• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1277 0

that cancer that’s getting into your lungs?” Andy: “Yeah.” (He felt that being Russian required a cigar always; but neither he nor Clifton ever actually inhaled the smoke.) On the Slycraft Hour, a barely seen public access show, he brought on Stanley and Janice—who did not feign Russian dialects—and he argued moral decency with a right-wing quack and evinced his right to destroy Fridays. “Fridays is rip-off, exactly copy of Saturday Night Live. Is bull. Is lot of bull. So I get mad. I ruin that show. I will do it again. Here is my mommy.” … Not as a Russian, he tracked down Alan Abel, a satirist known to be the World’s Greatest Hoaxer, whose New York Times obituary on January 2, 1980, had thrilled Andy, since Abel was not dead but only fooling and had tricked the paper of record into printing news of his demise. Among books Abel had published were The Confessions of a Hoaxer, The Panhandler’s Handbook, and How to Thrive on Rejection—so Andy felt a very close bond and the two of them became fast friends that spring and they would walk seventy-five blocks up and down Broadway together. “We talked and talked and talked and talked,” said Abel. “We did have a lot in common in the sense that he liked the kind of crazy shit—if you’ll pardon the expression—that I did. We would compare notes on panhandling-he was very dedicated to it, you know. He wanted us to collaborate on something really fantastic and enormous, but we could never figure out what it would be. He was especially fascinated with my rejection book and how I had gotten people to believe I was dead. He’d say, ‘How can I do that? I want to do that.’”

Late July: Andy was in London, which Merv announced (suspiciously), when Clifton returned to tape Merv’s show in Las Vegas, so as to promote his forthcoming two-week engagement at Harrah’s Stateline Lounge in Lake Tahoe beginning August 31; Merv asked him why he had come through the casino that day wearing a bag over his head and Clifton said, “Because my makeup man did not get here! And I don’t want the public to see me unless I look right!” Clifton told Merv that he was a forty-year resident of Las Vegas and lived in a Winnebago trailer home and that he had flown the Spruce Goose with Howard Hughes…. In London, meanwhile, Andy was enjoying a stopover on his way to Amsterdam, where he planned to do nothing else but explore the red-light district.

August 30: Before his gig—for which he would receive $7500 per week, performing three shows per night—Clifton checked into Harrah’s Tahoe while Andy checked into the Ormsby House hotel in Carson City, which was not close but was close enough; he was more concerned with proximity to his beloved brothels than with proximity to Clifton. He came to Harrah’s the first day in order to be seen on the premises and stoke conjecture. According to Gregg Sutton—whom Clifton now called MacNamara (leader of the band, natch)—Andy attended only one show. “He was disguised in a funky beard and weird clothes. He heckled Clifton—‘Tell the truth! You’re Andy Kaufman, you fraud!’ Clifton had him removed from the room.” Most other people left on their own; business was light. Clifton told an intrepid local news crew that he was suing Andy—“He’s using my name to get places! Makes me feel really mad, really bad, really sad—clad, had, mad, dad, fad! That’s every word that rhymes with mad—from A to Z! Thank you very much!” (“The rhyming thing was the one thing Zmuda invented,” said Sutton. The new Clifton also deployed a reptilian tongue which inadvertently slipped out between sentences as means of unpleasant punctuation.) The Hollywood Reporter reviewed the show fully duped—“Kaufman establishes nothing with which people can identify….” A showgirl, meanwhile, also fell for Clifton during his engagement, largely because she thought she was falling for Andy; Zmuda received her advances and intimacies without removing his facial prosthetics. “I told her that as an artist, I had to stay in character,” he said. “And she actually believed me.” Just to be safe, Sutton had advised him to keep the lights out and