Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [48]
Meanwhile, Elvis came back! Elvis made his first television special ever and it was called Elvis and NBC broadcast it on December 3 at nine o’clock and millions and millions of people tuned in and everyone decided that Elvis was back and would thereafter refer to the program as Elvis’s comeback special and one hippie boy in Boston who would begin to meditate two days later and would never stop until he couldn’t possibly meditate anymore also (and especially) watched the program, watched with a ferocious intensity and felt a bubbling bliss unrivaled, and kept wondering what everyone meant when they called it a comeback special.
She knew that it was in there and did not believe that it was in there. But her visitor never came, not that month, not the month afterward, and she would get up before school and eat her breakfast which she then promptly vomited, morning after morning, but it could not possibly be true, would not allow herself to think for a moment that it was. She told no one, not her sister, not her best friends, no one, especially not him, because it could not possibly be true. “It was total avoidance,” she said, “until the final moment of truth. I knew in my heart of hearts after a period of time, and I just refused to deal with it. I’d always been really sort of tiny—not petite, but small—and I was getting bigger and bigger. Not that much bigger, but bigger. So I started exercising like a mad person. I vitamined myself to death.” She took to wearing big Mexican wedding blouses—a fashion statement, nothing more, honestly—which obscured the belly enough as long as she kept dieting and denying as well as undressing and dressing in the bathroom with the door locked. “Obviously, I’d gained weight. People commented, including my parents. In fact, they did try to worm it out of me at one point. They knew something was wrong. I’d just pitch the biggest fit and say, ‘Listen, if you don’t trust me, we can go to the doctor’—which I wish they’d taken me up on—‘and we can deal with this once and for all!’” Her sister Gina would recall, “She got very secretive and really testy. There was a point where I thought I was gonna kill her myself!” But she had studied the art of playacting with a remarkable tutor who was lately closing his eyes and reclaiming lost innocence and also learning remedial television by doing, and so she committed thoroughly to this ruse that was all her own. “I was horseback riding at five months, and camping. The bathing suits had those blousy overtops, so I was covered.” Her senior year of high school continued on as such, marching delicately toward graduation in drastic covert performance.
The bliss people—why did even they sometimes call themselves bliss-ninnies?—noted his progress and dedication most approvingly. On February 10, 1969, he began at their urging a six-month course in something called Yoga Asanas, which was really a regimen of posture exercises to limber the body to better greet the deep silence that would keep him from ending up in the gutter. Among other skills, asanas helped enable a small mastery of the lotus position, which was the preferred position if one was truly serious about moving toward enlightenment, which, in his case, also meant toward show business fame. His instructor—a mentor, really—in this phase was Prudence Farrow, who had returned to Boston after her rather famous trip to India the previous year. Prudence, whose mother was Jane in the old Tarzan movies (oh!), had gone there, as most people knew, with her younger actress-sister Mia, whose surprising marriage to Frank Sinatra had just broken up, and they had studied and meditated with the Maharishi and all four Beatles atop a mountain. (John Lennon found her devotion to TM training so adorable there that he wrote a song about her, right there,