There are no empty beer cans or cigarette butts that can guide you to his grave. No crowds. No security guard. No graffiti on the neighboring headstones. Walk past Fishman and Waldman in Section One-4 of Beth David cemetery in Elmont until you reach a small bush with those little red berries that our moms all told us were poison when we were kids. Look down and you'll see it.
There is no bust of him in his Elvis getup, lip curled and hair coiffed. No statue of him standing awkwardly next to a phonograph, waiting to lip synch the Mighty Mouse theme song. No mention of his lounge-lizard alter ego Tony Clifton or the lovably incompetent Latka Gravas or the sword-swallowing fakir. No mention of his profession at all. No sign of what he was or who he was. Just a slab of granite, sticking six inches above the ground at the front of the Kaufman-Bernstein family plot, etched with the words "beloved son, brother and grandson."
Andy Kaufman's body is supposed to be lying six feet below this hunk of stone. Nobody's sure whether to believe that or not.
If Kaufman isn't lying underneath this pitch of earth in Elmont, then where would he be? Where would he have gone all these years? Elvis went to truck stops. Jim Morrison went to Africa. Maybe Andy went home.
"He would talk to Lynne Margulies, the love of his life, about if he was going to do this, what would be the right amount of time that he would be gone to prove that he was really dead?" Zmuda recalls. "And he came up with ten years. Who knows? If he had done this, maybe when the ten-year mark came up, he said, 'You know what? This is so cool what I'm doing now and I have such a different life. Who needs it? I've lived that one.'"
'The time to rise has been engaged'
There is no bust of him in his Elvis getup, lip curled and hair coiffed. No statue of him standing awkwardly next to a phonograph, waiting to lip synch the Mighty Mouse theme song. No mention of his lounge-lizard alter ego Tony Clifton or the lovably incompetent Latka Gravas or the sword-swallowing fakir. No mention of his profession at all. No sign of what he was or who he was. Just a slab of granite, sticking six inches above the ground at the front of the Kaufman-Bernstein family plot, etched with the words "beloved son, brother and grandson."
Andy Kaufman's body is supposed to be lying six feet below this hunk of stone. Nobody's sure whether to believe that or not.
If Kaufman isn't lying underneath this pitch of earth in Elmont, then where would he be? Where would he have gone all these years? Elvis went to truck stops. Jim Morrison went to Africa. Maybe Andy went home.
"He would talk to Lynne Margulies, the love of his life, about if he was going to do this, what would be the right amount of time that he would be gone to prove that he was really dead?" Zmuda recalls. "And he came up with ten years. Who knows? If he had done this, maybe when the ten-year mark came up, he said, 'You know what? This is so cool what I'm doing now and I have such a different life. Who needs it? I've lived that one.'"
'The time to rise has been engaged'
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment