Ring …
B: Hello?
A: Bob, it’s Andy.
B: Andy, it’s four a.m.
A: Sorry, but I decided to do it.
B: [Groggy] Do what?
A: Fake my death.
B: Great! Call me tomorrow.
A: Bob, I’m not joking. I shouldn’t even be saying this over the phone. Can you meet me at Canter’s?
B: You mean now?
A: Yeah, it’s important. This might be the most important day in my entire career.
[Thirty minutes later, I’m nursing a bowl of matzo-ball soup. Kaufman arrives ten minutes later. He sits down and orders a bowl of chocolate ice cream.]
B: That stuff’s gonna kill you.
A: I’m a dead man anyway. [He laughs.] OK, here’s what we need to do.
B: Stop right there, white man. What do you mean “we”? Andy, if I told you once I told you a thousand times: I think your faking your death is brilliant, and I know if anyone can pull it off, it’s you. But if you’re truly serious about doing it, you’ve got to count me out. This is one put-on I can’t help you with.
A: Why not?
B: Well, for one thing, it’s illegal. People fake their deaths every day.
A: They do?
B: Of course they do. Some of them don’t want to pay alimony or child support, or they’re looking to rip off the insurance company on their death benefits. Andy, you’re in SAG, AFTRA, the Writers Guild. Your dad probably has a large death benefit on you already. If you come up dead, those companies are going to pay large death payoffs to your family, especially since you’re so young. If they find out you’re not really dead, you’ll probably get a jail sentence.
A: But they’re not going to find out.
B: But if they do, you’ll be in a hell of a lot of trouble. And I’m not going to be in it with you. Besides, if you really go ahead with this, you shouldn’t tell anyone, especially me. It’s that special. Besides, you can’t ask me to lie to your mother about you being dead when you’re not. It would kill her. I couldn’t do that.
[I could see what I was telling him was beginning to get through to him.]
B: Andy, if you do this, really do it, you’ve got to convince even me that you really died. If you can do that, you’ve achieved the greatest put-on of all time.
A: Convince you?
B: Yes, convince me. And seeing that we’ve been talking about this for three years now, I don’t know how that is remotely possible.
A: Well, I see I have my work cut out for me then.
Two years later, Andy Kaufman died. I went to his funeral. I didn’t shed a tear. In fact, I had to bite my lip a few times to keep from exploding in laughter. At one point, I looked over to Bob Morton (Morty) a few pews over. Morty was a good friend of Andy’s and was the executive producer of the Letterman show. I think he was biting his lip too, trying not to laugh. Everyone was expecting Andy to jump out of the casket at any time. I knew he wouldn’t—that would have been too easy. Besides, being in it for the long run (thirty years), Kaufman would never give the trick away. He was old-school wrestling. You never admitted hoaxes … ever. It was a sacred code between the wrestlers back then and Kaufman. Lynne and I adhered to the same code.
I know this must all sound strange to the layman. But those of you who know about “the code” understand exactly what I’m talking about and how one would go to the grave keeping the secrets. Many have. The only reason I’m giving it up now is that Andy set a time limit on this one. Thirty years. So I’ve kept my part of the bargain and kept my mouth shut. But no more. The prank’s over. I want him back and he’s coming back.
Lynne, on the other hand—I really can’t tell if she is in on it or not. Her thinking I’m insane believing Andy’s alive might just be her working reverse psychology on me. She now believes the “secret” Andy made her and me promise to keep from his parents may just be the tip of the iceberg. His being gay was just half the story.
I’d be lying if I said the other half didn’t cross my mind also. It had crossed many others’ minds as well. But the mere thought of it was so forbidden, so unspeakable, no one dared utter the words. Lynne said, “Why was he so insistent that his parents never know?” Was the secret even darker than we all imagined?
I leafed through the book I had written about Andy nearly fourteen years ago and I listed it then, but more to scoff at the possibility than anything else. Was I wrong? Had the truth been staring me in the face for so long and my own personal homophobic denial made it more than I wanted to bear? Somewhere in my psyche was it a lot easier to believe he faked his death than to face such a horrible possibility? Did Andy Kaufman, in fact, die on May 16, 1984, and did he die of AIDS?
I didn’t want to believe it. No, it was all too horrible to comprehend. Therefore, it must not be true. Yet it crossed everyone’s mind who knew Andy, if even for a millisecond. But in the case of Lynne, those milliseconds added up to minutes and then hours, months, years, fueled by the knowledge of his being gay. Was this large-cell carcinoma, in fact, the AIDS virus misread at the time? After all, in ’84 not much was known of the disease. People were dying from it, but nobody had put two and two together yet. It wasn’t until a year after Kaufman’s death that Rock Hudson was diagnosed with AIDS, and only then did people first begin to take it seriously. Hudson was considered the first celebrity to die of AIDS. Could Kaufman have been the first instead? What were the signs? Could he have contracted it during his sexual experimentation with males in the Castro, as Lynne had suggested, or did he pick it up at the Mustang Ranch from a hooker? Before AIDS, brothels really didn’t enforce the “condom rule” as they legally do now. Would it somehow be easier on me if I knew Andy contracted it from a woman instead of a man? Would I think less of him if it was a male? Damn, why couldn’t he have just faked his fucking death and that be the end of it? Why couldn’t well enough be left alone? And yet, should Lynne and I hide from the truth no matter how horrible it could be? Why couldn’t Kaufman’s life be like that nice and tidy film Scott and Larry wrote? Why couldn’t all our lives be like a Hollywood movie with a beautiful score by R.E.M. and a lovable Paul Giamatti playing me and a $20 million movie star like Jim Carrey playing Andy? Why couldn’t everyone just leave well enough alone? Why couldn’t Kaufman live on in people’s minds as that funny Latka fellow from Taxi or that zany oddball who lip-synced to Mighty Mouse on SNL?
The answer was, Because Andy was real. A great artist whose work influenced countless other artists and will for years to come. And it’s the job and responsibility of those who knew and loved him to bear witness to the truth and be honest about his life no matter how painful that truth may be. He belongs to history now, so let’s lay it down right.
Toward the end, Lynne told me, the doctors gave him radiation that relieved the pressure of the tumors. Tumors caused by metastasis of lung cancer, which she believes may have been caused by AIDS. I, on the other hand, believe the tumors the doctors were looking at belonged to someone else’s X-rays. He wasn’t easy to be with at the end either. Nobody in that state is. He was pissed off he was dying this way. After all, he had so much more to do. He was just getting started. Only thirty-four years old. Was this some form of cosmic joke? At times, he’d break into mad laughter about it, and at other times, he’d openly weep. And yet somehow, Lynne stood by him. The woman should have been given a medal. The Kaufmans wouldn’t have even been there when he supposedly died if Lynne hadn’t called them. Andy didn’t want his family to know he had cancer or even be with him at the end. She said, “He was REALLY pissed at me when I called them in for what would be his final days. He wanted to die in peace.”
* * *
“On June 5, 1984 [twenty days after Andy Kaufman’s reported death], a fifty-eight-year-old man went to his doctor’s office to learn the results of a biopsy of a purple spot on his neck. He was told that it was Kaposi’s sarcoma. The man’s name was Rock Hudson. One year later, as his doctor, Michael Gottlieb, watched the actor’s helicopter land atop UCLA Medical Center heliport, Gottlieb walked down to the hospital auditorium where countless reporters gathered. He stood up to a podium with a microphone. He knew he needed to be deliberate in every word he spoke. More than anything else, he did not want to sound embarrassed. That he knew was what had been the problem all along with this infernal epidemic. It was about sex, and it was about homosexuals. Taken all together, it had simply ‘embarrassed’ everyone, he knew, and tens of thousands of Americans would die because of it. It was time for people to stop being ‘embarrassed,’ Gottlieb decided, if our society was ever to beat this horrible enemy. In calm, firm tones, Gottlieb began reading from his prepared statement. ‘Mr. Hudson is being evaluated and treated for complications of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome—AIDS.’”
That haunting passage is from a remarkable book, And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts, and I wonder if that same embarrassment lay at the core of Andy Kaufman’s mysterious disappearance. All this talk of faking his death or not may be nothing more than misdirection from the real illusion that had taken place.
Why is it when Michelle Maccarone (owner of Maccarone Gallery in New York City, the art house that was mounting a retrospective of Andy’s work and recognizing him as an important artist) went to see Andy’s dad, Stanley, thinking he would be overjoyed with the news, instead heard him belligerently scoff, saying, “Why do a retrospective on him? He wasn’t an artist. He was a troublemaker.” His own dad. Did Stanley know what Lynne was implying? Did he know about Andy’s being gay? Had he himself considered AIDS too? Was war hero Stanley Kaufman himself too embarrassed by what his son might have been into? Months later, after Michelle met with him, Stanley Kaufman himself would die, taking to his own grave secrets still unspoken, secrets that Lynne and I could now reveal.
* * *
Ring …
A: Hello … cough … cough
B: Andy, it’s Bob. Stop with the coughing already. I think it’s a dead giveaway.
A: I don’t know. Everyone seems to believe it.
B: Can you talk?
A: Wait one second. I want to make sure Lynne can’t hear … [pause] … It’s OK. She’s in the other room with the TV on. What’s up?
B: Andy, you can’t tell people you’re dying because you ate too much chocolate.
A: Who told you that?
B: Little Wendy.
A. She did?
B: Yes … and so did Cathy Utman.
A: Well, I read this book called Sugar Blues. And it said too much chocolate can kill you. And Bob, you know nobody eats more chocolate than me. So I’m telling people that’s what’s killing me.
B: Well, quit telling them that. It sounds ludicrous. Nobody’s going to believe you if you tell them that.
B: Andy, I don’t care about the book. Do you want people to believe you’re dying?
A: Yes.
B: OK. Then don’t go telling people that chocolate-covered Cocoa Puffs did you in.
A: What should I tell them?
B: Don’t ask me. It’s your death. You figure it out.
A: Maybe I’ll just stick with the cancer.
B: Stick with the cancer. I like the cancer. So let me ask you, how long are you going to stay dead for?
A: Good question. I told Lynne if I was going to be a little boy about it, I’d go in hiding for one or two years. But if I was going to be a man about it, it’d be twenty to thirty years.
B: THIRTY YEARS!?! YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS!
A: Well, think about it. Everyone knows I’m always pulling pranks. They’d expect me to disappear for a year or two, maybe even three or four. But if I’m gone for say twenty to thirty years, they’ll really believe I died.
B: That’s true. But your career will be over.
A: It’s over now. Besides, did I tell you George was trying to get me on another sitcom? I’d rather be dead. If showbiz is no longer fun, I’d rather be doing something else anyway.
B: Andy, do you know how long thirty years is? It’s a lifetime. What are you going to do over all that time?
A: I don’t know, but it’ll certainly be fun starting from scratch.
B: Christ, Andy, in thirty years people might not even remember who you are. So what’s the point?
A: Well, that’s the risk I’ll have to take. If it looks like I’m being forgotten, I might come back earlier.
B: This is crazy.
A: I know. It’s the best idea I’ve ever had. There’s nothing else I can ever do to top it. How do I not go for it? Bob, I’ve thought about this for two to three years. Now there’s no turning back. I’m gonna die.
B: Are you going to tell George about this?
A: NO!!! No commission for thirty years. I don’t think he’d like that.
B: So Lynne doesn’t know?
A: Nope, she thinks I’m really sick but I’m not taking it seriously.
B: Well, you better start acting like you’re taking it seriously or she’s not going to believe it if you don’t.
A: She will. I have that figured out too. Believe me, it all works out in the long run.