Andy Kaufman Revealed! Read Free Page B

little shows for neighborhood kids, always with the condition that adults were expressly forbidden to attend.
    Now he was being asked to do his thing in front of an audience over whom he had no control. His knee-jerk reaction was to decline, but TM had been altering his thought processes, allaying his fears and shyness, showing him that his concerns about others’ scrutiny of him were groundless. His mental placidity gave him a new confidence he had never before experienced. He agreed to do it.
    Using his TM discipline to wash away the terror and jittery nerves, Andy charged himself with a million volts of electricity and went before that audience at Grahm Junior College and performed some of the same routines he had done for his friends as a child. The juxtaposition of his children’s material with an adult audience was lightning in a bottle uncorked. The crowd’s extraordinary reaction, coupled with his new mind-set from TM, proved to Andy that his fears were no longer part of his luggage, so he set them down and never looked back.
    Perhaps he had been working up to that point of demarcation all his life. He had always lived in his own mind, but his meditation somehow allowed him to turn inside out and see outside reality as no more dangerous than had been his make-believe world as a child. Andy Kaufman had reinvented himself. It was mid-1969 and he was now ready to take the next step. Emboldened by his formal debut as an entertainer, Andy knew his next move was a necessity for his ascendancy as a performer to the great heights he envisioned. If that was to be his path, his direction in life, he required an audience with the most influential person he knew of. But meeting this person would be harder than getting to the Pope or the president, mainly because this person was bigger than either of them. Andy didn’t know how he was going to do it, but he knew he had to.
    He had to meet Elvis.
    Andy had written a book about Elvis. Having authored several other unfinished manuscripts, Andy felt his work in progress about Elvis was worthy of passing on to the King for approval. Somewhere around two hundred pages in length, the book was more a hand-scrawled tribute than a biography, and Andy felt it was a perfect calling card for an audience with this great man. Andy’s daily forays into meditation had given him the courage and resolve to meet Elvis. Almost completely broke and without a car, Andy visualized the gulf between himself and the King and saw them meeting. Now he just needed to, as they say,
actualize
the whole thing.
    At this point in his career, Elvis was in the throes of a comeback. Overwhelmed by his success in the late ’50s and early ’60s, Elvis had lost some of his bearings and had become to many almost a parody of his former self. One of his strategies to pull himself out of his tailspin was to return to live entertaining, and Las Vegas was the Mecca for live performing. Having already failed once at a comeback, this time Elvis took notice of the successes of Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck and created a power-packed, glitzy show with capes and flair and flash. Thus re armed, he rode hack in triumph as the “new Elvis,” now transformed into the white-clad, sequined, high-collared stage denizen with whom we are so familiar through myriad emulators.
    Andy discovered that Elvis was to do a series of shows at the Las Vegas Hilton, then the flagship of the chain and one of the biggest houses in Vegas. Having formulated the outline of a plan, and inspired by Jack Kerouac’s classic,
On the Road,
Andy gathered up his looseleaf Elvis opus and hit the asphalt. On foot. From Great Neck, Long Island, twenty-year-old Andy Kaufman began hitchhiking the twenty-five-hundred-some miles to his destiny with the greatest entertainer in the history of the world. Within a week he was entering the outskirts of America’s Gomorrah. By that time, Andy didn’t even have money for food, let alone a ticket to Elvis’s