Depending on whom you ask, Andy Kaufman either died on this day 29 years ago, or he pulled off one of history's greatest hoaxes. As evidence for the latter, they'll point to his career. Not the obvious one -- his "Taxi" gig or his quick-flaming stint on "Saturday Night Live" (which ended with the audience voting him off the show as part of a stunt he suggested, not thinking it would go that way). Even at the height of his mainstream success, Kaufman would tell any reporter who'd listen that all that flashy stuff was just to support his real work: his high-concept live act.
It's a long and sublimely silly list. Take the times Kaufman read The Great Gatsby aloud until the audience hissed and booed. "Would you rather listen to a tape?" he'd ask (they always said yes). But the tape simply turned out to be a recording of him reading The Great Gatsby. There was his Carnegie Hall special, after which he invited the entire audience -- all 2,800 of them, including Andy Warhol -- to a meticulously planned snack of milk and cookies.
Even a reasonable fan might have seen in the scope of Kaufman's lunacy a promise that he'd someday try the ultimate prank.
Today there is evidence to the contrary. A death certificate, for one. For those who can't make it to the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services to see the document in person, the Smoking Gun made an image available online in 1999 to counteract a flurry of rumors the website ascribed to "guerilla marketing" for the release of the Milos Forman biopic, "Man On The Moon," which stars Jim Carrey as Kaufman.
"In this case," admonished the writer, "it seems rather cynical, since Kaufman most certainly died on May 16, 1984 in Cedars Sinai Hospital, as this copy of his death certificate shows."
So there lies Kaufman, for all intents and purposes. (As well as under a "slab of granite" described by the Village Voice in a 1999 dispatch from Section One-4 of Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, N.Y.)
Still, a small subset of fans remain convinced that Kaufman faked his death. These few, who refer to themselves as "the disciples," await their hero with the grim determination of Pentecostals counting down the days until rapture. They've kept the faith even after moments of supposed return came and went. Their mythology is murky, and their methods are questionable. Step one foot into their world and the floor collapses into a rabbit hole.
Kaufman, if he were (is?) alive, would surely approve.
ACTS OF GENEROSITY
The disciples meet less regularly these days than they once did. But the point of contact hasn't changed. The clubhouse is online, at AndyKaufmanLives.com, the highest-trafficked Kaufman conspiracy website, which was registered in 2003 to one Stephen D. Maddox of Greenwood, Ind.
The original community was small but diverse. "There was this girl from Croatia, a guy from the Netherlands, a guy from Gibraltar," said Frank Edward Nora, the host of talk radio podcast "The Overnightscape." Nora, who runs the podcast out of his home in New Jersey, says he was "drawn in briefly" to the site out of journalistic curiosity, but long enough to become a disciple.
This "small, core group of a dozen or two dozen people" shared one thing in common, he said. "They'd all made this almost supernatural connection with Andy Kaufman, for whatever reason."
But they tend to fixate on someone else almost as much as they do on Kaufman: Maddox, the site's founder and bestower of the title "disciple," an enigmatic figure who claims to be a descendant of Kaufman's, and who some disciples believe could be closer than that.
Jack Bristow, a 27-year-old writer in Albuquerque, N.M., had his first brush with Maddox during the site's early days in 2003. Back then, Bristow was a skeptic. He recalls posting critiques of the death hoax conspiracy on the site's forum, which was moderated by a woman with the punny, fake-sounding name of Claire Channel.
"Some of the posters seemed to get a bit angry," Bristow wrote in an email to The Huffington Post. But "Claire would never get mad."
In 2004, Kaufman's longtime partner-in-crime Bob Zmuda organized a tribute night at the House of Blues in Los Angeles. The event piqued the interest of everyone at AKLives. Kaufman reportedly once teased that, if he died, he would return 20 years later. And Zmuda's show, "Andy Kaufman: Dead Or Alive," was to be held on May 16 -- 20 years to the day since Kaufman had last been seen.
Bristow wanted to go but didn't have the cash. Then came an email from Channel, asking if he was attending. When Bristow wrote explaining why he couldn't, he says she returned with an offer: "I have a few spare tickets lying around." Overjoyed, Bristow went out to L.A. He later learned that the two $175 tickets weren't Channel's only gift; she had also paid for tickets, airfare and hotel rooms for others who posted to the site.
About a year later, Bristow got another email from Channel, a confession "that she was not a girl at all, but that she was, in fact, Stephen Maddox." The ruse, coupled with Maddox's generosity, struck him as meaningful.
"Most of the people ... who claim to be dead celebrities are usually scam artists," Bristow wrote. "But Maddox has never asked anybody for money, as far as I know. Instead, he spends money generously on Andy Kaufman fans. And Andy was famously generous with his fans."
That the dead celebrity in question was a no-show in L.A. didn't shake Bristow's newly evolving faith. Kaufman wasn't dead after all, Bristow reasoned. He was living in Indiana, running a website.
HOW TO FAKE YOUR DEATH
In 1981, not long before his death, the real Andy Kaufman met Alan Abel, a professional hoaxer who'd managed the impossible the year before.
"I had my own obituary in The New York Times," Abel, now 82, told The Huffington Post by phone from his home in Connecticut. "I got eight inches of space, which is two more than the guy who invented the six-pack got. Only he actually died that day."
The meeting between Kaufman and Abel was the culmination of one of those series of events so guided by chance that those involved call it fate. Kaufman was in New York and happened to run into the host of a public-access show about martial arts. On a whim he accepted an invitation to make a cameo. The host told Kaufman to come on a Saturday rather than Thursday, when the show would be overrun by serious martial artists who would surely take offense at Kaufman's hijinks. Naturally, Kaufman took the warning as reason to come on Thursday.
In the building was Bob Pagani, a hoaxer and Kaufman acolyte who happened to have just mailed a letter -- a shot in the dark, as he described it -- asking the comic to appear on that week's show (Pagani said Kaufman insisted he never saw the letter).
After introducing himself, Pagani convinced Kaufman to do double duty and appear on both shows; Kaufman did, with the caveat that Kaufman's parents join the bit, too. The sequence -- in which a pair of actors play a moralizing couple railing at Kaufman for bringing on the decline of America -- has become required watching for diehard fans "More people have seen that silly show in the last few years than ever saw it when it aired on public access in Manhattan," Pagani claims.
Afterward, Pagani said he told Kaufman about Abel and the latest hoax in a career that stretched back to the '50s: convincing the normally infallible Grey Lady that he was dead.
"[Kaufman] was incredibly open for a celebrity," Pagani said. "He gave me his number. I called Alan and said, 'What are you doing tomorrow?' He said, 'Nothing.' I said, 'We're meeting Andy Kaufman.'"
The three met in the lobby of the Hilton on 53rd Street. By Pagani's account, Kaufman was "extremely interested" in Abel's death hoax. "He was asking Alan all about how he did it."
Abel said he told Kaufman everything in the lobby that day and over the course of the friendship that followed: how he put his "team" to work, setting up a fake funeral home in a trailer in Orem, Utah, and reserving All Souls Church in Manhattan for the funeral. Then there was the critical dispatch -- an actress friend with a gift for weeping on cue, who arrived at the Times office an hour before deadline, and that too, on a Sunday, when the second stringers were in charge.
"She could shed tears at the sight of a bumblebee falling down dead from the sky onto the sidewalk," Abel said of the actress, who pretended to be his widow.
The disciples treat the meeting between Abel and Kaufman as an origin story. And they learned much of it directly from Pagani and Abel.
Curt Eric Clendenin, a longtime AKLives poster and former child actor (he played an orphan in "The Blues Brothers"), says he tracked down the two hoax artists by hunting like "freaking Sherlock Holmes."
"I got an email out of the blue from [Clendenin] telling me that he's been following the stuff I've done over the years, that he's a big fan," Pagani recalled, in the bemused tone of someone who doesn't hear that often. "I was like ... okay!"
Pagani told him everything he remembered about Kaufman, and the two struck up a friendship online.
But Pagani still can't bring himself to accept Clendenin's premise. Believing the conspiracy theory, Pagani said, betrays not just his own better judgment but the judgment of most of Kaufman's nearest and dearest.
"I know people at the wake in Long Island literally leaned over the casket and said, 'Andy, if you're faking, please stop,'" he said. "I wish he had been faking, but I just don't think it's possible."
Merle Kessler, a hoaxer who appeared on a variety show with Kaufman in 1976, thinks there's no chance Kaufman's death was a scheme, "unless he, Elvis and Jim Morrison are all giggling up their sleeves somewhere. What would be the point of it?"
A LIVING LEGACY
The point, the disciples claim, is that Kaufman wanted less fame, not more. To really understand why and how Kaufman did what they insist he did, they'll tell you that you first have to understand Maddox.
In 2008, Maddox asked Nora, the podcaster, to host an "Andy Kaufman Press Conference" in a hotel in New Jersey, 10 miles from Rutgers University. The expectation was that Kaufman would finally appear.
A limited number of press were invited (Nora recalls them as being the ones who covered "weird" news). Before the proceedings, someone knocked on Nora’s room door. A man walked in wearing a monster mask. He introduced himself as Maddox.
"He didn't want anyone to see his face," Nora said.
The masked man escorted Nora into the conference room. The conference itself, which can be viewed online, went as bizarrely as one might imagine, with a puppet show mixed in with the playing of unintelligible audio tapes. For most of the attendees, the scene was simply live comedy. (Fittingly, the reporter there for Weird New Jersey, Chris Gethard, now has his own Comedy Central show, "Big Lake.")
But for the disciples and their ilk, the stakes were high.
"People were accusing me of being in on things," Nora said. "This was all being watched on the Internet by a small group of dedicated people."
Once again, Kaufman didn't make the promised arrival. After the event, the AKLives members seemed to lose hope. Discussion on the forum began to fall in line with mainstream Kaufman analyses, focused on his legacy in creating a "trickster archetype," as Nora puts it, with little debate about whether the man was actually alive or dead.
Then Maddox re-emerged. In an email, he told the disciples that he wanted to explain everything. Maddox gathered the group over the phone and unwound a far-fetched story now repeated as gospel. According to several disciples who said they were on the call, Maddox said that he is Andy Kaufman's son, that his mother and Kaufman were teenagers when he was born, and that his maternal grandparents raised him as his parents.
In Maddox's telling, in the '80s, when Kaufman's career was less fulfilling and his interest in Transcendental Meditation was sky high, he wended his way back to the woman with whom he'd had a child. What Maddox said happened next is straight out of a fairy tale, or a thriller: Kaufman was fed up with his life and so he swapped identities with the man to whom Maddox's biological mother was married. That man, who was ill at the time, made use of Kaufman's bank account to pay for his health care, Maddox told the disciples. Meanwhile, Kaufman got a second life with a woman he loved.
In this story, the cancer-ridden body in the casket, which people whispered their pleas to at the wake, was not Kaufman's, but belonged instead to the husband of Maddox's mother. Both families -- the Kaufmans and the Maddoxes -- were supposedly in on the ruse.
Maddox told the disciples on the call that he'd only recently learned all the details from his family. After the press conference, he said someone gave him Kaufman's current address, in New Mexico.
No one at the other end of the line asked for proof of any kind. The story, Clendenin told HuffPost, simply made sense. When asked how he could judge its veracity, he responded that "Steve Maddox told me that Kaufman is still alive. In fact, he told me where he is."
If there’s an objective party in any of this, it's Nora, who mined his experience as a disciple for his talk show without ever developing the emotional interest in Kaufman's state of being that the others claim. And yet, while Nora agrees that all of it -- the website, the lurid backstory, the monster mask -- seems to point to Maddox as some Kaufman fan gone haywire, he said he remains perplexed.
Maddox didn't seem to be "doing this for a lark," in Nora's estimation. He did it for too long and with too much devotion. Neither did he seem unhinged. "He mostly just seemed sad," Nora said.
After the phone call, Maddox more or less vanished. He occasionally tweeted or emailed provocative updates: that he'd moved to the apartment complex where Kaufman was living in Albuquerque. That Kaufman had admitted everything. That he goes by the name Lynne (which happens to be the first name of Kaufman’s longtime girlfriend, Lynne Margulis) and works in a convenience store, and has a second family. That Kaufman, or Lynne, wants nothing to do with Maddox.
But even those sporadic missives have stopped of late, and Maddox seems to have made himself unavailable. "He isn't answering his emails," Clendenin said. "What I thought was his phone number is not accepting calls."
Emails sent to several possible addresses obtained by The Huffington Post went unanswered.
For now, Nora entertains two possibilities, neither of which involve Maddox pulling the wool over anyone's eyes: either Maddox sincerely believes in a fantasy, or it's not a fantasy.
Or, the disciples have been duped, in which case, at least one thing still holds. Kaufman seems to have an heir.
