Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [25]
Upon the eve of his thirteenth birthday, scratched in longhand, composed in seventeen minutes, presented immediately to assemblage on Grassfield Road—this:
Jan. 16, 1962 (11:05 P.M.)
My Last Will and Testament: Andy Geoffrey Kaufman
I would like all my belongings (including money and possessions) to be divided in this way. (As I am writing this, I do not think much of my mother and father, but I must give them what I am going to give them because what they have given to me has amounted to something. I owe it to them.)
I would like Grandma Pearl M. Bernstein to be the guardian of my beloved dog, Snoopy. I would like Snoopy to live [the] best life.
I would like my belongings (possessions) to [be] divided evenly between (if any of the following should die before the will is read, the money is still to be divided between the remaining folks):
(Mother) Janice T. Kaufman Grandma Lillie
(Father) Stanley L. Kaufman Grandpa Paul
(Michael) My Brother [Great] Grandma Rachel
(Carol) My Sister Grandma Pearl
Aunt Fran (Maid) Margaret E. English
Uncle Jackie
[signed] Andy G. Kaufman (11:22 P.M.)
[witnessed and signed by:]
Pearl M. Bernstein
(Father) Stanley L. Kaufman Jan. 16, 1962 (11:27 P.M.)
Boy had no fear of death, saw it as kind of romantic, really. Nothing much scared him back then. And the things that actually did scare him he liked because being scared was fun and fun never scared him. Things grotesque generally pleased him—also, physical, mental, behavioral ugliness; the reviled, the aberrant. Certainly, as with most boys, he loved monsters. But he loved real ones as well as unreal ones. Per the latter, he never missed the classic black-and-white horror films shown late every Saturday night on local New York television—specifically Shock Theater as hosted by the comical pasty-faced ghoul Zacherle (pronounced, with ominous emphasis, Zacker-LEEE!), who emerged from a coffin each week to introduce the movies. Stanley and Janice would often socialize on these nights with another Great Neck couple whose son was roughly Andy’s age, and so Jimmy Krieger, a rather straight-arrow kid, quick and self-assured, became Andy’s regular partner in various macabre and offbeat predilections.
“We did this almost every Saturday night between the ages of ten and fourteen,” Krieger would recall. “Our parents would put us together, either at their house or at ours, and we’d stay up way past midnight watching these movies. We were both fascinated by them. We used to act out Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man—that was the biggie. Andy was absolutely frightened stiff of Lon Chaney, Jr., as the Wolf Man, the only monster that really bothered him. So I would be the Wolf Man and wear the fangs and stand behind a door to scare him. His parents hated that. He wasn’t thrilled, either. It’s ironic to think that Andy would later be thought of as the Boy Who Cried Wolf—and he was petrified over the Wolf Man. We also saw The Mummy maybe a thousand times on his sixteen-millimeter projector. Andy used to wrap himself in toilet paper and did that shuffling Mummy walk with the dangling hand. Sometimes it would be the Wolf Man versus the Mummy and we’d argue technically over who would win.”
By sheer force, it was usually Jimmy Krieger who won—a dynamic that had marked their relationship since early childhood. Stanley used to seethe whenever he caught Jimmy happily pouncing on and clobbering his impassive son: “Andy wouldn’t fight back. I got so mad once, I said, ‘Goddamn it, Andy, why don’t you hit him back?’” Krieger would remember the horseplay more lightheartedly: “Even though I was a year older than Andy, he was bigger than me. And he was a wimp, so what did that make me? Although I did beat up on him, it was all theatrical—nothing to really hurt him—just playing out what we saw on TV. A parent wouldn’t necessarily see it that way, though, I suppose.”
Still, the boys collaborated in hatching many superb schemes: