Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [98]
Mel would remember the coughing, how Andy coughed a lot during the rehearsals and the tapings. “He said it was nothing, just a little cold or something. But it wasn’t going away and it didn’t go away. I said, ‘Andy, you’ve got to go to the doctor.’ He said, ‘I don’t really go to doctors—I go to holistic practitioners.’ He fought me and fought me on this.” Anyway, he had always coughed. Everyone knew he always coughed. It was like a habit kind of. And the Crying never really helped matters—with all the bleating esophageal contractions, which were sort of brutal, so as to make the loud rhythmic eeeeeeeppppp-eeeeeeeppppps that took him to the drums. But it was, of course, nothing. Everyone knew. It was, um, just a habit.
Fred Silverman said noooooooooooooo way would ABC broadcast that thing, even in late night, and so it just sat there and this became desperately depressing to all involved but to none more than Andy, who could not understand the concerns. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not political or dirty. I tell people at the beginning to shut off their sets, but that cannot be the reason…. Everything I do is very innocent, very G-rated. My special could be shown on Saturday morning and appreciated by little kids…. Everybody tells me the Howdy Doody piece is too long. But I loved it. Howdy Doody is my friend.” But it was, they/Silverman said, too off-the-wall and too far-out and too whatever else and George eventually took it to NBC and Lorne Michaels wanted to run it in the Saturday Night Live time slot and it was all but a done deal when suddenly Fred Silverman became entertainment president of NBC and said noooooooooooooo way would NBC broadcast that thing. But by this time he was Latka on ABC and the new entertainment president there, Tony Thomopoulis, decided to just put it on the air, almost without warning, at eleven-thirty on Tuesday, August 28, 1979—and more than two years had elapsed since it was made—and it actually slightly outrated The Tonight Show on NBC. And the critics who wrote about it seemed to mostly admire it although lots of them also seemed a little worried about Andy. Janet Maslin in The New York Times called it “a generally crisp, often very funny program that in no way endangers Mr. Kaufman’s comic elusiveness. When any of the several characters Mr. Kaufman impersonates here suddenly proclaims himself ‘the real me,’ rest assured that he is lying.” But then Marvin Kitman in Newsday called the Howdy segment “embarrassingly private” and said the show was “vintage 1977 Kaufman, before he started to turn.” (Oh!) But then Kay Gardella in the New York Daily News called him “a comedian whose star is rising faster than his comedy repertoire…. You get the uneasy feeling when you’re watching him that he’s going to run out of gas before the show ends…. What he needs is more material.” But then Howard Rosenberg in the Los Angeles Times said it was “absurdity carried sometimes to the point of brilliance, sometimes to the point of tedium…. Watching this for a while, it becomes obvious … Andy Kaufman should be wearing a straitjacket.” But, of course, they were saying those things more than two years later.
Elvis would die twelve days after this—which was Andy’s August 4 appearance with Johnny Carson which would be his final appearance with Johnny Carson—which was the first time that he was the real him on The Tonight Show. Carson could not seem to connect at all with the real him. “It’s a little difficult to explain what Andy does,” Carson said by way of introduction. “He will do it when he comes out.” So he came out with eemetations and Elveece and threw pieces of the new white costume into the crowd until he got down to the I LOVE GRANDMA sweatshirt (which Pearl and Lillie separately kvelled about, Wearing it, can you imagine,