From Amazon
Bill Zehme's biography of comic actor/performance artist Andy Kaufman (subject of the feature film Man in the Moon) is a meticulously researched, eminently readable, and very strange book--this last being perhaps no surprise given its subject. Written over a six-year period, Lost in the Funhouse is crammed with details gleaned from interviews with the actor's family, friends, teachers, coworkers, and unwitting participants in Kaufman's pranks. In particular, the book provides great insight into Kaufman's early life in Great Neck, NY, his relationship with transcendental meditation, and his first forays into nightclubs in the early '70s. Zehme, author of The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin', weaves together multiple narratives from varying perspectives, including passages in which the author appears to have entered his subject's brain. Zehme did have access to unpublished letters and manuscripts (which fans would certainly like to see published on their own one day), but the only person who could legitimately verify the accuracy of these passages is no longer with us.
At its best, the book approaches that apex of artful celebrity bi-fiction, Nick Tosches's Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams. The transitions from one perspective to the next are a bit jarring at first, but once the reader gives in to Zehmes's collage of multiple personalities, one is considerably closer to understanding the book's subject. Kaufman was nothing if not a collection of various intense personalities: the young boy continually mourning his grandfather's death; the likable and naive Foreign Man; the talentless and irascible lounge singer Tony Clifton; the bliss-seeking student of TM; the devoted and loving son who never had anything to do with his own child; and world champion of inter-gender wrestling. Lost in the Funhouse is the one Kaufman tome that will please neophytes as well as those with their own Andy Kaufman Web sites. --Mike McGonigal
From Publishers Weekly
Already the subject of Bob Zmuda's recent memoir, Andy Kaufman Revealed, the avant-garde comedian receives more straightforward treatment at the hands of journalist Zehme (The Way You Wear Your Hat). Yet while Kaufman's life may be open to scrutiny, cracking the weird intricacies of his personality and motives is another matter. Growing up in Great Neck, N.Y., the young Andy honed his performance skills by hosting children's birthday parties before striking gold on the New York comedy scene with his creation of Foreign Man, a sweet, bumbling immigrant who would bomb with a series of unfunny jokes ("Tenk you veddy much"), only to veer into an uncanny impersonation of Elvis Presley. The character landed Kaufman a recurring guest spot on Saturday Night Live and a benchmark role as Latka Gravas on the sitcom Taxi. Eventually, his obnoxious alter ego, lounge singer Tony Clifton, and Kaufman's obsession with taunting and wrestling women audience members spurred Saturday Night Live viewers to vote by a wide margin to kick Kaufman off the show in 1982. A year and a half later, he was dead at the age of 35, the victim of lung cancer. Through the entertaining recollections of numerous friends, colleagues and family members, Kaufman comes across as either a genius or a lunatic, most likely a bit of both. Unfortunately, Zehme's mannered writing style (on Kaufman's part-time busboy job: "Plus, he could do funny things in the course of a shift not to be funny no really") detracts considerably from what is otherwise a balanced portrayal of his tumultuous career. 36 b&w photos not seen by PW. Agent, Chris Calhoun, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Timed to coincide with the release of Milos Foreman's film about Kaufman, Man on the Moon, this biography of the elusive comedian seems definitive. It covers Kaufman's initial Saturday Night Live appearances and portrayal of Latka Gravas on the sitcom Taxi, as well as subsequent shenanigans on Late Night with David Letterman and elsewhere. Journalist Zehme (author of a Sinatra biography, The Way You Wear Your Hat) writes from interviews with Kaufman's family and associates and uses the comedian's letters to good effect. He relates Kaufman's childhood on Long Island, his junior-college years in Boston, and other lesser-known moments. His work is perfectly serviceable, and libraries might want to purchase so as to capitalize on the interest surrounding Man on the Moon.
-Neal Baker, Earlham Coll., Richmond, IN
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
-Neal Baker, Earlham Coll., Richmond, IN
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"Fascinating ... Engrossing ... The closest thing we are ever likely to get to a definitive account of his life."
-- The New York Times Book Review
"In daring to crawl beneath Kaufman's psychic skin, armed with eyewitness accounts of his exploits, the book gets closer to the truth than we are otherwise likely to get."
-- Chicago Sun-Times
"Incisive, tellingly detailed."
-- Rolling Stone
From the Trade Paperback edition.
-- The New York Times Book Review
"In daring to crawl beneath Kaufman's psychic skin, armed with eyewitness accounts of his exploits, the book gets closer to the truth than we are otherwise likely to get."
-- Chicago Sun-Times
"Incisive, tellingly detailed."
-- Rolling Stone
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Book Description
From renowned journalist Bill Zehme, author of the New York Times bestselling The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin', comes the first full-fledged biography and the only complete story of the late comic genius Andy Kaufman. Based on six years of research, Andy's own unpublished, never-before-seen writings, and hundreds of interviews with family members, friends, and key players in Andy's endless charades, many of whom have become icons in their own right, Lost in the Funhouse takes us through the maze of Kaufman's mind and lets us sit deep behind his mad, dazzling blue eyes to see, firsthand, the fanciful landscape that was his life. Controversial, chaotic, splendidly surreal, and tragically brief--what a life it was.
Andy Kaufman was often a mystery even to his closest friends. Remote, aloof, impossible to know, his internal world was a kaleidoscope of characters fighting for time on the outside. He was as much Andy Kaufman as he was Foreign Man (dank you veddy much), who became the lovably bashful Latka on the hit TV series Taxi. He was as much Elvis Presley as he was the repugnant Tony Clifton, a lounge singer from Vegas who hated any audience that came to see him and who seemed to hate Andy Kaufman even more. He was a contradiction, a paradox on every level, an artist in every sense of the word.
During the comic boom of the seventies, when the world had begun to discover the prodigious talents of Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, John Belushi, Bill Murray, and so many others, Andy was simply doing what he had always done in his boyhood reveries. On the debut of Saturday Night Live, he stood nervously next to a phonograph that scratchily played the theme from Mighty Mouse. He fussed and fidgeted, waiting for his moment. When it came, he raised his hand and moved his mouth to the words "Here I come to save the day!" In that beautiful deliverance of pantomime before the millions of people for whom he had always dreamed about performing, Andy triumphed. He changed the face of comedy forever by lurching across boundaries that no one knew existed. He was the boy who made life his playground and never stopped playing, even when the games proved too dangerous for others. And in the end he would play alone, just as he had when it was all only beginning.
In Lost in the Funhouse, Bill Zehme sorts through a life of disinformation put forth by a master of deception to uncover the motivation behind the manipulation. Magically entertaining, it is a singular biography matched only by its singular subject.
Andy Kaufman was often a mystery even to his closest friends. Remote, aloof, impossible to know, his internal world was a kaleidoscope of characters fighting for time on the outside. He was as much Andy Kaufman as he was Foreign Man (dank you veddy much), who became the lovably bashful Latka on the hit TV series Taxi. He was as much Elvis Presley as he was the repugnant Tony Clifton, a lounge singer from Vegas who hated any audience that came to see him and who seemed to hate Andy Kaufman even more. He was a contradiction, a paradox on every level, an artist in every sense of the word.
During the comic boom of the seventies, when the world had begun to discover the prodigious talents of Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, John Belushi, Bill Murray, and so many others, Andy was simply doing what he had always done in his boyhood reveries. On the debut of Saturday Night Live, he stood nervously next to a phonograph that scratchily played the theme from Mighty Mouse. He fussed and fidgeted, waiting for his moment. When it came, he raised his hand and moved his mouth to the words "Here I come to save the day!" In that beautiful deliverance of pantomime before the millions of people for whom he had always dreamed about performing, Andy triumphed. He changed the face of comedy forever by lurching across boundaries that no one knew existed. He was the boy who made life his playground and never stopped playing, even when the games proved too dangerous for others. And in the end he would play alone, just as he had when it was all only beginning.
In Lost in the Funhouse, Bill Zehme sorts through a life of disinformation put forth by a master of deception to uncover the motivation behind the manipulation. Magically entertaining, it is a singular biography matched only by its singular subject.
About the Author
Bill Zehme is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin'. Recognized among the nation's more unique interpreters of popular culture, he is a longtime writer at large for Esquire, and his impressionistic profiles have appeared in Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Vanity Fair. During the six years of research for Lost in the Funhouse, he served as supervising producer of the network television retrospective Taxi: A Celebration and consulting producer of the NBC-TV special A Comedy Salute to Andy Kaufman. He lives in Chicago.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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-withpahrsnabiltiesfarbeeyon'thoza-mortal-meyen--" And when he was finished a smattering 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 11th, 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." Nevertheless, he was pleased enough with himself that night to consume as much ice cream as could be found in midtown Manhattan.
The following week's show was built around the reunion of singers Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, which left little room for much more than cursory sketches. But he was brought back most purposefully for the third and fourth broadcasts to lend presence and continuity. On October 25th, again in the first half-hour, guest host Rob Reiner introduced him (whereas stentorian announcer Don Pardo had done so in voice-over the first time) and he wore exactly what he had worn before--Foreign Man's checked sportcoat, white jeans, black dickie, pink shirt--and he stood next to the phonograph again and moved his mouth to "Pop Goes The Weasel", mirthfully evincing the larger vocal role of playful father to antic daughter. But his own voice, once again, was never heard. Then, on November 3rd, Candice Bergen--who had beheld his act more than once at The Improv--announced, "Boys and girls, this is a man I love very much. The word genius comes to mind, but I'll let you decide for yourselves." And here was Foreign Man at last, more tentative than ever, as pitch-perfect Bombing began with the canonball story moving into his eemetation of de Archie Bunker--Ehh, you stupid you are so stupid everybody ees stupid, ehh, get out of my chair, Meathead, de dingbat get into de kitchen making de food, ehh everybody is so stupid, dank you veddy much--at which point he lost his place and fell into a chasm of silent squirming, then in feeble effort to cover he offered to dance and sing and did (la-la-laaa!). Next, most historically in the realm of live television, he uttered the words ehh could we stop de tape? Then--I think we should turn off de T.V. . . . I don't know if you are laughing at me or weeth me. . . but I am trying to do my best but I forgot what I was going to do . . . And so, of course, he blithered and wept, emitting the rhythmic yelping breaths that brought his hands to the conga which he beat into manna which was, um, exquisite.
And within that four-week span of live broadcast reckoning, he had become more dependable than most anything else on the program and he remained a mystery but was also now a mystery of burgeoning fame, which was the plan all along. "I got to know him in the way that I get to know pretty much everyone I worked with on the show," Michaels said. "Because of the pressure, there's a kind of unavoidable intimacy. He had this real enthusiasm for what he was doing and he was very gentle. We never really talked at length--he'd just sort of tell me what he would do. Even before the show went on the air, we'd gotten to a place of trust. If he was enthusiastic about something he wanted to do, I didn't have to know much more. Within the club of the world I lived in, he was the edge--probably more than anybody else I can think of in comedy. There were lots of people doing variations on Lenny Bruce or doing what Richard Pryor had done, but here was a guy coming out of a completely original place. And you had to stand back and simply respect that."
And it was during those weeks and then in the months to come (then years thereafter) that he dwelt transparently amongst Saturday Night Live rabble, a separate and benign entity who came and did and scored and left--without sharing the secret of himself with more than a few of them. "I probably never spoke more than two words to him," said Beatts, and the same was true throughout the ranks. But there was one notable exception toward the beginning and that was Chevy Chase, the first break-out star in the cast, who projected something akin to likable smugness ("I'm Chevy Chase and you're not!") and prep school suavity, which were traits diametrically opposite to any possessed by Andy. But Chase, who also became a head writer, had moved into Herb Sargent's seventeenth floor office, which had a couch, and with the couch came the meditator who had already claimed the room as his deep-silence sanctum. "There were times when I'd walk in and he'd just be lying on the couch or doing some kind of yoga thing, or not," said Chase. "But I was so self-confident and sort of disarming--basically I just didn't give a shit--that I had no compunctions about simply facing the obvious with him. And I think the fact that I truly didn't give a shit made him comfortable to just be Andy. He knew there was no foolin' me--so we were able to talk about things. I remember engaging him in conversations about his method of preparation, his general health and well-being, his sanity, his acne. I asked him if he knew that he was funny and if he took pleasure in the responses he got to his work. Because he never really appeared to enjoy anything. And he said, yes, that he truly enjoyed the responses. He was always testing onstage, searching--is this funny or is it not funny or is it just odd? And did he care if it was funny? You know what? He did care. I once asked him, 'Do you know how brilliant you are?' And he turned shy again. He said he didn't know if anyone 'got it'--if they laughed at him or with him. But I think it meant something to him that I asked. I was sort of the cat's pajamas at the time and he respected that. But he also looked at what I was doing as rather pedestrian, I think, considering where he was headed.
"What's interes...
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 11th, 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." Nevertheless, he was pleased enough with himself that night to consume as much ice cream as could be found in midtown Manhattan.
The following week's show was built around the reunion of singers Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, which left little room for much more than cursory sketches. But he was brought back most purposefully for the third and fourth broadcasts to lend presence and continuity. On October 25th, again in the first half-hour, guest host Rob Reiner introduced him (whereas stentorian announcer Don Pardo had done so in voice-over the first time) and he wore exactly what he had worn before--Foreign Man's checked sportcoat, white jeans, black dickie, pink shirt--and he stood next to the phonograph again and moved his mouth to "Pop Goes The Weasel", mirthfully evincing the larger vocal role of playful father to antic daughter. But his own voice, once again, was never heard. Then, on November 3rd, Candice Bergen--who had beheld his act more than once at The Improv--announced, "Boys and girls, this is a man I love very much. The word genius comes to mind, but I'll let you decide for yourselves." And here was Foreign Man at last, more tentative than ever, as pitch-perfect Bombing began with the canonball story moving into his eemetation of de Archie Bunker--Ehh, you stupid you are so stupid everybody ees stupid, ehh, get out of my chair, Meathead, de dingbat get into de kitchen making de food, ehh everybody is so stupid, dank you veddy much--at which point he lost his place and fell into a chasm of silent squirming, then in feeble effort to cover he offered to dance and sing and did (la-la-laaa!). Next, most historically in the realm of live television, he uttered the words ehh could we stop de tape? Then--I think we should turn off de T.V. . . . I don't know if you are laughing at me or weeth me. . . but I am trying to do my best but I forgot what I was going to do . . . And so, of course, he blithered and wept, emitting the rhythmic yelping breaths that brought his hands to the conga which he beat into manna which was, um, exquisite.
And within that four-week span of live broadcast reckoning, he had become more dependable than most anything else on the program and he remained a mystery but was also now a mystery of burgeoning fame, which was the plan all along. "I got to know him in the way that I get to know pretty much everyone I worked with on the show," Michaels said. "Because of the pressure, there's a kind of unavoidable intimacy. He had this real enthusiasm for what he was doing and he was very gentle. We never really talked at length--he'd just sort of tell me what he would do. Even before the show went on the air, we'd gotten to a place of trust. If he was enthusiastic about something he wanted to do, I didn't have to know much more. Within the club of the world I lived in, he was the edge--probably more than anybody else I can think of in comedy. There were lots of people doing variations on Lenny Bruce or doing what Richard Pryor had done, but here was a guy coming out of a completely original place. And you had to stand back and simply respect that."
And it was during those weeks and then in the months to come (then years thereafter) that he dwelt transparently amongst Saturday Night Live rabble, a separate and benign entity who came and did and scored and left--without sharing the secret of himself with more than a few of them. "I probably never spoke more than two words to him," said Beatts, and the same was true throughout the ranks. But there was one notable exception toward the beginning and that was Chevy Chase, the first break-out star in the cast, who projected something akin to likable smugness ("I'm Chevy Chase and you're not!") and prep school suavity, which were traits diametrically opposite to any possessed by Andy. But Chase, who also became a head writer, had moved into Herb Sargent's seventeenth floor office, which had a couch, and with the couch came the meditator who had already claimed the room as his deep-silence sanctum. "There were times when I'd walk in and he'd just be lying on the couch or doing some kind of yoga thing, or not," said Chase. "But I was so self-confident and sort of disarming--basically I just didn't give a shit--that I had no compunctions about simply facing the obvious with him. And I think the fact that I truly didn't give a shit made him comfortable to just be Andy. He knew there was no foolin' me--so we were able to talk about things. I remember engaging him in conversations about his method of preparation, his general health and well-being, his sanity, his acne. I asked him if he knew that he was funny and if he took pleasure in the responses he got to his work. Because he never really appeared to enjoy anything. And he said, yes, that he truly enjoyed the responses. He was always testing onstage, searching--is this funny or is it not funny or is it just odd? And did he care if it was funny? You know what? He did care. I once asked him, 'Do you know how brilliant you are?' And he turned shy again. He said he didn't know if anyone 'got it'--if they laughed at him or with him. But I think it meant something to him that I asked. I was sort of the cat's pajamas at the time and he respected that. But he also looked at what I was doing as rather pedestrian, I think, considering where he was headed.
"What's interes...
