Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [115]
Clifton, meanwhile, required greater measures of obfuscation. Now, more than ever, Andy could be nowhere in plain sight. Zmuda arranged to employ the talents of makeup artist Ken Chase, who had done memorable work for the television mini-series Roots, and Chase would design new and appalling facial prosthetics contoured to transform one enigma into another. They went the week before—Andy and Bob and Linda Mitchell—to Chase’s home studio in Tarzana, where a cast was made of Andy’s head. “He meditated in his car for one hour before he came in to let me take the cast,” Chase said. “Then the girl would hold his hand and count out loud while the impression cream was hardening. He was very eccentric.” Foam-latex applications were then created to approximate ruddy cheeks and fleshy jowls and bulbous nose—“Our intent,” said Chase, “was to make him as physically obnoxious as possible. The cleft in the chin was my idea. Something about a cleft on a guy like that seemed particularly repulsive.” Chase also supplied ungainly sideburns and a cheap toupee (“purposefully obvious”) and a big “Burt Reynolds” mustache and Linda had gotten the unspeakable salmon-hued embroidered tuxedo with black lapels and piping (“That was a find,” she said, having plucked it from the racks of “a cheesy men’s store on Sunset”) and also the turquoise ruffled shirt which was to be worn over padding to barrel out the gut. And so they would report to Chase’s home each morning before Clifton and entourage headed for the set and the application process would take just over two hours—“Before he would let me make him up, he’d blow his nose twenty, thirty, forty times. Very kooky. And the minute the makeup was completed, his personality changed. Andy didn’t exist anymore.”
Because Clifton refused to occupy Andy’s dressing room, an enormous Winnebago trailer (with fully stocked bar) had been procured by Weinberger and, by most accounts, two bona fide call girls—very tall and blond and accommodating—were separately hired to dawdle with Clifton for the length of the week. (Weinberger maintained that they were extras, not pros.) Also, Linda Mitchell, a brunette, would become Clifton’s brassy blond-wigged secretary Ginger Sax; Zmuda would be his zoot-suited handler Bugsy Meyer. They would arrive at the Paramount gates in a rented pink Cadillac. Monday was to be the first table-reading of the script—in which the brothers DiPalma stage a poker game to decide which of them would entertain their mother for the holidays—and that morning the actors all gathered to begin business. Tony Clifton came to work five minutes early, Shapiro reported, and he complained about the other people when they came in late. (Which was meant to further divert suspicion away from Andy.) And so there they all sat, gawking at him, stifling laughter, stifling irritation, as he hid behind sunglasses and below latex and they saw that the orangey-spongey makeup stopped at his ears and it was Conaway sitting beside him who first smelled the remarkable B.O.—or was it cologne? or urine? or whiskey? or all?—and Clifton lit up his Camels and swigged from his pint of Jack Daniel’s and they knew Andy never drank or smoked. But Clifton actually tried to be congenial and made much reference to Las Vegas and bleated his dialogue as abrasively as possible (“Louie, you know Ma—sometimes she’s saaaaad, sometimes she’s glaaaaaad!”), altering it beyond anything recognizably written on the page. Mostly, however, he smelled really really awful. “You wanted to take a bath after you’d been in the room with him,” Henner said. “He was just sickening, always going ‘Hey, pretty lady, how ya doin’, baby!’ He kept coming on to me, which Andy never did.” In fact, he chased whatever “chickaroonies” materialized before him, offering free trips to Vegas and intimate tours of his Winnebago