_____________________________________________________________
In an email submitted to CAKS 10/2001:
"Hey, i wrote an essay on Andy and Elvis for a class called Elvis As Anthology that is taught here at the U of Iowa by Peter Nazareth."
Tenk You, Tenk You Veddy
Much!
Elvis Presley’s Influence
on Andy Kaufman
by Steve Ellerhoff
burdurhu@avalon.net
7 May 2000 (submitted to CAKS 10/2001)
"And behold a bird circling before the sun, and about nine cubits away. And I said to the angel, What is this
bird? And he said to me, This is the guardian of the earth. And I said, Lord, how is he the guardian of the earth?
Teach me. And the angel said to me, This bird flies alongside of the sun, and expanding his wings receives its
fiery rays. For if he were not receiving them, the human race would not be preserved, nor any other living creature.
But God appointed this bird thereto. And he expanded his wings, and I saw on his right wing very large letters,
as large as the space of a threshing-floor, the size of about four thousand modii; and the letters were of gold.
And the angel said to me, Read them. And I read, and they ran thus: Neither earth nor heaven bring me forth, but
wings of fire bring me forth. And I said, Lord, what is this bird, and what is his name? And the angel said to
me, His name is called Phoenix."
--from The Greek Apocalypse of Baruch
(Baruch 102-103)
Introduction
Since the beginning of my life there has been Andy Kaufman. He has played an odd role in my growing up, which is
only appropriate considering that playing odd roles was his career. He has somehow managed to pop up at unexpected
times and always comes to my attention just when I have stopped thinking about him. Even though he is gone now,
his work keeps returning, rising from his ashes, as if to make sure that he is never forgotten. As if anyone could
actually forget Andy Kaufman…
I was born on May 14, 1980, during the end of the third season of TAXI, an Emmy-winning sitcom that centered on
the lives of cabdrivers in New York City. The show boasted incredible talent: Judd Hirsch, Marilu Henner, Tony
Danza, Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, and yes, Andy Kaufman. My dad would watch it every week, biting his nails
habitually like he always has and laughing hysterically. My mom and I were in the living room too, watching the
show on a television that we replaced when I was four or five. This weekly experience went on until I had just
turned two, when TAXI was cancelled in 1982. From then on, we would watch TAXI on reruns every weeknight after
the local evening news, and by this time my little sister was watching too.
So along with Mister Rogers and the Muppets on Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, I had the cabbies at the Sunshine
Cab Company as some of my first television acquaintances. The character from TAXI who has always stood out in my
mind above all the others is Andy’s, Latka Gravas. It makes perfect sense. Latka, with his difficult-to-place gibber-jabber
was speaking my language: he was fluent in baby-talk. His manner of expression, both vocally and physically, was
one of emotion, not of thought. He was a big kid. So it’s no wonder that I’ve always carried Latka around with
me. He was the first adult on TV that I could identify with.
When TAXI was cancelled in 1982, my dad moved on to the popular new show Cheers. I didn’t. I remember throwing
fits because I had no desire whatsoever to watch a show about a bar. What’s a bar to a little boy? There was no
Andy Kaufman in it and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why my dad was laughing hysterically like he had
done with TAXI.
I remember trying to talk about TAXI with other kids but they apparently hadn’t seen it. I’d try to jog their memories
by telling them about the yellow cabs and the funny man in a white outfit who said words that made no sense. They’d
just shrug. I soon stopped thinking about it.
When I was eight, my family took its first vacation in Colorado. I was introduced there to the mountains and fly-fishing—and
I was also reintroduced to Andy Kaufman. At our condominium we had Cable TV, a luxury we didn’t subscribe to at
home. Every night Nick-At-Nite would show a half-hour program called The Best of Saturday Night Live. I was watching
this show when I first saw Andy Kaufman mouthing, "Here I come to save the day," to the Mighty Mouse
Theme. I loved it. I remember asking my dad lots of questions about Andy Kaufman. He told me stories about how
Andy would play the conga drums and cry and how you couldn’t tell if Andy was seriously upset or just fooling.
"It’s too bad he died," he said to me, "He was one of my favorite performers." It sounded more
like he was talking about an old friend than some guy on TV. I took my dad’s tone very seriously.
When I was thirteen, David Letterman switched networks from NBC to CBS. Just shortly before Dave made the big move,
I had started staying up late enough to watch late-night talk shows. Since everyone was making a big deal about
Dave switching networks, I watched and recorded every show of his last week on NBC. All week long Dave replayed
his favorite clips from his history at Late Night. This is where I saw a neckbrace-clad Kaufman slapped by wrestler
Jerry Lawler. I couldn’t believe it. I was laughing and shocked at the same time. But it didn’t end there. Andy
blew his stack at Lawler in a drawn-out tirade of beep-censored words. Here was a side of the childlike Kaufman
I hadn’t previously seen. But to a thirteen-year-old eighth grader, this verbal storm was magic. This incident
took place almost fifteen years before Jerry Springer became a household name.
Shortly after I entered high school, Nick-At-Nite finally brought back TAXI. I was reunited with the characters
from my childhood whom I hadn’t seen in years. But now I saw the show in a much different way than I had when I
was a little boy. I definitely developed a greater appreciation for Andy Kaufman’s range. Here he was Latka. Then
he’d become Latka’s other personality, the macho Vic Ferrari. Once he even became Alex Reiger, twinning Judd Hirsch’s
character perfectly. The more I saw Andy Kaufman at work, the more intrigued I became.
So by the time the film about his life, Man on the Moon, was released in 1999, along with three collections of
his writings published by Zilch Publishing and two biographies by Bill Zehme and Bob Zmuda with Matthew Scott Hansen,
I had already been asking myself, "Who was Andy Kaufman?" The recent influx of interest in Andy and his
work serves to give him a sort of widespread recognition; people are coming to realize what a talent was lost when
he died in 1984 and they are finally giving him the attention he deserves. Therefore it is the perfect time to
not only look at his life but to also analyze his work and his influences.
One of those influences, one who greatly impacted Andy Kaufman’s life and helped to shape his work, apart from
Howdy Doody, Transcendental Meditation, and all the others, was Elvis Presley.
Andy Discovers Elvis
Andy Kaufman, born on January 17, 1949, in Queens, New York, considered himself a song and dance man. Biographer
Bill Zehme makes it an explicit point in his book that music was an essential part of Andy Kaufman’s life from
the very beginning. When he was a very young child, he knew how to play records on a portable record player that
was on a dresser next to his crib. He also used to make mini-records of original songs he created in the recording
booth at Kiddie City in Douglaston, New York. And when he was in elementary school in 1959, he attended a school
assembly where he was exposed to African percussion. Babatunde Olatunji, a famous Nigerian percussionist who had
just recorded a successful debut album, amazed Andy Kaufman so much that day that Andy soon tracked him down and
received conga lessons from him. Andy had this constant exposure to music as a child growing up.
Though Andy would become one of the first people to seriously imitate Elvis Presley on the stage and television,
Elvis was not his favorite singer in the beginning. "Andy really liked Fabian, and I liked Elvis, as pre-teens,
then Andy switched from Fabian to Elvis," says Michael Kaufman, Andy’s brother (Kaufman interview). Andy loved
Fabian’s song "This Friendly World" which was the B side to "Hound Dog Man." The song is about
acceptance of everyone, and asks questions like, "Why should any heart be lonely?" To many ears now,
the song is a bit sugarcoated, but at the time the song rose to number twelve on the charts and Andy loved it.
Later in his life, Andy ended his TV special by singing the song with everyone who had appeared on the show; at
his funeral a tape was played of him singing it.
Andy’s grandfather, Paul Kaufman, was the person who had introduced Andy and his brother Michael to rock ‘n’ roll
when they were boys. He would bring them Elvis records, which Andy did not initially dig. Later, he would prefer
to tell another story about how he discovered Elvis.
"When I was five years old my parents took us to Tennessee. When we were there, my dad took us to a theater.
A man was doing an act which involved singing and shaking his hips a lot. When I got home from my trip, I jumped
around as if I were that guy. I practiced my singing and after a while I started to sound like him. Then, in 1960,
I saw Elvis for the first time and I couldn’t believe it. Elvis was doing the same thing I was doing and the same
thing that guy in Tennessee was doing. I never knew that guy’s name, but he was my inspiration, not Elvis."
(Zehme 40)
Zehme asked Andy’s father about that trip to Tennessee and Stanley Kaufman’s response was that it, "Did not
happen" (Zehme 42).
In any case, at some point, Elvis gripped Andy. I asked Michael Kaufman what he thought drew his brother to Elvis.
"I think it started with the girls screaming over him, and all the attention
he got. "Idolize" may be too strong a concept - perhaps what he idolized was Elvis' fame and his ‘larger
than lifeness’ and his ability to manipulate an audience. Eventually he came to appreciate the soul in his voice."
(Kaufman interview)
This all makes perfect sense when you look at what Andy was like as a child. He was quiet, spent a lot of time
putting on television shows to an imaginary camera in his bedroom wall, and seems to have been lonely. When he
was a few years old, his grandfather, Papu Cy, died and his parents didn’t explain it to him because they didn’t
know if he could understand death. They told him Papu had gone on a long trip and that he wouldn’t be coming back,
but Andy waited for him anyway. As it was pointed out in class, this sort of longing is something Elvis also seems
to have experienced, as his twin was stillborn. In any case, Andy probably really was attracted to Elvis for the
way he was shown with girls going wild for him and his natural ability to hold an audience in the palm of his hand.
I can confess myself that when I’m feeling longing for female companionship, I observe the guys in the spotlight
who are getting the girls and wonder how they do it. Now, being different from Andy, I look at John Lennon and
The Beatles, but for Andy, Elvis Presley seems to have filled that role. It is a desire to want to be that cool
so you too can get the girls and charm the audiences. Also, Andy must have loved Elvis’s ability to manipulate
audiences, because he himself would one day become a master at that art. And going from there, Andy actually worked
at imitating Elvis, getting his mannerisms down, and learning his songs, perhaps so he could tap into some of that
coolness which Elvis exuded.
Bill Zehme says if there was an Elvis movie out, Andy was there for multiple viewings. If Elvis was on the television,
Andy was parked in front of the tube, glued to the screen. If Andy was playing Elvis music in his family’s den,
he would be playing along on the congas. One of Andy’s closest friends was Greg Sutton, a boy he met at school;
they became close friends in the first place because they discovered they both had an appreciation for Elvis. Over
the years, Andy collected forty-three Elvis albums. He was definitely an all-out fan.
After Andy graduated from high school, he did not go on to college. Most of his friends went away to school but
he remained behind. He did not have to worry about the Vietnam War taking him away though, as he had received a
4-F status after a psychological evaluation which concluded that he was a, "paranoid schizophrenic with psychotic
tendencies" (Zehme 83). So he spent that post-high school year mainly with Elvis music in his family’s basement.
"I would stay home most of the time and just play his records and imitate him—I adopted him as a character,
combed my hair like him, dressed like him, made believe I was him. For most of the day, every day, for that one
year, I worked on my imitation" (Zehme 84). In the years to come, that year of preparation and practice would
come to benefit him greatly. But it is important to remember that during this year of study, Andy was probably
quite lonely and immersing himself in Elvis may have kept him going.
God
In his song "God," John Lennon adds Elvis to his list of the things which he no longer believes in. In
his novel/one-man-play/performance-epic God, Andy Kaufman seems to be saying Elvis is one of the best things to
believe in.
Andy was twenty years old when he started writing God. The previous fall he had enrolled at Grahm Junior College
in Boston, deciding if he would go to college to study anything, it would have to be Television Production. In
December he discovered Transcendental Meditation, which he would come to rely on for the rest of his life. By February
of 1969 he was learning more about TM from mentor Prudence Farrow (the older sister of Mia Farrow and namesake
of "Dear Prudence," which John Lennon wrote in India during The Beatles’ stay with the Maharishi Mahesh
Yogi), when he began composing God. It was to be his second major written work and he lugged the 147 page handwritten
text with him wherever he went.
In its composition, God is wholly original and labyrinthine. The text itself is unconventional in its setup to
a reader’s eye and takes a lot of concentration to read through straight from the page. Some pages have a single
sentence on them, and one page is filled up with a repeated "Tee-hee-hee." As a whole, God is broken
up into seven acts and within each act, characters and settings change without warning. For instance, in one paragraph
King Fluke will be arguing with Queen Silga and the next paragraph is suddenly talking about how much Larry loves
his job. It is as though the audience is watching TV while Kaufman, as author, has a remote control and is flipping
between channels. It is obvious that he meant for God to be performed for others versus being read in one’s favorite
armchair after dinner, and in fact, Andy did perform it by himself on several occasions, mostly for college audiences.
The reviews for God, published in local college newspapers, were warm and encouraging.
The content is, in a word, fanciful. A multitude of characters inhabits the landscape of God. There is King Fluke,
Queen Silga, and their servants. There is a floating man named Tinctured Puncture who cannot speak and acts as
a sort of savior to several characters. There is a dream girl named Gina who has magic bellbottoms that allow her
to fly (reminiscent of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" though Andy was not a Beatles fan). There is Larry
Prescott who becomes a famous singer and builds a huge amusement park called Heaven, and Larry’s manager Manny
Mackelblatt. And yes, there is God.
The book is laced with references to Elvis, some obscure, some obvious. The character of Larry Prescott seems to
be a normal-enough guy (within the context of this story) at the beginning of God. He delivers groceries in his
truck while driving drunk, singing at the top of his lungs and he likes his job. He sings so much that he cannot
stop and is described as having "a low, deep, Elvis Presley type voice" (Kaufman 48). Al Jolson style,
he even throws ". . . his arms out in a deep southern ‘Mammy!’" (Kaufman 48). It is only a matter of
time before he meets Manny Mackelblatt who owns Mackel Records. Manny, who reminds one of Colonel Tom Parker, says
he will make Larry a star when he hears him sing.
The next information given about Larry has him singing "You Ain’t Nothin’ But A Hound Dog," which is
essentially "Hound Dog," in a recording studio. He starts singing meekly but builds himself up to the
point where his whole body is moving. Of course, the song is a hit, "…whistled on the lips of everyone throughout
the world" (Kaufman 71). Larry Prescott becomes so famous and so much in demand that he becomes too expensive
for the record hops where he would perform. Eventually it costs $1,000,000 just to get him to smile, sort of reminiscent
of the $100,000-an-hour fee Elvis had for networks in late 1957 which kept him off TV for awhile (Quain 40). A
network gives in though and offers Larry two billion dollars to sing "You Ain’t Nothin’ But A Hound Dog"
on coast-to-coast television under the condition that he will not wiggle his knees or his hips. Larry, not interested
in the money, is unsure at first but Manny pushes him on anyway. He approaches the microphone and by making some
guttural noises "…all over the world in every living room people were watching and hearing The Voice and people
even walking the streets heard The Voice and reacted…" (Kaufman 74). Then after singing three lines of "You
Ain’t Nothin’ But A Hound Dog," he stops and so does the world. Larry then explodes with movement, the world
is driven crazy with happiness, and the censors quickly reposition the camera so he can only be seen from the waist
up; anyone say "Ed Sullivan?"
Larry has hit the top, but he quickly becomes bored with his gobs of money. He teams up with other investors and
they build the biggest amusement park in the world. It is so big that to build it they have to drain the Atlantic
Ocean and pay off everyone this action upsets. Finally they finish building the park, which is composed of several
circles that get smaller as one goes closer to the center. It is sort of a twin to Dante’s Hell, except this place
is literally called Heaven and is strictly for fun. Larry creates all the rides and attractions and people love
the place. But God becomes angry with the park and brings on a flood. Heaven is unaffected thanks to a special
dome, and God, throwing a hissy fit, finds he is so old that he can’t fly back to his own heaven. So Larry gives
him a job. God’s job is to sit in the center of Heaven on a chair and let people sit on his lap and talk to him,
much like Santa Claus.
One day God hears that Larry Prescott is going to perform in a stadium next to the center of Heaven. When God sees
everyone is more interested in Larry than in him, he takes the stage singing his own rendition of "You Ain’t
Nothin’ But A Hound Dog." When God wiggles his hips, it knocks half of the people unconscious and everyone
loves it. When he’s finished performing he cracks his back, gets angry, brings the world to an end, and dies. The
play ends with some optimism as the two characters unaffected by the world destruction fly away together.
Not only has Kaufman taken aspects of Elvis and injected them into Larry Prescott, he also has inserted aspects
of himself into the character. The year after he graduated from high school, he drove a delivery van full of groceries
to various places around Great Neck, New York, much like Larry driving his delivery truck full of groceries. Of
course, Larry being discovered and made famous by singing "You Ain’t Nothin’ But A Hound Dog" deviated
from Andy’s experience, but it was deeply rooted in Elvis Presley’s experience. Was Andy living the King’s life
vicariously through this character of Larry Prescott? Or rather, did Andy identify himself with Elvis and dream
of having the fame that Elvis had? Andy’s brother Michael says, "Andy liked playing ‘what ifs’ …what if you
could talk to God? So why not stretch the imagination and have God do a bad impersonation of Larry Prescott…also,
it was a fantasy of how famous he wanted to be" (Kaufman interview). I would have to agree, because of the
way Andy develops Larry Prescott in God with intertwining aspects of himself and Elvis. In any case, this work
shows the depth of his respect for Elvis. And why is this work called God? What if God of the title isn’t the God
in the story, but is really Larry Prescott or one of the other characters? It seems a distinct possibility and
as long as Andy played the "what if" game, why shouldn’t we when we look at God?
Andy’s Encounter with
Elvis
In the mythos of Andy Kaufman, he met the King in Las Vegas during the summer of 1969. Though no one is entirely
sure of what exactly transpired between Andy and Elvis, the story is probably rooted in some truth. Like Greek
myths, there is no one official version of the story, and so the accounts differ with each person who retells the
story. Bill Zehme says Andy liked to change details when he would tell people about it, but the ending was always
more or less the same.
On July 31, 1969, Elvis returned to giving live performances for a month at the International Hotel in Las Vegas.
He was to do two shows a night, have access to film equipment, and would be paid $500,000 (Guralnik 339). Andy
was headed out to Los Angeles to see what Hollywood was all about and since Vegas isn’t too far away from there,
he decided to go see Elvis perform. But he wouldn’t be content with just that. He had to meet Elvis and show him
God, which he had written earlier that year. So while he was in Los Angeles, he bought a pink suit at an MGM costume
sale to wear especially for his encounter with Elvis. He took a bus to Las Vegas and arrived at the International
Hotel ready to meet the King. Here, already, is where the story starts to go in different directions.
According to Bill Zehme, Andy would say that while he was waiting around the hotel devising plans for his great
encounter, he saw a lounge singer named Tony Clifton for the first time. Andy later took to becoming Tony Clifton
as part of his act and would enrage and shock his audiences. On one memorable occasion he used Tony against his
coworkers at TAXI, arriving at the Paramount studio in a pink Cadillac. Most people familiar with Andy’s career
believe that Tony Clifton was just a fictitious character he portrayed, but he always insisted that there was a
real-life Tony Clifton out there somewhere. Who knows? Most think he was making all of that up, but how can anyone
be sure?
Zehme says Andy figured out how to fulfill his mission by discovering that Elvis passed through the kitchen when
he would go to the stage from his suite and then back after the show was done. So all Andy had to do was position
himself in a hallway by the kitchen to run into Elvis. After a nice bribe, a security guard helped him get to where
he needed to be during Elvis’s midnight show, though sometimes Andy would say he didn’t have to bribe him. And
then he waited, repeating a Buddhist chant and wearing his pink suit with his copy of God, for Elvis to finish
his show and come along the hallway, returning to his suite for the night.
Suddenly Elvis and his bodyguards approached. Andy stepped up to them and as Zehme tells it:
…Elvis Presley regarded the oddity before him and what the hell came toward it and looked at the pile of pages
in its hands and heard something it said about God impersonating him or some damned thing and his lip curled slyly
and he rested his hand on the oddity’s shoulder and said something like well now that’s very good that’s very good
and he shook its hand and was precisely heard to remark, Man, this guy’s got a weird mind! And then Elvis Presley
strode off. . . (Zehme 110).
Bob Zmuda and Matthew Scott Hansen tell another version of the story. Zmuda says Elvis was performing at the Las
Vegas Hilton and that Andy was twenty-one years old when he hitchhiked from his home in Great Neck, New York, to
Las Vegas. At the Las Vegas Hilton, Andy immediately befriended the staff who told him Elvis would be passing through
the kitchen from his penthouse to the stage. Andy positioned himself in a cupboard, opening its door just a crack,
and waited for Elvis to come through on his way to the stage. Here Andy waited for over eight hours.
When Elvis and his bodyguards approached, Andy flew out of the cupboard with God in hand and presented it to the
King. Elvis stopped to acknowledge Andy, saying it was very good. Then Zmuda says the following:
Andy was pumped up enough to impart to Elvis the sentence he had traveled across the country to utter. "I’m
going to be famous, too," he said confidently.
The King paused to regard him for a second, then uttered the blessing Andy so desperately sought: "I’m sure
you will." And with that, Elvis reached out and gently patted Andy on the shoulder (Zmuda 18).
Zmuda and Hansen go on to say that Elvis walked away with his bodyguards while Andy stood there. Since Andy had
received a good word from Elvis, he was now capable of conquering any obstacle that stood before him on his quest
for fame and glory. Their conclusion of the story has him sort of baptized in the greatness of Elvis.
However, Bob Zmuda and Matthew Scott Hansen have made some factual errors. As verified in Guralnik’s book, the
hotel actually was the International Hotel, not the Las Vegas Hilton, and Andy would have been twenty, not twenty-one.
So Zehme was right on those facts in his account. It may be important to note that Zehme’s biography is authorized
by the Kaufman family whereas Zmuda and Hansen’s is not. Bob Zmuda had been Andy Kaufman’s official writer and
cohort in many of his professional pranks, though one cannot help but feel that maybe some of his stories in his
biography are stretched out a little. Really though, I should say that the biography by Zmuda and Hansen feels
much more like an autobiography of Bob Zmuda than a telling of Andy’s life. At times the text goes on several pages
without mention of something that Andy had done or that had happened to him. I understand that maybe Zmuda is trying
to build himself up for the reader so he/she will know who is telling the story. But in my humble opinion, it seems
more like Mr. Zmuda is promoting himself. I am not sure who ghost-writer Matthew Scott Hansen is, but his name
as co-author is almost hidden on the cover, while Zmuda’s name is proudly shown in big red block letters. I have
nothing against Bob Zmuda, I am simply saying that his approach to the telling of Andy Kaufman’s life feels a bit
fishy. Some other differences in Zmuda and Hansen’s account of Andy meeting Elvis is that they also make no mention
of Andy going to Los Angeles before heading to Las Vegas and Tony Clifton is not mentioned at all. Also, in their
version, Elvis is going to the stage whereas in Zehme’s version, Elvis is coming from the stage, though that is
not a very major difference.
But who knows what really happened when Andy went to Vegas that first time? Andy loved to tell stories and put
people on. Since he was the only witness to this event who seems to have remembered it and talked about it, is
it possible that he made the entire story up? And if he did create it in his imagination, does it really matter
whether it happened or not? It seems to be one of those stories which people can choose to believe or to not believe.
And with a story that is so good, and not hurting anyone, I find myself wanting to believe it very much.
Andy Doing the Elvis
Presley
And how did Andy do The Elvis Presley? So far this has only been an exploration of Elvis’s effects on Andy Kaufman’s
life, but not Andy’s effects on Elvis. Or rather, Andy’s effects as Elvis. The same summer of his encounter with
Elvis, just prior to the big meeting, Andy visited his second cousin, Rebecca Lawrence, and her husband, Steve
Tobias, in San Francisco. They recorded Andy on their new reel-to-reel tape recorder as he entertained them in
a variety of ways. Then they started talking to him about his performances as Elvis, which he had been doing for
friends and in coffehouses. He told them, "When I have an Elvis Presley suit on, I feel like Elvis Presley.
. . I become Elvis Presley. People probably think I don’t like Elvis Presley or they think I’m goofing on him and
stuff . . . But I don’t do anything to be funny" (Zehme 106-107).
After seeing two Elvis concerts at the Boston Garden and Madison Square Garden, Andy’s first appearance on television
outside of his work at Grahm Junior College came in 1972 on a local late-night talk show in Chicago called Kennedy-at-Nite
with broadcaster Bob Kennedy. Burt Dubrow, a friend from Grahm, was a producer of the show and asked him to appear
as Elvis for half an hour to talk with Kennedy. He showed off his memorabilia and talked as if he were Elvis Presley,
though he was not allowed to sing as Elvis. They made him lip-sync to Elvis songs, which went against his act,
though he apparently held himself well. When a caller asked him as Elvis how he maintained his sexy body, Andy
let some of himself slip into the mix. "Well, ah tell-you-what—ah do yoga every day. . . . It’s called Transcendental
Meditation. Ah started a few years ago and found it to be a verrrbig help to me. . . . Helps to keep me young.
Makes me feel better and it’s the easiest thang in the world to do" (Zehme 130-131). Apparently Elvis did
practice yoga, but Trascendental Meditation was not something that appealed to him. In any case, Andy carried himself
well in his first real television appearance off-campus.
Once Andy was doing Elvis Presley professionally in his own act, he first liked to come off to the audience as
Foreign Man, a wide-eyed, gentle, and confused foreigner from Caspiar, an island in the Caspian Sea which had sunk.
Once he had established to the audience that he was this foreigner, he would then go into his Elvis imitation and
shock the audience. On Monday, February 20, 1978, he appeared on The Tonight Show and was interviewed by Steve
Martin, who was guest-host for Johnny Carson. Martin asked Andy where he had created the Foreign Man character.
Andy responded with the following explanation:
In New York. I used to perform at a place called the Improvisation. . . . And I would go onstage and my act began
with my Elvis Presley imitation. So then people would say: ‘What is this? He thinks he’s Elvis Presley!’ So I—I
wanted to come up with something like, innocent, so that people would like me—and then I could imitate Elvis Presley.
. . . because people thought it was off-the-wall to do Elvis Presley (Zehme 199).
Two separate performances where Andy does Elvis Presley are worth looking at and examining in order to see what
his act really captured. The first of the two is from The Andy Kaufman Special in 1977, which Andy had done for
ABC. In his contract he demanded several privileges (i.e. a parking space for him and another for one of his alter-egos,
Tony Clifton) and one of those privileges was that he would be able to tape his very own hour-long television special.
Although ABC gave him $110,000 for the job, once he had finished it the studio, confused by it and thinking no
one would like it, shelved it until finally deciding to air it on August 28, 1979. The second Elvis performance
by Andy that will be examined is from The Midnight Special in 1981, which he hosted for one episode.
For The Andy Kaufman Special, Andy first hired Bill Belew for approximately $3,500 to construct him an Elvis costume.
Belew had himself made most of Elvis Presley’s own jumpsuits, and this particular costume was made from the same
material and gems and studs that had been used for Elvis. He even put buttons on it that had popped off of Elvis’s
outfits. Apparently Andy asked Belew many questions as his outfit was being made. Elvis was still alive at the
time and supposedly Belew told Andy and Bob Zmuda the secret of how he remained Elvis’s tailor.
"I never measure him," confessed Belew. "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" (Zmuda 79).
On The Andy Kaufman Special, Andy comes out as his Foreign Man character after the show’s title has been announced
and he proceeds to tell some stories. Then he does imitations. Imitation number one is Archie Bunker, though he
doesn’t break his character of Foreign Man. Imitation number two is Ed Sullivan, and again he doesn’t break character.
But imitation number three is, "The Elvis Presley." The audience scoffs, of course, expecting a Foreign
Man Elvis.
Suddenly "Thus Spake Zarathustra" starts to play, the booming symphonic piece by Strauss with which Stanley
Kubrick opened and closed his 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Shortly after that film came out, Elvis used it
to open his concerts. Andy removes strips of fabric from the sides of his white trousers to reveal sequined stars
running up and down the length of his pants. His back to the cameras and audience, he removes a fake dress shirt
with attached tie and discards it. Then he removes his sport jacket and puts on a new white jacket, the one Bill
Belew made, decorated with sequined stars and a giant metallic collar. He then takes his precious time to comb
his hair just right while the audience chortles. Finally he puts his guitar strap over his shoulder, holds his
guitar with his right hand at his belly, and looks over his shoulder with a Presleyan snile (a sneer-smile). The
Elvis fanfare breaks in with the trumpets from "See See Rider." He turns around with Southern confidence,
moving assuredly and fluidly light on his feet, donning his Bill Belew original costume. He is no longer Andy Kaufman:
he is now Elvis Presley.
The fanfare stops and he takes a short bow. The audience applauds generously. He gets a glass of water and says,
"Thank ya verra much." The audience laughs of course, not believing the evolution that has transpired.
Whereas Foreign Man’s imitations of Archie Bunker and Ed Sullivan were terrible, this imitation of Elvis is almost
unbelievably flawless. His body has completely transformed. He even looks like Elvis in the face, a perfect twin.
Grabbing a glass of water, he addresses the audience. "This is Gatorade. They told me backstage it works ten
times faster than water so if I run off the stage in the middle of the show don't worry, I'll be right back."
The audience laughs. "I’d like to do one of my biggest records for ya…course all of ‘em are the same size.
One of the first I recorded in . . . 1927 I think it was. It went something like this." He assumes a stance
and just then his leg starts shaking and his lip starts twitching. He has to physically calm his leg down and he
says, "Sum’in’ wrong with my lip." The way he addresses the audience with those lines is very intriguing.
Elvis in concerts used to joke that he would sing a song that had been recorded many years before his birth and
on the 1968 Elvis "Comeback" Special, he twitched his lip, saying there was something wrong with it.
When Elvis said these things, his tone seems to have been tongue-in-cheek. On one level maybe they are funny little
asides to put himself and the audience at ease. I have not come across any recordings of Elvis in concert where
he talks about Gatorade or singing a big record, even though all had been the same size. Maybe Andy made these
engaging asides up, or maybe he heard Elvis say them at some point. Certainly, if Andy was seeing Elvis films multiple
times and buying many records, he would remember such things Elvis had said. Clearly he took his Elvis act very
seriously, as he had told his second cousin and her husband that he actually becomes Elvis when he is performing
as Elvis.
So after regaining control of his leg and lip, he takes off his guitar so he can move around more easily. He breaks
into "Treat Me Nice," a song written by Leiber and Stoller and first recorded by Elvis in 1957. The song
was originally released as a single though it then appeared on the Jailhouse Rock EP. Andy has all of the Elvis
dance moves down pat, moving his entire body as only Elvis would. His voice is a deep Elvis staccato, and he sort
of gallops through the song. The crowd cheers and when he is finished singing, he goes into Elvis poses as lights
flash. Then, satisfying the audience’s celebrity lust, he removes his sequined jacket and throws it out to them.
Then he removes a black shirt that was underneath and he throws it out also. Then he removes a black turtleneck
which was under the black shirt and he throws that too. Finally he is left wearing a long-sleeved sweatshirt that
says "I LOVE GRANDMA" on it. He approaches the microphone, blinks a couple of times, and says as Foreign
Man, "Tenk you veddy much!" The Foreign Man to Elvis Presley evolution has come full-circle back to Foreign
Man.
Once the audience’s laughs die down a bit, he says not as Foreign Man or as Elvis but as Andy, "Ladies and
gentlemen, so far everything I’ve ever done for you, really I’m only fooling. . . This is really me. And we’ll
be right back after this." You think the act has ended there with the cut to commercial, but there is one
more character up Andy’s sleeve before the commercial will actually come. The commercial music chimes and suddenly
he asks if they are off the air in a rude east-coast accent. Once he is assured they are no longer recording, he
addresses the audience and starts asking them to give him back the clothes he had thrown out to them. Then the
commercial comes.
The second performance to be examined, on the episode of The Midnight Special which he hosted in January 1981,
opens with a similar act as The Andy Kaufman Special. He comes out and does the Foreign Man doing two imitations,
this time they are President Ronald Reagan and Steve Martin, and then he becomes Elvis. His transformation differs
slightly this time around. A back-up band which can be seen plays music while he makes the transition. This time
he wears black pants and simply takes his jacket off with his mock dress shirt and attached tie. This reveals he
is actually wearing a black jumpsuit with a wide v-neck white collar and a gold-studded vest. He then removes strips
of fabric from the sides of his pants and reveals more gold studs. He then puts on a black wig, as he no longer
had a full head of hair, though the camera cuts to one of the guitar players while this takes place so as to cover
up the fact that Andy is putting on a wig.
He stands with his back to the audience, moving to the music and when he turns around with his Presleyan snile,
the audience is screaming. He assumes some poses and approaches the microphone with that confidence that appears
completely genuine. The backup band stops at his signal and he says, "Thank ya verra much," and goes
through the Gatorade lines. He says the biggest record line again, says he will sing a song from 1927 again, and
also has lip spasms again. Then he goes into a staccato version of "I Beg of You" written by Rose Marie
McCoy and Kelly Owens which Elvis recorded in 1957 and released as a single. He rollicks to the song, grooves his
hips in pure Elvis mode, and again does a fine performance.
After he finishes the song, the audience applauds and the anchor host, Wolfman Jack, comes up to talk to Andy.
Andy lets out a, "Tenk you veddy much," as Foreign Man and then immediately speaks in his normal voice
with Wolfman about the guests who will be appearing later on the show, including Freddie "Boom Boom"
Cannon who sings "Tallahassee Lassie," Slim Whitman who lip-syncs to "I Remember You," and
Tony Clifton.
Later, at the end of the show, Andy returns dressed as Elvis, though he’s talking as Andy, not Elvis. He closes
the show and thanks everyone before going into "Too Much," written by Lee Rosenberg and Bernard Weinman
and recorded by Elvis in 1956, first released as a single, then appearing on the Elvis LP. Once he starts singing
and dancing, he is again fully Elvis; he rocks his whole body as the credits for the program scroll up.
There are some overall similarities in these performances. Andy says a lot of the same things as Elvis in each
before he starts to sing, and he seems to be singing in a similar way in each. Though he is wearing two different
outfits, they are both studded. The one in The Andy Kaufman Special is white, and the one in The Midnight Special
is black. The most interesting aspect about these two separate tapings is that he is singing early Elvis songs.
And furthermore, the songs he sings are not any of Elvis’s greatest hits, though when they initially were released,
they were hits. He seems to have chosen songs Elvis Presley sang earlier in his career to sing which fans may have
forgotten, even though he is dressing in the flashy outfits that Elvis wore later in his career. Bob Zmuda comments
on Andy’s approach to performing as Elvis Presley:
. . . Andy did a very early version of Elvis—the period of which Elvis was most fond. Unlike most imitators, Andy
didn’t do the standard Vegas Elvis, but rather did the younger "Rockabilly Cat" that Elvis had evolved
away from but always yearned to return to. When Andy did The Tonight Show, SNL, or any network show, he always
chose some obscure Elvis song with which to lead in (Zmuda 96).
Did Andy like the style and look of the later Elvis but prefer the music of the earlier Elvis? Or did he think
audiences would react better to a jumpsuit-clad Elvis if he wanted to sing songs which they may not be familiar
with? Maybe he is saying that the later Elvis, though he wore showy outfits, was still the same man who had once
recorded those early songs. Many people are quick to reject the later Elvis and just as quick to praise the early
Elvis. So in his own way, Andy has deconstructed people’s reactions to Elvis by portraying an older one with all
the vim and vigor of a younger one.
Andy Reacting to Elvis’s
Death (and faking his own)
Bill Zehme says when it was announced that Elvis Presley had died on August 16, 1977, Kathy Utman, a friend of
Andy’s, was driving him to the airport in Los Angeles through uncommonly heavy rain. They heard the news over the
radio and were, like the rest of the world, stunned. Kathy Utman says, ". . . he kept looking at me through
his tears and saying, ‘It’s not true. It can’t be true. It’s not true. It couldn’t be true.’ It was just so sad
to him" (Zehme 192). In 1983, about five and a half years after Elvis died, Andy went on a television show
hosted by a psychologist named Tom Cottle and when he was asked how he felt when Elvis died, Andy said, "I
was sad and, you know, like everybody else, I was a little doubting whether it was true or not, you know? It was
sort of an unbelievable thing" (Zehme 337). Through reading Bill Zehme’s book and Zmuda and Hansen’s book,
it seems to have been rare for Andy to show such an outpouring of emotion, unless of course it was while he was
performing. Zmuda and Hansen address Andy’s reaction in their book:
Many people have asked me about Andy’s reaction to Elvis’s death, and I told them all the same one word answer:
none, at least publicly. . . All the uproar put him off, as if a bunch of distant acquaintances had arrived at
the funeral, and Andy, as a close family member, had to retreat into his own private grief. Andy’s relationship
with Elvis was very personal to him and therefore did not require the validation of public garment-rending. (Zmuda
97)
One is reminded of Gracie Mae Still’s reaction to the public’s reaction to the death of Traynor, a character unarguably
based on Elvis, in Alice Walker’s short story Nineteen Fifty-Five. "But I didn’t want to see ‘em. They was
crying and crying and didn’t even know what they was crying for" (Walker 20).
Andy had a genuine respect and appreciation for Elvis and when Elvis died, it was very sad for him. It seems as
though whenever a culturally-important figure dies suddenly, and sometimes not so suddenly, many people put on
a show of mourning. For Andy this would not have been necessary, and he may have even considered expressing those
feelings to be inappropriate. But why would he even have to come out and mourn in front of the public when he could
continue to become Elvis in his act? He helped breathe life into Elvis after death. Michael Kaufman told me a bit
about Andy’s relationship with Elvis.
Andy could separate Elvis the person from Elvis the personality, and wouldn't have assumed that Elvis "the
person" was someone to automatically idolize. He had compassion for Elvis in his later, declining years and
the kind of life that fame had subjected him to. (Kaufman interview)
In 1978, Andy made an appearance on The Mike Douglas Show. After Andy sang "Confidence" from Elvis’ film
Clambake as himself, not as Elvis, and did some other songs, Mike Douglas had some very important words to pass
on to him. "I was recently with a man named Jerry Weintraub, who. . . booked Elvis Presley on all of his engagements
before he passed away. And he told me that Elvis told him that of all the people who did impressions of him—of
Elvis—he enjoyed you the most. And I thought you’d like to know that. . ." (Zehme 211). I have not seen the
footage myself but Bill Zehme says that Andy appeared ". . . to be completely unaffected by hearing this,
even though the audience applauded most rousingly—they were proud of him. . . But he could only momentarily glaze
in a fashion that no one but his intimates would recognize as a chink approximating humanness/humility/happiness
. . . ." (Zehme 212).
In early 1982, after Albert Goldman’s scurrilous biography came out about Elvis, which said among other things
that Elvis enjoyed watching women wrestle in cotton underwear, Andy appeared as Elvis on Saturday Night Live. He
lip-synched to a chicken opera record and then took two girls from the audience back to his dressing room while
the cameras followed him. In the dressing room he told them to take off all of their clothes except their underwear
and then wrestle while he would watch. But as they moved to follow his instructions, Andy removed his Elvis wig
and spoke directly to the camera. He said, "Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to just say something right now.
Um, what I just did was based on that book by Albert Goldman about Elvis. And, uh, I would just like to say, all
my life I’ve been a fan of Elvis Presley and, uh, I disapprove of that book and also I disapprove of what I just
did" (Zehme 309). Since Elvis was no longer around to defend his name, someone had to do it for him. So here
is Andy dishing it back to Albert Goldman, standing up for Elvis and deconstructing Goldman’s biography through
a few minutes of humor. The funny thing is that Zmuda says Andy had filmstrips of women wrestling in cotton underwear,
and furthermore, both Zmuda and Zehme say that Andy slept with many of the women he wrestled with over the span
of his Intergender Wrestling career.
But was Elvis really dead? Many people were asking that question after his death and the idea that Elvis is still
alive and well has wormed its way deep into American folklore. Andy seems to have entertained the idea himself
and talked to others about it. Zmuda says Andy ran into Bill Belew, the man he hired to make Elvis outfits for
him, a few months after Elvis had died and asked him if he thought Elvis had faked his death. Belew’s response
was, "No. He’s dead, no question about it. Nobody could eat that many Monte Cristo sandwiches and live"
(Zmuda, 79).
But Andy did not just go around asking people if they thought Elvis was really dead. He actively put a lot of thought
into the possibility that Elvis had faked his death. He must have acted like a scientist with his encyclopedic
knowledge of Elvis, doing a lot of research so that he could come to his own conclusion. And it appears that he
did come up with a conclusion. In 1978 during an interview with magazine writer Judd Klinger, Andy explained his
theory of the four Elvises:
"The managers saw that he was getting old so they got rid of him. And then from ’58 to ’60 they didn’t have
anybody, so they said that he was in the Army. In 1960, they got a new guy who played the part of Elvis Presley
until ‘69—this guy, you noticed, didn’t look at all like the other guy, didn’t have the sideburns or anything.
Then, when they saw that his movies were falling off at the box office, they came up with another guy and he looked
different! He played the part until ’73, until they got another guy and this guy was overweight, but then they
saw that business was really falling off—the concerts and the records weren’t selling. So they got rid of that
guy and they said that Elvis was dead. That was just so they could sell a lot of records, which worked. And in
a few years, they’ll get another guy and say, ‘We were only kidding—Elvis is alive!’" (Zehme 319-320)
Zehme goes on to comment ". . . it was a theory of rebirth; it was about returning anew from nadir, about
reinvention and rising from ashes" (Zehme 320). The myth of the phoenix: it seems to have symbolically followed
Elvis around even in his life [as pointed out in class]. Some of the people who were close to Andy have expressed
that he had a fascination with faking his own death. Zehme points out in his book that Andy had discussed it with
master-hoaxer Alan Abel, who had faked his own death and then appeared publicly after his obituary had been published.
Zmuda says Andy personally discussed faking his death with him, as an act of sorts. Zmuda refused to take part
in such a thing on the basis that it was over the line and illegal. Zmuda told him, "No, Kaufman, if you really
wanted to fake your death, you couldn’t tell anybody, and I mean anybody" (Zmuda 253). Andy understood and
never brought it up with him again. But Zmuda goes on to say that Andy approached others about it, including two
producers named Jack Burns and John Moffitt who produced the television show Fridays. Moffitt told Zmuda that Andy
told him, "I’m going to fake my death, go into hiding for ten years, and then reappear" (Zmuda 253).
Zmuda also reports that Andy told his friend Mimi Lambert, whom he had wrestled on Saturday Night Live, that if
he were to fake his death, he would not disappear suddenly, but would rather draw his death out slowly. He told
her that he would pretend to have cancer.
Andy at Graceland and
in Tupelo
Bob Zmuda and Matthew Scott Hansen tell a story of Andy’s trip to Graceland and then on to Elvis’s birth home in
Tupelo, Mississippi. But as inconsistencies of fact in the Zmuda/Hansen text have already been pointed out, it
is important to remember that Bob Zmuda is in love with storytelling and what he says may not be entirely true.
Still, his accounts of Andy at the homes of Elvis are a lot of fun.
According to Zmuda and Hansen, sometime in the early eighties when he was on his wrestling stint with Jerry Lawler
in Memphis, Andy went with Bob to Graceland. It was a pilgrimage that any self-respecting Elvis fan should make,
so they went and Andy was recognized by some of the staff that kept up the grounds and the house. They led Andy
and Bob into the private living quarters where Elvis had lived which are closed-off to the public. They were shown
the room where Elvis kept his videotapes.
"Elvis, he was a big fan of yours," said the custodian. She pointed at a section of the tapes. "Those
have you on ‘em."
Andy slid a tape out and, sure enough, it was marked "Andy Kaufman." Andy’s eyes teared at the notion
he’d had an influence on the King. (Zmuda 97).
Zmuda says this was the first time he had seen Andy show any grief that Elvis had died and was gone. That’s significant
because Zmuda says this happened after Elvis had already been dead for some years. Assuming Zmuda isn’t stretching
his story out here, that would mean Andy had hidden his sadness for Elvis dying from one of the people closest
to him.
From the videotape room they were taken to Elvis’ bedroom. They both eyed the bathroom, the one in which Elvis
was found dead, and Bob distracted the custodian with small-talk so Andy could go check it out. As the story goes,
Andy went into the bathroom before the guide could stop him and he emerged a few minutes later as the flush of
the toilet could be heard. Zmuda writes, "Andy whispered to me, ‘I used Elvis’s throne…I mean I really used
it! It was amazing, absolutely amazing."
I asked Michael Kaufman about his brother’s trip to Graceland and he tells a brief, but interestingly different
version of the story:
I have not read Zmuda's book - but the first time Andy went to Graceland, we flew down together from Chicago and
were picked up at the airport by Jerry Lawler. It was great because a fan from Jonesboro, Arkansas, met Andy for
the first time and was his companion for the few days in Memphis. Beside that, it was a thrill for Andy to be inside
the grounds of Graceland. (Kaufman interview)
In Zmuda and Hansen’s story, no one is mentioned as being along with Andy and Bob. So are they telling a bit of
a tall tale or leaving people out to make the story less complicated? Who knows? But it’s safe to say that along
with what both Zmuda and Michael Kaufman have said, Andy really was excited to be at Graceland.
Zmuda also writes with Hansen about when he went with Andy to the birthplace of Elvis in Tupelo, Mississippi. He
says they went there from Graceland and Zmuda convinced Andy to go into the house dressed in his Elvis costume.
And what did Andy do? He got dressed up, went in the house as tourists gave him unfriendly looks, and had his picture
taken on Elvis’s bed while no one was watching.
The End
Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the screenwriters who wrote the screenplay for Man on the Moon, write in
their introduction to the published script about the difficulty they had writing the film. "No matter how
much we studied the material, we couldn’t figure out the real Andy" (Alexander xi). They called Lynne Margulies,
who was Andy’s girlfriend at the end of his life, and she told them that there was no real Andy. That viewpoint
became the backbone of their script.
But I will argue that it isn’t that simple. There was a real Andy Kaufman, if you look at him from a certain angle.
You may not understand him, or know his motivations, but it isn’t necessary to know those private things to appreciate
who someone was. Andy was a trickster if ever there was one, and no one will ever know why he did many of the things
he did. Through his life, Andy, like Elvis, was an anthology of characters and personas. To name a minute few of
his faces, he was Uncle Andy, Foreign Man, Latka, Vic Ferrari, Tony Clifton, British Man, the Fakir, the conga-player,
the Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World, and Elvis Presley.
Andy Kaufman died of lung cancer on May 16, 1984. At his funeral, an Elvis Presley fan-club stood outside the Temple
Beth-El in Great Neck, New York. Whereas Andy took many of his anthology of characters along with him when he died,
a few lived on. A year after Andy’s death, on May 16, 1985, Tony Clifton made an appearance at The Comedy Store
in Los Angeles. Several of his other characters also made appearances in Man on the Moon. But it seems the persona
who has lived on most vividly, the one that Andy was possibly the first to seriously twin, is, as Foreign Man would
call him, The Elvis Presley. Andy Kaufman is the patron saint of and Adam to all Elvis impersonators. Nowadays,
more than ever, Elvis is everywhere. He is pumping gas in commercials, marrying people in Las Vegas, even sky-diving
along with other Elvises. There is a Mexican Elvis, an Israeli Elvis, a Thai Elvis, even a Hungarian
Elvis. . . And through these many incantations of Elvis, the original Elvis Presley, the phoenix, is not the only
one living on, rising from his ashes.
Andy Kaufman is, too.
Bibliography and Works
Cited
Alexander, Scott, and Larry Karaszewski. Introduction. The Shooting Script: Man On
The Moon. By Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. New York, NY: Newmarket Press, 1999.
"Andy Kaufman." The Midnight Special. NBC. Burbank, California. 23 January 1981.
Baruch. "The Greek Apocalypse of Baruch." The Book of Fabulous Beasts: A Treasury
of Writings from Ancient Times to the Present. Ed. Nigg, Joseph. New York, NY: Oxford University, 1999.
Guralnick, Peter. Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley. New York, NY: Back
Bay Books, 1999.
Kaufman, Andy. God . . . And Other Plays. Wayne, NJ: Zilch Publishing, 1999.
Kaufman, Michael. Personal interview. 9 April 2000.
Raaphorst, Lex. "Unofficial BMG Nederland Catalogue." Elvex Pages (1998, 1999).
On-line. Internet. 3 May 2000. Available WWW: http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Alley/8250/elvex.html.
"The Andy Kaufman Special." ABC. KTTV, Los Angeles. 28 August 1979.
"The Rock Is Solid." The Elvis Reader: Texts and Sources on the King of Rock’n’ Roll.
Ed. Kevin Quain. 1st ed. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. 38.
Walker, Alice. "Nineteen Fifty-Five." You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down. Orlando, FL: Harvest, 1981.
Zehme, Bill. Lost In The Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman. New York,
NY: Delacorte Press, 1999.
Zmuda, Bob, and Matthew Scott Hansen. Best Friend Tells All: Andy Kaufman Revealed!. New York, NY: Little, Brown
and Company, 1999.
______________________________________________________
Forever Kaufman
by Chrissy Lynn
wdominelli@earthlink.net
Submitted 10/2001
I have a back pack
with ANDY KAUFMAN FOREVER written on it and when people see it they smile or laugh or sometimes they ask me who
that is. When I put that statement on the bag I carry everywhere with me I just thought it was a cute thing to
say... something silly that sounded good! Yet I'm aware now that putting forever next to Kaufman's name makes
sense... and heres why.....
Forever there is Kaufman
and his insanity. Forever there is madness... his madness growing inside of me until my last breath. Forever
there are uncharted freaks somewhere still chanting his name, still screaming in Memphis, still crazy like him.
Forever there is love and chocolate and the games that children play... the games he began to fool the foolish
and enchant the wise. All in perfect timing came his performance... his show on the stage of life. Forever beat
his drums, and his dizzy dancing to their sound still twists and circles in my crazy mind. Forever dancing dizzy
will I be because of him. Forever there are taxi's that a foreign man repairs, still speeding through the city
not noticing him... not grateful to him. Forever there is Vegas Anarchy and the man who mad it real with cursing
and insulting and cigarette smoke... throwing drinks in Polish faces as his laughter filled the room. Forever
there is Cancer... stealing the sweetest children, stealing the one who's childhood never faded with time... who's
innocence bloomed bright as the sun. Yet Forever there are those who can't recall his name, who question his existence,
who never will believe in his life's illusions and magic. So Forever there is me... believing and loving him here
on the ground... listening to his music in the autumn breeze... and knowing he was a great one and will be... forever!
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