DEAD
OR ALIVE
HUFFINGTON
06.16.13
I had my own
obituary in
The New York Times. 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.”
was a no-show in L.A. didn’t shake Bristow’s new faith.
Kaufman wasn’t dead after all, he
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 of Kaufman and Abel
capped off of one of those series of
events so guided by chance, those involved call it fate. On the streets of New
York, Kaufman was approached by the
host of a public-access TV show on the
martial arts. He wanted Kaufman to
make a cameo, but on a Saturday rather
than Thursday, when the episode would
be overrun by serious martial artists
who wouldn’t like 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 his show,
which filmed in the same studio, that
week (Pagani said Kaufman insisted he
never saw the letter).
After introducing himself, Pagani asked
Kaufman to do double duty; Kaufman
said yes, with the caveat that his parents join the bit, too. The sequence — in
which a pair of actors play a moralizing
couple railing at Kaufman for ruining
America — is now 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: bamboozling the normally infallible
Grey Lady into proclaiming him dead.