Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [72]
She was brass like he never knew. She was also game and they became characters together—“I happily discovered that whoever he became, I had just the girl for him.” At Coney Island, she was the bitchy gum-snapping moll to his Tony Piccinini, “an overconfident, inept Romeo” who loudly promised to win giant stuffed animals for her, drawing large and larger crowds that watched him fail and fail until she stormed off while he called after her, “Sweetheart! Baby! Don’t do me like this—I love ya!!” He took her to Times Square porn parlors, where she would pruriently stare over men’s shoulders and ahem until the places were emptied. She would accompany Foreign Man to wrestling matches at Madison Square Garden, where he entertained their seating section whenever a behemoth took a questionable fall—“Look at dat! Dat guy is so good, he knock de other guy down weethout even haffing to touch him!” They perfected a volatility that was sometimes real and often not and few witnesses ever knew the difference. Silver Friedman watched one nasty imbroglio unfold late one night on the pavement outside of the Improv—“We heard some shouting and the next thing we knew she was hitting him with her purse. And he was shoving her. Then he grabbed her purse and whacked her with it. And they’re haranguing like two cats and didn’t care who saw it. It was hysterical. But it was a lover’s spat and they were very involved in it. I think it was real. It lasted about six minutes.”
On nights when he didn’t have to return his father’s car to Great Neck, he stayed in her Greenwich Village apartment; Sunday mornings in bed he would read her the funny papers while eating ice cream. She studied his act and understood every nuance—“To listen to your own silence is an amazing secret of comedy,” she would observe (without ever having met Maharishi), “and most people are not brave enough to do that. But he could stand there the longest with nothing perceptible happening, and yet so much happened.” Whenever she sang at the Improv, however, he left the room; as such, he convinced her to become a comedienne. She had, after all, attitude to spare and had assisted him most splendidly with a character that he had begun developing who wasn’t him or Foreign Man but a guy very much like the foul lounge singer he maybe/memorably saw in Las Vegas—Tony Clifton was his name, although nobody in New York knew of him, so he decided to call his character Tony Clifton. (He privately admitted that Richard Belzer, the acidic emcee at Catch who bore no resemblance except in stage demeanor, also partly inspired the character.) Which meant that he abused everyone from the stage while warbling badly while dressed in a dark coat and clip-on bow tie (for now) and wore a little grease paint mustache while singling out some schlub down in front and berating him until this noisy hostess chickie got fed up and bounded onto the stage and climbed on his back and started whaling on him while he insulted her and told her to knock it off with the women’s lib jazz and said she oughta go back into the kitchen and raise babies like all chickies were meant to do whereupon she slugged him and he fell and begged for mercy until she left the stage in triumph and he started in again about how she should go back to the kitchen/babies and she moved toward him again and he said he was just kidding and everyone was furious and he would flee as hissing filled room as per busted steam pipe. Anyway, she was funny—could actually make him laugh (nobody else did really)—and so he counseled and coached her (quite incongruously) on how to relate to audiences