One day in the late 1960s, I visited a friend at her office at Grahm Junior College in Boston, where she taught English. When we left her office for lunch, a young man sprang from a chair and planted himself in front of my friend. He was tall and sturdily built, but there was no sense of menace. His blue eyes were haunting, if not haunted, and he looked more anxious than aggressive. “Have you read it?” he asked.
My friend told him she had not read it yet but would. He was disappointed, but he thanked her and went on his way. My friend told me he was one of her students, a likeable oddball who wanted her to read the novel he wrote. Its title was “God.”
Several months later, I went to the Cambridge apartment of a different friend. I was picking him up to go somewhere, but he had been detained so his roommate let me in to wait. It was the same guy I had seen at Grahm. I didn’t mention having seen him before because he was self-conscious enough already. He could barely make eye contact and seemed more interested in the magazine he was reading than my attempt at small talk. I busied myself by looking through the row of LPs on the floor below the turntable. I flipped through the requisite albums of the period—Dylan, Beatles, Airplane, Dead—then came upon what seemed to be every album Elvis Presley ever made. “Wow, someone here really likes Elvis,” I exclaimed.
My companion suddenly came alive. His blue eyes widened, he smiled broadly, and he said, looking at me directly, “Do you like Elvis? I’m his biggest fan. I see him whenever I can. I saw him in Vegas. I saw him in LA…” and so on through more locations and a gleeful monologue about Elvis’s greatness.
Soon, my friend arrived and we left. But it was not the last I would see of Andy Kaufman.
A bit later on I got deeply into Transcendental Meditation and started spending time at the Cambridge TM center. As it happened, so did Andy. I confess that I avoided him at first because his awkward shyness—or what I thought was shyness—made me uncomfortable. Then I started to see the side of him that came alive over Elvis, the voluble life-of-the-party side, and that was irresistible. He turned out to be far more intelligent, inquisitive, warm-hearted, and affable than his eccentricities suggested, and he was funny as hell in a goofy, off-the-wall kind of way.
As time went on, I would see him not only at the meditation center, but at parties, restaurants, walks to and from places, and weekend retreats and, later on, longer retreats (his commitment to meditation practice was as unwavering as his commitment to his art). Maybe others knew that Andy had show biz aspirations, but for quite some time I did not. I just thought he was a wacky guy who entertained himself and his friends by putting on accents, babbling in gibberish to shopkeepers, fearlessly baiting people on the streets, talking about Howdy Doody and Mighty Mouse, and on a couple of memorable occasions, breaking into his impeccable Elvis imitation.
I didn’t know he was working on his material, developing his comedic persona, and perfecting the timing of his radical performance art.
One warm spring night, Andy and I and a couple of friends went to Brigham’s in Harvard Square for ice cream. He was the last of us to place his order at the counter. Only now he wasn’t Andy. He was the character he called Foreign Man. Foreign Man spoke hesitantly in a vaguely East European accent, and he had a childlike, stranger-in-a-strange-land innocence that made you want to help him. The poor youngster behind the counter tried his best as Foreign Man wrestled with the choice of flavors. I don’t remember how many flavors there actually were, but it felt like hundreds as Foreign Man started to order one, changed his mind, examined the other options, and asked for yet another sample. This went on and on as the line behind us got longer and eventually bled onto the street. People called out, “Come on,” and other more threatening taunts. The server grew more and more desperate. I was afraid someone would get violent. I tried to get Andy’s attention, but Foreign Man was oblivious.
Just as he would do as a famous entertainer, Andy took it to the brink. He settled on—wait for it—vanilla. He paid for his cone, slowly counting out every cent as if American money was new to him, and said, “Tenk you veddy much.”
Foreign Man, of course, would become Latka Gravas, the loveable mechanic in the sitcom “Taxi.”
Other Andy bits that I witnessed—the lame Foreign Man jokes, the weeping jags that segued into a calypso chant with bongo drums, the Mighty Mouse routine (not the wrestling, thankfully)—would become staples of his comedy club act and, later, his national TV gigs. Friends and I still talk about the time he performed his club act almost in its entirety at a meditation retreat just a few months before his appearance on the first Saturday Night Live broadcast.
I ran into Andy only a few times after he became famous, but the last encounter was poignant. In 1982, I moved to Los Angeles. Sometime later that year or early in the next, I was writing about holistic health and went to the Whole Life Expo to peruse the wellness products in the exhibit hall. And there was Andy doing the same. He was alone, and while he was happy to see me, he seemed preoccupied and maybe troubled. I thought it was just discomfort about being stared at by people who recognized him. We walked around together, and I was struck by how he pressed for information about certain healthcare products. After a while, I got impatient and said goodbye.
A year later, Andy was dead, although his penchant for blurring the border between the real and not real sparked rumors that he had faked it. He had large-cell lung carcinoma, a rare form of lung cancer made even rarer by the fact that Andy, according to friends who knew him better than I did, never smoked. I learned that he blamed the illness on the metallic makeup that made him look like a robot in the movie “Heartbeeps.” I have no idea if that is true, but clearly Andy had been desperate to find a natural cure.
The reverence with which Andy came to be held in comedy circles was, at first, baffling to me. But I came to appreciate the daring, inventive, off-the-wall, boundary-breaking creativity that, experts say, reshaped American entertainment. I am grateful to have witnessed its formative stages.
Why write this piece about a performer who has been gone for 41 years? Two reasons. One, it is a reminder that the awkward weirdo we find it uncomfortable to be around might very well be a genius in the making. Two, a documentary about Andy’s life and work is opening at The Triplex in Great Barrington this weekend. It is a good one. It is called “Thank You Very Much,” and that was what I was saying to Andy’s spirit when I saw it on Friday.
