Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [3]
He would never care much about money because Daddy seemed to care about it so intensely. He would see Daddy become angry about it, and about many other things, too, but down deep it was money matters that roiled most all aggravations that spewed forth onto the family. Daddy yelled a lot. Upon reflection, in fact, Daddy would sometimes lament that he really didn’t feel alive unless he was angry.
Daddy came with a story, about which his son also cared little, but with which the son would become familiar enough, although never so much as to expend much empathy or acknowledgment. That, of course, is the province of fathers and sons before sons become their fathers. Nevertheless, here was Stanley Lawrence Kaufman, born of Flatbush, thus of Brooklyn, on August 31, 1922. Later, he would blame his birth sign, Virgo, for his passionate need to order the life in which he lived: “Gotta have control, gotta have control,” he would tell intimates. He would also say, “I start my day writing a list and the best part of my day is when I check that list off at night.” He was produced by people less meticulous and very boisterous, origin German-Jewish, though American-born: His father, Paul, especially, was nothing if not a (barely) repressed showman whose youthful antics on the Lower East Side caught the fancy of a vaudeville producer who had sent Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson into the world. It was Paul’s formidable young wife, the former Lillie Goldberg, who told him to oy knock it off with even thinking about such fun and games and to get a decent job thank you, which turned out to be hawking cheap baubles and beads, which grew into a costume jewelry business that served better department stores throughout North America. They had two sons, six years apart, Stanley first, Jackie second, both of whom were to be good boys who followed in their father’s jaunty, bejeweled footsteps.
So, young Stanley was thus: a street-savvy hail-fellow-well-met; a dashing and wiry little guy from a girth-endowed gene pool—these life-loving Kaufmans packed poundage!—and also he was fast; they called him Speedy Stanley on the track teams at school; he was quick with numbers, too, and took a business degree at Penn before the Army got him in ’44 and sent him over to Normandy five days after D-Day. In one year of fight, of blood and chaos, he went down thrice, three Purple Hearts attendant. He received some minor German shrapnel first, was mended; then a prisoner he was escorting back from the lines of the Black Forest stepped on a land mine, killing the prisoner and searing Stanley’s face and nose and neck (marks forever carried, though obscured), but he was mended again; then, out along the French-German border, a Nazi shell loaded with nails and tacks exploded in his chest, which sent him home, elated, with at least one tack lodged so deeply that it showed up in X rays for all time thereafter. He went home to the little girl he left behind, in whom he had found his first and only soul mate, whom he had vowed and yearned to marry immediately upon his return, so long as the Nazis hadn’t killed him.
This love—which would come to bear a boy with big eyes—had struck him four springs earlier, in 1941. He had a fraternity brother at Penn who had a beautiful cousin on Long Island, in Belle Harbor, with whom he wanted to set Stanley up. Her name was Janice Terry Bernstein, a mere fifteen and a half years old, but