Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [82]
Lorne Michaels put him on camera and taped an obligatory audition, not that it mattered, because he was firmly understood to be part of the birth-march of Saturday Night, but everyone else had to do it as well, so he recited “MacArthur Park” not as an old Jew but as himself, which wasn’t really very funny which he never tried to be anyway. He sat with a forearm propped on a desktop at 30 Rockefeller Center and spoke the lyrics twice, pouring it on just a tad in the second rendering (with dramatic closing-of-eyes in anguished places), and Lorne thanked him and said, “You want to do something else?” And he said, “Um, okay,” then looked down, then looked up and became dew-dripping mushmouthed hillbilly and drawled, “Fasterna-speedn-bullet-mo-pahrfulna-loc’motive-abletuh-leap-tawl-buildnsna-sanglebown—Look upna sky, it’sa birrrd, it’sa playyyun, nope, it’s Suprmayn, yeeppppp, Suuuprmayn-strayunge-vizzter-frum-enuthr-planet-who-cameta-Earth-withpahrsnabilitiesfarbeeyon’thoza-mortal-meyen—” And when he was finished a smattering of applause echoed in the room and he smiled shyly and got up and left.
He became a fixture around the show’s seventeenth-floor production offices in the weeks before the October premiere. He did not fraternize as much as lurk. Relatively few staff or cast members knew who he was or what he was or what he was supposed to do—although John Belushi had become an early true believer after having seen the conga-crying in clubs. Anne Beatts, a newly recruited writer, first encountered him slumping in Lorne’s antechamber—“I thought, Oh, man, is this the kind of person they’re hiring? I don’t know if I want to be a part of this! He was so twitchy and weird and had bad skin. He looked very nerdy and geeky. I had severe doubts about the show from the beginning and my initial impression of Andy was the first of them.” Very late on the Friday night before the broadcast, however, her opinion changed when she saw him rehearse, which he almost didn’t because the rehearsals dragged on interminably and he had yet to perform a run-through of Mighty Mouse for the crew and finally he said he had to leave. “And it was like—‘Wait, you can’t leave!’” Beatts would recall. “And he said, ‘No, I have to go if I’m going to make the last train back to Great Neck.’ Lorne told him, ‘No, Andy, we need you here.’ So he said, ‘Well, I guess I could get my mother to come pick me up….’”
On October 11, he meditated twice, locking himself in the office of head writer Herb Sargent—once before dress rehearsal and again before the live broadcast. Both times he taped a note on the door —Please do not disturb me while I meditate, Andy Kaufman. All around him, panic and mayhem swirled as would become customary Saturday Night crucible. Then all panic escalated after the dress rehearsal, which went desperately over the ninety-minute limit. “There was a lot of weeping and wailing and fierce argument,” Michaels would recall. “We had to make cuts and one of the choices was to cut Andy. And that was the one thing I wasn’t going to do. Andy was sacrosanct. More than any one thing in that first show, he represented the spirit of what we were trying to do. Not only was it—in the language of the time—a hip act, but the very hippest aspect was that he only lip-synched the part of Mighty Mouse. That was the essence of avant-garde.” Said Ebersol, “We put him on in the first half hour because we felt it was a killer. And it killed. The audience went nuts. When the show was over, the commercial parodies and Andy were the only things that people talked about. And he knew at that moment that that was it for the piece. Mighty Mouse had killed night after night for years in the clubs—but now television had eaten it up and it wasn’t going to be a surprise anymore.