Man on the Moon, Milos Forman’s new film biography of Andy Kaufman, opens with a bit borrowed from The Andy Kaufman Special, a TV show the comedian made for ABC in 1977. Jim Carrey plays Kaufman as Foreign Man (better known as Latka Gravas from Taxi); he fidgets, his eyes dart around, he stammers out a welcome and an apology. The film is terrible, he says, full of distortions and lies, so he’s edited it down to this: nothing. The gag plays out through credits and a blackout, then Carrey as Andy returns and takes it all back. He’s just been weeding out the bad audience members, he explains–the film is excellent and very funny.
Phony third-person descriptions of first-person events are a hallmark of youthful self-dramatization but can also indicate instability–the affectation is harmless unless it’s not entirely an affectation. It could be a divided consciousness that makes the victim either a spectator to himself or the perpetual subject of blank autoscrutiny. Zehme suggests that Kaufman shuttled between the poles of just such a consciousness, and that The Huey Williams Story, like his stage characters, sprang from a sinister intersection of fantasy and insanity: the imaginary friend, the invention that’s harmless unless it doesn’t go away.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Kaufman was born in Queens, New York, on January 17, 1949. His family says he got his start in showbiz at nine months, when he learned to operate a portable Victrola through the bars of his crib; by four years he’d begun performing for an invisible camera in his bedroom wall. By then the Kaufmans had moved to Great Neck, Long Island, an upper-middle-class suburb known for its swell former residents Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald–in fact The Great Gatsby had been written about a mile from the Kaufman home. Stanley Kaufman was a thrice-decorated war hero who sublimated a performing itch into selling jewelry for his father, Paul (himself “a barely repressed showman”). Andy’s mother was a former teen fashion model. Andy was the first of three children, reportedly beloved by all, especially his grandfathers Cy, a profoundly gentle man who Stanley calls “the love of Andy’s life,” and Paul, who’d bought the Victrola and who first taught Andy the art of bombing. Performing at childhood parties, Paul would purposely bungle magic tricks and fumble with musical instruments, his face creased with dismay, to the delight of the screaming tots.
Yet Andy was already withdrawn, Zehme offering no explanation beyond the death of Cy and the birth of brother Michael. While the other kids were outside playing, Kaufman sequestered himself, rehearsing, pantomiming. According to Zehme, Kaufman was already performing for Dhrupick or for himself-as-Dhrupick. “He and/or Dhrupick became many characters and now the characters were working regularly. They made noises that burst out of him; he was a crowd; he was a spectacle.” The characters were inspired by a steady diet of cartoons, monster movies, variety shows, and wrestling matches from the infant days of television. At just the age when most children outgrow their imaginary friends, Zehme suggests, Kaufman began growing into his. Eventually the impressions would become differentiated, codified, finally blossoming into personae he could manipulate, less hyperinflated ego than a kind of puppetry. “Howdy had Buffalo Bob and what great pals they were! One really couldn’t exist without the other (they even sort of sounded alike), it seemed to him. . . . Superman was two guys who were one guy. Popeye ate spinach and became a different/same Popeye.”
Bob Zmuda met Kaufman at the Improv in 1973. Kaufman had done his first realized piece, the Foreign Man-to-Elvis transformation, in which he would shift from absolute incompetence to utter command, then acknowledge the audience’s cheers with a meek “tenk you veddy much.” Its basic arc, one that confuses and tests an audience before rewarding it, is cited by comics as the essence of Kaufman’s approach. A template for all his cons–establishing a premise, then inverting it–and for the art he was to make of “dying” onstage, it impressed Zmuda. When he went backstage after the show, Kaufman convinced him that he was Foreign Man, had a bad back, and needed someone to load up his equipment. After Zmuda finished helping him, Kaufman leaped into his car and sped away, spitting out a decidedly American “Sucker!” Zmuda was even more impressed.
At least that’s how Zmuda pitches it. Zehme presents him as entirely peripheral until Kaufman’s later years. He’s often been characterized by Kaufman’s fans and colleagues as a leech who made a career out of bringing out the worst in Kaufman. The publication of his book and his role as coexecutive producer of Man on the Moon hardly refute the notion. But then, Zmuda very publicly played Tony Clifton’s sidekick Bugsy and Memphis Mafia sycophant Red West to Kaufman’s Elvis on SNL. The pair encouraged amateur psychoanalysis in the press and leaked phony scandals to eavesdropping tabloid reporters, so it’s just as likely that they agreed to demonize Zmuda, leading people to think they’d drawn the conclusion themselves. So when Zmuda calls the wrestling sexcapades of the early 80s “good clean fun” and explains that part of their overall con was to conceal his role as Kaufman’s writer, one wonders whether skepticism or credulity is the more cynical response.
Zmuda crafted a new resolution to Kaufman’s British Man routine for an SNL appearance. The standard routine was a matter of goading the audience into revolt by reading The Great Gatsby aloud with a pretentious accent, then closing the book and threatening not to finish if they wouldn’t settle down. Repeat as necessary. The Zmuda version crossed it with the Mighty Mouse routine, which everyone loved: Kaufman dangled the positive reinforcement of playing “a music record” to the audience if they’d settle down. They didn’t, and when an angry Kaufman threw on the record anyway, to sudden cheers–Here’s your damn music!–it was a scratchy recording of British Man reading Gatsby. In “Variations on a Theme,” Kaufman’s routine is “killed” by heckler Zmuda, who then kills the routine again by revealing he’s a plant. Kaufman’s 1979 shows at LA’s Huntington Hartford Theater and at Carnegie Hall were received with something like wonderment.
