Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [119]
Incidentally, I was told that Andy Kaufman is scoring tremendously as the character Latka Gravas on Taxi. They have a rating system for likability and he’s going through the roof….
The triumph was such that nobody cared except him and also Bob and, although George was happy for his client, George could live without this tsouris to be sure—and mostly everybody who witnessed it wanted to forget it (at least for the time being). Army Archerd, the columnist for Variety, got wind and thought about running an item, but Ed. told him that Clifton had a serious drinking problem and the less said about it the better. And Andy wanted to take out an ad in the trades to trumpet Tony’s mistreatment at the hands of Paramount and Taxi personnel, but Ed. told George that the less said about it the better. And Danny DeVito would say, most diplomatically, “There were some bad feelings toward … Tony. We all felt it was a big waste of time. It was a very strange game.” Knoedelseder, meanwhile, met Clifton two nights later—on the very night the “Brother Rat” episode was filmed without him—for a private deposition in Clifton’s room at the Sunset 400 Motel in Hollywood. (Andy had checked in the night before to call Knoedelseder, as Clifton, and arrange the interview.) For the occasion, Clifton’s face had once again been shellacked by Ken Chase. And Knoedelseder found him in the dank smoky motel room where Sinatra music played and closed-circuit porno flickered on the television and skin magazines were splayed across the rumpled bed littered with empty whiskey bottles. (Bob was supposed to have had two more hookers there but couldn’t convince any to play along at the offering price.) Then, after visiting for a while amid the grim detritus, Knoedelseder took Clifton to a bar across the street, where Clifton drank much Jack Daniel’s—Knoedelseder tasted it to make sure it was the real thing—while abusing the female bartender and then he legitimately picked up a Hollywood waif who had wandered in and, eventually, Knoedelseder deposited the lounge singer and the girl back at the motel and fled. When his Los Angeles Times piece ran two months later—THE IDENTITY CRISES OF ANDY KAUFMAN—there would be no mention of this night with Clifton, although the Taxi imbroglio was covered in a small sidebar that featured one photograph of Clifton being thrown off the set.
And, one week after the firing, on a flight to a college engagement in Albany, Bob let it slip to Andy that all of the actors at Taxi had been told early on that Andy was playing Clifton and were urged to just go along with it and this news crushed him and he felt betrayed and became enraged and he called Linda Mitchell to scream and then he called George who calmed him somewhat before he could scream very much. And when he returned to Paramount a week after this, Tony Danza had brought in a projector to show the movies he had shot of Clifton’s final day and everyone gathered in a room above the stage to watch—“And we’re laughing—you know, laughing at ourselves and at him and at the whole nightmare of it. And then Andy walks in and he stands there staring at the screen. And everybody sort of nervously takes this mass gulp. Finally the movie runs out—and there are a few beats of silence afterward. Maybe too many beats. And then he clears his throat and says, ‘Gee, who was that asshole?’ And with that, he turns and leaves the room. End of story.”
He kept telling George Carnegie-Hall-Carnegie-Hall-Carnegie-Hall and George kept saying I’m-trying-I’m-trying which he was and finally, rather suddenly, definite headway was made—with the help of Marty Klein and the team of other agents at APA who found a New York