Lost in the Funhouse (42 page)

ZMUDA
: No, there’s no problem. The only problem is that I’m
doing your act for you…. If you did some new material, then I wouldn’t know what you’re gonna do next.

ANDY
: Well, uh, I was asked to do this material tonight, okay? This is what the club asked me to do, and I’m doing it.

ZMUDA
: Sure, they asked you to do it because your new stuff’s a bunch of crap…. Can I say something? I was always a big fan of yours, like, I’m talkin’ seven, eight years ago. And I just feel that you have been repeating yourself continually…. I don’t consider wrestling women to be funny, to be creative, to be any of those things.

ANDY
: I do a lot of original stuff on
Late Night …

ZMUDA
: Okay, so what? What’s original?

ANDY
: Well, did you see me on
Fridays?
Caused a lot of talk.

ZMUDA
: Yeah, I saw you on
Fridays.
A put-on. Pushing people around and actors … That’s not original, that’s not comedy. That’s put-on! Anybody could do that. You understand?

ANDY
: You’re right, it was a put-on.

ZMUDA
: I’m telling you, I’m just being honest…. I’m not trying to be obnoxious. I’m just saying that you were a very original guy.

ANDY
: I was. I was a very original guy. I was considered a very original comic.

ZMUDA
: That’s right. And
was
is the key word. You said it yourself.

ANDY
: Well …

ZMUDA
: You’ve lost all credibility. I’m just saying that you used to be an original performer, see?

And, of course, the audience felt embarrassment beyond any embarrassment ever felt for the pitiful Foreign Man when Foreign Man was new and innocent and lost. This was now the disemboweling of an actual life and career—and, whether or not what was happening was real, it was nevertheless all very true and all very profoundly true. What the room felt was hot sticky suffocating devastation and the man down in front of the stage did not stop—he attacked that stupid character Latka and called that movie
Heartbeeps
a piece-of-shit-bomb and said that Andy Kaufman would never make another movie because who would hire him now? And a guy in back, who was Pat Benatar’s uncle, who was an off-duty security cop, screamed for Zmuda to shut the fuck
up and Zmuda told him to fuck himself and Zmuda returned to his interrogation and the cop reached for the gun that he kept in his boot and Rick Newman crawled over and grabbed the cop’s ankle and whispered, “Shut up! He’s a plant! This is a taping!” And Zmuda demanded to hear new material and Andy responded by doing the twist while singing
booboobooboobooboo
over and over and the audience laughed and Zmuda said that they were laughing only because they knew him from
Taxi
and Andy said, “I guess you’re right. I don’t have any new material. I don’t have anything new to do.” And the tears started welling and then came the little gulping sobs and Zmuda said, “See, now this is the old crying routine, the bombing.” And Andy stopped suddenly and said, “You’ve seen me do that?”

ZMUDA
: Yes! Everybody’s seen you do that! Kaufman,
look,
call a spade a spade. You don’t have anything new to do.
[Turning to the audience]
As a matter of fact, that is why he hired me tonight to come here. Look—there’s a little mike on me, you see this? He hired me tonight to come here and criticize him, you know? See, today he was saying,
“Zmuda, here’s what we’re gonna do … I’ll take my old material and I’ll call it Variation on a Theme….”
The theme is the old material and the variation is that I’m told to sit here and criticize it.
[To Andy]
Well, it’s true. Am I being honest? Am I a plant? Be honest—am I a plant? Come on! Am I a plant? Is this another Kaufman put-on? Is this more bullshit? Am I a plant? … Tell the people … there’s a mike here.
[To audience]
Come on, you see it. There’s a mike, they sat me down here to do this …

ANDY
: Yeah
… [sotto voce]
You’re not supposed to say anything.

ZMUDA
: Fine, then just cut it out [of the tape].

ANDY
:
[s.v.]
You just fucked up the act!

ZMUDA
: Fine! Fine!

ANDY
:
[s.v.]
You weren’t supposed to …

ZMUDA
: Fuck you! Fffff—

At which point, on the tape of the program that was broadcast, there would be an awkward edit, as though something had happened and needed to be removed when in fact nothing had happened except the execution of Andy’s notion to make an obvious edit to suggest
that something had happened—“It was planned that way,” said Rick Newman. “The public went crazy when the show was broadcast. HBO and Catch got hundreds of phone calls from people demanding to know what happened. We told them there was nothing to be discussed—‘We can’t tell you. Just leave it be.’” And when the program resumed, Andy said, “Ladies and gentlemen, right now I’d like to do my oldest routine, which I’ve done so much that many people are sick of it. Um … but I’m gonna do it anyway, and it’s my imitation of Elvis Presley. Thank you.”

Elvis, bewigged, hoarse, no longer lean or taut—it did not matter, really. Elvis cleansed the palate with familiarity, with “Jailhouse Rock.” People still hooted, if not screamed. Meanwhile, many people would consider Variations on a Theme—or whatever he wished to call this act of self-immolation—to be perhaps the most brilliant thing that he had ever done. In any case, he felt very extremely liberated afterward.

The brace finally disappeared. It itched.

New material: the Fakir, mystical Eastern wonder-worker/fraud. Wearing diaper and turban and black socks and brown walking shoes and nothing else, he wordlessly dances forth and ripples his stomach muscles and his pectoral muscles in syncopation with the beat of conga drums (somebody else plays them) and performs a horizontal handstand (yogic coordination) and then stands to swallow a sword (presented by Zmuda in butler’s togs) and then fixes a felt mustache above his lip and straps on a guitar and imitates the falsetto of Slim Whitman singing “Rosemarie.” (“I’m bringing romance back,” he liked to say now.) He had always been a fakir. But he had never worn a diaper and a turban onstage before. He practiced in L.A. at the Improv. He wanted to do it on tour, but George couldn’t really line up a decent tour for him anymore, so on September 25, he went on a ten-city bus tour of California to campaign for Governor Jerry Brown, who was running for the U.S. Senate, performing in college and high school auditoriums with musicians Kris Kristofferson and Billy Swan. He did not
care much about the senatorial race; he did not care much about politics in general. But it was good to tour again. Mostly, he meditated in the back of the bus in between stops.

The fakir would debut for television on
Saturday Night Live,
where he knew it would remind people of what he had done long ago before making such a racket. The date was set for October 23 and he was advertised as that week’s special guest star and he arrived early in the week to begin rehearsal. On Saturday evening, he performed at dress rehearsal as well, after which Stanley and Janice came to Rockefeller Center to watch the live broadcast and they were about to be seated in the studio audience when Andy was told that he had been cut from the show due to time constraints and due to the fact that Dick Ebersol was not thrilled with the fakir. “It was fifteen minutes before show time,” said Stanley. “He was devastated. And I was seething. I’m quick to blow my stack. If I had seen Dick Ebersol that night, I probably would have smacked him.” Said writer Bob Tischler, “Andy had never been bumped from the show before. He was legitimately pissed.” Tischler had followed him back to the Berkshire Place Hotel to assess the damage and attend to reparations. They went to Ebersol the next week with a plan writhed from the mire. He wanted to be scheduled to appear the following Saturday, October 30—“He told me to bill him at the top of the show as a guest but then he wanted me to cut him again,” said Ebersol. “He said, ‘While the show’s on the air, you’ll send somebody to the dressing room to tell me there’s not enough time and I’m not going to get on. It’ll be a totally normal thing. Then we’ll stage a fight out in the hallway after the show finishes.’”

The premise of the appearance he would not make was to be an explanation of why he had been bumped from the previous week’s show and a personal attack on Ebersol—and because it was such a straightforward piece, a monologue, he would not have to be part of the pre-broadcast dress rehearsal that evening, which was a good thing because he would actually be in Gainesville, Florida, at that
time, performing an actual concert—a makeup date, really—at the University of Florida. To accommodate the
Saturday Night Live
scheme, the concert had been moved up two hours, after which he would speed to the airport and fly directly to New York so as to be present when he was cut from the show and therefore assault Ebersol outside the studio as the audience filed toward the elevators after one
A.M.
and thus ignite gossip and scandal. None of this would be known to anyone except Ebersol and Tischler and writers Blaustein and Sheffield and director Davey Wilson. Later, Ebersol would tell Kay Gardella of the New York
Daily News
why he had bumped Andy and his monologue—“He handed me three handwritten pages he planned to do that [were] not only unfunny but also belligerent. Frankly, I felt betrayed. I made my mind up that he was not going on.”

And so they fought because he had been cut
twice in a row;
and so they fought in the hallway by the makeup room—“Andy comes out of this makeup room and accosts me,” said Ebersol. “Starts screaming at me because I had fucked him and I owed it to him as a friend to put him back on the show. It got worse and worse and I was taking it, but he was good enough to start actually making me angrier and angrier. Finally, I turned my back on him. He never stopped screaming.” Said Blaustein, “It was great theater, totally believable. Everyone was sort of spellbound—the audience, the staff and crew that were milling around.”

It was happening all over again.

And none of it was televised.

Two Saturdays later, November 13, the plan lumbered forward. Andy watched in Los Angeles and saw, near the very end of the program, Ebersol address the camera and the audience—

“Hi, I’m Dick Ebersol, the executive producer of
Saturday Night Live.
In recent weeks, we have received inquiries from many of you, including even the editors of
TV Guide,
as to why, prior to our last two telecasts, we heavily promoted Andy Kaufman and then failed to present him as advertised. So tonight, let me set the record straight by saying, in my opinion, that in both cases Andy misled us into thinking,
right up until airtime, that his material would be up to the show’s standards. It was not. It was not even funny, and in my opinion Andy Kaufman is not funny anymore. And I believe
you,
the audience here, agrees with me. So thank you, and I hope this sets the record straight. Good night.”

Gardella, afterward, in the
Daily News:
“True or not, it’s a cruel blow even if the two were embroiled in a publicity stunt, which Ebersol denies.”

The audience at the Letterman show liked the fakir bit just fine. He performed it there five nights later. He was forbidden by the network, however, from mentioning Ebersol or
Saturday Night Live.
But he did tell Letterman, “Lately, it’s become a pretty popular thing to say that Andy Kaufman isn’t funny anymore. [Audience laughed.] And that Andy Kaufman should not be allowed on television, and that he should be banned from television.” He likened it to blacklisting—“It reeks of McCarthyism to me”—and brandished a clipping from the
San Jose Mercury News
whose headline blared,
ANDY KAUFMAN SHOULD BE PUT OUT TO PASTURE
. [Audience awwwwwwwwed.] He told Letterman, “Let’s face it—yours is about the only show I’m allowed on right now. And I thank you very much.” And Letterman said, “Well, we kinda feel it’s a badge of honor, Andy.” He also said that he was working with his lawyers on a plan to refund the price of admission to anyone who had paid to see
Heartbeeps.
Letterman said, “Well, make sure you have change for a twenty.”

He had buttonholed Ebersol outside the Improv the previous summer and told him that he had very much liked the Larry the Lobster vote in April. “Andy had been intrigued with the vote,” said Ebersol. “That had resonated with him. And so he had it in his mind that he wanted to have a vote like Larry.” Which had been the crux of the
mission from the start. He had wanted to build the rejection of October 23 into a monstrosity of consumptive rejection—from the hallway skirmish to the he-isn’t-funny-anymore statement to the cry for appeal on the Letterman show to a culmination in democratic process and telephonic technology. Should he be allowed to return to the show or should he be banished forever? On the November 20 broadcast, the nation would be polled and two telephone numbers would be given out over the air—one to save him, one to punish him for all transgressions in aggregate. The lobster had lived and he insisted to Ebersol that he would as well. “He never thought he would lose,” Ebersol said. “I know that as clear as day.” Blaustein: “He didn’t think he could lose. He was convinced they would vote him on.” Tischler: “He didn’t think it could backfire.”

They tried to talk him out of it.

He camped all week in the Berkshire Place Hotel and received their repeated entreaties to call it off. He told George that he was sure that even if he lost, they would let him return somehow. He wouldn’t even have to be him when he came back. Some other him could come back. He had many other hims from which to choose, didn’t he? And it was going to be all in fun, only fooling, no really, anyway, wasn’t it? He was not worried.

“As the week went along,” said Ebersol, “I kept saying to Tischler, ‘He’s not going to win this.’ The wrestling had ticked people off. He was going to lose the vote and then we were really going to be in trouble, because if people vote no, then the vote has to hold.” Blaustein said, “I remember late Thursday night we went over to the hotel and said, ‘Andy, just as your pieces have to be real, so does ours. And if they vote you off, you can’t come back—unless we do something at the end, where you run in and cause a disruption and somehow you say the vote was fixed.’ He said, ‘No, I want to keep it real. They’re gonna vote me on.’ We said, ‘But if they don’t, you realize that you can’t ever come back?’”