If we were good, we got milk and cookies at the end, and maybe a mass bunny hop out into the street. What had redeemed Andy Kaufman was a perpetual sense of play there was always something in the eyes, a glimmer that indicated he was playing with the idea of being watched, and that he was looking back. It wasn’t funny and it wasn’t entertaining, and you began to wonder what kind of morbid symptom this was, not only for the producers to press this consciously awful act beyond midnight, but for the audience to sit with it. Now he was exploiting us in the name of Kaufman. Clifton flapped his lips in a deliberately bad parody of Kaufman doing Presley. Suddenly there was a pause in the mounting din: If ever there was a moment for Kaufman to declare himself redux, this was it.īut it wasn’t. People began pelting him with wadded-up bills and programs, paper airplanes.Īt one point he turned his back to prepare for an Elvis impersonation the lights went down. He was rude to people he invited onstage (“Get off the stage, pal! Get the hell off!”). The lounge trip down memory lane, Vegas-style, with “I Gotta Be Me,” “Volare,” “New York, New York” and the sine qua non of every Vegas act, “My Way,” all sung in a rough, catarrhal voice, off key. He spoke with a faint Chicago accent Kaufman grew up in Long Island. The height, for example-this guy was shorter. The audience looked hard, straining.īut some things you couldn’t double-fake. Obviously he was wearing a pad to beef up his front. He wore a pink tuxedo jacket over a blue shirt with ruffles. Was there anyone who wasn’t in on the joke? Was it a joke? “It’s gotta be him, it’s gotta!” said a man in the rear.Ĭlifton came on in front of his band, the Cliftones. George Hamilton, David Letterman, Merv Griffin. Steve Allen and Dinah Shore introducing Clifton. Whoopi Goldberg, Shari Belafonte Harper and Rodney Dangerfield were there, along with a couple of hot young film directors and other industry types to whom it’s crucial to be in the know.īyron Allen, a gifted young mimic-comedienne named Pam Mattison, Paul Rodriguez (in good form with new material) and the rock ‘n’ roll band of Billy Swan and Buddy Hollywood preceded the appearance of Clifton, whose delay was milked to the limit by emcee Gary Owens’ dilatory buildup, which took so long that the audience became bored and talkative. Inside, paparazzi swung their camera packs perilously over the little tables clustered with drinks, holding their cameras at the ready, like gunfighters. I’m going to stage my own death, go underground in Paris and re-emerge as Tony Clifton.” The photo we saw as Clifton in the news looked stagy enough.Ĭould it be? The street outside the Comedy Store was packed. A macabre groundswell of rumor began about how Kaufman, after successfully staging a contretemps and a walkout from a TV show, had said: “If you think this is something, wait two years. Tony Clifton came to town and gave interviews. ![]() In theater parlance it’s called “demystification,” and Kaufman was a master at it.ĭuring the last couple of weeks, a banner announcing Tony Clifton had stretched across the Sunset Strip. That was Kaufman’s game-to go you one further, to stare down an audience with a deliberately bad act and thereby challenge the rules of the spectator-performer relationship. ![]() ![]() invite you to attend ‘TONY CLIFTON LIVE’ (And Guests).” Top price was $100.Įveryone, or almost everyone, in the audience knew that Tony Clifton, the aggressively untalented Vegas lounge singer, had been Kaufman’s alter ego, a role played out with such impeccable dead-pan logic that Kaufman never whipped off the wig and glasses to give it away. The evening was billed as the “American Cancer Society (Van Nuys Chapter) in association with The Andy Kaufman Memorial Fund.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |