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CHAPTER 1

“I Am Not a Comedian”

Phone rings …

B: Hello?

A: Bob!

B: Yeah, Andy.

A: How would I go about getting my hands on a cadaver without anyone knowing?

B: Go dig one up, like Igor did.

A: Seriously, I’m not joking.

B: Neither am I. You could probably buy one from a city morgue some place. They routinely sell those poor homeless bastards to medical schools so med students can practice on them. But there’s going to be paperwork. Besides, you need a body that looks like you—that complicates the matter.

A: Well, I’m kind of figuring that one out. If I died in a car crash or fire, that would make it harder to identify the body.

B: Yes, that’s true, but they’re still going to check dental records. How are you going to get around that?

A: Maybe I can have some of my teeth pulled out and throw them in the fire. Will that do?

B: You’ll have to yank a hell of a lot of them out. They usually have X-rays of the entire set of teeth, uppers and lowers.

A few weeks later. Ring …

B: Hello Andy, what’s up?

A: I figured it out!

B: Figured what out?

A: I don’t go the cadaver route. I work with a real live body. I find someone who’s dying of some disease, like cancer. At the end, they’re all shrunken up and the chemotherapy makes them lose all their hair.

B: OK so far. I’m with you.

A: Bob, it’s just what we did with Clifton. We made everyone think that you were me as Tony through prosthetics. I do kind of the same thing, but this time I find somebody who kind of resembles me who’s terminal. I’ll pay them off. This way, they can leave a substantial amount of money for their loved ones. And then on my end, I’ll start to look like them.

B: How you gonna do that?

A: I’ll lose weight. Shave my head. Maybe I’ll even go through chemo myself. I wonder how much of that stuff a healthy person can take without doing too much damage to themselves. My hair will really fall out and I’ll have severe weight loss. Everyone will really think I’m dying. Nobody has ever gone this far to pull something like this off. It would be the crowning achievement of my career.

B: What career? You’ll be dead.

A: Exactly. Dead, but not forgotten. Eventually I’ll come back.

B: Andy, are you serious about this?

A: Dead serious.

* * *

Lynne

Every time Andy would go to a doctor, he’d ask him if he had cancer. I’d get so mad at him, I’d say, “Andy, you’re going to talk yourself into getting cancer.” So he called me from the doctor’s office one day and told me he had cancer. He said in a bragging tone, “You see, I told you I was going to get cancer.” His doctors sat us down over the first week and said, “There’s nothing we can do. You might not even live for six months. You’re going to die.”

The amazing thing is Andy took it like somebody had just told him he couldn’t go to the movies—“Oh, all right.” It’s like he believed in magic or something and he’d be cured.

I think he was so evolved because of meditation that the thought of death didn’t scare him. He didn’t want to die. He just wasn’t afraid of it. Then off we went to the Philippines to see this “psychic surgeon,” getting two treatments a day, six days a week. You’d take off all your clothes except your underwear and then lie on a table. It’s very sterile and you’re in this third world country. It’s very hot. And the décor is kind of bamboo fake Jesus. And you’re standing in line with these Japanese tourists who come there on tour because it’s a fun thing to do. So you have them, and then also a few people like Andy who are really very sick. So you lie on the table and the guy starts putting his little hands on you, and blood starts flowing out, and he starts pulling these gut-like things out of you. It only takes a few seconds and then they wipe you up and off you go, and then the next Japanese tourist lies down. So there we were for six weeks. Andy was good at first. But then around the time Bob got there, he turned for the worse and couldn’t even walk. Bob had to go to some Catholic hospital and get down on his hands and knees and pray with the nuns before they would give him this World War II walker that was like a huge cage for Andy. Then back to LA in Cedars-Sinai Hospital. It’s like he went to sleep and that was it.

When Andy died, many people thought he had faked his death. What the public didn’t know is that for many years he had talked about faking his own death. The first person I know of who he told was John Moffitt, the producer of “Fridays,” back in 1981. I know he talked to Bob about it constantly. He talked to me about it many times. He told his manager, George Shapiro. He also told an ex-girlfriend named Mimi. He told all of us he was serious about doing it and then he died. I was in the room the moment he passed, and yet at times I say to myself, Could he possibly have faked it? ’Cause if he had, he would have taken it all the way with his family, his loved ones being around the bed. He would have taken it that far. He would have done it to me.

* * *

If I had lectured him back in the States about crossing his t’s and dotting his i’s in regard to making those around him believe he was dying, once in the Philippines he took the task to heart. When I arrived in Baguio City, Philippines, on April 7, 1984, he totally appeared as someone who would be dead in a short time. He was skin and bones. He could hardly walk. Lynne would have to assist him going to the bathroom, clean him up and help him back into bed. It was truly a sad, pathetic sight worthy of an Academy Award. I was quite impressed. I couldn’t wait to speak to him privately, but Lynne never left his side. Occasionally he would weep about his condition. I had only one opportunity to talk to him alone. He had fallen asleep and Lynne momentarily left the room to get a Coke from a machine down the hall. I jumped up and approached his bed. I shook him ever so gently and whispered, “Andy, wake up. It’s Bob.” He didn’t stir. I shook him harder. He slowly started to wake. “I want to talk to you. Lynne’s going to be back any minute.” He began to come around, his eyes flickered and then opened. I said, “Andy, you with this dying routine … It’s fantastic. Totally believable.” He smiled softly and then said in a raspy, low-energy voice, “I’m really dying, Bob.” I heard the key jiggle in the lock. Lynne had returned. I quickly ran back to the couch and picked up the paper as if I was reading it. Lynne entered the room. “How’s he doing?” “Still sleeping, I guess.”

He supposedly died at 6:20 p.m. on May 16, 1984. I was not bedside when he died. I had gone home for a few hours to sleep when I got the call from his secretary, Linda Mitchell. She simply said, “It’s over.” I hung up the phone and said to myself, “Over? … We’ve only just begun.” I flew to the funeral in Great Neck a couple of days later. At the funeral, I had to try my best not to laugh out loud. Luckily, a stifled laugh with a little cough thrown in can appear as a sob. So now the long wait would start, year after year after year would pass. Surely he’d try somehow to get in contact with me. I certainly would receive some sign, something that only I would understand and could never be linked back to him. But nothing. Cold silence. Eventually, over time, I too believed he had died. He had to. Yes, he told me he was going to fake his death, but ten, twenty, twenty-five years later? It just had to be the most unimaginable coincidence ever. Had to be. Who plans to fake his death one day and then the next day really dies? It just doesn’t happen, but it did. And it happened to the strangest individual who ever lived. And I believed his death like a fool. Against all odds believed it. Believed it because Andy wanted me to believe it. It’s just like I told him, “You’re going to have to convince me you died,” and he did. But no more. So why did I change my mind? Facts, pure and simple. If you look at all the facts, you can only draw one conclusion: Andy Kaufman faked his own death.

* * *

It seems that so many critics and fans are driven almost to the point of distraction trying to break through the Kaufman enigma. You can only imagine the questions Lynne and I fielded for years, with people wondering what he was really like. Of course, one could never answer that. Can one answer that for anyone? Do we really know what made Abe Lincoln tick? Can Daniel Day Lewis tell us? Can anybody really explain you to anyone else? I’d venture to say you couldn’t even explain yourself to yourself if you tried. Yet over the years, so many people (bright people) are still trying to figure Kaufman out. Intellectual thought falls short. But if there is one thing family and friends can agree on, it’s the fact that he was strange, very strange. Perhaps the closest we can get to understand Kaufman is through his adherence to transcendental meditation, sex, fun, and metaphysics in no particular order. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that an understanding of Andy is going to be easy. After all, his is the trigonometry of psyches. Things will not be black or white even though I will attempt at times to paint them as such, more for my own sanity than the reader’s. Writing about madness hopefully needn’t make the writer mad.

And also throw out all that comedy bullshit. I’m telling you, he was not a comedian and really shouldn’t be judged through the prism of comedy, or you’ll never come close to understanding him. Andy was funny (sometimes) because he was an absurdist, but being funny truly wasn’t a goal. Remember, Andy wasn’t waiting for the laughs. If they came, OK. He’d take them. But if they didn’t—and many times they didn’t—it really made no difference to him. It might have mattered to the TV executives, his managers, club owners, and the public, but to Andy, never. Laughter? How trite.

If he wasn’t a comedian, then what was he? To me, Andy was a behavioral scientist. He was constantly measuring people’s reaction to stimuli. Andy instinctively knew back in ’72 what neuroscientists have recently discovered: that laughter is one way the brain deals with the discomfort of an embarrassing situation (Foreign Man), inappropriate jokes (Tony Clifton), or the surprise of an unexpected punch line (“Take my wife … please take her.”). He was always looking at the human condition and poking his nose around in areas where no one else did. Who interviews a girl with a tape recorder right after he has sex with her for the first time, asking why she doesn’t like to have her legs up high while she’s having intercourse with him? Who would ask such a thing? The sex researcher Alfred Kinsey perhaps, but even Kinsey would be more demure about it and have the young lady fill out a questionnaire. Not Andy, because Andy doesn’t care what she answers. That’s irrelevant. What fascinates him is her shock at his asking. That’s the behavior he’s interested in exploring—the “uncomfortableness” of a situation. This is the behavior he would explore time and time again.

When he first started doing the Foreign Man act, which he lifted from seeing a Pakistani man telling bad jokes at Café Wha? in Greenwich Village when he was fourteen, he could see how painful it was for the man not getting laughs (even though Andy and a friend were dying inside). So Andy used that same uncomfortableness to his advantage. You were uncomfortable watching his Foreign Man character’s ineptitude. The uncomfortableness led to nervous and embarrassed laughter from the audience. Andy milked that embarrassed laughter and accused the audience of “laughing at me, not with me.” And then he would start to cry. This would only cause the audience to laugh louder. Occasionally there’d be a few sensitive people in the audience (usually women) who would get very offended at the audience for laughing at this poor soul (not knowing the whole thing was a put-on).

Andy would also utilize real situations from his own life, no matter how painful, and present them onstage. Sometimes they got people to laugh. Sometimes they got people angry. Sometimes they got an audience to walk out. To Andy, it was all the same. He just wanted real emotions. He wanted his audience to be in the present. When he ran into me in ’74, I was fresh out of guerrilla street theater and radical Abbie Hoffman-style politics—fused with an almost unrelenting devotion to psychologist Abraham Maslow’s theory of “self-actualization” and a living-in-the-present philosophy—and Andy and I immediately clicked. It was uncanny how we thought exactly alike. In interviews he would state, “Once I met Bob, I just knew he had to be my writer. We just looked at the world the same way.”

Never forget that Kaufman’s psychological imperative onstage was to search for the “uncomfortableness” in every situation. This bloodletting, like the Stations of the Cross, led him on the road to spiritual enlightenment. Performance would therefore become a sacred ritual, performance as High Mass. Fame and fortune would bring him comfort and security. Andy, on the other hand, would rather be uncomfortable and insecure and not a prisoner to the karma of the material world. As you will see, give him the opportunity to sabotage his career and he’d leap at it. When Dick Ebersol, producer of Saturday Night Live, designed a vote to banish him from SNL, it was just too tantalizing for Andy not to go along with it. His deep-rooted martyr complex couldn’t be happier! Jesus had his Judas. Kaufman had his Ebersol. Judas and Ebersol have their roles to play in order for both narcissists to reach transcendence.

Andy was in heaven (not that the vote didn’t hurt him—it did—deeply, which he also enjoyed). But at the same time it gave him fodder for his next scenario to act out. Andy is kicked out of show business. How uncomfortable is that! How embarrassing. Christ, it’s another Everest to climb.

In this context, the ultimate scenario, Kaufman faking his death, is par for the course. Andy endures the crucifixion and martyrdom and all the benefits that go along with it. “They’ll see how much they miss me when I’m gone.” But like they said in the film Man on the Moon, it’s a showbiz death in a showbiz town in a showbiz hospital. No one really dies. Not really! What fun!

The petty squabbles that people would get into would also fascinate him. He’d love to get people all riled up, taking the bait, and watch them go to pieces. And then he’d laugh, much as we would viewing a box full of puppies romping, biting, or tumbling over one another.

Andy was above the fray, not in an arrogant way, but more in an innocent way. He was probably one of the most innocent people I’ve ever known, at least in the beginning. But remember, we’re talking forty to forty-five years ago. He existed smack in the middle of the ’60s. Remember the flower children? Andy surrounded himself with them. It’s been pointed out, most recently by writer Vernon Chatman, who just spent three years editing Andy’s micro-cassette tapes of over eighty hours for Drag City’s Andy and His Grandmother album, that Andy lacked cynicism. Vernon could not “detect one ounce of cynicism in Kaufman—none.” Correctly so. And yet cynicism, like pain, can protect us from hurt. Put your hand in a fire, you quickly withdraw it. The pain protects you from more injury. So too cynicism protects us from the pain of society. Yes, it makes us jaded, but it constantly reminds us that there is a real cruel world out there.

Because Andy didn’t have that cynicism, that safeguard, when a series of mishaps happened to him, such as being voted off SNL, or being kicked out of the Transcendental Meditation movement, he had no defenses. He couldn’t cynically shrug it off. He’d feel the sting of rejection and couldn’t release it. Did that sting internalize itself in the form of cancer cells, as Lynne suggests? Did they rebel and grow? Obviously a positive mental state has a lot to do with good health. Did this extremely healthy individual’s own gene pool simply fail to cope with the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” even if he brought that “outrageous fortune” on himself? Did something in him just say, “It’s time for Elvis to leave the building”? Or, did those rejections, mixed with his obsession about faking his death, reach such a crescendo that he finally acted upon it?

* * *

“I AM NOT A COMEDIAN!” He would yell it from the rooftops. Andy couldn’t tell a joke to save his life. Wouldn’t want to. He was however a bullshit artist, a master in the art of the humbug or “put-on,” a prankster. Now most of the time, laughter accompanies a good prank. Maybe that’s where the confusion came in. Usually at first people who are pranked are annoyed and don’t laugh. But soon, if they have a sense of humor, they lighten up and go ahead and laugh with everyone else. Some don’t. We’ve all experienced people in our lives like that. They’re better to stay away from. Many of them don’t have a sense of humor and after being pranked will say indignantly, “That wasn’t funny.” But Andy, on the other hand, always found life funny, if not downright hilarious. He had no use for people who didn’t. In fact, if he stumbled upon one of these individuals, he took it upon himself to teach them a lesson by becoming even more obnoxious, sometimes even sadistically so. Eventually he would take on the entire entertainment industry, and he would either win or lose, depending on whether you had a sense of humor or not.

To some, Andy was a man-child. Michael Stipe of R.E.M., the band that wrote the homage to Kaufman in Man on the Moon, thought Andy was “a seven-year-old his entire life. I really feel like he was trying to lift us out of some morass of banality, of accepting everything for what it is rather than questioning it.” Was Andy a wide-eyed innocent? Or was he a fearless and subversive outlaw, lampooning the mediocrity of the entertainment industry? To me, his writer for ten years, he was both. Did he ever sit down and openly discuss lampooning the mediocrity around us? No. He would never intellectualize about anything he did and hated when people tried. Andy could also be quite funny if he wanted to be and could construct a comedic scenario with the best of them, but then—a moment later—purposely bore the audience to death just to see how much they could take before they walked out. When asked whether he was concerned that this sort of behavior could cost him a mass audience, his reply was, “I don’t perform for the masses. I perform for a small group who knows what I’m doing.” I would even take it a step further and say Andy was performing for himself. Blissful self-indulgence. This attitude would keep his manager George Shapiro up at night. As for me, I was sharing the rocket ship with Evel Knievel. Director Judd Apatow said it best: “Where do you go if you’re Bob Zmuda? After you write for Kaufman, how can you possibly write for somebody else?” You’re right, Judd, you can’t. So what do you do? Just keep writing for Kaufman! Dead or alive, it doesn’t matter.

* * *

Alan Zweibel, one of the early and top writers from SNL, captured his first impression of Andy’s genius:

I heard about Andy Kaufman before I saw him. I remember they were talking about him and how he got fired from a club in Florida and they said why did he go there in the first place? Why would they understand him? And then I didn’t really get what that sentence meant. And then one night I was at the Improv and did see that Andy Kaufman was on. And I sat in the back of the room out of curiosity. So did the other comics. And I saw him do Mighty Mouse and thought I was going to go crazy. I saw him do the Foreign Man. Here was a guy that showed that you didn’t need language, you didn’t need English to elicit a response from an audience. I have never seen anybody and probably to this very day who could manipulate an audience any way he wanted to. When he would do Tony Clifton, he would get the audience to hate him. He would have the audience booing him. And then at the end he would have them cheering him. He would be able to take them any place he wanted them to go. And people started coming to the club to see this guy. At Rick Newman’s Catch a Rising Star, Carl Reiner and Rob Reiner would come to see him. One night Woody Allen was there. On another, Dustin Hoffman. It was this phenomenon. People would come in and go, “Golly, I could never do a thing like this.” I would never think that anybody could do a thing like this. I could never think that a thing like this should be done. But it is being done and look how great it is. It was so different than anyone’s background orientation. I don’t know how this happened. I was impressed. Besides his talent, there was a commitment there. He would meditate before every performance. There was a real commitment to what he did. He was unfailing. He just dug in. But I worried about him. I thought, “Where is he going to do this?” People write jokes, tell jokes, and take the check. Where was he going to go with this outside of the Improv and Catch a Rising Star? How was this guy going to make a living?

* * *

What drove Andy to do the things he did? As in most performers, I believe there was a level of narcissism at play. In Andy’s case, throw in some sadomasochistic tendencies also. I say this because at times he truly enjoyed being rejected and hurt. Once Jeff Conaway, a cast member of Taxi, got drunk and started beating the hell out of him. He didn’t even protect himself and took the beating, à la Gandhi. Emotionally and physically he was hurting, but Jeff believed, “He pushed me to do it and enjoyed it.”

He wallowed in the pain. Another time, after being voted off SNL, he immediately went on David Letterman, making a routine out of the collapse of his career. I tell people, “Andy Kaufman died for our sins”—because I believe his psychological imperative in faking his death was martyrdom.

Yes, I believe that he faked his death. How can I think anything different? He talked to me about it endlessly for three years, and also to others. It would be his “greatest illusion,” he said, and when he was gone, “people should be ashamed for they had the greatest performer in the world in their midst and blew it.”

The consummate performer to the end, leaving them wanting MORE and sadistically punishing them by not giving it to them. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Music up: the theme from King of Kings plays. Roll credits. Is that where you are going to end it, Andy? Lifting Jesus’s routine from an MGM biblical pic? But let’s not forget the resurrection. Aren’t you at least curious what a stir you’d create if you returned? That was the plan after all, wasn’t it? Remember, you told Lynne, “Twenty or thirty years and I’ll be back.” Well, it’s been thirty years! Mom and Pop are gone. If you wanted to walk on stage dressed in leather with a boy toy on a leash, be my guest. And don’t worry about jail time. I’m sure you could easily pay back all those life insurance policies you ripped off in no time. We’d book you in the biggest venues around and charge top dollar. Who wouldn’t pay to see the man who successfully faked his death? Andy Kaufman, the greatest entertainer of all time, returns. They always said you were twenty years ahead of your time. Well, perhaps now, thirty years later, the public has caught up with you. Give them one more chance. Your fans await you!

* * *

According to Andy, Janice Kaufman, his mother, admitted that it was her fault that Andy started to go to psychiatrists as early as age four. “I thought that children should always be happy and when Andy wasn’t, I thought something was wrong.” Andy said, “It’s not that I was crazy, it’s just that I was sad at times because the world was sad at times. When I would perform, it wasn’t sad anymore.”

I think Andy and I were kindred spirits in this regard. Both of our dads yelled a lot. I mean a lot. I remember going down into the basement of my home and performing to imaginary audiences just to get away from it. I would venture to say that many fledgling performers did the same. Performance was distraction from the harsh reality of life. When Kaufman and I met, we intrinsically knew this and from that moment on, the performances never stopped. It was 24/7. This nonstop act unleashed an overabundance of pranks, many times heaped on unwitting strangers, like it or not.

The fact that there were now two of us created a dynamic where one was constantly fueling the other. We were like the would-be murderers Hickock and Smith in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Alone, they wouldn’t have done what they did to that unfortunate Clutter family. But together, they hog-tied and slaughtered them.

Kaufman and I together formed the same duo. We couldn’t control ourselves or shut it down. We were hell-bent on “slaughtering” the status quo. I imagine we had a sense of youthful entitlement, but we weren’t fascists about it. It was just fun. Fun was the key. Fun was the drug that fueled it all. Because if we were having fun, we wouldn’t have to be sad. Fun … Funny … Humor … Comedy. You can see how the comedian label got wrongly applied. Fun. It’s a word that can easily be taken for granted. People casually throw it around, as in, “We had a fun time.” People who knew Andy will always use that word seriously in describing him, pointing out that fun really was his essence. Cindy Williams of Laverne & Shirley fame was a friend of Andy’s. She elaborates:

As an actress who loved to act, I couldn’t have met a better person than Andy, who acted every moment of his life. It was one big improv continuously. Such fun. The best fun I ever had in my life.

* * *

Lynne

Fun was everything with Andy. Breakfast was fun. We’d play the card game Crazy Eights for hours at breakfast because it was so much fun. Andy once challenged my brother Steve, who was a professional, world-famous card player, to a game of Crazy Eights. For fun. Sometimes we’d be driving in a car and pull up to a light. If there was a car next to us, Andy would start to strangle me and I would mouth “HELP!” to the car next to us, then when the light changed we’d speed off leaving them in shock. Just for the fun of it.

Another story: When I first got to San Francisco, I was living in an apartment with a roommate, Michael. Michael made a comment to me at some point that Andy used a lot of toilet paper. So Andy made it his mission that every night he would bring home a four-pack roll of toilet paper (always the same brand, of course) and put the pack on the back of the toilet. The pile grew higher and higher. Andy was waiting for Michael to say something, but he didn’t. So Andy just kept adding packs until the pile reached the ceiling. Then he had me go in and ask Michael if he could get me down a pack of toilet paper because I couldn’t reach it. That was the punch line.

* * *

Fun. It’s the reason Andy chose me to be his writer. In fact, I was really more “Andy’s actor” than “Andy’s writer.” We played and pranked constantly. Andy met his match with me. No matter when, no matter where, I “acted with Andy.” It was always fun. That’s why Andy became disheartened when his fun turned to work on Taxi. WORK IS NOT FUN! As the brilliant clinical psychologist Dr. Stan Martindale said, “Once they pay you for something you love doing, they kill it for you.”

Andy realized early in life that kids got away with murder. Watch them in stores or supermarkets. They yell and cry, throw temper tantrums, and God forbid their mother physically reprimand them. Nowadays, a mom can run the risk of being thrown into jail. I am often asked, “Was that childlike nature Andy displayed a put-on?” The answer is “Yes … and no.” You see, he too wanted to get away with murder, so he would turn it off and on whenever he chose, depending on the situation. At the high end of innocence you have Foreign Man; i.e., the lovable Latka character from Taxi. In Foreign Man’s case, the innocence is amplified by the use of a foreign accent, making the character that much more vulnerable, as he tries to maneuver in a society that speaks a different language.

On Andy’s first Tonight Show appearance with Johnny Carson, when he’s invited to sit on the couch, Johnny is talking to him much like an adult to a six-year-old. In this case, he’s dropped the foreign accent all together, but the Bambi eye movement, innocence, and shyness are all part of the act. Johnny doesn’t know it at the time and believes it to be real. Besides, comedically it works for both pros. Later, on other Carson appearances, Andy turns it down quite a bit and starts acting more his age. This new dynamic throws Johnny, he doesn’t know how to play Andy, and the laughter becomes less and less each time. Soon, Johnny realizes it’s not working any more between him and Kaufman and doesn’t invite him back, at least not when he’s hosting. In retrospect, if Andy had maintained that childlike quality each time, he most likely would have been asked back countless times, and Johnny could have done his famous deadpan takes to the audience, much as he did with other childlike wackos like Charo and Tiny Tim.

But Kaufman didn’t want to maintain that innocent character all the time. After all, there was a trunk load of alter egos just waiting in the wings, some of them bad guys who wanted to wrestle or the obnoxious lounge singer Tony Clifton who needed to come out. But innocence was in his arsenal of characters and could be summoned up whenever it was called for, even in everyday life, especially to pick up girls. That wide-eyed childishness just sucked them in. It was like a lost puppy they were gonna save. Once that puppy had got them in the sack, however, he would turn into a full-grown wolf—“Wanna wrastle?”

This man/child gimmick proved quite effective in business dealings also. Let the managers and agents bust their balls figuring out the best direction to take his career in. After all, they were getting a piece of the action. He’d just sit wrapped up in his innocent cocoon, spooning chocolate ice cream into his mouth like a child. He played the innocent to his manager, George Shapiro, through his entire career, and George would reciprocate by talking back to him in baby talk—much like his real dad did. Howard West, George’s partner in Shapiro/West, knew it was an act and didn’t buy into it, so Andy steered clear of Howard, choosing to deal with George instead.

With Lynne and me, he dropped the façade altogether. We wouldn’t put up with it, nor would he want us to. Recently I was talking to Scott Thorson, who was Liberace’s lover, played by Matt Damon in HBO’s highly successful Behind the Candelabra. After watching Michael Douglas’s portrayal of Liberace, I asked Scott if Liberace really talked like that. He said, “Hell, no. Only onstage. At home, he used his real voice.” Same with Kaufman. At home, he used his real voice, at least around Lynne and me. Still, he’d cleverly work us sometimes with his hurt innocence when he really wanted something.

Like an artist with a palette of colors, Kaufman could mix and choose whatever character it would take to get what he wanted. I’m sure in the faking of his death, he had a whole other persona waiting in the wings, so he could live unrecognized. And I doubt very strongly that he would have flown off to live on some remote little island in the Caspian Sea. I think rather like Osama bin Laden, he would be hiding in plain sight, every day gloating in the satisfaction of his legendary disappearing act. Look around next time you go out. You just might spot him. Someone, someplace is probably standing next to him this very minute. By now he might be bald or have a beard and probably a good size gut to go along with it. Once he even told me he might have one of his legs amputated. This way no one would suspect him of being Andy Kaufman, who had two good legs.

This obsession with faking his death became just that—an obsession. No matter what time of day or night, if he had an idea or question about it and needed a sounding board, I was there, much to the chagrin of many a live-in girlfriend. Even though he never discussed how to fake his death with Lynne (after all, he was planning on fooling her also … and did), the around-the-clock phone calls about anything and everything just kept coming incessantly.

* * *

Lynne

Oh, man, the phone thing. I hate talking on the phone and it’s a testament to my love for Andy that I tolerated talking to him for hours at night when he or I were away from one another. He would talk endlessly because he knew it drove me crazy! I’d try to disengage and say I had to go to sleep and he’d say, “OK, good night …” But then, just try to hang up! He’d say goodnight but not hang up, then you’d say “Are you still there?” “Yes, alright, good night” … silence, silence, silence … “Hello?” “OK, you hang up first.” “No, you hang up first.” “No, you hang up” … for hours. Hours! But at the same time it was so much fun. Andy was like a little kid.

* * *

Ring …

B: Hi, Andy!

A: How did you know it’s me?

B: It’s three a.m. Who else would it be?

A: Sorry!

B: It’s OK. What’s up?

A: What’s the name of that stuff that Juliet swallowed to make her appear dead?

B: I don’t know. I think Shakespeare made up the whole story.

A: No, it was real! He just took it from some newspaper article he read.

B: Wait a second. Are you telling me Romeo and Juliet really happened?

A: Yes! We learned it in school. William Shakespeare wrote his play based on a real incident that actually occurred in Verona, Italy. You can actually visit Juliet’s tomb. It’s a big tourist attraction.

B: Is she in it?

A: I don’t know. I never went. I guess she is.

B: Well, I’m sure if you researched it some, you could find out what it is. How long does it knock you out for?

A: I don’t know. I remember once in science class, the teacher injected a live frog with the stuff or something like it.

B: What happened?

A: It died—or at least it looked dead. The next day it was hopping back around in its tank.

B: No shit!

A: Yeah, I saw it with my own eyes. If I can get ahold of some of that stuff, I’ll swallow it, appear dead, and then come back when no one’s looking.

B: How do you know when that’s going to be? And how can you be sure no one’s around?

A: Well, I would imagine after you die, like in a hospital bed, they take you down to the morgue. I can wake up there in the middle of the night. And if I already have the substitute body in the same morgue, I’ll just switch toe tags. Then I’ll put on a fake beard and clothes and simply walk out. Presto change-o! Look, I know it’s not going to be that simple, Bob. Maybe I’ll pay one of those Mexican guys who clean up there to help me. Most of those guys are illegal, anyway. They’d probably be happy to make a few extra bucks.

B: What if they wheel you down to the morgue and start performing an autopsy on you? Hell, they can kill you while you’re still alive and not even know it.

A: Why would they need to perform an autopsy on me? They already would know what I died of.

B: And what is it you’re going to die from?

A: I don’t know yet. I’m still working on it. I’m in no rush. I won’t do it until it’s perfect. All right, talk to you tomorrow.

B: Great, Andy. Now I’m going to have nightmares about bodies in morgues.

A: You want me to send a hooker over? I got phone numbers. She could be there in an hour. It’s on me. I had three working girls already this week.

B: Three? Why not just fuck groupies …

A: They’re more trouble than they’re worth … You want a hooker?

B: No, save your money. You’re going to need it. I don’t think faking your death is going to be cheap.

A: But you do admit it’s doable.

B: Of course it’s doable. People get away with it every day.

A: Can you imagine how great this will be when I actually do it?

B: Well, just remember: If you get caught, they don’t give out chocolate ice cream in jail. Speaking of jail, you better send me a piece of paper stating I had nothing to do with helping you.