New Details on the Death of Andy Kaufman

While revisiting my ancient Andy Kaufman obsession on the 23rd anniversary of Man On The Moon, it has come to my attention that some new info regarding when he was actually "diagnosed" with "lung cancer" has leaked out via 2 different sources.  (I put those words in Chris Farley air quotes for reasons that will become clear shortly.  Read on).  If you're not a die hard Kaufman fan this article will be meaningless to you so maybe don't read on.  

Everyone's aware of the rumors Kaufman faked his death and will return at some unknown time/location as part of the biggest prank to ever occur.  I don't fully agree with this assertion, but I do see three distinct possibilities here and one of them does involve death faking.  The info I'm about to disclose has led me to three possible conclusions.  Please note:  These are all my conjecture alone.  You can pick which scenario you think sounds most likely or create your own adventure.  

Official story:  Andy's symptoms were first noticed on Thanksgiving 1983 by concerned family members who prompted him to go to the doctor, which he did shortly thereafter.  Tests were run & sent off for confirmation & he was officially diagnosed with large cell carcinoma of the lung in the 2nd week of December 1983.  This is now known to be false, as Andy told Jerry Lawler he had just been diagnosed with lung cancer BEFORE Thanksgiving & told Margaret McMullan, editor of Glamour magazine, in April of 1983 that he was fasting to treat a flu-like illness and thinking of "going to the Philippines" (where he later got psychic surgery in a final bid to save his life).  She said he also appeared pale & "kept coughing" at this time, and that he "knew about the cancer."  

These accounts contradict the story that Andy was only diagnosed in the last months of his life & found out at the same time as those closest to him like his manager George & girlfriend Lynne, and that he'd gotten "a clean bill of health" 6 months earlier.  But why the subterfuge?

Scenario 1: "He knew he had cancer way earlier than he let on."

Andy knew he was sick & was diagnosed much earlier than he told anyone.  But instead of fully accepting the gravity of his disease, he chose holistic/alternative treatments like fasting, yoga & teas.  Like Bob Marley & Steve Jobs, he thought he could will himself better with these bogus "natural" treatments & fucked around too long, only turning to mainstream chemo/radiation when the cancer failed to respond & had metastasized.  By then it was too late. This is totally something Andy would do, being a devotee of Transcendental Meditation & believing in the power of pseudoscientific treatments like "internal flossing" (don't look it up), megadoses of vitamins & a macrobiotic diet.  

He didn't want to worry his loved ones but told others along the way, such as wrestling partner Jerry Lawler.  In the Vice "Tales from the Territories" episode, Jerry states that Andy disclosed his illness after filming the "Jerry Lawler Show" episode in which Andy coughed repeatedly.  "I'm sorry for the coughing, man.  I was just diagnosed with lung cancer."  This was around Thanksgiving '83 (November 20th according to online sources), the same infamous Thanksgiving at which Andy was exhibiting the "nagging cough" at the dinner table with family but hadn't yet been diagnosed.  The official Bill Zehme biography says Andy was diagnosed in the 2nd week of December.  Ever the optimist, Andy still chose not to tell his folks until the last minute in late February '84 (and even then it was Lynne who called & spilled the beans).  Mother Janice had just had a massive stroke, so he wouldn't have wanted to worry her further, plus he legitimately believed he'd get better.  

How could a non-smoker get lung cancer?  The idea that only smokers get lung cancer is flawed.  In fact environmental causes are a distant second to genetic/inherited ("germline") mutations when it comes to most types of cancer.   The dreaded 'Big C' ran in Andy's family--both his maternal grandfather & mother died of it, and the disease tends to be more common in Jewish people in general.  (It's also strangely more common in tall people).  He did have a minor history of smoking & lived in LA where air pollution was terrible before smog regulations came into play.  But there may have been an even more insidious contributor:  radon.  

Like carbon monoxide, radon gas is odorless and tasteless & can't be seen with the naked eye.  This radioactive gas lodges in the lungs & causes lung cancer years or decades after exposure.  In fact, it  is the #1 cause of lung cancer in non-smokers.  It tends to settle in basements but can invade any part of the home.  Andy spent his "lost year" living in his parents' basement working on his Elvis imitation day & night, and if Margaret McMullan's story is true he also lived there again in '83 for a spell while his mom was sick.  Combined with all the secondhand cigarette smoke floating around nightclubs, bars, cars & other establishments during the 20th Century, radon could've easily tipped the scales toward cancer if indeed it was present in his parents' basement.  (There were also lots of other nasties like asbestos & talc floating around in the '50s, '60s and '70s).

Gut reaction:  How much do you trust this guy?

And what of all the death faking talk?  In this scenario, it would've largely been cooked up after death by Bob Zmuda, Andy's writer & co-conspirator.   We have no firsthand evidence of Andy telling anyone he was going to fake his death or that he'd seriously considered it.  He discussed it once as heard on the "Andy Kaufman & His Grandmother" tape recording (see below), but it was mostly Zmuda's idea... maybe a promise he made to him on his death bed as well.  

In this scenario, Zmuda went around to Andy's old friends & love interests around the time of Man on the Moon and the Zehme biography, begging them to play along & give a story (just a short quote, really) to Zehme & anyone who asked about Andy telling them he was planning to fake his death some time in the '80s.  This would be something easy they could do to cement his legend (and let's be real, to sell more merch).  2Pac's estate did it brilliantly with the 7 Day Theory stuff and all the posthumous albums; what's the harm in telling a little white Kaufmanesque lie?  Andy would've approved.  Universal Studios even got in on the act with their own "Andy Lives" website in 1999, which was a blatant ploy to drum up interest in the movie.  

Kaufman Discusses Faking His Death with Bob Zmuda

     

Scenario 2:  "From Fakir to (Death) Faker"

As "The Fakir" on Letterman (Painting by Maciej Mackiewicz)

Andy chose to fake his death as a logical next move in a thoroughly destroyed career.  He'd gotten the wrestling out of his system; people were tired of the foreign-man-becomes-a-balding-Elvis schtick. (He drove a final irreversible stake through its heart in August 1982 at the Improv where it first debuted a decade before).  He'd "played with the medium" as much as any human could, wrecking a live TV show on Fridays & cursing a blue streak on Letterman... and then resorting to whatever this desperation was.  Where else was there to go?  

No, really:  Taxi was cancelled, he was voted off SNL, his movie career was doomed before it left the gate, the Broadway show closed in ONE DAY.  His beloved cult--err, Loving Enlightened Spiritually Regenerative Personal Growth Movement ®--had kicked him out, and his mom was rendered speechless by a stroke while battling bone cancer.  This had to be an all-time low in his adult life, harkening back to the days when that sad little boy stared out the window for hours after his beloved Papu Cy died & his parents lied about where he went.  "Why didn't he take me with him?"  He even opened up to TV psychologist Tom Cottle about this formative incident in an out-of-character candid appearance on "Up Close" in May of 1983.  

Abandoned by his spiritual community & performing peers, cast adrift in a sea of directionless flailing, a middle aged flowerchild struggling to adapt to the wealth-worshiping, Bible bashing Reaganite '80s .  The times they were a-changing and not in a good way.  Everything was happening so fast... 

What's real and what's not?  "Why should I sit around & become a has-been in an industry that doesn't appreciate me while binge-watching previews of my parents' demise?  The same parents that lied to me about Papu Cy?  Did these TM bliss ninnies ever care about me to begin with?  Even Zmuda's finding better things to do with his time.  How could so many people NOT get what I'm doing in the so-called hippest town on Earth, entertainment capital of the world?  What's so damned (sorry!) special about Hee Haw or Silver Spoons?  

What's real and what's not?"  

Here's some reality for ya:  Lung cancer is rarely diagnosed in its early stages & doesn't often cause symptoms until it's advanced, so the fact that Andy was coughing & bringing Kleenex boxes on talk shows as early as February '83 is suspect.  He kept bringing them on TV shows into May (see: Tom Cottle appearance).  Some people don't know they have it until they die of it.  Furthermore, the large cell carcinoma Andy died of is extremely rare in non-smokers.  See for yourself:

That tiny green sliver is where Andy falls in overall lung cancer deaths

In non-smokers under 40, large cell carcinoma is exceedingly, vanishingly rare.  Yes, Kaufman smoked as a teenager & occasionally puffed cigars & cigs as Tony Clifton.  (Whether he inhaled is up for debate).  But that doesn't make him a "smoker".  A smoker is someone who lights up at least one cigarette every day.  Indeed, having a history of smoking does increase your odds of getting large cell carcinoma, but the average time it takes to get there is 30 to 40 years, and the risk is much higher in women.  Non-smokers get lung cancer all the time, but not THIS particular lung cancer.  It's also the fastest growing of all the lung tumors with a doubling rate of only 67.5 days.  

His talks with hoaxer/death faker Alan Abel, his (unpublicized) time in cancer wards entertaining sick kids & his lifelong obsession with Elvis, who was also widely rumored to have faked his death point to the real possibility he could've pulled this off.  Not having access to the internet back then, he likely neglected some details however, like forgetting to remove his unibrow & chest hair while having his head shaved. That's not how chemo-induced alopecia works, breh.  Once these pics blew up around 1999-2000, Lynne "admitted" to shaving his head because failing to do so would've blown his cover once all the cancer survivors in the world pointed out the inconsistencies.  

Pic from the Natty Enquirer

"When I do something like this, I do it for real."  Andy's super-serial talk with Tom Cottle, his touching family appearance on Letterman (1/7/83) & every calculated cough & sniffle in '83 were a well planned set-up for his disappearing act in '84.  The weight loss was a result of fasting (which he admitted that he was doing to the Glamour editor in April of '83), and he was already plotting a trip to the Philippines nearly a year before he actually went as per the same article.  Yet he continued working, including doing some physically taxing wrestling moves right up until his final match on November 21, 1983.  (He boxed Lawler in this loud & raucous showdown).  How many Stage IV cancer patients have you seen do this? 

November 21, the day AFTER his coughing fit on the Lawler Show

If he was truly sick back in February of '83, one wouldn't expect such stamina & athleticism so late in his illness.  Yet he spent most of 1983 wrestling, not just in one city but on a pro-tour of Indiana, Florida, Nashville and Memphis.  He can even be seen swinging his left arm, which was allegedly in immense pain & ravaged by cancer, in the trademark ZZ Top twirl on his last television appearance "The Top" in January '84, not to mention his last wrestling appearance in November when he did the "windmill" on Lawler.  

The cough & shortness of breath also come and go:  It's terrible on Tom Cottle, the Jerry Lawler Show, The Top & his November "Rock Island" Improv appearance but makes no appearances on the lengthy Andy Kaufman Show (PBS, July '83), his last 2 Letterman performances (9/11/83 & 11/17/83) or his last public appearance ever at the LA premiere of My Breakfast With Blassie (3/20/84).  He also has a history of fake coughing (see: his bum act on Letterman, 1980).  Could it be that the cough comes and goes as he remembers to summon it forth?  He also offered to "shave his head" if a woman could pin him in a wrestling match, both on SNL & in his Memphis matches.  Foreshadowing?

About those Philippines photos.  Would you be posing for cheerful group pics when you're down to 90 lbs, bald & in the fight of your life?  We don't see John Wayne or Jim Varney taking group photos with their nurses or lying on the treatment table as they received whatever therapy they deemed appropriate to fight their cancer.  That's not to criticize any cancer patient who does those things--there's no "wrong" way to face down such a dreaded diagnosis.  It just looks a tad suspect in the context of how sick he was & how little time he had left.  Also, who took the pictures & sent them to the National Enquirer?  The remote psychic surgery clinics of Baguio aren't exactly paparazzi hotspots.  Andy was known to send in fake stories about himself so at the very least he probably gave the thumbs up to send them.  

The question then arises, was the entire cancer story fake too?  And who's this guy?

Kaufman's nurse with a guy from the group photo.  But who? (Photo credit: Andykaufmanlives.com) 

Death believers were in the minority in '84.  It would be one thing if the "death hoax" rumors started 15 years later at the time of Man On The Moon or the Zmuda book releases, but they were always there... even before Andy died.  They called it "his dying bit".  To his face.  Even close friends like Cindy Williams & Taxi cast members didn't believe he had actually croaked.  Only one castmate (the lovely & demure Carol Kane) attended his funeral & she discreetly poked his waxen body in the casket, as did Zmuda's friend Joe Troiani.  

While impolite, the fact that Andy would turn to loved ones and say "I can't believe they think I'm faking this" is laughable.  He'd faked a number of incredibly serious things before:  an engagement, a conversion to Christianity, a broken neck (supported by an ambulance ride + 3 days in the hospital & 5 months in a neck brace), a physical fight on late night TV in which he got assaulted for real & riled up the FCC; pretending to be a whole 'nother person and adopting habits that normally repulsed him (oral sex, smoking, eating red meat & drinking alcohol as Tony Clifton).  His whole life was based on alternate identities & fakery!  Why WOULD they believe he suddenly had a rare terminal lung cancer at age 35?  

Those things alone would be enough to raise an eyebrow.  But if he'd actually talked so extensively about faking his death (by cancer, no less) to around 15 people as is claimed in Lost in the Funhouse & other official accounts, the chances he really did die of cancer in '84 go down even further.  And if that Tony Clifton Story script was not in fact a Bob Zmuda creation pushed out after Andy's death (which I'm not convinced of but have seen no proof of its existence other than a few retro looking relics), the chances he died of lung cancer in Cedars Sinai for real are near zero.  Statistically speaking.  To believe otherwise makes YOU the conspiracy theorist.  Or "coincidence theorist".  Same difference.  

Give me one other instance of a person predicting their exact cause & location of death when they had no reason to suspect they'd die that way.  This was years before he could've actually had the disease, mind you.  He didn't just write that Tony would die prematurely from some random disease, it was cancer (though Bob did say "lung cancer" specifically in his book which is not accurate).  Not just any hospital in L.A. but Cedars of Hollywood where he actually died.  Oh, and at the end Andy breaks the "fourth wall" to make this grand announcement about the death of Tony (who is actually Andy as we all know).  Very meta.

This photo is incredibly high quality, unlike the ones that showed up in the tabloid.  Note the abundance of chest hair & full bushy eyebrows; no patchy hair loss anywhere.  Only a completely bald head:

Who took professional quality photos of this event?!

How did he do it?  When the hell is he returning?

That's part of the mystery, isn't it?  We can speculate but nobody REALLY knows.  Just like what happens after WE die, it's all a big question mark.  I don't buy the theory that he could "trade places" with a dying man & be mistaken for him in the casket and on his deathbed.  If the Nathan McCoy theory is true, his doctor & everyone at his bedside would've had to be in on it because nobody legit mistook another man for Andy Kaufman no matter how cancer-riddled he was at the time of death.  Your core facial features don't change as evidenced by the picture above.  I've seen maybe one or two other Andy Kaufman lookalikes in my day--Krist Novoselic comes to mind--but they weren't dead ringers (excuse the pun) & wouldn't fool loved ones.  AK was unusually tall for a Jewish guy & had other distinguishing features like his huge eyes & facial moles.  The only way an open casket could work is with a replica/wax figure, or if the real McCoy (heh) was in there himself... & the latter is far-fetched.

It also doesn't explain why Andy's social security number is still active in the Social Security Death Index, or why he renewed his passport for another 10 years before going to the Philippines.  For those things to be relevant, he would've had to continue living as Andy under his real identity... not "Nathan's".  (An Andy Kaufman passport isn't getting "Nathan McCoy" very far after real Nathan dies & identities are switched as per the theory).  The more likely conclusion is that Nathan McCoy was just an alias like the book says.  Celebrities use aliases all the time, like when Brittany Murphy was prescribed medicine under the name "Lola Manilow."  That's illegal, but so is faking your death.  We rely entirely on the Zehme biography for our account of what happened in those final days, and it has already proven incomplete or inaccurate in the "when/where he was first diagnosed" department so who's to say what really happened?  

Another pic from AndyKaufmanLives.com 

As for when & how he would "return," I'm not entirely convinced he would.  Aside from the legal stickiness, he left for a reason and nobody knows what that reason was.  Maybe he was legitimately disgusted by his perceived mistreatment by the entertainment industry, the TM community & even his loved ones.  Maybe he just wanted to escape the fake Hollywood scene & return to a life of street theatre where things were exciting and "real" again.  Perhaps he was sick of adulting & wanted to indulge his darker fantasies full time overseas somewhere, living a more Cliftonesque life of bedding hookers & wrecking his liver like he did in high school with all the booze & drugs.  (Remember, the TM community had saved him from life as a derelict alcoholic according to him... now it was gone).  In one of his last Letterman appearances, he said he'd been "hitchhiking" across the country so the hobo life was on his mind.  Or he went in the other direction, seeking out a new cultish religion & living anonymously among monks or other closed-off devotees.

Maybe he has "returned" and we haven't noticed... on the internet, in small clubs, music videos or other quaint places over the years.  Andy was known to do things purely for his own amusement, like sending Zmuda as Clifton on Letterman & giggling to himself from home, or pretending to be an incensed usher at the opening of his doomed Broadway play "Teaneck Tanzi" & screaming at theatre goers until he was nearly slugged by one.  Who's to say this hasn't happened many times since his "passing"?  Who says it isn't happening right now?  

Which brings us to our 3rd & final scenario:  

Scenario 3: Perhaps AIDS really was a factor as Lynne suggested.  

The claim that Andy's "only vice was a love of chocolate ice cream" has been repeated so much you'd almost believe it if you didn't know better.  In reality, the man was a bonafide sex addict, sleeping with more prostitutes at Nevada's Mustang & Bunny Ranches in a weekend than some men bed in 2 lifetimes.  That's not counting all his girlfriends, casual hookups & various & sundry sexual encounters we still don't know about.  He was also known to masturbate during some of those long "meditation" sessions.  

Even if he wasn't bisexual as claimed in the 2014 Zmuda/Margulies book, Andy slept with enough prostitutes & college coeds to expose him to every STD in the book at a time when doing so was extremely dangerous.  He gets into an argument about VD with one of his sex partners on the "Andy Kaufman & His Grandmother" tapes.  His ex Elayne Boosler joked on the PBS special in 1983:  "You went out with girls on heroin after (dating me)."  IV drug users are at a greatly increased risk for contracting HIV & were one of the original AIDS risk groups.  Whether her comment was in jest or not, there's a good chance some of the prostitutes Andy slept with did use IV drugs or come in contact with the virus via other routes.  

The '60s & '70s were a time of Free Love, sexual liberation & unrestrained hedonism that we all paid for in the '80s & beyond.  If nothing else, the timing was perfect for Andy to contract AIDS & die right before the first antibody test for HIV was developed in 1985.  AIDS would explain his reluctance to tell anyone he was sick, his head-shaving to make it look like cancer & the fact that his symptoms set in much earlier than one would expect with lung cancer.  The sniffles we saw Andy exhibit throughout '83 aren't really a symptom of lung cancer at all, actually, but would fit with the lowered immunity of HIV that makes it increasingly hard for the body to fight infection.  

"What kinda guy are you?"  

You didn't have to be clairvoyant to see that AIDS was ramping up by 1983, particularly in the gay/bisexual male community.  The fact that the name had changed from "GRID" to "AIDS" was a big clue that it was now everyone's problem, though it still disproportionately affected homosexual men--especially those in NY & LA.  By '83 it had been in the national blood supply for years already.  Andy probably knew his time was growing short, particularly if he was hitting up the bathhouses in San Francisco where his girlfriend Lynne lived.  She stated he would "disappear for hours at a time" and claim to be at the cookie shop (Famous Amos, I believe?), though she now suspects he was up to other things.  Zmuda allegedly had to tape down his boner at Lawler wrestling matches just like he did with women, and prostitutes knew him around the Mustang Ranch as an "ass bandit".  Both Lynne & Zmuda say he told them he was bisexual on his death bed & swore them to secrecy, though there are zero other reports of this from anyone who knew him.  

Even if Andy did have lung cancer, that doesn't mean he didn't also have AIDS.  In those days other famous people were claimed to have died of ailments like meningitis & even lung cancer to obscure the fact that they died of AIDS.  Amanda Blake of Gunsmoke was said to have died of throat cancer, which she did have, but AIDS was later proven to be the true cause of death.  Brady Bunch dad Robert Reed allegedly died of colon cancer but it came out later he was also suffering from AIDS.  In both cases, nobody was "lying" that they had cancer... there was just an omission about the HIV.  As it turns out, lung cancer is 1 of 7 AIDS-related cancers that's more common in HIV+ patients.

Doctors in those days were occasionally known to fudge death certificates for celebrities like in the case of Liberace.  And there was no autopsy on Andy, remember.   He died before Blake, Reed or Liberace when even less scrutiny would've been given to his cause of death as AIDS was new to the world but especially to the straight masses, who had mostly ignored it so long as it only affected gay men.  Rock Hudson wouldn't "happen" for another year yet.  There were likely other celebrities who perished undetected from the virus in those days.  Unless Andy's doctor specifically looked at his T-cell count or checked for Hepatitis B infection (the best indicator of HIV in the days before a test existed) they wouldn't have suspected HIV/AIDS because he wasn't in one of the major risk groups (openly, anyway).  He just would've had a gradual decline in immune function until he died of an opportunistic infection like pneumocystis pneumonia, cryptosporidium or cancer. 

But why all the end-of-life pageantry?  In this scenario, Andy might've gone to the Philippines, shaved his head & sent in the Enquirer photos to draw attention away from the fact he had AIDS.  It was a shameful thing in those days:  kids were disowned by parents, employees fired & tenants kicked out of their apartments due to irrational fear & disinformation.  And then there was the homosexual stigma.  Bumper stickers that read: "AIDS - It's killing all the right people" sat sandwiched between "Honor Roll Mom" and "Baby On Board".  Perhaps if people were too busy talking about how unlikely it was for a 35-year-old health nut (who believed in psychic surgery, no less!), to die of lung cancer, they would be too distracted to realize the REAL reason he died.  Andy was particularly worried his uptight father Stanley would find out according to Lynne & Zmuda's book, but AIDS rumors swirled in Hollywood just days after Andy died according to Zmuda's 1999 biography Andy Kaufman: Revealed!  That's where I first had this revelation.  

Andy's career got dark in the last few years of his life, which people later attributed to a brain tumor.  But in retrospect maybe he knew he was sick & just said "fuck it."  Wrestling was something he'd loved since boyhood.  He clearly revered the sport, referring to Jerry only as "Mr. Lawler" even in the midst of his "dumb hick" tirades, and he never cashed any of his checks for the matches, choosing instead to frame & display them.  He knew it would ruin his career but if he was not long for this world what the hell did it matter?  

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE DEATH FAKING TALK?  If Andy heard about AIDS in the gay community or on the news around '81-'82, he could've planted the death faking stories himself in an attempt to cement his own legacy because he suspected he was going to die even before he was ill.  The first known New York death in a gay man was in 1981 (Nick Rock of Fire Island) but the disease had been spreading quietly among IV drug users & the homeless of New York City since the early '70s.  (Ironically it was initially referred to as a "rare cancer" in gay men).  Perhaps death really was in the back of his mind & he was scared but couldn't tell anyone what he was going through due to the stigma of AIDS, not unlike Freddie Mercury in the early '80s before his diagnosis.  So he decided to take a page from his parents' book & do what they did to him as a child:  start toying with the idea of death.  Maybe God would swoop down and "take him away on a trip" too and he wouldn't tell them he was sick at all?  Just "disappear" to be with God & Papu Cy?  Maybe the death faking rumors were partly for THEIR comfort and he really didn't intend to tell them he was dying at all?

This would be the most tragic scenario of all if true, but I happen to think it's the most likely since lung cancer in non-smokers under 40 is so rare otherwise... particularly large cell carcinoma.  A destroyed immune system would be just the thing necessary to allow a few cancer cells to grow into an unstoppable tumor.  And his secretive behavior aligns with this theory.

To Make an Unbearably Long Story Even Longer

Whether you believe Scenario 1 or Scenario 2 (or some combination of Scenarios 1 & 3), it's undeniable there was major deception on the part of Andy Kaufman in his final year.  He either knew something was wrong or was planning an escape much earlier than we were led to believe, which has now been confirmed by both Mr. Lawler & Mrs. McMullan.  The question is when did he find out, why did he keep it from certain people & who first diagnosed him?

It would be interesting to hear Bill Zehme's take on these developments, or to find out if Andy told anyone else he was diagnosed before December 1983.  Dr. Rubins, Andy's primary care doctor who diagnosed him (allegedly in December '83) along with lung specialist Dr William Young, either went along with Andy's charade & "pretended" to diagnose him for the 1st time at that appointment or he'd been diagnosed elsewhere when he broke the news to Lawler in November.  (If the former, that calls into question Dr. Rubins' willingness to lie in general--would he also be willing to help him cover up an AIDS diagnosis?  Fake his death?  HIPAA wasn't made law until 1996).  If the latter, who had diagnosed Andy with lung cancer prior to December '83?  Jerry Lawler has repeated the story in another interview (more than once: see here) so it's almost certainly true.  

Either way, the con has gone on long enough.  It's time for the world and his fans to know the real deal when it comes to Andy Kaufman's final year & what really caused him to leave us.  For those who get tired of fans rehashing the "did he fake it/was it cancer" thing:  that's understandable.  You're free to not engage, but don't come for me because I'm not the one who's gone to all this trouble to put the death faking stuff out there in the first place.  The contradictions & plot holes that keep popping up nearly 40 years later are of interest to some of us.  I'm not a conspiracy theorist but in this case they're kinda baked into the story courtesy of the man himself.  And they're only going to get darker with time as more contradictory stories trickle out.  If you want it to stop, a cohesive explanation would go a long way toward that.  

And if any of you folks at home or in the peanut gallery want to cite the information contained in this article, please at least link back to it or attribute it to N*sd*jj at adventuresinpsychonautics.blogspot.com

Thank you very much.  

Enquirer exposes its own fake story

Playing with the medium on PBS special

Coughing on Cottle (May, 1983)

Gone wrestling bears (yeah yeah yeah yeah)

MOTM movie prop

"Real" incident

A man on the brink(?)

He was planning this college lecture tour for '84, but alas...

Variation on a Theme/Penultimate Bombing

Stan & Jan at the funeral (lost footage)

"Elchanan Gedaliah son of Shmuel Leizer" (top)

"Best Ways to Impress People"

"Ongoing Creativity/Future Endeavors":  Ad by George Shapiro in '04 

Addressed to Andy

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