Go West, Young Man
You just never knew what Andy Kaufman was going to do.
RICK NEWMAN
In the back of my mind I knew that the road west would eventually take us to California, but Shelly and I stopped off in Chicago before moving on. This was home, and we needed a little grounding before jumping into the next frying pan. While staying at the apartment of my good friend Joe Troiani, Shelly and I gathered a little more money and prepared for the road ahead. Joe was heading out to San Diego for military training and invited us to join him there. After resting up for a few months (we needed it after being pummeled in the Big Apple for four years), we jumped in the beater and pointed the hood ornament toward the Golden State. California, here we come …
For me, trucking across the face of America is one of the great experiences of life. It awakens in me a sense of what the pioneers encountered as well as a feeling of patriotism, a feeling of country. Three weeks after departing Chicago, we looped over the north end of the Bay Area and headed down into the heart of San Francisco to that wellspring of free love, the Haight-Ashbury district. When we arrived at the intersection of those namesake streets, I got out of the Rambler and just stood and stared at the crossed street markers. Far more than just two street signs that had spawned the name of a community, it represented a way of life that was now gone but had altered, in however small a way, the course of human culture. Though the evidence of madras plaids and love beads and patchouli wafting on the air was fading, we had been out of Vietnam more than a year, and the notion that love could conquer hate had made its impression on more than a few. The free-love movement had served its purpose, and society had moved on, the better for it, one hopes.
Shelly and I spent just a few days in Haight-Ashbury. I had been headed to Hollywood all along, I just didn’t know it. I had rolled Andy’s words around in my head about a million times, but, given his increasing visibility on television and my decreasing finances, I kept hearing the little devil on my shoulder whispering in my ear, Give it up, he’ll never call. I didn’t want to believe it, so we struck out on Highway I, down the coast to Sodom.
Since our money was running low, we pitched our tent along the ocean and took our time getting to Los Angeles. The coastline was stunning to a Midwest boy who had never seen such magnificence. When we finally rolled into La La Land, we made the requisite detour from the coast highway and headed the twenty miles over to Hollywood. The actual section of Los Angeles called Hollywood can come as a bit of a shock to anyone who has never been there. It covers a very large area, and the unsuspecting find that it is not glamorous but rather aging and somewhat run-down. Even in 1976 it was shabby. Today crews are working to gentrify Hollywood, but it is still frayed around the edges.
Still, as we passed through those streets, every time I’d glimpse one of the famous Hollywood soundstages looming in the distance I’d get depressed because I wasn’t a part of it. I didn’t even drop down to Melrose to visit the Improv, for fear of running into someone I knew who would see how down on my luck I was. As we made our way back to the freeway, Shelly sensed my despair.
“You should call him,” she said.
“Call who?” I replied, playing dumb.
“Andy. Who did you think?”
“Why?” I said, wanting to hear her rationale; maybe it was more hopeful than what I was imagining.
“Because he’s your friend and he said he wanted you as his writer,” she said simply. But it was too easy. Andy hadn’t called me. It was his move, he was the big star. “Call him,” she said. “It’s about your career, it’s important.”
“He’s forgotten all about that by now,” I said bitterly.
“No, he hasn’t, he’s just busy. He’s not like that.”
She was so naive, I thought. What did she know?
“Fuck Hollywood!” I said, my voice rising in rage. “Fuck my career! Fuck the phoniness!”
We drove in silence for a while, and as we left Hollywood I had a deep sense of dread. I hadn’t been there an hour and I hated the place. It was ugly and cruel and run-down and I so desperately wanted to be part of it I could taste it. I pointed the car south to San Diego.
“They said Californy is the place you oughtta be, so we loaded up our truck and we moved to … Diego. San Diego, that is …”
We settled into a well-known hippie enclave called Ocean Beach, or O.B. to locals. It was a funky, eclectic community that ran the social gamut from people on welfare to those whose second car was a Bentley, but our particular area featured a well-insulated collective of free spirits. Many of our group were into crystals and auras way before most people knew dick about their chakras. O.B. was a laid-back but partying little place on the southwest corner of Mission Bay and the Pacific Ocean. Shelly and I rented a small bungalow two blocks from the beach and settled into Bohemianism. Shelly got a job at the People’s Food Co-op, which, in keeping with the anticapitalistic credo of our adopted class, didn’t pay a salary. But they did offer her carte blanche on all the organic fruits and vegetables we could eat, so out of necessity we became vegetarians.
On weekends I would go over to Balboa Park, by the zoo, and work as a street performer, doing the same magic act I’d done as a kid. Eventually I took a job as a short-order cook at one of the nearby hotel restaurants. After a few weeks an accounting indicated I was averaging precisely ninety dollars a week. This reality caused me to up my consumption of marijuana to carry me away from thoughts of a career that had never gotten going and the broken promises of a former friend that could have changed my life. The more dope I smoked the less I worried about my station in life, which was one of slinging hotcakes and eggs to people who could buy or sell me with the spare change in their pockets.
I had tried to become a radical, a social commando bent on changing the system by becoming an important part of it, but now I was at the lowest rung of the ladder, powerless, and my dreams went up in sweet smoke every night. Shelly and I had no phone or television, lest they bring tidings of someone we had known in our previous lives, “good” news that someone else had “made it.” I was terrified of television, for it promised at every turn of the dial to slap me in the face with the success of my former associates at the Improv.
I slipped into my routine of rising at five-thirty to be at work at six to dish up fried animal products to the ruling class. Shelly and I were living a marginal yet pleasant existence, so finally, like an emergency-room doctor who’s been beating a dying patient’s chest too long, I just gave up. Why didn’t I pick up the phone and call Andy? I guess my pride wouldn’t allow it. He was in the driver’s seat. If he didn’t call me, then calling him wouldn’t make any difference. Feeling a lot of self-pity, I figured the parade had not only passed me by but also run me over.
I have never been a believer in psychic phenomena, but something happened to me during this time that deeply rattled my skepticism. I still have a hard time accepting what transpired because I absolutely cannot explain it, but I have a number of friends who witnessed it and will verify its occurrence.
One morning around eight, I was at work dishing up breakfasts from my griddle when I heard a voice. It wasn’t like someone speaking next to me, but more like one in my head. (I warned you.) It was unsettling because it was so clear, so arresting. “Take off your apron, immediately, walk off this job, go home, and wait for further instructions … for your life is about to change,” said the voice. The voice was so strong, so compelling, that I set down my spatula, undid my apron, and handed it to my stunned boss on the way out.
“Where you going?” he asked.
“I just quit. Nothing personal. See ya,” I said, and walked out.
I went out and climbed into my rusted Rambler Rebel and drove home, where Shelly was getting ready for work.
“What’s wrong? What are you doing home so early?” she asked.
I told her the story and she was cosmic enough to accept its possibility, so she kissed me good-bye, wished me luck, and left. I sat down, fired up a joint, and awaited my instructions from the other world. The day passed and I waited patiently, knowing something was going to happen.
That night Shelly asked to hear the story again. As I retold it, her enthusiasm renewed mine. We went to bed with the certainty that the next day would bring me my new destiny. The day came and went, and by the end of the third day I was beginning to doubt my sanity. Shelly and our friends were becoming concerned about my mental state, and I discussed with them the possibility of seeing a psychologist at the local free clinic.
The next day I got up, still jobless, kissed Shelly as she exited the door for her job, and sat down to mope about my fragile mental and financial condition. Sometime around midafternoon there was a knock at the door. I thought it was a well-meaning neighbor coming over to “counsel” me, but to my surprise it was a delivery man.
“You Bob Zmuda?”
“Yeah,” I said warily, as if my bad luck had manifested some forgotten misstep from my previous life.
“I gotta telegram. Sign here,” he said, thrusting his clipboard at me. I signed, and he handed me a sealed telegram. I went inside and looked at it for a moment, scared that it might be bad news, but also filled with excitement from the promise of my “voice.” I opened it.
BOB — CALL MY MANAGER GEORGE SHAPIRO IMMEDIATELY. SIGNED, ANDY
I stared at the message in my hand for a moment or two, almost disbelieving it. Andy was becoming a big star, he wanted me, and the “voice” had told the truth. The phone number was in Los Angeles. Hollywood. It was two-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon, and I ran in my bathrobe, screaming in glee, to a phone booth down the block. I got an operator who instructed me to drop some coins in. I was still dropping in coins when George Shapiro’s assistant, Diane, answered.
“Good afternoon, Shapiro/West,” she said.
“Uh, yes, may I speak to Mr. Shapiro?”
The sounds of the coins coupled with the naïveté in my voice caused her to shortstop me. “Mr. Shapiro is not in. May I take a message?” she said with the slightest touch of derision. I was crushed.
“Well, when will he be back?” I asked, still hopeful, but taken down a notch.
“Later. May I take a number?”
“Sir, you’ll have to insert another seventy-five cents,” said the operator.
Now Diane was really wondering, and when I said, “Sorry, I don’t have a number,” she dismissed me.
“I’ll tell him you called. Your name?”
“Bob Zmuda,” I said as I shoved my last three quarters in the slot, trying to keep the connection. Suddenly all hell broke loose.
“Bob Zmuda!?” she screeched. “You’re Bob Zmuda? George, George! It’s him,” she screamed to Shapiro. “It’s Bob Zmuda! We found him!”
The quality of life in Hollywood is determined by who takes your calls. I’d arrived. George Shapiro got on the phone, out of breath at the prospect of talking to the elusive Bob Zmuda.
“Zmuda? Bob Zmuda?” he asked, almost shrieking.
“Yeah, I’m Bob Zmuda. I got Andy’s telegram.”
“Where the hell are you? Andy’s been looking for you for weeks! What are you doing?”
“I’m in San Diego, working as a short-order cook.”
Shapiro turned to whoever was in the room. “He’s in San Diego! He’s a dishwasher!”
I don’t know how Shapiro got dishwasher from short-order cook, but to this day that’s my occupation when he tells the story. George, repeat after me: short-order cook. Shapiro returned to me and said, “Well, kid, your ship just came in. Andy told me you’re the greatest writer in the world and he wants you to fly to Hollywood to write his next show, a ninety-minute special he’s doing for ABC. I guess you’ll just drive up, huh?”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The “voice” had been dead-on. “Yeah, I’ll drive. When do you want me there?”
“How about yesterday,” cracked Shapiro.
“I’m already there,” I said.
That telegram would change my life forever. But what about the voice? How did it know and whose voice was it? Back in Los Angeles, Andy’s phone was ringing. George was calling to let him know that they had found me. Andy, in a deep meditative trance, was oblivious to the noisy phone. Besides, he already knew.
Shelly and I packed up the Rambler and headed north. This time the squalid streets of Hollywood looked like they were paved with gold. That evening I saw Andy for the first time in months.
The first thing out of his mouth was, “I’ll bet you thought I forgot about you.”
I lied through my teeth. “I knew you’d call.”
Andy and I enthusiastically went back to work and were soon writing his special. One of the guests on the show, Cindy Williams, was also starring in Laverne and Shirley. Cindy loved the way Andy and I worked together and approached me one day. “You want to write for me?” she asked. “I mean keep writing for Andy of course, but I need some ideas for a movie I want to do.”
I was taken aback. “Yeah, I’d love to, but you’ll have to ask Andy if it’s okay.”
“Oh sure, absolutely,” she said. “I’ll ask him this afternoon.”
Cindy asked Andy, who thought it was a great opportunity for me, so suddenly I was writing for Andy and Cindy Williams. During that time Andy introduced me to Rodney Dangerfield, a supporter since Andy’s early days. One day Andy came in the door of our office. “Want to work for Rodney Dangerfield?” he asked. “He needs some help on his special. I said you’d love to. You got the time … whaddya think?”
I was stunned. I took it. In the course of about a month I had gone from fry cook at ninety bucks a week to Hollywood writer making five thousand a week. At the end of the day I thought perhaps I had judged Hollywood too harshly. We started eating meat again, a choice brought on by our financial bounty, and possibly also a metaphor for our new existence. Radicalism was for saps; I was now a pillar of the system and I loved it.
George Shapiro couldn’t have been happier that I was in town, for now there was someone else to hold Andy’s hand. And Andy Kaufman needed a lot of hand-holding. Eccentric to the point of compulsion, Andy was a slave to routine. He would rise around 11 A.M. and do his bathroom routine, which would take an exceedingly long time. (Andy had a bizarre habit of using a different toothbrush for every day of the week except Sunday, when he skipped brushing altogether.) By twelve-thirty he’d begin his ninety minutes of yoga and meditation. By two o’clock Andy would be ready for breakfast. When we’d finished eating and returned to the office it would be three-thirty, maybe four o’clock before we wrote word one.
Writing with Andy was never dull. Andy accepted adult responsibilities, but whenever those duties required the drudgery of what appeared to be work he would shut down. Don’t get me wrong, Andy was one of the hardest-working human beings I’ve ever seen, constantly in motion, but if it seemed like work, not play, then he resisted. So we didn’t work when we wrote, we played. Andy was a staunch believer that creativity wasn’t summoned like a quivering servant, but rather was spawned from the muse; when pressures on the mind and body were suspended, creativity then just bubbled to the surface from the deepest recesses of the subconscious.
Our “writing” sessions consisted of sitting down with legal pads and pens in front of us and then talking about everything but the special we were to write for ABC. We spent days just jabbering away, but once in a while, when we least expected it, we’d be hit by inspiration and an idea would be committed to paper. Typically we would sit around for hours, and the ideas came almost like afterthoughts. Andy hated pressure, and when we were feeling pressured — that the weight of the entire special was on our shoulders — Andy would get on the phone and order in some strippers. When the strippers arrived we would forget our task and spend the rest of the afternoon and evening entertaining and being entertained by our “guests.” After one of the stripper sessions we were driving home in my Rambler, laughing about how we’d blown the whole day without writing a word and had partied with two strippers. Then it hit us: that was how we’d open the special.
When we got over to Andy’s place we really went to work, this time thinking solely about the show. We decided to have him confess to having blown all of ABC’s money on strippers instead of sets and costumes. Then we decided Foreign Man should not only open but host, but because the strippers wouldn’t work with Foreign Man’s naive mystique we cut them out and had him just confess to blowing all the money. That’s how the special eventually opened: Foreign Man, all alone with one camera, telling on himself. It was hilarious.
Andy had his own form of beta-testing material: like Mr. X, Andy and I would draw from real life, or manipulate real life, then adapt the material for his use on stage. We would draw on various events, examining their value and how Andy might use them onstage. Once, years before I met him, Andy was accosted on the streets of New York by toughs who demanded his money. Foreign Man was instantly invented as a fast-thinking Andy haltingly pleaded ignorance and poverty with a thick accent, causing the thugs to abandon the pathetic little immigrant for more worthy prey. On another occasion, Andy witnessed the worst act in Las Vegas and Tony Clifton was born.
Often Andy tested material live and, occasionally, even on national television audiences. This was, to most professional entertainers, insane. When most comedians, even brilliant “extemporaneous” comics such as Robin Williams, are riffing, it is usually very carefully planned — it just looks brilliantly improvised. Going out on stage with a “concept” was terrifying at best, but that was how Andy often sought to discover what was behind the curtain, what the mystery was all about, by pushing that envelope far past his comfort level. To walk out in front of a large group of people with a carefully mapped game plan, then change it, was potential professional suicide, but Andy loved the danger and fluidity of the situation. He was not unlike a sort of behavioral scientist who would step out on stage and begin pushing buttons just to see what would happen. Though Andy was supposed to be the performer, the audience didn’t know it but Andy was really watching them from the stage.
As a new arrival in Hollywood Andy wanted to remain as grounded as possible and not be subject to the glittering temptations that he’d heard so much about. He rented a room in a Hollywood Mills home owned by a man named Richard and his girlfriend, who were fellow practitioners of TM. Richard was a pleasant guy who dabbled in his basement creating works of art — sculptures and whatnot. One day while Richard was out I commented to Andy about one of his pieces, a sculpture of a plastic baby, bleeding as it popped through the shattered screen of a derelict television. Andy’s off-the-cuff comment, “Oh, that’s probably just a metaphor for his life,” didn’t mean anything to me and I didn’t pursue it, but it would come to have a lot of meaning soon enough.
Andy’s obsession with studying failure — its progression, its mechanics, even its chemistry — caused him to begin formulating what he dubbed the “Has-Been Corner.” Inspired by what he saw as the caprices of fame and inevitable decline as he got the lay of Hollywood, Andy felt bringing a has-been on stage with him would be an interesting element to incorporate into his act, a subversive thought given most performers’ desperate need to keep the limelight to themselves. In what he pictured as a showcase for the once-famous, the has-beens would be sent out to flounder in front of an audience like fish in the bottom of a boat, in an attempt to regain some of their vanished fame.
Andy saw the Has-Been Corner as celebrating the entropics of a showbiz career, a decay that intrigued him more and more as he flew closer to stardom. He was fascinated by the ideatum of the inevitable divestment of dignity one must accept after thrusting oneself in the public eye and accepting that praise and adulation. He wanted to re-create the moment when the big karmic wheel spun around and, on the bottom of its arc, squashed the former famous person just as he or she tried to relight that torch of celebrity. Andy wanted to observe that moment. He was beginning to see the mean-spiritedness that came with fame, the quick investiture and equally quick dethronement, and he wanted, like a little kid screwing around with his chemistry set, to watch what happened when certain ingredients were mixed together. He was gripped by the state of being a has-been because, as he put it, “If it could happen to others it can happen to me.”
While we were discussing the more nihilistic aspects of the Has-Been Corner, Andy remarked offhandedly, “You know Richard’s a has-been.”
I pictured his roommate, the artist. “From what?” I inquired.
“Remember West Side Story?” he asked.
“Yeah …”
“He played Tony.”
“What? Like on Broadway? Or some high school production?” I said.
“No, no, he was Tony in the movie, the major motion picture with Natalie Wood.”
My face fell. I was stunned. I’d seen the movie, more than once as a matter of fact, and I hadn’t recognized Richard as Richard Beymer.
“He had a good career going out here in Hollywood,” Andy continued, “then the bottom fell out. West Side Story was this huge Broadway hit, and when they decided to do the movie, instead of using the Broadway stars they cast the leads with two movie actors, Natalie Wood and Richard. When they shot the movie they lip-synched the singing, and because of that they took a rash of unkind press, especially back east. Anyway, when the dust settled, Natalie Wood survived, Richard didn’t.”
It was a sad, ugly story but Richard was not bitter, though he would caution Andy from time to time with advice like, “Watch out, Andy. Once they have no use for you they’ll discard you like an old washrag. I know. It happened to me.” Years later Richard would be cast in David Lynch’s gothic soap opera Twin Peaks, but until that happened his acting career was effectively over. Andy convinced Richard that he should be the first participant in the Has-Been Corner. He may have been a has-been, but Richard was also a good sport.
The West Coast Improv became Andy’s new home, and just like back in New York, Budd gave Andy free rein to experiment with an audience anytime he chose. And we did, often. Any wacky idea we had, Budd let us do it. As a run-through before working the Has-Been Corner into our television special, Andy booked Richard some stage time at the Improv. Andy came out and told a packed house he wanted to give a former star another chance, then Richard took the stage. Describing his early successes, then his last big gig as Tony in West Side Story, Richard held the crowd rapt as he detailed his fall from grace. “If I’d only been allowed to sing ‘Maria’ in my own voice, I would have been a star even today,” he said, wistfully.
“Richard,” prompted Andy gently from the side of the stage, “why don’t you sing it for us? Sing ‘Maria.’”
Richard seemed to demur and the crowd erupted into polite but encouraging applause. Finally acquiescing, Richard wrested the microphone from its stand as the lights went down and a single spot illuminated his face. A hush fell over the house as the familiar Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim musical strains began. “The most beautiful sound I ever heard …” Richard sang, “Mah-ree-ah …” Then it happened. Richard hit a clinker note, but continued gamely. “I just met a girl named Mah-reeah!” and another clinker. And another. The audience cringed. Richard sensed their discomfort but plunged on. Now he was dying and it was only getting worse. The crowd sat in horrified silence as the has-been proved why he was just that. Now they all knew why he’d been overdubbed in West Side Story.
Suddenly, Richard stopped in mid-refrain. The music ground to a halt. “You’re right, Andy,” said Richard shakily through his tears, “you’re right. I am a has-been!” And with that he dropped the microphone and rushed offstage and out the door, faster than if he’d just insulted Richard Burton. The audience was stunned and embarrassed for him. Andy quietly thanked them and exited.
Outside, Andy and Richard shared a good laugh: the put-on had worked. Richard had died on purpose. In fact, Richard had a pretty fair singing voice and could have impressed if not wowed the club. But that wouldn’t have been fitting for a has-been. Andy was so impressed with the disturbing dynamic of Richard’s Has-Been Corner presentation that he enthusiastically pressed Richard to take the act on national television, a feat Andy could arrange through his special. In spite of his good nature, Richard could not be persuaded. A few hundred people at the Improv was one thing, but proclaiming your lameness in front of the entire country? That stretched even Richard’s sense of humor. He declined.
By July of 1977 we were ready to begin taping the special. Despite the opening joke about blowing the entire budget, there was sufficient money for Andy to fulfill two of his childhood dreams. The first was to hire Bill Bellew, Elvis Presley’s favorite costume designer, (Elvis was still with us at that point, He didn’t turn up dead in his bathroom until August 16, 1977.) Bellew crafted two Elvis outfits for Andy, identical copies of those worn by the King. Bellew even had a jarful of buttons he used on Andy’s costumes that had once been on E’s outfits but had popped off. Andy was constantly hounding Bill about what it was like to work for Elvis and one day Bill told us the secret of how he’d managed to stay costumer to a vain man whose weight varied like an overseas cargo container.
“I never measure him,” confessed Bellew. “He loves to eat, among a lot of other things, Monte Cristo sandwiches. Other costumers did their job but when it was time to check his girth, they’d get fired — you know, shoot the messenger. So I caught on fast. After every concert I get hold of his pants and let ’em out a little. I know he knows it isn’t true but we both keep up the charade his pants still have a thirty-two-inch waist. In reality, I think they’re probably closer to fifty-two.”
Despite the slam on the King, Andy loved the story and had Bill repeat it from time to time. Some months after Elvis was gone, Andy ran into Bellew and asked a curious question. “You think he faked his death?”
Bill Bellew didn’t hesitate. “No. He’s dead, no question about it. Nobody could eat that many Monte Cristos and live.” Case closed. That must have ignited in Andy some fears of overconsumption, for soon after, he took me aside and, looking slightly alarmed, said, “You think I eat too much chocolate?”
Andy did consume an extraordinary amount of chocolate — lots of chocolate during the day topped off by a bowl of chocolate ice cream after every dinner — but I didn’t think it was harmful because he didn’t seem to show any effects, unlike Elvis. “No, I don’t think so. Why, you think you eat too much?”
“Apparently not.” He shrugged and that was the end of it. He never ceased his prodigious chocolate ingestion, but the cautionary nature of Bellew’s story must have remained in the back of his mind. Years later, when he lay dying in his hospital bed at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, he looked at me and summed it up. “Chocolate has killed me.”
The second childhood dream Andy saw come true through his ABC special was being able to work with Howdy Doody. In December 1947, a thirty-year-old guy who had changed his name From Robert Schmidt to Buffalo Bob Smith went on the air with television’s first children’s show and made entertainment as well as cultural history. Though there were only twenty thousand television sets nationwide when the show began, Howdy Doody would go on to enchant that generation of baby boomers, and would eventually build an audience of more than ten million loyal fans per week.
Andy, of course, was one of them, but his identification with the little wooden sideman of Bob’s, the puppet that became known as Howdy Doody, was more than just that of an ardent fan: Andy truly believed that Howdy possessed a life of his own. So when Andy had the power to put nearly anyone he pleased on his ABC special, it was somehow fitting that the first choice of the man who was still a kid was not even a flesh-and-blood person but rather an animated figment from the dawn of television and the dawn of Andy’s cognizance of the art of entertainment.
Booking Howdy Doody on his show was a dream come true for Andy. “He was the first real star of television,” Andy said to me, the reverence in his voice and on his face no sham, so honestly in awe was he of getting the little wooden man as his guest. As a lonely kid in Great Neck, while the other kids played outdoors, Andy would sit in front of the television accompanied by his imaginary friends, transfixed by the interplay between Buffalo Bob and Howdy. When Howdy spoke Andy felt it was to him and him alone. Andy even appeared on Howdy Doody as a member of the Peanut Gallery. Howdy Doody would become the spiritual foundation for many of our future productions, including that ABC special.
Once the edict from Andy went out that we would have Howdy Doody on the show, the first miracle to be performed was finding him and Buffalo Bob. Howdy Doody had ended its run in 1960, and though Smith and the producers engineered a kitsch resurgence of Howdy appearances on college campuses in the early seventies — along with a short-lived revival on the airwaves — Howdy and Bob had more or less disappeared.
Andy had a friend named Burt Dubrow from their days together in Grahm College’s television department, and Andy recalled Burt once telling him that from the time he was about ten years old he had known Buffalo Bob. Andy called Burt, and with his help we found Bob and arranged to have him, Howdy, and the puppeteer fly out to Hollywood to tape the show. Andy wanted only Howdy on camera with him, so the plan was for Bob to lay down Howdy’s voice track, and for the puppeteer to provide the action.
When Howdy (in his box) and the puppeteer, Pady Blackwood, arrived at the studio, we cleared the soundstage of all personnel. This was going to be a big moment for Andy and he wanted privacy. After Pady had unboxed Howdy and propped him up for the meeting, I went to get Andy, who was holed up in his dressing room, waiting nervously for the big moment.
“Is he there?” he asked me, shaking. I knew that he hadn’t slept the night before, so anxious was he over the prospect of facing his entire childhood in the form of a small, wooden marionette.
“Yeah, he’s there. Howdy’s ready to meet you,” I said.
Andy wrung his hands expectantly and slowly rose. His trembling was no joke. He looked at me with a slightly stricken expression. “What if he doesn’t like me?”
As surreal as that question was, I resisted the temptation to make a crack, for I realized this meeting was possibly bigger for Andy than his brush with Elvis. “Andy,” I said gently, “he’ll love you. You’re making him a star again.”
That convinced Andy that it would be all right, so he ventured out into the hallway and headed toward the big stage door. The cast and crew were assembled outside as Andy slowly swung back the door and entered the lighted studio in a scene not unlike that when Richard Dreyfuss enters the alien vessel in Close Encounters. I closed the door and waited for the historic meeting to begin. Not twenty seconds had passed when the silence was shattered by a blood-chilling scream and Andy burst through the door, headed for the security of his dressing room. “That’s not Howdy Doody! That’s an impostor!” he yelled in a rage.
I followed him to his door, but it was locked. “Andy, what’s wrong?”
“That’s not Howdy, that’s the impostor, Photo Doody!” He spat the words angrily.
I went into the studio and found Pady Blackwood, who was quite shaken by the incident. I pointed at the alleged Howdy Doody. “Is this the real Howdy Doody?”
“Yes, of course it is,” he said. “It’s the same marionette we’ve been using for years.”
I looked him straight in the eye. “You can honestly guarantee that this is the original Howdy Doody? What’s Photo Doody?”
The guy paused for a moment as if considering his next words. “Well, actually, this is Photo Doody. He’s just like the other marionette only he’s used for still photographs and so on. He’s got better cosmetics than the original and no strings to get in the way. The other puppet I brought for the taping is the same only with strings. Hardly anybody can tell the difference between these two and the original.”
Andy Kaufman could. I went back to Andy’s room and, when he finally calmed down, explained the situation. After a short meeting we decided that the real Howdy would be brought to Hollywood immediately.
On the day of the taping, Andy walked out onto the stage toward the original Howdy, who was propped up, patiently waiting for him. Andy had apparently done a lot of meditation over this moment, for when he first saw Howdy it was magical. Before we got the take used in the special, we could see Andy in the monitors gazing lovingly at Howdy in crystal-clear sincerity, the man-child revealing the true depth of his feelings for this small wooden man, probably his only real friend as a child. Andy was actually choked up. After he recovered his emotions, we brought in Pady the puppeteer, and the scene went perfectly.
A few days before we got around to shooting that precious moment, Buffalo Bob arrived to lay down Howdy’s audio track. Andy had anticipated a charismatic and delightful older man, clad in his frontiersman outfit, dispensing sage advice to all the “girls and boys” on the set. What he got was an old guy wearing a rumpled leisure suit, sucking up cigarettes, and apparently hung-over. Andy was startled by Bob’s appearance, but the coup de grâce came two minutes after they met when Bob launched into a barrage of foulmouthed “pussy” jokes. I could see Andy’s face noticeably flush. Had Tony Clifton been around, he and Bob would have gotten along famously, hut Andy couldn’t wait to get away from the guy. During the taping Bob broke into an uncontrollable hacking cough that infused the recording booth with the foul odor of cigarette residue and the booze still in his system. Once he had the cough under control he looked at Andy, shaking his head. “I hate that fucking Howdy voice. It kills my throat.” Once the voice tracks were done Andy left and did not speak to Bob again.
An even less fortunate has-been was poor Gail Slobodkin. Andy was friends with the young, struggling actress and offered her a part in the ABC special. A cute, perky honey-blonde, Gail had once played in The Sound of Music on Broadway but enjoyed little success afterward. Thus credited, we bestowed upon Gail the honor of being the first candidate for our nationally televised debut of the Has-Been Corner. The tape rolled just as she was about to perform her segment, and to create believability that she was truly a has-been, Andy asked her something on-camera that he never would have said even in private: “When was the first time you realized you’d never make it?”
Seemingly taken aback, Gail was nevertheless pleasant despite Andy’s cold-blooded question. Andy, undeterred, pressed on. “Gail,” he asked, “what’s it like being a has-been?” The sweet girl was gut-shot by his remarks but cheerfully defended herself and her decision to return to showbiz. Andy summed it up, “Well, I hope you make it … but I don’t think you will.” And with that rousing introduction Gail sang a selection from The Sound of Music, the charming “Lonely Goatherd.” As Gail gamely belted out her song, Andy was in the background conducting an “angry” discussion with the floor director, me. When he’d notice the camera on him he’d shove me away and let Gail continue. We did this twice, then Gail finished.
During the taping Gail was obviously hurt by Andy’s mean comments and reacted by giving him a gentle slap. It was done more out of her own pain than to inflict pain on Andy. She kept her chin up, did the show, and left the building. Three days later a distraught Gail checked into a low-rent Hollywood motel, took a hot bath, ratcheted open a can of Van Camp’s pork and beans, shoveled the cold beans down her throat with a plastic spoon, then cut that throat with the jagged can lid. Her body was discovered by the housekeeper the next morning. Her suicide note blamed Andy for his cold-hearted mockery of her on national television. The LAPD finally passed the note on to Andy, who kept it by his framed picture of the Maharishi. Only once did I summon the courage to ask him about his feelings surrounding Gail’s death.
He never answered because it never happened.
You’ve just been had. Gail Slobodkin not only is still alive but is living happily in southern California. It was all a put-on. Gail’s reactions were all carefully staged and her feelings were intact. The point of the story was to demonstrate to you, the reader, the feeling of being Kaufmanized. This was the same emotion Andy and I sought to evoke not only in audiences but often when we were out in public, just the two of us. A mass Kaufmanization of an audience was fun, but the process itself was the rush, and to befuddle just one person was often just as thrilling.
The Gail Slobodkin story is an example of the tomfoolery Andy and I attempted to perpetrate with our special, but the executives at ABC were reluctant to become victims of Kaufmanization and resisted many of our suggestions about elements of the special. For instance, psychological games were one thing, but fucking around with the God-given technology of our medium? Well, it was unthinkable. When Andy told the network brass that we wanted to cause the picture to roll at one point during the telecast so people would think that their sets needed adjusting or that there was some interference from beyond their living rooms, the TV execs wet themselves. Andy told them he wanted the rolling to endure for as long as three minutes. The suits became terrified that people might switch channels to check what was wrong and not come back. They obviously had a lot of faith in the ability of our material to hold people’s attention. After a lot of wrangling we finally acknowledged that three minutes might push the limits of even the most ardent Andy fan, so we limited the rolling picture to about thirty seconds — just long enough to irritate but not completely lose our viewers. It was typical Kaufman brinkmanship, not only in the picture rolling itself, but in the process of scaring the executives with the inflated estimate of the time the effect would last. We never intended the rolling to last three minutes, we just used Kaufmanization to soften them up.
Another offbeat routine that I wrote for that special was a musical interlude where Andy played the congas backed by four burly, bad-ass-looking brothers. The song? Disney’s “It’s a Small World after All.” The juxtaposition of a children’s song and tough guys as the singers was Kaufman and Zmuda at their best.
When the special was complete we proudly handed it over to ABC, sat back, and waited for a time slot in the near future. Fred Silverman, ABC’s president and the man who would later go on to be recognized as the savior of NBC, scrutinized the pilot in his office with a gaggle of ass-kissing programming executives. Had Silverman been a medieval king with the power of life and death, he first would have chosen the rack for us and then chopped off our heads and put them on pikes for all the vassals of the Kingdom of Hollywood to see and fear. Since he couldn’t do that, he exercised his next best option: he proclaimed that our special was “unairable” and that “people in Kansas wouldn’t understand it.” He promptly banned it from his network. We were crushed.
After letting the dust settle for a year, Shapiro/West took the program to NBC, but lo and behold, Fred had taken his court there, and once again we were stymied. I was deeply depressed and hurt at the time, feeling that our rejection stemmed from having gone in such a strange, unconventional direction. I was certain the fruits of our labors — of which we were very proud — would never see the light of cathode ray tubes across the country. Then, about a year after the NBC pass, Shapiro/West again knocked on ABC’s door. This time the castle was in the hands of Tony Thomopoulos, who, bless his heart, loved our special.
ABC finally ran the show — on August 28, 1979, more than two years after we’d taped it — and put it up against Johnny Carson. When the Nielsen results came in, we had knocked Carson off his throne, at least for that evening, and our special was hailed by critics as genius invention, with one critic saying it was “the most innovative TV special of its type.” We were finally vindicated. Even Fred Silverman was lambasted for his lack of vision and for sitting on the program. It was a sweet moment for us, but the process had taught me a fundamental fact about Hollywood: it took only one executive to shut you down.
Andy’s famous penchant for wrestling had its roots around the time of his twenty-ninth birthday, in January 1978. I didn’t have a clue what to get him for his birthday. Andy had enough money to buy what he wanted, but lived below his means and didn’t really want much. The only thing he wanted — his own television show — I didn’t have the power to grant him.
My solution was to try and fulfill one of his fantasies. Our relationship had become very close, so I started asking him what got him off. He had heard that Elvis loved watching wrestling between girls who were clad only in white cotton panties. (This was before Albert Goldman’s 1981 book, Elvis, revealed all manner of weirdness ascribed to the King, including that pastime.) Andy too was thrilled to observe scantily clad young women grappling in a no-holds-barred scenario.
One afternoon, soon after making my inquiries about his sexual thrills, I was at his place working with him on some material. “Oh, I’ve gotta show you something,” he said, jumping up and heading into his bedroom.
I followed. “What is it?” I asked. He closed the curtains in the room as I entered. Though this was around the time videotape recorders were first available, neither of us had one. Andy pulled out a little 8-millimeter projector.
“What’s this? Porno?” I asked, feeling I was about to have my question answered regarding the nature of his titillation.
“You’ll see,” he said as he spooled up a film and flipped the switch.
The projector beamed to life and suddenly we were watching two bikini-clad babes wrestling. I could hear Andy’s breathing rate increase despite the sharp crackle of the machine. When the grainy, three-minute featurette ended I had an idea of what would constitute Andy’s dream gift. I could tell he was still aroused by the footage, so I tossed another log on the fire. “Who would you like to see wrestle?”
“What do you mean?”
“Two women, maybe even someone we know, wrestling.”
His eyes lit up “Someone we know?”
“Yeah, like, say, Marilyn and, uh, I don’t know, maybe Gail,” I offered.
The prospect of those two friends wrestling began playing in his mind. Marilyn Rubin was an aspiring actress in our circle whom Andy had been eyeing but had not yet made a play for. And Gail Slobodkin, Marilyn’s best friend and our “has-been” actress, was also someone that Andy found attractive. They had both appeared in our ABC special, and as I explained, Gail had survived.
“Get them to wrestle?” Andy asked, hoping I wasn’t kidding.
“Yeah, sure, in bikinis, just like your girls there,” I said, indicating his projector.
A few days later, on the night of his birthday, we held a party at his apartment with about twenty friends. Once the evening was well under way, I cleared part of the living room and laid down a wrestling mat. I put Andy in a chair ringside and then changed into a referee outfit. Then I introduced the contestants, Marilyn and Gail, who entered from the bedroom wearing skimpy little bikinis. It was all good, clean fun, but I knew Andy pretty well, and I could tell he was dizzy from overstimulation.
That night everyone but Marilyn Rubin went home, an occurrence that would be repeated many times: girl comes over, they chat, they wrestle. To facilitate those assignations, Andy installed a mat in his bedroom and frequently wrestled his female guests before capping off the evening grappling between the sheets. That night — whether as a voyeur or as a participant — Andy had discovered the joys of live wrestling, which would soon become a large part of his act. Many people thought that the wrestling was just another put-on, that it was Andy being Andy.
In fact, it was just Andy being horny.
Andy’s affair with Marilyn would be on and off for years. She confided to me that what she found so amazing about Andy was that on the outside he appeared shy and wimpy, yet in the sack he was the exact opposite. She said she was flabbergasted the first time and called him “one of the greatest lovers” she ever experienced. Secretly, I was somewhat relieved when she qualified him as one of the greatest lovers, as I also had a brief fling with her.
Marilyn proudly boasted that Kaufman made a point of calling her every New Year’s Eve, no matter where he was. What she didn’t know was that I had the opportunity to spend one of those New Year’s Eves with Andy, and from noon to midnight I watched him work the phone from his little black book. It was inspirational to watch him in action, personalizing his contacts like an ace salesman, with both past lovers and potential new leads.
That was when we came up with the concept of wrestling Andy’s female college fans. It was an excuse to go somewhere and it gave him the opportunity to rub against a number of different student bodies every night. Watching Gail and Marilyn thrash around was one thing, but to actually rut around with new girls, strangers even, was heaven for Andy. It also paid off in terms of his success with his opponents, for he not only always won but also had sex with at least a third of them.
The college shows were fun for Andy, but I had to find a way to make them pay for me. Going on the road was going to cost me in lost income, for when I was absent from Hollywood I was not receiving my five or six thousand a week for writing. I brought it up to Andy one day, early on, before we actually went on the first tour. “I need to get paid for this, especially if I’m doing the whole setup, producing it and all.”
Andy shrugged. “Yeah, sure. Talk to George.”
I made the phone call. “How’s a thousand a show?” I asked Shapiro.
“Sounds fair,” he said. And that was that.
We were booking sometimes three shows a week, so making three thousand was technically a loss, but it was still damn good money. And of course, surrounded by fawning coeds more than made up for any financial deficit I suffered when I was away from town. Our forays into the heartland to obtain sex partners for Mr. Kaufman came to be referred to by us as the Fan Mail Sex Tours.
Meanwhile, it was March 1978 and Andy wanted a new angle on his Great Gatsby routine. He had been reading Gatsby to audiences for years but wanted to take the act on Saturday Night Live. Budd Friedman had let Andy do the bit on nights the club was slow, but only just before closing time. When he wanted to clear the place out he’d send Andy on stage, The Great Gatsby in hand. People would laugh for about fifteen minutes, but after that, exactly to plan, it became a deadly bore (with apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald) and the place would empty almost as fast as if you’d yelled “Fire.”
Lorne Michaels wisely never agreed to let Andy do the full routine, given that the show’s sponsors wouldn’t appreciate Andy “clearing the house.” I came up with a way to keep the bit to five minutes and make it funny, thus making the transition from an experiment to test the tolerance of an audience to a part of his act that worked for all and was actually funny from start to finish. Andy went along with the alteration.
On the night he first performed the revised bit, Andy took the SNL stage in front of the cameras. Instead of his trademark turtleneck he was wearing an ascot. When he spoke it was in an exaggerated “English” accent — actually akin to the stilted dialect many American screen actors of the ‘30s and ‘40s adopted — and the audience knew they were in for something special.
“Tonight, I am going to read The Great Gatsby,” he informed them. He didn’t say, “I’m going to read from The Great Gatsby.” The implication was that he was going to read the whole thing. Then he began reading … from page one. Occasional laughter erupted like sporadic gunfire, but most individuals were transfixed by a man reading a book on national television. A few minutes into the reading the audience rebelled in unison and “British Man” slammed the book shut and scolded them. Then he offered them a choice: more Fitzgerald or a record. The small record player sitting nearby, coupled with the almost cult following, from Andy’s lip-synching of various children’s standards and the audience’s boredom with the book, made the choice clear. The crowd screamed for the record and Andy, wearing the slightest of smirks, gave them what they wanted. He dropped the tone arm and the record turned out to be … none other than British Man reading Gatsby. It got a huge laugh, was a perfect out-cue for the bit, and later Andy went on and on with praise for my coming up with the idea. This was an important step in the Kaufman-Zmuda relationship. It showed Andy that even a routine he’d been doing for years could be improved.
Andy’s peculiar habits saved him from much of the savaging that went on behind the scenes of SNL. All week during the rehearsals, and right up to actual airtime, Lorne would be making constant adjustments to people’s sketches. Andy was able to avoid having his material downsized for a couple of reasons. First, since he was not a cast member, he was required to show up only a few days before the airdate to briefly run through some blocking. His other excuse stemmed from his habit of meditating up to the moment of his actual performance. For those reasons he was usually unavailable for conferences with Lorne, which, for anyone else, often meant a cut in their screen time.
Because of that scarcity of presence and since he never participated in any sketches (at least in the first few years), Andy also was not privy to all the backstabbing and claws-out infighting that went on backstage at SNL. Even when Andy’s pieces went a little long he experienced none of the resentment that anyone else would have suffered. As a fly on the wall I began to see the cast and staff’s vision of Andy: almost a holy man of comedy, pure and simple and brilliant. There was the sense that Andy was a real “artist” in their midst, and everyone treated him with sincere respect.
The late John Belushi, himself a rebel, marveled not only at Andy’s onstage antics but at his offstage ones as well. In every dressing room at SNL there was a television monitor displaying the show — the same feed that was broadcast. Every dressing room, that is, but Andy’s. He couldn’t have cared less about the telecast and always had his TV switched to a wrestling match. Although a few cast members were appalled that Andy wasn’t watching (and let him know it), Belushi often joined him. One time, Belushi, in his killer-bee outfit, settled in with Andy in his dressing room to watch a wrestling match. Meanwhile, as the show went out live, the talent wranglers were hysterically combing the corridors looking for Belushi, fearing he had walked out of the building.
On March 14, 1978, three days after Andy did Gatsby on SNL, we jumped on a plane to Columbus, Ohio, to conduct an experiment. Andy’s old friend Burt Duhrow, with whom we dug up Howdy and Buffalo Bob, was there producing a children’s show for Group W called Bananaz. Intrigued by anything to do with children’s entertainment, Andy had approached Burt with the idea of his making an appearance on the show, whose format allowed for such flexibility. Burt assured Andy, as a visiting celebrity, that he could do “anything he wanted.” What Andy did not immediately tell Burt was that the show was going to be a test for a concept we’d been kicking around.
One night during our writing sessions for Andy’s special, we discussed an incident that had occurred on Carson’s show several years earlier. Ask any freshman comic from the ‘60s or ‘70s about the unscheduled “wave-over.” If Carson liked your act, at his whim you were invited to the next level, which was to cross the stage and actually sit and chat with His Excellency. If you finished your act and didn’t get the wave-over, that is, if Johnny just applauded and thanked you but made no attempt to speak to you, you probably should have considered the insurance business as a new career before you even left the stage. Many comedians survived the non-wave-over, but it was a bitch to really make it without that stamp of approval from the man who’d launched the careers of probably 80 percent of all working comics.
After performing his set on the stage of The Tonight Show, a young comic got his big break and received the much-coveted wave-over from Johnny. This was his chance to interact with the Titan of Late-Night Comedy in a way that could get him better bookings, better-looking women, and, best of all, a shot at his own series. It sounds insanely capricious but the wave-over could indeed represent such opportunities. Unfortunately, at the same time the comic was getting his wave-over, forces were at work to unhinge his karmic fortune. Don Rickles was taping a sitcom down the hall and decided to waltz over to see what his buddy Johnny was doing. Just as the young comic was plopping his ass down for some quality time with Mr. Carson, Rickles entered stage right and the audience went bonkers. Rickles, as usual, was hilarious. Suddenly the young comic was rolled over by the wheels of the Master of Put-Down Comedy, and Rickles wasn’t even aware of it. Carson was now in stitches and the young comic became wallpaper.
Andy was taken by the unfairness of show business and the small twists of fate that propel one person to great heights and cast another into the depths. In keeping with the Has-Been Corner and its cavalier dismissal of one’s life work, Andy loved the notion that just as one guy’s big chance presents itself, another, bigger fish just swims in and sucks him up without so much as a second thought.
For our little experiment in Columbus, our young comic was replaced by Dr. Zmudee, an expert on an arcane field of psychology called psychogenesis. Psychogenesis is an actual field of study. In laymen’s terms, it is the origin of physical or psychological states, be they normal or abnormal, as seen as a product of the interaction between conscious and unconscious psychological pressures. Did I lose you? Good. That said, we went to Ohio to play out this human drama.
We met with Burt outside the production facility and told him what we planned. He balked at first but Andy reminded him of his promise to let us do what we wanted. Andy also stipulated that Burt was not to tell anyone else of our charade — or that Andy and I knew each other — particularly the host of Bananaz. Then I left for the studio.
Once the taping of Bananaz was under way, the host introduced me to his audience, comprising people ranging in age from about six to ten.
“Kids, today we have a very smart man, Dr. Zmudee, who has written a really interesting book called Psychogenesis. Welcome, Dr. Zmudee,” he said as I entered and sat down. “So, tell us about your book.”
Had the host said I was going to come out and skin a live cat the applause might have been warmer, but undaunted I proceeded to launch into a turgid description of the theory of psychogenesis and my attendant book. The real study of psychogenesis is so complex it would have taxed a room full of physicists, but to a pack of children my words instantly threw them into exquisite boredom. Meanwhile, the host, though completely lost in my gobbledygook, was trying his best to feign interest as I earnestly tried to convey the extreme importance of my life’s study.
Magically, out of the wings, like the angel Gabriel sent to save the show, came the rising young television star Andy Kaufman. There was a collective sigh from the children, the host, and the crew, as if they were being delivered from a firing squad. Andy entered waving. No one of his caliber had ever guested the show. In just a few seconds the audience had been spared a death by psychogenesis and had been given the joy of having a real entertainer in their midst. In about ten minutes Andy had the crowd nuts with glee, as Dr. Zmudee sat mute and smoldering, his big chance at explaining psychogenesis trammeled by this upstart. Andy finally left to screams and cheers, and Dr. Zmudee began where he’d left off. A pall again visited the set and settled in as the good doctor rambled on about his abstruse field of interest.
Suddenly Andy appeared again, this time armed with his congas. The house went wild and he began an animated set of drumming and singing as the now quite irritated Dr. Zmudee sat uncomfortably nearby and watched as his opportunity passed. After a few minutes, Dr. Zmudee could stand it no more. He jumped to his feet and demanded of the host that the enormously rude Kaufman be made to leave so that he could finish his interview.
“Hey kids,” said Andy brightly, “who do you want to see? Him … or me?”
The kids clamored in unison, “YOU!!!” The vote thus tallied, the steaming Dr. Zmudee had lost by a landslide.
“You’re just a bunch of uneducated little brats,” spat Dr. Zmudee. “You wouldn’t know something of substance if it bit you on the ass!”
The gauntlet now hurled, the kids responded with angry hisses and boos as the host paled, having lost any control. Andy tapped his conga as he beat out an attack on Dr. Zmudee. “Hey, Doc, why don’t you take your book and go home. Better yet, why don’t you write the follow-up, How to Put an Audience to Sleep in Two Minutes.”
As the kids laughed him to scorn, Dr. Zmudee snapped. He leaped across the stage at the conga-playing smart-ass who had ruined his big interview. (Allow me to note that this production was going out live to greater Columbus.) Dr. Zmudee shoved Andy to the floor, but the plucky comedian responded by rebounding and applying a classic wrestling hold. The battle escalated to the cheers of the little Romans. A shocked Hurt Dubrow made a quick decision from the control booth. Reaching over the console, he flipped a switch cutting the signal to thousands of sets across the city.
Suddenly the station’s switchboard lit up like Times Square. Hundreds of incensed and distraught parents were furious over the spectacle of two men fighting on their children’s show, but were probably even more pissed that the station went to black before they could ascertain a winner. Burt was summoned to his boss’s office and given the ultimatum that his job was at stake if Andy and Dr. Zmudee didn’t go on the five o’clock news to explain and apologize.
When the time came we faced the camera, side by side, ready to be interviewed by the two anchors. We stared blankly into the lens like a pair of zombies, seeming merely to mouth the words we’d been given. We later called this the “Viet Cong Confession.”
“So Andy,” said one of the chipper anchors, “you two actually know each other?”
“Yes,” droned Andy, doing his best automaton, “that is true.”
“Yes, right,” I concurred robotically, “we know one another.”
The anchors didn’t know what to make of our odd behavior and continued. “And Dr. Zmudee? You’re not really a doctor, is that right?”
“No,” I said.
There was a second of confusion as the other anchor picked up the cue. “Is that no, you’re not a doctor, or no, that’s not right and in fact you are?”
“Correct,” I said.
Before they could ask any more dumb questions Andy and I suddenly turned on each other and started the fight all over. They quickly cut to a commercial as we caromed off the desk and nearly destroyed their weather map. Security was called to escort us out of the facility. Separate cabs were hailed and we were sent to the airport, where we reunited in a lounge and laughed our asses off.
Burt kept his job, mostly because the station’s ratings quadrupled during that five o’clock newscast. Perhaps Burt discovered something that day, for he would, years later, become a wildly rich man as co-creator and executive producer of that other unbridled slugfest, Ferry Springer. Years later, Andy and I would reissue this bit, including the Viet Cong Confession, on the ABC show Fridays to a great deal of clamor in the press and from the public. The influences of Kaufmanism would be felt near and far for years to come.