DEAD
OR ALIVE
HUFFINGTON
06.16.13
Most of the people ... who claim to
be dead celebrities are usually scam artists.”
website ascribed to “guerrilla 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 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, registered since 2003 to a
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
from his house in New Jersey, says he
was “drawn in briefly” to the site out
of journalistic curiosity, long enough to
become a disciple.
Posters shared one thing in common,
he said. “They’d all made this almost
supernatural connection with Andy
Kaufman, for whatever reason.”
Talk to the disciples though, and
you’ll find they fixate on someone else
equally. That’s Maddox, the site’s founder and bestower of the title “disciple,”
an enigmatic figu