Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [20]
“When I was five years old my parents took us to Tennessee. When we were there, my dad took us to a theater. A man was doing an act which involved singing and shaking his hips a lot. When I got home from my trip, I jumped around as if I were that guy. I practiced my singing and after a while I started to sound like him. Then, in 1960, I saw Elvis for the first time and I couldn’t believe it. Elvis was doing the same thing I was doing and the same thing that guy in Tennessee was doing. I never knew that guy’s name, but he was my inspiration, not Elvis.”
As with so much treasure, Grandpa Paul brought Elvis to him.
This, of course, was the presumptive wont of Paul Kaufman. He was the uncommon senior—sixty-five the year of Presley’s emergence—who embraced all newness with unnerving zeal. He could not help but help himself—and his loved ones—to whatever suddenly struck his epic fancy. Was it so wrong to enjoy? To enjoy spreading enjoyment? He believed in living in, and of, the moment and saw no reward in acting his age, whatever that meant. Among friends and acquaintances, for instance, he would be the first owner of a color television set, gleefully paying upwards of $3,500 for the distinction. He proudly drove a 1957 Chrysler Imperial outfitted with its own dashboard phonograph which spun specially designed records that he blared through rolled-down windows so as to remind neighbors of his youthful abandon. “You know what record he played most?” Stanley would say. “‘Davy Crockett’ from the Walt Disney program! My father was a big kid.”
And so now the youngsters were making the new music, especially the southern boy with the guitar who did the wiggling with the waist. He thought that his eldest grandson should have this buoyant noise in his ears. And so he brought “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Tutti Frutti” and, well, Andy was indifferent and disinterested—did not get it at all—and Michael danced and jumped and made the records his own. Michael took to Elvis first, along with a generation (slightly older) and much of the free-thinking world, while Andy patiently waited for … Fabian. He waited for Fabian Forte of Philadelphia, teen prettyboy with street-punk voice and glandular energy, whose frenetic sounds would spill from radios nearly three years thereafter. Anyway, when the time came, without even being asked, Grandpa Paul brought Fabian to him as well.
Fabian’s would be the first rock-and-roll music that mattered to him—perhaps because it was executed by an adolescent only six years his senior, eight years Elvis Presley’s junior. He could, would, see himself doing likewise, if a little differently, as soon as possible. So he remained loyal whenever pressed: “Fabian was my favorite singer, and then Elvis,” he averred. “I chose Fabian over Elvis because he was the first guy I ever heard.” Which was to say, he may have listened to Elvis but did not hear him until he was ready. Truth was ever negotiable, though, and he would conjure other legends to serve him when necessary, such as the one about an early life-altering trip to Memphis with his family where he saw a mystery man shake hips. (“Did not happen,” said Stanley.) “See, when Elvis went into the Army, Fabian came on the scene, and that was when I really got into liking rock and roll. Fabian became my idol.” He would most clearly remember the summer of 1959 when his grandfather presented him with three pivotal singles: “Got the Feeling” by Fabian, “Mary Lou” by Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, and “I Need Your Love Tonight” by Elvis. This was the first morsel of Presley that truly resonated—bouncy, plaintive, leghappy —“Oh! Oh! I love you so! Uh-oh! I can’t let you go!” He would know it intimately.