Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [156]
Like Columbus before him, he officially charted a new world on October 12. He had been down once already in June and again in July, but those had been brief reconnaissance missions that also involved meeting southern females who had sent him inviting letters. True cahoots with his future nemesis had begun even earlier. He had wanted to wrestle women at Madison Square Garden, but was told that wrestling despot Vince McMahon, Sr., would never go for such carny in the hallowed arena. But Bill Apter, who edited Wrestler and Inside Wrestling magazines, had become a friend, and Apter offered another option. Very late one night that spring, after they had seen matches at the Garden, they returned to Apter’s apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens—not far from the hospital where Andy was born. Apter told him, “I have a friend in Memphis, Tennessee, who might be interested in your idea. He’s a wrestler and a promoter down there and his name is Jerry Lawler.” Apter decided that they should call him right then, no matter that it was after one o’clock in the morning. Lawler answered, wide awake, and Apter told him that he had Latka from Taxi with him and Lawler said, “Put him on!” Apter would recall, “They spoke for quite some time. And when he hung up, Andy was very invigorated. He called me a couple of days later and said, ‘I’m going down to see Lawler.’ And that was the start of the whole thing.”
A few weeks later, on June 5, he flew from Los Angeles to Memphis and headed directly over to the Mid-South Coliseum, which was considered Lawler’s kingdom since Lawler was considered the King of Memphis now that the other one was dead. (Lawler’s local celebrity was such that he had been the first attraction ever to break Elvis’s record for consecutive sellouts at the 12,000-seat Coliseum.) Memphis had long been a wrestling mecca and Lawler was regional potentate, a Baby-face (good guy, per parlance) champion muscle-slab who triumphed over serial insidious Tarheels (bad guys, per parlance) throughout the southern territories. But Lawler was also possessed of business savvy and held ranking office inside the Memphis Wrestling Company, which filled the cards and devised all thunderous theatrics that were played out at the Coliseum. And so the prospect of enlisting the lure of the comical maniac who took on the womenfolk was more than exciting. Lawler, in fact, had been made giddy by that first late-night phone call and, upon hanging up, heard himself splutter, “Oh my God!” He would recall, “All Andy wanted to do was experience the thrill of wrestling in front of a wrestling crowd. That was the whole thing. He had been doing it for people that really came to see stand-up comedy. They didn’t come to see him wrestle and they weren’t appreciating it. He told me, ‘I just want to get the response that wrestlers should get!’” So Lawler told him, “Yes, please! Let’s talk about it!” Jimmy Hart, the preeminent southern Tarheel wrestler, had been in Lawler’s home when the call came. Per Hart’s recollection: “Us being a small territory and Andy being a TV star-well, we knew it would be nothing but big box office business!”
They welcomed him into their fold in June and took him backstage, where he made taunting tapes to broadcast during wrestling programs that would rile the women enough so that they’d want to come whup him when he returned. It was then decided that from that point forward he would (very legitimately) bill himself as the World’s Intergender Wrestling Champion—he was, after all, undefeated in over three hundred contests—and everyone thought the title had a perfectly highfalutin ring to it. So the date was picked and it would be Columbus Day and now here he was on that very day in October and they threw a handful of girls