Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [171]
They ran one of the more pathetic commercials, but the audience did not awwwwwwwwww, which would have helped, and some viewers and press alike claimed the show had welshed on its promise by giving Andy even another thirty seconds of airtime. Ebersol called George and said, “We’re going to have to rest this for at least a year or more.” Years later, he would concede that SNL, which had prided itself on flagrant rule-breaking, had perhaps taken itself a bit too seriously in this matter—“In retrospect, it seems so silly, but we had a loose sort of integrity with this thing. People had spent money voting—about one hundred eighty grand. It seemed strangely unconscionable to do a backflop on the deal. But eventually we would have.”
Writers Blaustein and Sheffield met with him in the aftermath. They presented an idea in which he would be disguised as a black cleaning woman in the background of sketches over the course of many weeks until finally he ripped away the artifice and declared himself back. He liked the idea at first, but as time went on he thought it seemed a little too desperate. Plus, the whole thing sort of made him, um, sick.
He had lost his favorite playground.
His father, meanwhile, would nurse a hatred for Ebersol that grew more incendiary with every passing year. “Miserable bastard,” Stanley would say. George would also somehow see it all as a double cross. “They could be rightfully pissed at Dick for a million different things,” said Tischler, “but in terms of the vote, it was Andy who was really driving it. He refused to understand the reality of it. Reality, however, was something he always had an unusual relationship with.”
Before the vote, he kept asking Johnny Legend about that Lynne girl and Legend told him that his sister, that Lynne girl, was helping to edit the Blassie movie and then by late fall they were ready to show him a rough cut of the movie out by Venice Beach so he went and he watched her more than the movie and they all went to a Mexican restaurant that was open until three in the morning. Their first night together they stayed up until dawn watching televangelist Dr. Gene Scott, thereby consecrating their own private unusual relationship with shared realities. Which was to say, they fit. She would let him strangle her in cars to frighten other motorists; she would hang out with him in pinball arcades at ridiculous hours; she would perform screaming fights with him in public; she had posed in Apartment Wrestling magazine grappling with another girl in bikinis; she had done a nude layout for Gallery magazine; and she didn’t mind his obsession with prostitutes. The moment she knew they were meant for each other came weeks after they began and they were at the Berkshire Place in New York—“He took his socks off and blew into them and started rolling them up. I recognized that from the W. C. Fields film The Man on the Flying Trapeze, and I repeated a line that Fields’s wife had said—‘Why would the maternity hospital be calling you in the middle of the night?’ And his eyes lit up, as if to say, ‘Oh