Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [143]
After the match, Andy called and when he first got on the phone he said, “George, I’m going to tell you something that I think will make you happy.” Then he went forth and told me that he felt that maybe the audience was not ready for wrestling and he was going to hold off on wrestling on television for a while. I’m glad he arrived at this decision himself. I felt that it was hurting his career, but the man is creative and has to have his space within which to work.
Grandma Pearl died January 8, 1980.
And he was very disconsolate.
They buried her at the Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, Long Island.
She had given him Hubert’s.
Had taken him to the wrestling matches.
Had taken him to see Howdy.
Cut the kiddin’, Kid McCoy, she always said.
“I remember he was standing there at the grave site and he looked so pitiful,” said sainted former housekeeper Margaret E. English, from whom he had long ago hid in the back of Daddy’s car and then surprised Mommy and Daddy while the car crossed the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and, since they were already late for the formal dance in the city that night, they dropped him off with Grandma Pearl.
Papu Cy was buried there too.
And Grandpa Paul.
The Kaufmans and the Bernsteins were all going to be buried there together, since they always got along so well. Mommy and Daddy also had plots there. Everyone would be together. Eventually.
Anyway, he had not been to the cemetery for a very long time.
So he stood there and looked pitiful.
“He was so sad,” said Margaret.
Gregg Sutton always told him that it was Kutsher’s that had killed Grandma Pearl.
He immediately went down to see Grandma Lillie in Hollywood, Florida, where he found a JCPenney nearby and bought her a big color television set and also a home movie camera for himself so that he could take home movies of her watching her new color television set (and, incidentally, she did not approve of him spending such a ridiculous amount of money on her and did not understand why he set up his crazy camera to film every minute of every hour that they spent visiting).
He also filmed a nice visit they had with Aunt Esther Denoff—
ANDY: You watch Saturday Night Live when I’m on, don’t you?
LILLIE: Sometimes.
ANDY: You like that show, don’t you?
LILLIE: No.
ANDY: You only watch it for me?
LILLIE: Yeah.
ANDY: And what about when I wrestle? Do you like it then?
LILLIE: No.
ANDY: What do you think of it when I wrestle?
LILLIE: It’s terrible.
ESTHER: I never saw you wrestle.
LILLIE: You never saw him wrestle? You didn’t miss anything.
But he was her darling grandson and she played along with whatever shenanigans he wished, even when very late that night he kept his camera running while she fell asleep sitting on the sofa holding the remote control to her new television—he liked filming her sleeping very much—so there he was sitting beside his sleeping grandmother for a very long time before he took the remote control out of her hands and watched the television himself and then he woke her when he found the unseemly commercials for the not-very-nice things. “Oh, look! Grandma, look, look! Isn’t that terrible, what they advertise on television? X-rated motel? Isn’t that something? They put that on television? Look at that! Topless dancing places now! And men! Nude men dancers! Now, look at that! Look at that, Grandma! Only sexy things, it says. On television! It’s terrible!” Grandma Lillie groggily agreed that it was all very terrible.
On March 1, he made a six-minute-forty-one-second version of Uncle Andy’s Fun House for a proposed experimental ABC-TV program called Buckshot on which little films made by interesting people would be featured. The network people said that if the little version of Uncle Andy’s Fun House was especially good, it could even become a weekly series. He was very excited. It would be a children’s show for adults, he decided. He had puppets made of Tony Clifton and