Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [165]
He wanted Latka to wear the brace, too. Ed. Weinberger adamantly refused. He removed the brace before the filming of the first episode of the season and put it back on after they all took bows that night. Cast members just rolled their eyes. He pretended not to notice.
George did not want him to do My Breakfast with Blassie, which was an hour-long videotaped movie in which he would eat breakfast at a Sambo’s in Hollywood with bombastic former-five-time-heavyweight-wrestling champion, silver-headed bad guy Freddie Blassie, who enjoyed calling people pencil-neck geeks and had made a novelty record called “Pencil-Neck Geek,” which Andy admired as much as he admired Freddie Blassie himself. The man who wrote and produced Blassie’s record, Johnny Legend (whose real name was Martin Margulies), now wanted to make a very cheap parody of the art film My Dinner with André, which Andy hated as much as he respected Blassie. Legend asked Andy if he wanted to do it and Andy said that he did despite George’s protests. (George thought that Andy’s involvement in anything that smacked again of wrestling—including a boring movie about having breakfast with a crazy wrestler—only invited further destruction. He told Linda Lautrec—who co-created the film with Johnny Legend—“I hope you sell it in a foreign country and everybody makes their money back and no one here ever sees it.” But he meant it in a nice way.) So, on August 9, the movie was shot at Sambo’s and there was no script because it was going to be an extemporaneous exercise in which the two men—one in a dirty neck brace, the other carrying a cane—discussed life and geeks and fastidious hygiene. “I want my hands to be like a surgeon’s when I eat,” Andy told Blassie. Both men agreed that it was unwise to shake hands with people in restaurants and then this girl from the next table came over to shake hands and ask for an autograph and at her table were three other girls, and they were all plants, and one of them was Linda Mitchell (who would also play classical guitar on the sound track) and another was Johnny Legend’s younger sister, Lynne Margulies, whom Andy had not met until that very moment on camera. And he thought she was very attractive and flirted with her instantly, right there on camera, and she was unamused and truthfully said that she had never seen him on television. “I’m a famous star,” he told her, and she said, “Oh.” He demonstrated tenk you veddy much for her and said, “When you first walked in, I noticed you right away. And I said to myself, Now, this is somebody who I would give my time to. ’Cause I don’t give my time to just anybody. But to you, I would.” And he kissed her hand and tried to get her phone number and Linda called him obnoxious and, later, Zmuda came over to the table and pretended to be a hostile fan and pulled several befouled drinking straws from his nose and laid them on the table and also vomited (ice cream) and Blassie said, “I’m ready to puke in that asshole’s face!” And Andy also spoke of his late wrestling career and asked Blassie, “Do you think I’m a has-been now?” And Blassie said no, but also said, “It’s better to be a has-been than a never-was.”
He reclaimed Clifton for himself one more time. Clifton performed a medley of songs with a troupe of chorus girls on The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show, which was an ABC-TV special taped in Toronto a week after the Blassie congress and which would rank fifty-fourth in the ratings when it aired a month later. Horrified Muppets watched him from the control room. Miss Piggy said, “Isn’t he something?” Kermit the Frog hemmed and hawed uncomfortably and finally acknowledged, “Interesting.” Andy wrote the name of one of the Clifton dancers in his ever-burgeoning phone book—“Darlene, looked sixteen, really twenty-one, Taurus.”
There would be no more Clifton. Not for him.
He flew directly to New York to end what he had started precisely where he had started it. The