Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [80]
Also that March, a wily filmmaker named Larry Cohen came to the Improv in search of someone with a “certain crazy look” who could infiltrate the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day Parade in police uniform—marching in line with actual NYPD cops, as though he were a member of the force—then appear to go berserk firing a phony gun at random, then pretend to be shot down, then fall to the ground, mouthing the words “God told me to,” and play dead. He quickly spotted a worthy candidate onstage and Andy said he would very much like to do it. He had, he said, some experience at wielding fake guns and pretending to die. Cohen’s project was to be a made-for-television detective movie called God Told Me To, wherein various New Yorkers believe they hear the voice of God asking for bloodshed and they comply in accordance. (“Strangely enough,” Cohen would say, “this was before the Son of Sam murders, but Andy bore an amazing likeness to David Berkowitz, the real guy who heard voices and killed people.”) Cohen told him where to show up on the day of the parade, whereupon a police uniform would be provided for him. Cohen asked, “So, what size jacket do you wear?” “I don’t know.” “Well, what size shirt do you wear?” “Um, I don’t know.” “Shoe size?” “I don’t know.” Cohen said, “You’re a grown man. How can you not know what size clothes you wear?” Andy said, “I wear my father’s old clothes.”
A uniform awaited in any case on St. Patrick’s Day and he donned it—“And we left him alone for a few minutes while I went to organize the crew and then I came back to find him walking around as a policeman and he was goading all these Irishmen behind barricades on the sidewalk, all of them half drunk already. He had his police cap on backwards and he was making faces at them, deliberately provoking everybody. They wanted to jump over the barricades and just beat the shit out of him. So I start pulling them away, shouting, ‘Get back! He’s an actor! He’s not a cop!’” Anyway, he stepped into the parade and fell in with marching cops who knew nothing of what was happening (since Cohen had gotten no permit to film) and he pantomimed his killing spree and dropped dead as though riddled with bullets as cameras rolled and police marched onward. “The funny part,” said Cohen, “was that there must have been five thousand cops on the street and yet nobody bothered us because they just assumed that if we were doing this, we must have had permission from somebody. Otherwise, who would go out in the middle of five thousand police officers and start firing a weapon? It was an exercise in sheer audacity. Andy, of course, thought this was absolutely the greatest thing he’d ever done!”
Having secured his first professional acting credit—which would amount to four minutes of eventual screen time—he was summoned in April to Philadelphia, where his Grahm cohort Burt Dubrow now worked on the staff of the nationally syndicated Mike Douglas Show. Just as with the Elvis scheme in Chicago, Dubrow had cooked up another plot. The show’s producers had made a running gag of tormenting Robert Goulet whenever he guested with Douglas and now Goulet was set to appear again and Dubrow believed that Laughing Man, posed as a boom-microphone operator, would properly devastate the singer. So Laughing Man was in position as Goulet was asked to sing “The Nearness of You” to the wives of four hockey players and so he began to sing and Laughing Man could be heard shrieking in hyena fashion and Goulet stopped and said “What is he laughing at?” and Mike Douglas approached Laughing Man who gulpingly indicated