It will surprise the casual observer how unsurprised Andy Kaufman's fans will be to learn that the world's greatest performance-art comic faked his death in 1984, and that he has been living a productive life of anonymity ever since. Perhaps because he uses the Web to stay connected with the world at large, and enjoys the subversive spirit of the alternative press, Kaufman has chosen this venue to lift the veil on the biggest media hoax of all time.

I recently met with Mr. Kaufman inside a boarded-up citrus stand in California's Golden Triangle, where he said he had recently spent a season working the groves alongside migrant pickers. For a man who once read "The Great Gatsby" to an incredulous audience, it seems fitting that he would for a time attempt to live out a scene from "Of Mice and Men." Kaufman had approached me via email in late summer, sending an anonymous quiz. Thankfully, I was in a whimsical mood the day the note arrived, so I filled out the form--sample question, "Which would you be more likely to serve, tofurkey, or turducken?"--and hit reply. Soon enough, we were talking on the phone, and one day I found myself knocking on the door of a plywood shack whose faded signs promised fresh-picked grapefruit and oranges by the bushel.

I wondered whether I would recognize Kaufman, if he really did answer the door. But as he stepped briefly into the sun to invite me inside, I knew this was no pretender pranking a gullible scribe. His skin was dark from working outdoors, and he sported a close-cropped beard, but the searching, alien eyes gave him away instantly. After offering me a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice from a plaid Thermos, Kaufman set a stopwatch next to a battery-powered lantern on the inside counter and said he would stay only fifteen minutes, in case I was followed or had somehow set him up. It seemed he wanted people to know that he had greatly exaggerated rumors of his death, but he was not yet ready to be physically found by the world at large.

As I took out my reporter's notebook--I was allowed no camera or tape recorder--Kaufman began to speak. What he had to say, badly reproduced here by a terrible notetaker, will undoubtedly delight his most rabid fans, while infuriating many others:

"My plan all along was to wait 15 years and, with the help of my old collaborator Bob Zmuda, see a biopic come out. Kind of build the dead-star adulation to a fever pitch and then, for once, give the fans what they were longing for, the impossible return from the grave. You have to realize that my thinking was strongly influenced by the fervor surrounding Elvis. I mean, what if all that wishing and all those Graceland vigils and Weekly World News headlines had really brought him back? Would people have been able to even comprehend that?

"I knew I wasn't nearly the icon that Elvis was, but, ironically, I realized that by dying a death that raised questions--by being the kind of person who might fake his death, then dying young--I might someday achieve that Presley cachet. So much of what I was doing had a hoax element to it, you know, maybe I would fake my death. But then, I died such a horrible death. Lung cancer. At 35. Most of society, the so-called polite society, would not be able to get their head around the idea that a person--especially a celebrity--would fake a horrible, wasting death. It's just not done, faking that kind of grotesque tragedy. But come on. I had discussed the idea of faking my death, and then I died at 35 of lung cancer, a nonsmoker. Talk about hiding in plain sight.

"The reason I asked Zmuda to keep my Tony Clifton character alive, aside from it being a favorite of mine, because he's just so abusive and self-unaware, and audiences would eat it up, even though I often meant the absolutely vile things I said as Tony, the main reason I asked Bob to keep Tony alive was so I could ride the publicity wave of the movie a bit in public while still being dead. I would be able to take the stage as Tony, do some outrageous shit, and everyone would think it was Zmuda. It would be like Huck Finn seeing his own funeral.

"But now I'm not so sure about coming back at all. I don't miss the heat of celebrity, and in terms of performance art, there's no weirder performance that I can do than to sneak over the Mexican border at 3am with a group of illegal aliens and go to work picking oranges and avocados. If I do come back in a way that ensures everyone will believe I'm still alive--because, no offense, very few people are going to believe this rambling bullshit on your Web site--then I think it would be great if I was arrested by the Border Patrol, and my identity was discovered that way. The confusion that would cause, you know, Entertainment Weekly running the mug shot--is this yet another hoax?--but then how did the U.S. government get in on it?

"But barring that--and I'll probably give up the citrus picking about ten minutes after we part ways and start an entirely new life--I think I might just stay under the radar. I've even performed a few times over the last few years. I played percussion in a bar band outside Ensenada for a few months. The customers weren't going to be catching any 'Taxi' reruns on Nick at Nite, right? But I quit that one when the bouncer cut me, thought I was after his girlfriend. And then that experience led to this. I'm fluent in Spanish now. And the best thing about that is, I've been reading Borges in the original language. Wow.

"Borges. Now he's kind of the reason I've decided to go back to ground after this. You look at his stories, the way his mind worked, that was the kind of thing I was trying to do in performance. And now 15 years have passed, and I'm movie-of-the-week material. A guy like Bill Zehme goes from writing a book on Regis Philbin to doing a number on me, for God sakes, am I right? Meanwhile, I look around at the landscape, and nobody has moved the ball forward an inch. Where's the comic innovation in the last 15 years? Seriously. Show it to me. 'South Park,' 'Dumb and Dumber'? Innovation today means coming up with a new way to showcase shit. So if I'm still out there on the cutting edge, why bother with it? I just don't have any respect for the situation. I feel fine on the outside. Until someone does something that takes my breath away creatively, there's no challenge to me to come back."

At that, Kaufman looked down at the stopwatch. Seven minutes and twenty seconds had passed. "That's really all I have to say," he said, clicking off the watch and standing to usher me out before I had a chance to make the most out of the promised 15 minutes with some questions of my own. Seeing the look on my face, Kaufman shrugged and added, "I guess I lied again."

Frank Sennett

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