Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [17]
He never did it to be funny, of course, possibly.
Anyway, they all got bored with it.
He was, after all, nuts.
Meanwhile, in his new bedroom on Grassfield Road, the wall-camera business began wearing upon his mother. In his ninth summer, she demanded that he just stop. He would choose to remember it this way: “She said, ‘You cannot do these shows anymore unless you have an audience. Even if it’s only one person watching you.’ She thought, Now he can’t do them anymore—ha ha ha! This was very bad, in that he was onto something big by now. Panicked, he sought solution; his brother could not have been less interested, was always outside playing, anyway; friends were not an option, really; finally, he noticed another person in his family, female, two years of age, very malleable. “My sister loved bubble gum. So what I would do was bribe her. I’d give her a piece of bubble gum every day if she would just sit in the room. Also, I wasn’t shy in front of her, because she didn’t know how to talk. So she would be my audience—and that was my loophole. I got my mother on that one.”
Big break came the year before. Out of the blue. Changed everything. Started everything. Thus the panic and the desperate need for practice. Finally, for once, he had acquired a proper audience—not a gaggle of bemused/hectoring onlookers (as with schoolyard), or a loophole (as would his sister become), but an actual rapt assemblage that sat in little folding chairs to watch him. “I had a movie projector, and a friend of the family asked me if I would show some movies at his daughter’s birthday party. I said sure and I did some stuff between films.” Whatever the stuff, no memory would be retained. Musical chairs? Fun with phonograph? Magic tricks? All very likely. Certainly all would figure later, very much later, and also sooner. But this was his fleeting debut at something really real. It was a taste. It filled him with ideas. He got to do in public that which was previously private or semi-such. Gently, tentatively, he had performed for children who wanted and expected him to perform for them. And they seemed to kind of enjoy him. Little birthday party children, they liked him. This was very very good. He would do more. He could see it very clearly.
February 13, 1975 (3:04 A.M.):
He had left the club, loaded his stuff back into his father’s car, driven the quiet Long Island Expressway from town back to Great Neck, back to Grassfield Road. Things had gone well enough—his work with the pitiful F. Man was only getting better and better and more fragile so as to almost crumble like brittle ash but never really. “Laughing at me? Or … laughing weeth me?” Grandma Pearl always told him with with with. Also E. was probably perfect by now, at least for these crowds—voice very strong, legs and hips electric, needed only better costume. Phonograph, drums, songs, fooling, teasing, lying in/for fun—fine so far. Good nights, okay nights, bad nights, just moving forward. Anyway, Budd and Rick really liked him and always gave him time, and the NBC people were supposed to come to see him work soon, something about some new show that might happen, and he already did that Dean Martin summer thing last year, so it was building and building. Mommy and Daddy were sleeping, of course, and he smushed his ice cream and took it down to his room and opened his sand-colored Pen-Tab Wire Bound Theme Book (90 Sheets; 69 cents) on which he had chicken-scrawled across the cover, as he did with everything he wrote in, “This book belongs to Andy Kaufman.” (He had started this one last May, slowly filling it with short stories and ideas, almost always in the dead of night, because it was quiet and he needed to sleep all day, anyway.) Now he would make notes for the novel, whatever the novel would be whenever he got around to writing it. It would be huge, he knew that, and it would be about a boy who grew up to become the world’s greatest entertainer (himself, he hoped; you have to write what you know plus make-believe things) and it would deal with a mountain