Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [182]
Stanley rented him a nice house in Pacific Palisades, just steps from the beach, at 300 Lombard. He would be able to watch sunsets on the ocean and have more room to breathe. His family headed home a week before the Philippines quest—about which Stanley banked no optimism—and they would return once he had completed his journey. The night before Andy and Lynne departed, there would be a Blassie premiere at the Nuart Theater in West Los Angeles. He would go with some trepidation, for he resembled a wraith, gray and emaciated; he had lost more than twenty pounds and most of his hair and much candlepower in the eyeglow. Lynne shaved what remained of his hair into a renegade mohawk and Gregg Sutton loaned him a studded black leather vest—so he would inhabit one last persona with which to confuse them all. At the Nuart, Lynne and Linda flanked each arm to discourage overt approaches from boisterous friends. Robin Williams came, as did Marilu Henner and director Harold Ramis and Budd Friedman and Elayne Boosler, who fled to the rest room in tears when she first saw him. (Little Wendy followed her in and told her it was cancer.) Afterward, Budd took George aside and said, “Do you think Andy would like to have a little bon voyage party upstairs at the club with some friends and chocolate ice cream?” So a big troop of them repaired to the Improv and the ice cream was plentiful and Andy was happy for the first time in many months and George and Zmuda stoked the room with an effusiveness so relentlessly upbeat as to distract everyone from believing the worst, which they did anyway. “It was like having a wake with the corpse in attendance,” said Sutton.
I went to the airport to see Andy and Lynne off on the their trip. The flight was 7:15 P.M.Andy had to use a wheelchair because his leg was hurting and, as always, it was a long walk at the airport. A photographer took Andy’s picture in the wheelchair. He jumped out of the wheelchair and screamed, “What the fuck are you taking my picture in a wheelchair for?! You fucking leech! You leech!” Andy chased the guy, trying to get to the camera, but he ran away. Bob Zmuda and Elayne Boosler chased the guy to no avail. Andy said it felt great to get so mad. He loved it. Johnny Gray and Linda Mitchell also saw Andy off. I hugged and kissed Andy several times and wished him a good and healthy journey, and asked him to come back well, as we have a lot of good, creative things to do. Andy hugged and kissed everyone and thanked us for coming. It meant a great deal to him and he expressed this touchingly to us. He had shaved his head completely (actually, Lynne did it), and he removed his hat at the departure gate. This cute, loving, bald-headed guy started to board the plane, holding his jacket in one hand and waving goodbye with the other. It was somehow a very touching and beautiful picture.
The April 24 issue of the National Enquirer published the wheelchair photograph with a story headlined “TAXI” STAR TELLS PALS: I’M DYING OF CANCER. It was the first time the tabloid had ever run a story about him that he hadn’t invented and phoned in himself.
The trip took fifteen hours by air and they stayed nearly six weeks in the largely impoverished town of Baguio, where the renowned faith healer and local politician Jun Labo presided over the unadorned clinic in which patients waited in a queue and stepped forth, one at a time, to receive salvation. Andy received the treatment twice a day. He wore only Jockey shorts and took his turns climbing on and off the operating table on which Labo performed spiritual sleight-of-hand—first dipping his surgical hands into water, then inserting them into a folded towel to dry, then quickly pressing them to Andy’s skin and producing the entrails of disease (and/or