Who was the real Andy Kaufman? It’s a question that had people scratching their heads even before the actor/performance artist—who was often pigeonho
Who was the real Andy Kaufman? It’s a question that had people scratching their heads even before the actor/performance artist—who was often pigeonholed as being a comedian, much to his own chagrin—passed away in 1984 at the age of 35. Within his too-short lifetime, the Taxi star managed to pack in a lifetime’s worth of affluent material that we’re still analyzing today. Whether he was lip-synching the Mighty Mouse theme song—specifically, the chorus—wrestling women as the self-proclaimed Intergender Wrestling Champion of the World, reading The Great Gatsby in its entirety to an audience, crooning as an obnoxious lounge singer named Tony Clifton, or taking the entire audience of Carnegie Hall out for milk and cookies, Kaufman is still keeping us guessing as to what is and isn’t real.
The thing is, how you view Kaufman can change depending on who you ask. For instance, he himself always said he was “just a song and dance man.” His secretary, Linda Mitchell, has said that he told her he aspired to be “the greatest entertainer of all time.” David Letterman tells me that spending time with Andy was like, “spending a day at the carnival.” Filmmaker Clay Tweel sees him as being “someone who is very sweet and full of contrast.” Longtime admirer Dwayne Johnson refers to Kaufman as being “the epitome of humanity in that it takes guts to go down the road that Andy went down.” To his sister Carol Kaufman, he was simply “a gentle man who genuinely loved his family.”
Kaufman, featured in Andy Kaufman Is Me.The Kaufman Estate.
Now, Tweel’s recent documentary—Andy Kaufman Is Me—premieres tonight at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film attempts to pull back the curtain and show a side of Kaufman that audiences may be unfamiliar with: the man behind the meticulously calculated chaos that he relished in making you believe was genuine, off-the-rails chaos.
“I remember seeing old SNL clips when I was little of Andy,” Tweel says of his first exposure to the gifted performer. “And he struck me as strange and sort of gave me uncomfortable feelings, but I liked it and I didn’t know why. I love being able to understand people who are the best at what they do, what their creative juices look like. Trying to get inside their brain.”
There’s been countless books written about Kaufman, a major motion picture starring Jim Carrey, TV retrospectives, a podcast, a long-running award devoted to preserving his legacy, and even an entire college course at DePaul University in Chicago dedicated to his work. But there hadn’t been a comprehensive documentary that adequately covered the scope of his life and career. Kaufman’s family knew there was a story there left to tell. Says Tweel, “I’ll never forget my first conversation with the Kaufman family. They were talking about how there was parts of Andy that the public never got to see. And my first question was ‘How are we going to be able to show that? It’s a visual medium. What’re we going to do?’ And that’s when they told me about the 84 hours of audio tapes.”
From 1977 until 1982, Kaufman kept a tape recorder rolling in his coat pocket. Some would know they were being recorded. Most would not. According to Kaufman’s brother, Michael Kaufman, “He wasn’t doing it for a purpose. He wasn’t doing it for legacy. He was just having fun. And look at the results. It allowed memories to be rekindled.”
For Kaufman, this was an act of self-expression. And he was able to do it without the gatekeepers of the TV or film industry telling him he couldn’t. He had complete control over his tape recorder. As his sister Carol says, “Self-expression was so important to him in his life. And on the flip side: the lack of self-expression—when he was voted off SNL, when he was prevented from going to the Maharishi workshops, when he wasn’t invited to other television shows—was also a detriment to his health.”
Interviews from Andy Kaufman Is Me: siblings Michael Kaufman and Carol Kaufman-Kerman; David Letterman.All: Fifth Season.
He would record conversations with fans, including those who wrote him hate letters, who he would personally call. (He would always tell Letterman, “Send me the hate mail,” after he did his Late Night show). He would record moments of fun singing in the car with his family, or heartfelt conversations with his grandma, Lillie, whom he loved so dearly that he would wear a shirt that says “I Love Grandma” while onstage. He would record prank phone calls made to the restaurant he worked at as a busboy, mundane conversations with those in his life that seem to go nowhere, and interactions with hitchhikers he picked up. Once, he recorded hours of material as a character he was playing in a movie. He wanted to go somewhere where he wouldn’t be recognized, so he flew to London and stood in Hyde Park where he would claim to be God in a hefty Southern drawl. Moments that would otherwise be lost to time were just waiting to be unearthed. “In my opinion, [the 84 hours of audio] took the documentary to another level,” says Dwayne Johnson, who is a producer on the film via his production company, Seven Bucks Productions. “When you just hear him speak at times, he’s so vulnerable and open.”
Adds Carol, “The first time I heard the tapes, I felt like I was hanging onto Andy and the brotherly love. When Andy got busy and famous, he couldn’t give me the same time as when we were much younger and living together in a house. I did this search of ‘How did Andy relate to me? Did he still love me? Was I still important to him as his kid sister?’ So when I heard these recordings [which featured Andy and his sister talking on the phone, with her not knowing she was being recorded], I was very emotional because it was so tender and loving. I could feel our closeness and how easily we could speak about personal things. How he was interested in my life.”
Kaufman is often heralded as being ahead of his time. When people say that, they’re speaking specifically to his professional output. But on these audio tapes, you realize that he was also a pioneer of capturing everyday moments as they unfolded, much like what you might find on social media today. These tapes represent a fascination with catching raw and real emotions during a time when the only output for something like that would’ve been on Candid Camera. It was just another way for Kaufman to orchestrate his own narrative and bring his ultimate fantasy world to life.
Kaufman with Judd Hirsch, Tony Danza, and Marilu Henner in Taxi (1978-1983).Everett Collection.
As unpredictable as things might have looked when he was on Fridays and pouring water on Michael Richards’s head, for instance, everything he did was completely by design. There were no accidents with Andy. And unlike Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat is that—a lot of times—he’d even let the other person in on it. “One of many nice things about Andy is you would get a rough outline,” says Letterman, an executive producer of the recent documentary via Worldwide Pants. “It was like a menu at Denny’s. He would tell you what he was up to, generally. So there were never any surprises, except that the performance that he had outlined was always interesting and exciting.”
The audio archives that Tweel had access to aren’t constrained to just Andy’s personal recordings either. Featured in the film are archival audios used for Bill Zehme’s 1999 book, Lost in the Funhouse. Through this archival audio, Andy’s father, Stanley—who passed in 2013—is able to shed lithe on his relationship with his son, which was occasionally strained when Andy was a teenager. He even shares a letter that Andy wrote to him a few years before his massive break on Saturday Night Live that really paints a picture of not just the regard that Andy held his family in, but his determination to make it in show business and the massive things that he had on the horizon. Tweel told me that Zehme’s tapes were essential because “sometimes audio interviews are a little more candid and a little more honest because people have dropped the pretenses that a video camera brings.”
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