupe of chorus girls on
The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show,
which was an ABC-TV special taped in Toronto a week after the Blassie congress and which would rank fifty-fourth in the ratings when it aired a month later. Horrified Muppets watched him from the control room. Miss Piggy said, “Isn’t he something?” Kermit the Frog hemmed and hawed uncomfortably and finally acknowledged, “Interesting.” Andy wrote the name of one of the Clifton dancers in his ever-burgeoning phone book—“Darlene, looked sixteen, really twenty-one, Taurus.”

There would be no more Clifton. Not for him.

He flew directly to New York to end what he had started precisely where he had started it.
The material—everyone said there was nothing new, that he needed something new….
He was to perform on the HBO taping of Catch a Rising Star’s tenth anniversary, which would take place at the Upper East Side club where he had first hauled forth his props and made everyone think he wasn’t who he was and vice versa.
So he decided to kill it off, to put the material out of its misery, to expose it as the charade and the lodestone that it had become….
For the sake of nostalgia, he would do what he had done at the outset, what had induced them all into falling down and falling over and falling to the floor and, most of all, falling for him.
He could fool no one anymore, they said, because everyone was
“on to” him, they said, and people were even making light of the neck brace of which he was so proud which seemed very rude….
Besides him, there would be other Catch alums performing—Richard Belzer, David Brenner, Gabe Kaplan, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Joe Piscopo, Pat Benatar.
He planted Zmuda up front and had Rick Newman make sure that a microphone was hidden somewhere on Zmuda’s body so that Zmuda could be clearly overheard as the material was drained of its blood and left for dead….
“Anyway,” he said, “tonight what I’d like to do is the exact same routine which I did ten years ago. It’s called Foreign Man Turning into Elvis Presley.” At which point there was warm applause.
At which point Zmuda could be heard throughout the club and, later, on television saying, “Tenk you veddy much.”
And Foreign Man blinked into character and said, “Tenk you veddy much.”
Zmuda turned to a woman nearby and said, “See, see! Tenk you veddy much!”
“I am veddy happy to be here but one theeng I don’t like about New York—”
“Ees de traffic …”
“Ees too much traffic you know tonight eet was so much traffic—”
“Eet took me an hour…”
“—eet took me an hour and a half to get here!”
“See! See!”
“Talking about de terrible theengs—”
“Take my wife …”
“—take my wife, please take her!”
“Her cooking ees so bad eets …”

And this was not mere heckling; it was worse and also better; it was the act anticipated, performed in parsed phrases, slightly ahead of itself. It was Foreign Man unmasked and torched and vanquished forever. And the audience laughed with majestic unease as the humiliations echoed on—through
“eemetations/
eemetations” and
“de Archie Bunker/de
Archie Bunker” and
“dingbat get eento de kitchen and make me de food/
dingbat get eento de kitchen and make me de food.” And Andy was wet; his face was soaked with flop summoned from trained synapses and abetted by blistering lights and he had to say something to stop this man down in front of the stage from ruining everything
and he had to say something to push this man down in front of the stage into now decimating everything that he was and had ever been
and so he said, “Is there a problem?”