Jerry The King Lawler vs. Andy Kaufman (Oct 1981 – Jul 1983)

Background

By 1981, Andy Kaufman was a television star. He had been on Taxi since 1978 as Latka Gravas, and he had built a reputation on routines designed to leave audiences unsure whether they were watching a joke.[3][7] He had also grown up a wrestling fan, watching the WWWF in New York and idolizing Nature Boy Buddy Rogers.[10][21] Jim Cornette has said Kaufman was especially drawn to the heel who never broke the fourth wall, and that he carried the same idea into everything he did.[14]

For years Kaufman had wrestled women from the audience in his comedy shows, calling himself the Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World.[6][21] Lawler later said the bit wasn't going over in comedy clubs: "Nobody was enjoying it but Andy."[6] By one count he wrestled more than 400 women.[15][18]

Kaufman wanted a wrestling crowd, so he went to Vince McMahon Sr. at a WWF show in New York. Lawler's understanding was that McMahon told him, "I'm hesitant to involve a Hollywood actor in our wrestling show. I don't want people to think that all of our wrestlers are actors," and gave him the brush-off.[6] Bill Apter, the wrestling journalist, was at that show and steered Kaufman to Lawler in Memphis.[2][6]

Lawler was the biggest star in Memphis. Cornette has said that in 1974, Lawler's first year as a main event star, the Mid-South Coliseum ran 51 shows and sold around 400,000 tickets, and that Memphis wrestling was at times the highest-rated local television program of any kind in the country.[14] A former radio DJ, he had beaten his mentor Jackie Fargo for the NWA Southern Heavyweight Championship in 1974, started calling himself the King, and in 1977 helped Jerry Jarrett break away from Nick Gulas to start their own promotion.[16] When Kaufman called, Lawler said, "I jumped on it right away," because a Hollywood star in Memphis meant a rub for his wrestling shows.[6]

Kaufman made his Memphis debut at the Mid-South Coliseum on October 12, 1981, beating three women and drawing with a fourth.[9] Lawler remembered a sellout, and remembered Kaufman offering prize money to any woman who could beat him and promising one he'd marry her.[6] Other accounts put the prize at $1,000.[1][21]

Build-up

Lawler said Kaufman probably meant to do just the one show, "but I saw dollar signs," and asked him back.[6] Lawler later said the Memphis appearance was supposed to be a one-time deal.[10] Kaufman came back for a rematch with the woman he hadn't beaten on November 23, 1981.[9]

The rivalry started with a woman named Foxy, a tall, sturdy challenger who, unlike Kaufman's earlier opponents, had a real chance.[15] In their first match she charged across the ring, bodyslammed Kaufman, and nearly beat him before he pinned her. "The roof almost blew off the Coliseum," Lawler said.[6][15] Kaufman came backstage thrilled with the reaction.[6] Lawler wanted a rematch and went on TV promising to train her, and Foxy said on camera that she needed the money because her house had burned down, but that she wouldn't marry Kaufman "if he was the last man on earth."[6]

In the rematch Kaufman pinned her again, then stomped and kicked her and rubbed her face in the mat while 10,000 fans chanted Lawler's name.[6] Lawler got in the ring, grabbed Kaufman by the arm, and pulled him off her.[1][6] Kaufman staggered across the ring, jumped up and started screaming, "I will sue you! You can't put your hands on me!" "And that's how it all started," Lawler said.[6] It was time for Kaufman to wrestle a man, and Lawler challenged him to a real fight.[6][15]

Cornette has said the reason it worked was that both men committed completely. "Once they inhabited a character," he said, Lawler as the King of Memphis wrestling and Kaufman as the Inter-Gender Champion, "they could make anybody believe anything they said."[14] On TV, Kaufman talked about having brains and being a big star from Hollywood.[6]

The build ran on Memphis's NBC affiliate, WMC-TV Channel 5, which aired a 90-minute wrestling show every Saturday morning. Kaufman taped interviews in Los Angeles and at the Coliseum, mocking Memphis and its Southern accents.[6] In one he held up a bar of soap: "This is soap. Say it with me. Soooaap." In another he explained toilet paper.[6]

After the toilet paper interview, Lawler said, station manager Mori Greiner called: "We can't air more of these Andy Kaufman videos. We're getting so many hate calls it's tying up our switchboard." The calls, he said, came all week long, threatening both Kaufman and the station.[6] Jim Cornette, who was in the business at the time, has said Kaufman "was making wrestling a joke on TV."[14] Lawler went on local news to argue that wrestling's dignity required an answer in the ring.[14]

Cornette remembered another tape in which Kaufman tried to teach Memphis fans how to brush their teeth.[14] Lawler answered on the six o'clock news: "I'm not gonna let some little jerk comedian from Hollywood come in here and make us all look like idiots." Asked whether he was going to hurt Kaufman, he said, "I think I have to hurt him."[14]

Kaufman's line for the whole territory was that he was from Hollywood, the phrase that later gave the 1989 documentary about the feud, I'm from Hollywood, its title.[19] By early 1982 his wrestling had reached Playboy, which ran an article and pictorial on his October match with Playmate Susan Smith.[9]

The match was set for April 5, 1982. Lawler said the media coverage was unlike anything Memphis had seen, because until then the only outlet that covered their wrestling was the station they were on.[6] When Kaufman got in the ring that night and started prancing around, Lawler took the microphone: "Did you come down here to wrestle or to act like an ass?"[6]

The Matches

The match happened on April 5, 1982, at the Mid-South Coliseum in front of about 10,000 fans.[6][7] Kaufman came out in a lavender onesie and stalled for several minutes, taunting Lawler in an exaggerated Southern accent: "I'm from Hollywood! Where they make movies and TV shows! I'm not from down here in Mayn-fuss, Ten-uh-see!"[1][15] At one point, while the referee held Lawler back, Kaufman slapped him in the face three times.[15]

To get it started, Lawler put both hands behind his back and offered him a free headlock: "You've talked about all of these moves that you know. Put a headlock on me and let's get this thing started."[6] Kaufman took it. Lawler hesitated a few seconds, then lifted him into a back suplex.[1][6]

Then he gave him a piledriver. In Memphis the piledriver was an illegal move, and using it meant an immediate disqualification, but it was Lawler's finisher.[6] He piledrove Kaufman twice, and Kaufman won by disqualification.[1][7][14][20]

Kaufman lay in the ring and didn't move while fans threw garbage. When referee Jerry Calhoun went over, Kaufman said he wanted an ambulance.[14] Lawler remembered the cost at about $500, while Cornette, who was at ringside as a photographer, remembers Lawler putting it at $300. Either way, Kaufman said he'd pay for it himself.[6][7][14]

Lawler got on the microphone: "Hey, instead of calling him an ambulance, why don't you call him a taxi?"[14] Cornette said Kaufman lay in the middle of the Coliseum for 20 minutes with garbage raining down before the ambulance arrived. "Nobody was leaving, they wanted to see what would happen." It made all the newspapers the next day.[14]

"All the 10,000 people had stayed right there in the building, and here comes this ambulance," Lawler said. The EMTs put a neck brace on Kaufman, put him on a stretcher, and took him to St. Francis Hospital in Memphis.[6] He stayed there three days with his neck in traction.[6][18]

The injury underneath it was real. Bob Zmuda, Kaufman's writing partner, said X-rays showed a bad sprain: "he could have had a broken neck."[8] Zmuda added, "I think that Jerry was shocked he didn't have a broken neck."[8]

Zmuda also remembered being left behind in the arena when Kaufman was taken away. Fans who knew he was Kaufman's friend started yelling "that's his buddy," and he had to make his own way back down the aisle to the dressing room.[8]

Aftermath

Kaufman checked out of the hospital after three days, went back to California, and taped more interviews: "This is not over! You tried to end my career! You tried to break my neck!"[6] He wore the neck brace on television for months, and when the new season of Taxi started he tried to wear it on the show, but they wouldn't let him.[14] A few weeks after the match it was featured on Saturday Night Live.[1][2]

Memphis was waiting on a rematch when Lawler got a call from Late Night with David Letterman.[6] Kaufman had been a regular on the show since his first appearance on February 17, 1982.[9] The plan, Lawler said, was that Letterman would show the clips, the two of them would argue a little, and after a break Kaufman would apologize for making fun of wrestling and Lawler would apologize for hurting his neck.[6]

The segment aired July 28, 1982.[7][9][20] Neither man apologized. As the band started playing them into a break, Lawler stood up and slapped Kaufman out of his chair.[6][7]

The taping didn't resume for about fifteen minutes. When it did, Kaufman stormed back onto the set screaming profanities, pounded on Letterman's desk, and threw Letterman's coffee at Lawler.[6] When it aired that night, NBC had replaced the curse words with the sound of a cuckoo clock.[6]

Bill Apter's photo of the slap made the front page of the New York Times, and the Associated Press picked it up for hundreds of other papers.[7] After NBC threatened Kaufman, he threatened to sue the network for $200 million and buy it with the money to run a 24-hour wrestling channel.[1][15]

The feud ran through 1983. Kaufman brought in a hired masked partner, the Colossus of Death, whom Lawler disposed of, and then put a bounty of $5,000, later $10,000, on any wrestler who could put Lawler in the hospital.[7] Kaufman teamed with manager Jimmy Hart in a handicap match against Lawler and got piledriven again.[7]

Then Kaufman and Hart fell out, and Kaufman asked Lawler for help. Lawler agreed to team with him on the condition that it would be his last wrestling match.[1][7] Three minutes in, Kaufman threw powder in Lawler's eyes and the Assassins piledrove him.[1] Kaufman wrestled several more shows at the Mid-South Coliseum in July 1983.[9]

Kaufman was diagnosed with large-cell lung carcinoma. He spent six weeks in the Philippines trying "psychic surgery," which Zmuda, a former magician, could see was faked, and he died on May 16, 1984, at 35.[5][7] In Memphis, Jimmy Hart went on television and blamed Lawler's piledrivers for Kaufman's cancer.[7]

Behind the Scenes

Nobody outside Kaufman's and Lawler's closest circles knew, for years, that any of it had been arranged. The public didn't learn otherwise until 1995, when the Emmy-nominated NBC documentary A Comedy Salute to Andy Kaufman revealed that the two men were friends.[3] That was more than a decade after Kaufman's death.[3][5]

Lawler filled in the details in his 2002 memoir, It's Good to Be the King... Sometimes. He wrote that he and Kaufman decided on their own to have the confrontation on Letterman, that neither Letterman nor his producer knew ahead of time what would happen, and that he worried after the show that he would be arrested.[4] He also wrote that he was sure Letterman was angry about it.[4]

Lawler's description of meeting Kaufman runs against the character. Apter had told him Kaufman was "a really nice, quiet, humble kid," and Lawler found him exactly that. "Andy and I were the same age when we met, and he never, not once, ever called me by my first name. It was always, 'Mr. Lawler.'"[6] Kaufman told him, "I'm not a comedian. I've never gone out and told a joke in my life. I'm just a performance artist," and "I wanna play a bad guy."[6]

Inside the hospital, people believed it too. Cornette was staying with a cousin whose wife was a nurse on the floor where Kaufman was taken, and when she got home from her shift she asked, "So Lawler really hurt Kaufman, huh?"[14] In public, Lawler kept up the act long after Kaufman's death. Asked by a reporter about it, he said, "I didn't like Andy Kaufman, and Andy Kaufman didn't like me. I'm the wrong person to talk to about that."[14]

Lance Russell, the voice of Memphis wrestling, remembered that "Andy Kaufman was the biggest thing we had in terms of crowds in Memphis," and that Kaufman asked for a private locker room so he could meditate before his matches.[7]

The two sides kept the secret even from the people around them. At the Letterman taping, Kaufman refused to meet with Lawler and the segment coordinator together and would not come anywhere near him.[6] Lawler said that when he came back out after the slap, the New York crowd booed him like a wrestling crowd.[6]

Zmuda has described the Letterman segment as going smoothly at first: "Letterman had shown the clip from Memphis and everything was kind of going nice."[8] He and Kaufman had also talked to Vince McMahon about putting a Lawler and Kaufman match in the WWF, but McMahon wanted to stay away from Hollywood, and it never happened.[8]

When Jim Carrey played Kaufman in Man on the Moon, he stayed in character on set and treated Lawler as an enemy. Lawler said the first time he saw Carrey, a glass bottle of juice came flying at him and Carrey, dressed as Kaufman, yelled, "I'll get you, Lawler!"[11] Lawler has also said Carrey spat in his face while playing the role.[11] "He obviously thought we really didn't like each other," Lawler told Steve Austin on Broken Skull Sessions, where he said that he and Kaufman had been friends.[11]

Legacy

The feud took Memphis wrestling into national news. Lawler said that as soon as the Letterman segment aired, "my phone started blowing up. The New York Times, all the New York papers, everybody was calling."[6] After the match, he said, TV news shows and newspapers all over the country reported that a big star had been injured in a wrestling match in Memphis.[6]

Cornette has argued that Memphis could do what McMahon Sr. wouldn't, because of how Lawler and Kaufman approached it.[14] McMahon was afraid that booking Kaufman at Madison Square Garden would make wrestling look phony.[14] In New York, Cornette said, Kaufman's opponent would have been champion Bob Backlund, who couldn't have talked people into believing it the way Lawler did.[14] Instead, he said, Lawler and Kaufman "actually did more to make people believe wrestling was real than anything else done in the last 30 years."[14] One retrospective called his time in Memphis his best work: "For everything else Andy Kaufman did in his brief career... his turn as a territory wrestling heel was his best work."[17]

When Kaufman announced his illness in 1984, even his closest friends and family thought it was a gag, that he was "pulling an Andy."[18] The tabloids met the news with the same skepticism.[7]

Kaufman also appeared in the 1983 film My Breakfast with Blassie with WWF manager Freddie Blassie.[21] Man on the Moon brought the feud to a new audience in 1999.[11]

Lawler campaigned for years to get Kaufman into the WWE Hall of Fame.[13] Kaufman went in with the class of 2023, alongside Rey Mysterio, The Great Muta, Stacy Keibler and Tim White.[12][21] Lawler, recovering from a stroke, couldn't attend in person and spoke from home: "One of [the] most memorable moments in my career certainly involved Andy Kaufman."[13] Jimmy Hart inducted him.[13]

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. "Andy Kaufman's Feud Against Jerry 'The King' Lawler" — LiveAbout. https://www.liveabout.com/andy-kaufman-vs-jerry-lawler-2787147
2. "10 Things Fans Should Know About The Andy Kaufman Vs. Jerry Lawler Feud" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/things-fans-should-know-andy-kaufman-jerry-lawler-feud/
3. Andy Kaufman — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Kaufman
4. "Wrestler Fesses Famous Feud A Sham" (AP, Dec 26, 2002) — CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wrestler-fesses-famous-feud-a-sham/
5. "The Tragic Death Of Andy Kaufman" — Grunge. https://www.grunge.com/608329/the-tragic-death-of-andy-kaufman/
6. "Kaufman and 'The King': 30 years later" (Jerry Lawler interview) — WWE.com. https://www.wwe.com/classics/kaufman-and-the-king-30-years-later
7. "Andy Kaufman and Jerry Lawler - The Truth Behind Their Feud" — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/andy-kaufman-jerry-lawler/
8. "Bob Zmuda on infamous Andy Kaufman-Jerry Lawler angle" (Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling interview) — WrestleView. https://www.wrestleview.com/misc-news/54550-bob-zumda-on-infamous-andy-kaufman-jerry-lawler-angle/
9. Timeline — Andy Kaufman official website. https://andykaufman.com/pages/timeline
10. "Jerry Lawler Says Andy Kaufman's Memphis Appearance Was Supposed To Be A One Time Deal" (Dinner With The King podcast) — Still Real to Us. https://stillrealtous.com/jerry-lawler-says-andy-kaufmans-memphis-appearance-supposed-one-time-deal/
11. "Jerry Lawler Had A Contentious Relationship With Jim Carrey While Filming 'Man On The Moon'" — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/1107511/jerry-lawler-had-a-contentious-relationship-with-jim-carrey-while-filming-man-on-the-moon/
12. "Andy Kaufman Named to 2023 WWE Hall of Fame Class Headlined by Rey Mysterio" — Bleacher Report. https://bleacherreport.com/articles/10069473-andy-kaufman-named-to-2023-wwe-hall-of-fame-class-headlined-by-rey-mysterio
13. "A Recovering Jerry Lawler Helps Jimmy Hart Induct Andy Kaufman Into The WWE Hall Of Fame" — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/1245861/a-recovering-jerry-lawler-helps-jimmy-hart-induct-andy-kaufman-into-the-wwe-hall-of-fame/
14. "On the Timeless Beauty of Jerry Lawler Kicking Andy Kaufman's Ass" — Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/wrestlings-greatest-feud-andy-kaufman-vs-jerry-lawler/
15. "Andy Kaufman and the Unlikely Rise of Intergender Wrestling: 'I'm Not Choking Her!'" — The Daily Beast. https://www.thedailybeast.com/im-not-choking-her-andy-kaufman-and-the-unlikely-controversial-rise-of-intergender-wrestling/
16. "10 Things Wrestling Fans Should Know About Jerry Lawler's Career In Memphis" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/wrestling-jerry-lawler-career-memphis-facts-trivia-things-to-know/
17. "#1 on my list of pro wrestling's best feuds: Andy Kaufman vs. Jerry Lawler" — Augusta Free Press. https://augustafreepress.com/news/1-on-my-list-of-pro-wrestlings-best-feuds-andy-kaufman-vs-jerry-lawler/
18. "Andy Kaufman" — Do You Remember?. https://www.doyouremember.co.uk/memory/andy-kaufman
19. I'm from Hollywood — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_from_Hollywood
20. "Jerry Lawler's Memphis foes" — WWE.com. https://www.wwe.com/classics/classic-lists/jerry-lawlers-memphis-foes
21. "Andy Kaufman" (WWE Hall of Fame profile) — WWE.com. https://www.wwe.com/superstars/andy-kaufman

Further Listening

• A Comedy Salute to Andy Kaufman (1995 NBC special) — the tribute broadcast that first told the public the Lawler feud had been staged
• It's Good to Be the King... Sometimes (Jerry Lawler's memoir) — Lawler's own account of the Letterman planning and the years of silence that followed
• I'm from Hollywood (1989 documentary, directed by Lynne Margulies) — Kaufman's own footage from the Memphis run, with interviews from Lawler, Jimmy Hart, and Bob Zmuda
• Steve Austin's Broken Skull Sessions with Jerry Lawler — Lawler's extended retrospective on building the angle with Kaufman
• Man on the Moon (1999 film) — the dramatized version, with Jim Carrey's method performance and Lawler's own account of what filming it was actually like