Andy, in 1978: “How can you write this? You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know about the craziness, the insanity.” Photograph by Elizabeth Wolynski

One night in 1975, I was tying up the garbage when my husband called me to come and see something he was watching on TV. “You have to see this!” he called. I couldn’t believe there was anything on television that I had to see, but he sounded as if he had found something exciting and wonderful.

There was a tall, dark, and almost handsome man, dressed in a black turtleneck sweater, with a button-down shirt and a checked sports jacket over it. He was standing on a stage, with a small record-player next to him, and when he put the needle on, it played the Mighty Mouse theme song. The man appeared to have no idea what he was doing until the singing began. Then he knew just what he was doing, and suddenly he turned into a baritone star from a nineteen-fifties musical as he started to lip-synch the words. It wasn’t funny the way other things are funny. It just made you laugh.

The mysterious man was Andy Kaufman, on “Saturday Night Live.” During the next couple of years, I tried to watch the show whenever he was on as a guest. In 1978, I read that he would be performing in New York, at Town Hall. I got the idea that I would meet him, talk to him, and find out how he came to do what he was doing, and I would write about it.

At the end of a year of meeting with Andy—and hanging out and taping whatever happened—I went to my typewriter, and soon had a long manuscript, which was thought to be too strange to be published at the time. Most people didn’t know who Andy was. He had made a special for a television network, but no network would show it. Then Andy was advised by his manager to take a part on the sitcom “Taxi” so that he could become well known. This worked, and the special was televised at last.

A cough that Andy had for a while turned out to be lung cancer, and he died in 1984. He was thirty-five years old.

Now a movie has been made about him, and I thought it would be a good idea to show how he talked about his own life.

NOT FUNNY

“I want the audience to have a wonderful happy feeling inside them and leave with big smiles on their faces,” Andy said with a blank stare when I met him for the first time. When he saw reviews calling him a comedian, he looked unhappy. “I wouldn’t mind being compared to Charlie Chaplin or W. C. Fields,” he said sadly. “But I don’t find most comedy funny.”

“What’s it for, some kinda movie magazine, or what?” Andy’s manager, George Shapiro, had asked me over the phone from Beverly Hills. “Yeah, well, Andy doesn’t like to do these things, and he’s going to be very busy when he’s in New York. But, listen, he’s also going to perform at his high school, in Great Neck, and this is a great triumph for him because he was so shy in high school. You can go out there and talk to him after the concert.”

Andy’s mother was at home in Great Neck, and sounded surprised to hear that her son was a genius. She said that Andy’s father was in the costume-jewelry business, and that she was a homemaker and mother. If Andy was from a regular family, the question of how he got to be the way he was seemed even more mysterious. I wanted to come right out and ask her, but it was too soon for that.

Andy himself, on the phone from Los Angeles, said he was rushing out to perform at the Comedy Store. Every few minutes, he’d say, “I’m late, I haven’t meditated yet, I don’t have time for this.” When he called back after his performance, he had a list of questions: “How tall are you? When is your birthday? What color hair do you have? I just want to know whether I’d be interested in having a love affair with you. Wouldn’t that be fun? You could get me to give away all my secrets and then you could use them in your story.”

“Couldn’t you tell the secrets any other way?”

“Yeah, probably, but with my pants up I’d give away less than with my pants down.”

“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” I said.

“I’m just kidding. But wouldn’t it be great if you were my dream girl, a girl from my fantasies?”

GREAT NECK

When the concert didn’t begin on time the unruly mob of kids in the auditorium began screaming for Andy. Soon he danced onto the stage holding a microphone and singing “Oklahoma.” He skipped around as he sang in an unprofessional voice. Then he began to speak with an unknown foreign accent. The foreign man started to tell some jokes in a meek and nervous way, and when the audience wouldn’t laugh he began to laugh himself. Then the audience began to boo and the foreign man started to apologize and cry. When he recovered he said he’d like to do some impressions, but they were so bad they weren’t impressions at all. Finally, he said he’d like to do Elvis Presley. He turned around and changed into a costume and then did an unbelievably perfect imitation. He even had Elvis Presley’s voice. The audience of kids went crazy with happiness. Then Andy stepped forward and, in the foreign accent again, said, “Tenk you vedy much.”

While I waited outside Andy’s dressing room, his father came over and sat down. “Andy was the first in our neighborhood to entertain at children’s birthday parties,” he said. “Lily Tomlin heckled him in Los Angeles, but then she apologized and explained that she thought he was a real artist.”

“When I grow up, I want to be rediscovered.” Facebook

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A guy named Bob came along and said he was Andy’s road manager. I believed him, because he had long blond hair and was wearing a cap with a visor. “The first time I saw Andy talk to Johnny Carson, I figured that he was from Brooklyn or Long Island and came from a regular family,” I told Bob as I tried to explain my project.

“Oh, you thought that was the real Andy?” Bob said. “That’s just a character he does—Andy Kaufman—nice, normal, sweet boy. That’s not really Andy.”

Andy sat down at a desk in a classroom and drank from two large bottles of juice. Some students stood around and asked him questions like “Who are your influences?” He told them that his parents had taken him to a night club when he was a child and that he saw a singer there and he presumed the singer was Elvis Presley. Around that time, he began to imitate the singer. Years later, he realized that the singer was an imitator of Elvis Presley and that he had been imitating the imitator all along.

“How did you feel when you realized you were imitating the wrong person?” one of the students asked.

“Pretty bad. But nobody knew I was imitating the imitator. So it wasn’t that bad.”