Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [176]
Before presenting the adopted children idea, he and segment producer Robert Morton had discussed another plan. He wanted to sign his last will and testament on the air with Letterman as witness. He went to Stanley first to see what he thought of this. Stanley suggested that he think of something else to do. Morton witnessed the signing of the will instead in the privacy of his Late Night office.
In search of new credibility, he decided that he wanted to go out on the college lecture circuit. That fall, George set him up with a Pasadena lecturing agency called Stofan/Blancarte and postcards were printed and later mailed out to universities everywhere. The postcards featured photographs of him playing Elvis and Latka; of him snarling as a wrestler; of him eating ice cream; of him wearing a straitjacket. The words on the back of the postcard read:
On Creating Reality:
The Physics of Human Response
Andy Kaufman’s career of the past 10 years has been a series of experiments which form the groundwork for a thesis. Using film clips and telling stories, Andy will set you straight once and for all about his controversial career and how it relates to the dynamics of human behavior.
For the first time, Andy tells the TRUTH!!
They aimed to send him out on the speaker hustings sometime by the end of the year. “He would have been a smash,” George would say. “As for telling the truth, though, I’m sure he would’ve made something up.”
Budd Friedman needed him in Los Angeles on November 7 to perform for the Improv’s twentieth anniversary taping, and so he came back and stayed in Linda Mitchell’s small apartment, not far from the club, to prepare his material. He remembered something that he had never used before but had always meant to, which was “Cash for the Merchandise”—the labyrinthine spoken-word multivoiced opening number for The Music Man, in which a train car full of nattering traveling salesmen bandy about the nuances of hucksterism in impossible syncopation. He practiced and practiced with his conga drum in Linda’s tiny guest bedroom/den—and this felt familiar….
At the taping, he had a portable clothes dryer waiting for him onstage. He carried a load of laundry up and threw it in the machine, then pressed the start button. He went to the conga and established his beat and sang the Elvis song “Paralyzed” in his own voice, which was something he had never done before. Then he launched into “Cash for the Merchandise”—which he had transformed into a dizzying spectacle of recitation, a performance piece both thrilling and stupefying. The audience cheered more forcefully than any that he had experienced in a very long while.
He then brought out Little Wendy—with whom he had mended because she was an important part of his world and he was never very good at estranging himself from people who meant something—and he ventured into a new veiled autobiographical fantasy that had been itching to surface. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “you know, when I was about fourteen, I was in junior high school, and my first girlfriend—I got her pregnant. And had a little girl—who I have hardly seen, because we gave her away—or she gave her away for adoption. And for about twenty years, I have lived with the thought that somewhere in the world there’s a little Andy Kaufman running around. So, just recently—a few weeks ago, I was contacted by an agency called Children Anonymous. And that’s an agency [to aid] adopted children looking for their natural parents. So, because of that agency, I’ve spent a very delightful week with my child. Whose name