Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [181]
He saw only one reason that this was happening to him. “It’s the chocolate,” he told them. “Too much chocolate.”
George said industry people were starting to hear about it on the streets. On February 10, he insisted that Andy tell Stanley before it turned up in the tabloids. Andy refused, said not yet, because he might get better. George called Michael and urged him to tell Stanley. Michael said he would try, but then he couldn’t quite do it, either. “He didn’t tell his family for two months,” said Lynne. “Finally, I just snuck off to the phone and called his dad and said, ‘You better get out here. Andy’s sick.’ A day or two later, his mom walked into the bedroom-Andy had no idea they’d been told—and he got mad at me.”
It was by now the third week of February. Stanley said, “When we saw him for the first time lying on this mattress on the floor, it was devasting. He was already just about gone. He had no use of his arm. Sometimes he couldn’t walk or talk. It was a disaster.” They hastened him back into radiation. Stanley would lift him up the three steps onto the linear-accelerator table, as Grossman witnessed with overwhelming sadness. “I cried—I mean, there were tears in my eyes. I had to leave the room. It was so sad, seeing a father have to pick up his kid and put him on this table….” Janice would hold his hand every night until he fell asleep. George, Stanley and Linda saw Rubins a week later and Rubins said it could be anywhere from two weeks to a few months.
Andy called psychologist John Gray, whose love seminar he had attended just over a year before, and asked for counseling to help him and his family understand what was happening. “He wanted to say goodbye to his family,” said Gray, whose work with relationships later manifested itself in such books as Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. “He gave them a chance to share feelings and to talk about their life together. Andy was very open to role-playing, which creates a context to express and understand different points of view without aggravation. He responded very well to it.” They went to Gray’s home office in Brentwood for a few days and in different groupings. Stanley loathed every minute of it—“We called them ten-Kleenex-box sessions. His success was based on the number of Kleenex boxes the clients used. He was trying to bring out our anger toward each other—that we were angry with each other, that we didn’t love each other. He wanted hatred and anger to come out, and boy, he wouldn’t take no for an answer. This was meant to please Andy because if there was no emotion, then Gray wasn’t cleansing our souls. And he had Janice there—who could hardly speak, knowing that her son was in such terrible shape—and he had to make her cry! It was cruel.” Said Carol, “I remember how awkward it was watching Andy—who had swelling on the brain that day—so he couldn’t talk. And my mother couldn’t talk. They just looked at each other. It was kind of heartbreaking.”
George attended a session with Michael, Lynne and Andy. In the session, Andy expressed his resentment toward me when I didn’t support some of his artistic endeavors like his wrestling, Tony Clifton, his novel, Howdy Doody et cetera. He opened up his feelings, and during an exercise I played the role of Andy expressing his feelings toward George, telling him I didn’t feel enough support from him in my creative efforts as an avant garde entertainer. It was stimulating for both of us. I felt great afterward and so did Andy. …
He heard about the healers who pulled clumps of disease out of bodies by magic. He and Lynne found one in the California desert; some clumps were extracted which looked like animal intestines, but also like red stringy globs of, um, cancer; there