Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [158]
And now that they had established themselves as mortal enemies, they started to think of ways to elevate their feud and sell more tickets and figure out how the fellow in longjohns wasn’t going to get hurt. Several meals were shared in the process of discussion. Lawler’s wife liked to cook. George, meanwhile, would think it was fortunate that reports of this last occurrence did not filter anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon line.
Heartbeeps opened December 18, one year after its haphazard completion following the SAG strike. Variety noted, “Each moment passes like hours waiting for this slumgullion to slide by.” Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, “It’s a mystery to me why this film was made.” George reported, Of all the films that opened at Christmastime, it did the worst. Absolutely embarrassingly bad at the box office, which is a setback for Andy’s motion picture career quite considerably.
They were saying he was poison.
They were saying he was impossible.
Simka returned to Latka during the first week of 1982, when the eighty-first episode, “Simka Returns,” was filmed and Andy was exceptionally late for an important rehearsal that week and Ed. Weinberger called George and screamed—“Who the hell does Andy think he is? I’m completely fed up with him!”
Taxi had been struggling in the ratings ever since the season before when the network moved it from Tuesdays to Thursday nights. It would rank in the lowly fifty-third position by the end of this season, its fourth, and would be canceled by ABC on May 4 but then rescued (for its brilliance and integrity) on May 21 by NBC, where the series would be permitted its fifth season, which would also be its last.
Simka, meanwhile, had returned to save Latka from his multiple personalities disorder. In addition to the playboy Vic Ferrari, he had also become, in varying measures, Arlo the cowboy, Sir Geoffrey Hypen-Hill, who was British Man, and Alex Reiger, wherein he emulated the Judd Hirsch character. With Simka, he gave them all up for love. They would marry six episodes later.
He returned to Saturday Night Live, where it had been more than two years since he wrestled and disappeared from the show. Dick Ebersol had been brought in as executive producer not long after the Charles-Rockett-fuck incident, which had prompted in part a creative house-razing and a fresh start with new personnel. Andy had wanted to host, but Ebersol said no; Andy had wanted Clifton to appear, but Ebersol said no. Elvis appeared, instead, on January 30; he wore a wig now because of his thinning hairline; he also wore a stunning cerulean studded jumpsuit that Bill Belew had recently designed. Elvis lip-synched to the old chicken opera record—which was funny but a desecration—after which Elvis picked two girls from the audience to be brought to his dressing room by Elvis’s bodyguard Red West (Zmuda). The cameras followed them inside, whereupon Elvis instructed the girls to rassle—“Whoa! Wait a minute,” he said as they began. “Take off your clothes, but leave the panties on.” And as they moved to do this, he stopped them and removed his wig and addressed the camera—“Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to just say something right now. Um, what I just did was based on that book by Albert Goldman about Elvis. And, uh, I would just like to say, all my life I’ve been a fan of Elvis Presley and, uh, I disapprove of that book and also I disapprove of what I just did.”
David Letterman returned to NBC with a new talk-and-comedy show called Late Night with David Letterman, which took the place of The Tomorrow Show immediately following Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Andy made his first appearance on the program in its third week, February 17, and proudly showed clips of himself wrestling and berating women in Memphis—after which Letterman said, “Andy, you’ve turned out to be quite a fine young man.” He then displayed his brand-new