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I ALWAYS WANTED TO WRESTLE WOMEN

I've been obsessed with about five people in my life. Not people I've actually met or know; my personal obsessions are countless and much more damaging to my mental state. But in terms of famous types, there have been about five, starting with Prince Charles when I was a kid. Why, I don't know.

I became obsessed with Andy Kaufman as soon as a friend heard about him and bought I'm From Hollywood, a brilliant hour-long documentary which chronicles Kaufman's inter-gender wrestling phase. I'd never seen anyone like Kaufman. Lynne Margulies, his last girlfriend before he died, made the film in 1989, five years after his death, and last week also brought out a book, Dear Andy Kaufman, I Hate Your Guts!, which collects his more memorable hate-mail from this period, such as: "I'm in an electric wheelchair and I'd gladly run it over him a few times if it would shut him up."

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Kaufman loved this. He wanted to be reviled. He was fascinated with failure and rejection, and spent as much time as he could pissing people off in the name of self-entertainment, subversion, and real-life pantomime. Making himself despicable to the masses thrilled him from the start. His first stand-up gigs, in the early 70s, saw the unknown Kaufman take to the stage in the guise of an inept foreign comedian, who was consistently jeered by crowds for his (deliberately) pathetic impressions. Later, when the character became famous as part of the sitcom Taxi, Kaufman would frustrate new fans at gigs by ignoring their hollers for him to do the foreign shtick, and sat on a stool reading from The Great Gatsby instead. For ages.

He'd been into wrestling since he was a kid, and regularly went to matches throughout the 70s. And in 1979, the same year he played a gig at Carnegie Hall to 3000 people, he started wrestling women. He had to wrestle women; he knew that any half decent male wrestler would beat the shit out of him. After a few matches, he went to Memphis and, in the ring, challenged women to take him on, offering $1000 to whoever could beat him, as well as promising to shave his head and marry his victor.

He claimed women didn't have the mental chops to beat him, and were better suited to chopping carrots and washing dishes. "These people don't know how to live," he said of the local citizens, and, on regional TV, said, "I can bring you up from the squalor that you're living in… the gutter and the garbage that your lives are," before introducing them to soap. Riling Southerners was a sport to him. Reaction was king. He called fans who booed him a "bunch of slimy hicks", and played up his obnoxiousness to dangerously inciting levels.

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When wrestling legend Jerry Lawler appeared ringside to train one of the women up against Kaufman, and ended up slapping him across the ring, Kaufman threatened to sue, setting off one of the best media feuds of all time. War was waged. Lawler challenged Kaufman to a match, Kaufman accepted, and spent a few minutes avoiding him in and out of the ring until Lawler slammed him to the floor before putting him in hospital with a piledriver. The national media perked up and the pair were invited on to David Letterman's show, where Lawler again slapped Kaufman before the latter screamed profanities and threw a glass of water at him.

People began worry about Kaufman, concerned that his wrestling obsession was spiralling out of control. He charged on, stepping up the feud by hiring other wrestlers to beat Lawler, before teaming up with him in the ring in return for a pledge to never wrestle again, only to double cross him on the mat and kick him while he was down. The same year (1983), Taxi was cancelled, he got himself voted off Saturday Night Live for good (in a vote which he had organised himself, and honoured when the majority voted against him), and found it increasingly hard to get any stand-up gigs booked because of the public backlash. The next year, he died of lung cancer. In the late 90s, as director Milos Forman was gearing up to make Kaufman biopic Man On the Moon, the feud with Lawler was revealed to be a collaboration; the two had both got the publicity they wanted, and Kaufman had the added bonus of sleeping with, if his friend Bob Zmuda is to be believed, 70 percent of the women he wrestled.

Still, much of what happened was genuine. Letterman wasn't in on it. Kaufman really did get hurt, although not half as much as he made out (after the piledriver he was in hospital for three days; he wore his neckbrace for months). People wondered how much of Kaufman's wrestling persona was real and how much was fake, but ultimately there's little difference. As Kaufman later said: "Whenever I play a role, whether it's good or bad, an evil person or a nice person, I believe in being a purist and going all the way." A die-hard fan of the sport, his aim was always to recapture the old, pre-television days of carnival wrestling where wrestlers would go town to town and offer cash to those who would take them on. He wanted it to be exciting, and in the tradition of the best wrestlers, he wanted to work the crowd into a hateful frenzy. As much as the feud with Lawler was a hoax, Kaufman really did rile Southerners, and the subsequent backlash really was to the detriment of his career. His failure was a success.

Kaufman manipulated crowds, he manipulated the media, he manipulated TV audiences. The world was his playground. There aren't celebrities like him today; there weren't then. Even back when he was a recurring guest on golden era Saturday Night Live, burgeoning comedy legends such as John Belushi, Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy seemed tame and old hat next to him. There may be shades of Kaufman in what Joaquin Phoenix is doing with his rap 'career', although that story is yet to pan out, and nobody really cares anyway. Forman's film didn't do him justice – shiny and sentimental, it lacked his guerrilla spirit, so if you're new to the man, don't watch that, watch I'm From Hollywood, which shows him at his renegade best. Some people even believe he faked his death, his biggest stunt yet. They're morons.

ALEX GODFREY