Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [173]
Latka Gravas donned his coveralls for the last time on earth. The one hundred twelfth episode of Taxi was filmed at Paramount Stage 25 on February 18, and it was the final time they would all do this together. Danny DeVito would say, “Everybody was very emotional due to the fact that we were all splittin’ up and we knew it and we didn’t want to.” Tears were easy for Andy, always were, and he shed not one that day. He always felt that he had done his best work as Latka five years before there ever was a Latka.
Five days later he told Letterman that he wanted to film a remake of the Laurel and Hardy classic Sons of the Desert, starring himself and Fred Blassie, who sat to his left. Blassie demonstrated—“You’ve got us into a fine mess again, you pencil-neck geek! Now you’re crying again! You hearing that pencil-neck geek crying again?” “Well,” said Letterman, “I know people will look forward to that!” Andy also announced that he would be appearing in a legitimate Broadway play called Teaneck Tanzi, which would begin previews in April. Letterman teased him—“No wrestling in this?” Andy said, “Um … actually, I’d ra—Hmmm. It’s hard to—No, I don’t know.”
The play was set in a wrestling ring and he would portray the belligerent referee who presided over the matches of a woman wrestler named Tanzi (portrayed by Deborah Harry), who would solve her life problems by grappling, in turns, with her husband, her parents, her shrink, her best friend, et cetera. He had lobbied for the role and went to London to meet with the producers in March and began rehearsals in New York shortly thereafter. (The rehearsals, it turned out, had reached a crucial stage by April 9, the night on which Saturday Night Live would be hosted by Joan Rivers, who had pluckishly decided to bring Andy back onto the show, and Dick Ebsersol had actually acquiesced to her wishes—but Andy could not extricate himself from his theater duties, nor did he leap to try. “By that point,” said George, “we were just fed up with the whole thing at Saturday Night Live. We didn’t go after it anymore because we were still pissed.”)
And so Teaneck Tanzi: The Venus Flytrap opened at the Nederlander Theater on April 20 and also closed on April 20 and Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times that he had found only one high point in the evening and it had nothing to do with the play itself, but with a theater usher—“Slipped in among the bona fide employees of the Nederlander is a ringer—the comic Andy Kaufman. Mr. Kaufman’s shtick, as his fans know, is hostility, and here he is, in the highest of dudgeon, a cigarette dangling from his lips, barking at seated customers. He demands to see our ticket stubs, and, should we not immediately locate them, he loudly threatens to eject us clear out to the street. As most of Mr. Kaufman’s victims don’t recognize him, there’s sadistic fun to be had in watching the surly comedian provoke the uninitiated into angry screaming. A critic near me almost slugged him.”
Daddy and Michael and Carol had attended opening/closing night but Mommy hadn’t been feeling well. She had been experiencing shortness of breath and chest pains for some time and then she and Daddy were playing tennis and suddenly she became so winded that she could barely breathe at all. They went to the doctor, who discovered plaque obstructing one of her heart arteries and said she needed triple bypass surgery and was ordered to take it easy until the operation was scheduled. And she felt it was ridiculous that at age fifty-eight she would need such a thing done. But, just the same, Uncle Jackie Kaufman’s wife, Aunt Fran, went to keep her company on the night of the premiere. “She was very jealous, of course, that she couldn’t go,” Aunt Fran said. To miss her Pussycat