faked
About
This blog is for educational and entertainment purposes only.
Nearly all the information on this site has been published somewhere.
Internet, newspapers, magazines, books, podcasts, videos, etc.
Go ahead and look.
Andy Kaufman told at least FIFTEEN people that he planned to fake his death:
Bob Zmuda
Michael Kaufman
Carol Kaufman
George Shapiro
Lynne Margulies
Bob Tischler
Barry Blaustein
David Sheffield
John Moffitt
Jack Burns
Jeff Conaway
Alan Abel
Bob Pagani
Jerry Lawler
Mimi Lambert
Most of his closest friends think he could have.
Some of these people say they helped him do it.
Andy Kaufman, The Truth Finally
Andy was diagnosed with large cell carcinoma in November 1983.
This form of lung cancer is aggressive with high mortality rates.
Andy was a non-smoking vegetarian health nut since his 20s.
He told friends it was eating chocolate that gave him cancer.
When asked if he was really sick, he never gave a straight answer.
He didn’t tell his family until near the very end.
He visited a quack clinic in a Hollywood strip mall that was open only a few years.
The holistic doctors allegedly treated his left arm with radiation.
He said he was told to flush out the disease with tea and fasting.
He consequently lost many pounds, looking like a typical cancer patient.
His girlfriend Lynne admits she shaved his head. He kept his chest hair.
In March, Andy flew to the Philippines for psychic surgery.
It has been debunked as medical fraud, entirely placebo effect.
A healer claims to remove disease from the body with his hands.
It is a sleight-of-hand trick using chicken blood and guts as tumors.
Andy was obsessed with magic, carnival, and illusion.
He learned to levitate, swallow swords, and more.
He had to know that this was fake.
Are you buying it??
Dr. Rubins projected that he would not live past 1984.
Andy had a passport that did not expire until 1986.
This should have been sufficient for his trip, which was only a few weeks.
Canceled early, the replacement was good until 1994, another ten years.
His death certificate says he passed on May 16, 1984 at Cedars Sinai Hospital.
Four years before he announced his illness, he wrote a screenplay where his character dies of cancer in Cedars Sinai Hospital and reappears alive at the end. He pitched the movie to Universal Pictures, but eventually got dismissed.
Andy Kaufman’s social security number is not listed in the Social Security Administrations death index.
His SSN is still active and has listed many addresses over the past thirty years.
None of these belong to his relatives, their companies, or the family estate.
>>> Death certificates are occasionally used to fake a person’s death for insurance fraud and to evade law enforcement officials or irate relatives. “Official” Los Angeles County death certificates, for example, were readily available in the mid-1990s for between $500 and $1,000 each. For fraudulent purposes, people have often used death certificates from remote nations and from countries in turmoil. <<<
“Andy changed the face of comedy forever by lurching across boundaries that no one knew existed. He was the boy who made life his playground and never stopped playing, even when the games proved too dangerous for others. And in the end he would play alone, just as he had when it was all only beginning.
In Lost in the Funhouse, Bill Zehme sorts through a life of disinformation put forth by a master of deception to uncover the motivation behind the manipulation.”
His career includes a series of pranks and hoaxes.
He was always looking to be legendary.
What is real? What is fake?
That’s the Andy way.
You can keep your warped sense of humor here for a few years, YOU BUM!
Abel, Alan
“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.”
Alan Abel would appear under different aliases, like Bruce Spencer, Dr. Harrison T. Rogers, Jim Rogers, G. Clifford Prout, Count Von Blitzstein, Martin Ostracher, Rufus Thunderberg, or Martin Swagg Jr. His NY Times obituary said he was survived by brother Bruce Spencer. lol
In 1980, Alan Abel was introduced to Andy Kaufman. “We had a special kinship,” he says, explaining how they bonded over their pranks. The comedian obsessed over the details of how he faked his death, and he pumped Abel for more information about how he pulled it off.
“He [Andy Kaufman] wanted to collaborate on something really fantastic and enormous, but we could never figure out what it would be. He was especially fascinated with my rejection book and how I had gotten people to believe I was dead. He’d say, “How can I do that? I want to do that.’”
By Bob Pagani’s account, Kaufman was “extremely interested” in Abel’s death hoax. “He was asking Alan all about how he did it.”
The trio [Bob Pagani, Alan Abel, and Andy Kaufman] met in the plush lobby of the Hilton on 53rd Street, where Kaufman was staying.
Abel said he told Kaufman everything, that day and during 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.
“A few months before Andy Kaufman “died,” he read the galleys of my book published during the spring of 1984. One chapter dealt with my fake obituary in the NY Times. He wanted to know even more details on how I carried off my demise that fooled relatives, friends, the media and even creditors.. So I remain one of those who question his passing.”
Andy Kaufman Confidential 