Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [0]
FUNHOUSE
THE LIFE AND MIND OF ANDY KAUFMAN
“Comprehensive … if you want the facts, this is the
only [book] you need.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“If I had lost the Andy Kaufman I first met in 1975, I found him again in Lost in the Funhouse.”
—Lorne Michaels, Saturday Night Live
“Fascinating and frequently hilarious.”
—Kansas City Star
“Insightful.”
—The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
“Nobody, not his family or his ‘best friend,’ got as close to the truth about Andy as did Bill Zehme in Lost in the Funhouse. His six years of research unmasks the distortions and allows the reader to meet the real Andy.”
—Stanley L. Kaufman (Andy’s father)
“Entertaining … comprehensive … [Zehme] interviewed more than 200 people who had known or worked with Kaufman; had full access to Kaufman’s family as well as the comic performer’s personal papers; utilizes his manager’s diaries; and did some diligent reporting. … Zehme’s a pro.”
—Chicago Tribune
“What a gift … to have a book that helps you enjoy once again Andy Kaufman’s wild and wondrous mind. It’s brilliant!”
—Carl Reiner
“Excellent.”
—Esquire (England)
“Bill Zehme’s bio of Andy Kaufman gets a firm grasp on the slippery master. … Zehme’s book hasn’t a dull page.”
—Artforum
“Bill Zehme was dedicated to revealing the true Andy Kaufman story and I’m so grateful for that. This book is the interesting, funny, sad, unique and-finally and completely-true story of a very special life!”
—George Shapiro, Andy Kaufman’s manager and co-executive producer of Man on the Moon
“Ingenious … the best possible guess of what this singular comedian was all about.”
—St. Petersburg Times
“Zehme writes with a verve that is rare among biographers, sometimes letting the prose go into a voice reminiscent of Kaufman’s own speech patterns.”
—Ft. Worth Star-Telegram
For Lucy Ellen,
with love very extremely
1
Everyone lives in his own fantasy world, but most people don’t understand that. No one perceives the real world. Each person simply calls his private, personal fantasies the Truth.
—Federico Fellini
Um. Ummm….
He came late. Mommy and Daddy tried to make him three times and each time they got a new baby started something bad happened to Mommy and she cried. He was made the fourth time, finally, and so was his invisible twin brother, Dhrupick, but nobody cared about Dhrupick, although Dhrupick would later help him do special things. No, really. He had to name Dhrupick himself, because nobody else ever saw Dhrupick, or they didn’t know that they saw him even when they saw him. And also, since Dhrupick was his exact replicate, he could be Dhrupick when he wasn’t himself, which was often, eventually more and more so. Anyway, Dhrupick made being somebody else easy, he learned. Of what was mathematically considered to be his childhood (just yearwise), he would later tell some person, “Every once in a while, every week or two, I would wake up in the morning and I would say, ‘I think I’ll be Dhrupick.’ D-h-r-u, I think, p-i-c-k. I chose that name for a logical reason, but I forget what it was.”
And so his eyes opened thirty-five years and four months before they stopped seeing anything anymore ever again. Once opened, they were stroboscopic! They were two very big bright blue dancers! They spun and spun inside white orbs even bigger! They said come-here-and-help-me-play-and-please-just-help-me-and-here-I-am-and-I’m-not-here-at-all-and-oh-yes-I-am-no-really. He was seven pounds eleven ounces (a craps-table baby!) and Daddy later joked that his eyes had weighed four pounds alone. Daddy proudly designed his birth announcement with a picture of a baby rolling dice, come seven and eleven; pounds, ounces, natch. He (and Dhrupick) came out of Mommy just after two o’clock on the afternoon of January 17, 1949, in a bed in Kew Gardens Hospital in Queens, New York. Mommy started calling him Pussycat almost right away. He purred for her most always, but he learned to yell sometimes, too. That came a bit later.
He got his own