November 4, 1998
TO THE MOON, ANDY!: There are any number of second and third-hand reports. But veteran L.A. "shockabilly" player Johnny Legend was an eyewitness to the incident that sent Jim Carrey to the hospital at the hands of an angry wrestler.

In fact, he confesses, he might have indirectly had something to do with it.

Legend -- a contemporary of The Doors, who plays the El Mocambo tomorrow -- is cast in the movie Man On The Moon, in which Carrey portrays the maniacally-unpredictable late comic Andy Kaufman. Legend, who also dabbles as a wrestling manager, was one of Kaufman's closest friends.

The scene in question re-creates an infamous incident in an arena in Memphis, where Kaufman, who'd been playing out a wrestling-fixation, spat on wrestler Jerry (The King) Lawlor and ended up in a neckbrace after Lawlor pounded him. The Sept. 24 incident, on set at the L.A. Olympic Auditorium, saw the very same Jerry Lawlor injure Carrey after he spat on him.

"They were filming all day, and Carrey had totally turned into Andy," says Legend. "He was harassing Lawlor and the audience. He was asking me for tips on how to really get Lawlor's goat. He was all day, in the ring and outside, looking around the edges of the trailers, like, 'Where's that Jerry Lawlor? I'm really gonna get him!'

"I was basically in the mode of dealing with Andy again, 15 years later." They shot the scene, says Legend, and after the director yelled cut, "all of a sudden there was a weird disturbance in the ring and Carrey kind of disappeared to the side. And a minute later they told two or three thousand extras they were done for the day, please go home, get the hell out of here. People are running around and an ambulance pulls up and Carrey's going off on a stretcher."

Contrary to earlier reports (and the howling indignation of Carrey's manager that the wrestler "behaved in an unprofessional manner"), Lawlor seems to still be employed in Man On The Moon. "I was always skeptical about him being fired," Legend says. "He has too many key scenes in the film as far as I'm concerned."

As for rumours that the whole thing was a setup, Legend laughs. "It really is one of those Kaufman things all over again, where nobody, including Andy, knows exactly what's happened.

"I remember saying back then, 'The guy's going to go to his grave and nobody's ever gonna know what the punchline was."