Andy Kaufman's Wrestling Career Put to the Printed Page in Dear Andy Kaufman, I Hate Your Guts!

In 1979, Andy Kaufman issued a direct challenge to the women of America. Kaufman was a longtime follower of the ridiculous machismo and overblown personas of professional wrestlers, and began to wrestle women as part of his stage act, declaring himself the "inter-gender wrestling champion of the world." The perennial oddball offered a $1,000 prize to any woman who could pin him in a grappling match, with the added guarantee that he would shave his head and also marry the woman who could beat him.

It's somewhere between 99% and completely likely that Kaufman was hoping that his tongue-in-cheek sexism would stir the passions ignited by the '60s women's liberation movement, and he wasn't disappointed. He received a swarm of mail in response to his contest: fervent challenges, love letters and hate mail from thousands of women (and more than a few men).

And after marinating for more than three decades in Kaufman's personal files, the cream of this crop has been collected into a book, billed as an "astonishing portrait of the late '70s liberated female psyche": Dear Andy Kaufman, I Hate Your Guts! The book is a collection of those hand-written letters, photos and illustrations, with an introduction by Lynne Margulies and forward by Bob Zmuda. It hits bookshelves just in time for Christmas on Dec. 1.

Of course, if you want the actual video of Kaufman wrestling, you can't exactly watch it in a book. But that's what YouTube is for, right?

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