How I Got to Be Whoever It Is I Am Read online

  There are not a lot of people I will always cherish, but Joe Schoenfeld, who has been deceased for years, remains in my thoughts.

  Another time, the legendary Abe Lastfogel joined Joe and me for a drink in Joe’s office at the end of the day. At some point, Abe said, “Why don’t we go into my office and have our drink under Johnny’s picture.” Johnny was Johnny Hyde, who was Abe’s partner when William Morris really became William Morris, around 1930.

  I have no point to make in the following two stories about two other William Morris agents I knew in the sixties, one in California and the other in New York, but I think they’re worth telling.

  Cy Marsh was a flamboyant Hollywood agent who actually stood on his desk as he talked to me. I was asking if he could help get me considered for bigger television shows.

  He proclaimed, while standing on his desk, “I represent Rod Steiger.” Compared to Rod Steiger of On the Waterfront fame, I was relatively unknown. Cy said, “How am I, who represents Rod Steiger, going to look if I ask, ‘Anything for Charles Grodin?’ ” I found him hilarious, even though I don’t think he ever asked, “Anything for Charles Grodin?”

  Rod Steiger was a guest on my cable show in the nineties about thirty years after Cy talked to me standing on his desk, which I assume looking back must be some kind of power move. It wasn’t obvious at the time. The power move I do find obvious is when people in positions of authority speak in something slightly above a whisper in a private office. I have some hearing loss. But not that much. They speak in something slightly above a whisper.

  Anyway, Rod Steiger was on my show thirty years later. I was doing a program on depression, and he was one of three or four guests who battled that terrible scourge. My mother and my brother have both suffered from depression, so I obviously don’t mean to be funny, but Rod Steiger was so depressed on the show that even though he wasn’t with me in the studio but was on the satellite, I started to get depressed.

  The agent for William Morris in New York who was Harry Ufland’s boss when he and I first connected observed of me, “He’s probably going to be another Eli Wallach, but who’s got the time?”

  This agent was widely known for reaching for any male’s scrotum that came within his reach. He never made that move on me—something about my attitude, I guess. On the few occasions when he called me, I felt I better take a pill of some kind, because his energy was so high. He died young. Call me crazy; I liked him, too. Characters! I’ve often said sometimes the agents should be the performers!

  Critics

  A critic for Variety, Art Murphy, who called himself Murph, said of me in my second leading role in a movie in 1974, “It would be sad to think an acting career lay ahead.” The next year, I won a best actor award on Broadway in Same Time, Next Year, and the year after that I was in Heaven Can Wait. That critic is now deceased. When articles appeared about him after his passing, it was reported he was snappish around the office and enjoyed dressing in women’s clothes.

  I honestly don’t look down on how anyone dresses, as long as they’re properly covered. Snappish around the office or anywhere is way over the line to me.

  I’m more sympathetic to a local critic in Santa Monica who said of a movie I wrote, Movers & Shakers, “If you want to know what it feels like to die sitting upright in your theater seat, go see this movie.” The late ABC critic Joel Siegel said of the same movie, “You’ll laugh till you cry.”

  While I don’t believe it was as good as Joel Siegel said, I obviously don’t agree with the Santa Monica critic. It probably never occurred to him that the movie was too hip or inside for him to get. I mean, I don’t get a lot of things, and I almost always believe it’s my shortcoming.

  I mean, how bad could the movie be? The cast included Walter Matthau, Steve Martin, Gilda Radner, Bill Macy, Penny Marshall, and Tyne Daley, among many others who’ve had a job or two, including me. Inside? Yes. Bad? No.

  One of my closest friends was a critic, Richard Watts, Jr. From the early seventies until he died at the age of eighty-two in 1980, Dick was the theater critic for the New York Post and before that a movie critic and later a theater critic for the New York Herald Tribune. He and I and a changing group of three or four others would meet every Friday night at Manhattan’s “21” Club for drinks and then have dinner there or go to other restaurants around the city. I loved Dick Watts. He was as kind a man as I’ve ever met and knowledgeable on so many subjects.

  The late Clive Barnes, formerly the drama critic of the New York Times and later a critic for the New York Post, wrote about Dick after he passed. He said among other things that Dick’s opinions were informed by knowledge, love, and, very significantly, compassion. He said his writing was modest, and he had the honesty almost to protest his subjectivity.

  Dick once gave a mixed review to something I had produced and directed on Broadway. He said that most likely part of his problem with the play came from some hearing loss he was suffering, as there were a number of lines spoken offstage. That Friday at “21,” I read into his ear a review from another major critic. He listened carefully, and when I finished turned to me with a big grin and said, “Why, Chuck, that’s a rave!”

  There was only one Dick Watts. He knew he was subjective, as we all are, and he genuinely came to the theater wanting to like the production.

  Maybe, in fairness, all critics want to like what they’re reviewing. Personally, I couldn’t handle going to see a play or a movie five nights a week or so. I mean, I’d come in in a bad mood, and that of course wouldn’t be fair to the people putting on the show.

  The Graduate

  No matter how many times I’ve written about or said to people that I did not turn down the lead in The Graduate, the question always comes up in interviews. “Why did you turn down the lead in The Graduate?”

  I had read about twenty pages from the script for the director, Mike Nichols; the writer, Buck Henry; and the producer, Larry Turman; with an excellent actress reading the role of Mrs. Robinson. Mike called me that night to say, “You’re our number one choice. We don’t have a second choice.” He also said, “When I close my eyes and listen to you, you’re perfect, but when I look at you…” It was a typically gracious Mike way of saying, “Lose some weight.” It wasn’t that I was heavy, he just thought that being thinner would make me look younger. I was thirty-one. The character was supposed to be early twenties. He said they wanted to do a screen test, but only for “photographic purposes.”

  In order to do a screen test you must first agree to the fee they will pay you, if they choose to hire you. They offered me $500 a week to star in The Graduate, plus a seven-year contract with modest increases, all with their option, of course. I was making more than that for a three-day guest spot on a television show, and I simply thought it was unfair. It really had nothing to do with the money, but the fairness.

  This attitude, which first reared its head on the CBS Sunday morning shows, manifested again. Even though I have sometimes worked for scale in really low-budget movies, in this case I thought the salary was inappropriate, and I still feel that way. We went back and forth and finally agreed on a thousand dollars a week.

  It seemed that within an hour my doorbell rang, and somebody delivered a large packet of pages from The Graduate that they wanted me to memorize before going in front of the cameras the next morning. That’s the kind of thing you deal with if you’re doing a soap opera, but to get to the level of acting they had seen me do in the office reading the script would be impossible. A note enclosed in the envelope read, “If you have any questions, call Mike Nichols,” and they gave me his home phone number.

  Now I believe he might have subconsciously known something wrong was happening. I called him and said, “With this many pages to memorize overnight, I can’t be at the level I know you’d expect.” By then, I had studied acting for ten years and done a lot of theater and television. He again said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s only a photographic test,” and alluded to my need t
o lose weight to look younger. When I showed up on the set I had lost so much weight that Mike didn’t recognize me. However, it wasn’t only a “photographic test.”

  I absolutely didn’t know the lines. I asked if I could improvise. The answer was no, and when Mike asked me if I would jump up and down on the bed and I asked why, it confirmed his feeling, a false one, that I would be difficult to deal with. I was not offered the role.I thought the whole thing was handled inappropriately. I’m sure that none of the people behind The Graduate realized that. I know Mike and Buck, and they’re really nice guys. Later, when I did work with Mike on Catch-22, he discovered what everyone learned when they worked with me: I wasn’t difficult to deal with.

  One director who probably wouldn’t agree with that last statement is Joel Schumacher, who directed The Incredible Shrinking Woman, which I believe was his first picture. It was a movie filled with special effects, which by definition meant there would be more than your average mind-numbing hours of waiting around—like, eight. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t the only one who felt some thought could be given to how many hours the actors were waiting. I not only wasn’t the only one, but one actress actually felt it was being done deliberately to drive her crazy!

  I went to Joel to ask if he could give some consideration to the actors’ call times. He looked at me as though I was nuts. He said, “You expect me to think about that!?” It was clear the special effects were more than enough of a challenge for him. I said, “I do expect you to think about that.” He told me that I was being paid more than Lily Tomlin, who played the Shrinking Woman. I said, “Really? Who’s her agent?” Then I said, “Under your logic the person being paid the most should wait the longest.” He said, “You’re like a Jewish prince.” Joel is Jewish, so I didn’t take it as an anti-Semitic remark, but I didn’t like it. Joel saw the look in my eye that surfaces from time to time and quickly added about himself, “And I’m white trash.”

  Back to The Graduate. Turn it down? I may be a lot of things, but nuts really isn’t one of them. At the time, in spite of working in television, I owed $800 to the Actors Federal Credit Union. Believe me, I didn’t turn down The Graduate. To this day, I don’t think they realize they made it impossible for me to succeed. I say that not to point a finger but for directors in the future who may not realize what actors need to be at their best.

  For example, when I’m involved in casting plays I write, instead of having the director, producer, casting director, and myself sit behind a long table, I give the person auditioning a table to sit behind as well, instead of just a straight-back chair. Sometimes I give them my table.

  There’s a reason plays are in rehearsal for four weeks and then in previews before critics come. Movie scripts are often given to actors months ahead of time. As I’ve said, the only place actors are asked to memorize pages and pages of dialogue in a short period is on soap operas. I’ve done two soap operas and found it impossible to be anywhere near the level I can reach with the time given in movies and onstage. There are wonderful soap opera actors, but you don’t ever hear their names mentioned among our great actors. When they had opportunities with movies or theater they could really fulfill their potential.

  I once asked a veteran soap opera actress if she enjoyed the work. She said, “The only thing I enjoy is the last line.”

  I’ve always tried to focus on what I have and not on what I don’t have, because in the overall scheme of things, if I consider what I have been given it would be ridiculous for me to ever feel sorry for myself, and I never have.

  I’ve known Mike Nichols for forty years, but since The Graduate test I’ve never had a bumpy moment with him. Whenever I see him, I can’t help but be aware I’m looking at someone very special—so original in his wit and so smart—probably in a class of his own, at least in show business. The two of us once had lunch, and the subject of The Graduate never came up. Oddly, I don’t even remember thinking about it when I was with him.

  In 1997, thirty years after our awkward, failed encounter on The Graduate, Mike called to compliment me on something he’d seen on my cable show—a classy move. He’s a highly unusual dude. If our country ever becomes a monarchy, I could easily see him as king.

  A friend of mine recently called my attention to Pictures at the Revolutionby Marc Harris (Penguin, 2008) in which The Graduate is discussed by Mike Nichols and Buck Henry:

  Charles Grodin, a thirty-one-year-old TV and theater performer with a growing list of credits, impressed them both with a very sharp reading. “Grodin got very close,” says Nichols. “His reading was hilarious, he’s brilliantly talented, and he understood the jokes. But he didn’t look like Benjamin to me.”

  “Chuck Grodin gave the best reading,” says Henry. “And maybe one of the best readings I’ve ever heard in my career, so funny and interesting. He thinks we offered him the part—I don’t think we did. I don’t remember his screen test, whereas Dustin’s was really memorable.”

  Dustin Hoffman is a brilliant actor. We were in Lee Strasberg’s class together. I have no doubt he gave a memorable screen test. I also have no doubt he had the script well ahead of the night before he did the test.

  Sometime in the early sixties, years before all of this, I saw Dustin standing on a street corner near where I lived. He said he was looking for me, because he was directing something in the basement of a church and he wanted me to be in it. There would be no pay, of course. I told him I couldn’t, because I had to work (driving a cab at that time). As I walked away, I looked back at him still standing on the corner. I remember thinking to myself, God, I wonder what’s going to happen to him? Obviously, he’s worked so hard and deeply deserves everything that’s happened to him. I think he’s a magnificent actor.

  Mike Nichols wrote me a note after The Graduate screen test saying he’d like me to do Catch-22 with him. That helped, but what really kept The Graduate situation from getting to me was a telegram I received soon after the test from Renée Taylor, saying she wanted to meet with me. My friend now of over fifty years, Gene Wilder, got Renée and me together. Through Renée I met her friend Elaine May, which led me to doing The Heartbreak Kid, which really launched my movie career.

  The French Girl

  Right around this time in the late sixties, I was living in an apartment in New York. One day I answered the phone, and there was a French girl on the line. It was a wrong number, but we began to chat. She told me she was a young actress recently arrived from Paris to screen test for the role of a sexy young woman in a movie. She was charming and somewhat flirtatious. After a while, I asked for her number. I was, of course, single. She wouldn’t give it to me but took mine and said she’d call again.

  About a week later she did, and again we had a flirtatious conversation, and again she wouldn’t give me her number but said she’d call again. These weekly calls went on for about a month, until she finally gave me her number. That would prove to be an unconsciously self-destructive move on her part. She said she’d still prefer to call me. I didn’t ask why, but I chose to respect her wishes and didn’t call her.

  After about a half-dozen phone calls, she started to ask me about my dating life. I told her I was seeing a girl, and she began to ask about her. After the second call, when she continued to ask about my new girlfriend, I began to feel suspicious. I wasn’t sure what I was suspicious about, just suspicious.

  I called my girlfriend and asked her if she had any girlfriends from France. She said she didn’t. I then gave her the French girl’s number and asked her to look through her phone book to see if that number belonged to anyone she knew. It didn’t.

  As weeks went by, the French girl continued to call and continued to want to know what the latest was with the girl I was seeing. So I asked my girlfriend to again carefully go through her phone book to see if the girl’s number corresponded to any in her book. This time she found it. It didn’t belong to a French girl but to a chubby friend of hers who was very good at doing accents.

 
I asked my friend to put together a small group of people, including the friend who did accents so well, and we’d all go to Central Park and have a picnic. The next Sunday about five of us sat on the side of a hill in Central Park and had our picnic. The chubby girl who was good at accents sat a few feet from me.

  The next day the “French girl” called me again to ask me what I had done over the weekend. I told her I’d gone to the park with some friends and had a picnic. She asked me if it was fun. I said, “Well, you were there, what did you think?” There was a long, uncomfortable silence, and she finally said goodbye, without the French accent.

  A couple of years went by, of course without any calls from the “French girl.” My girlfriend and I had gone our separate ways. She had moved to California. One day the phone rang, and it was the “French girl” using her own voice. She asked me if I had heard from my former girlfriend. I said I hadn’t. She then said she had driven off a cliff in California and was dead.

  Given my past experience with this girl, I was dubious. Incredibly, she wanted to chat some more about this and that, but I quickly got off the phone and called my former girlfriend’s brother. He confirmed she had driven off a cliff and felt it was an accident. But, in fact, she had died. Sheila was in her twenties.

  Simon and Garfunkel and My Politics?

  In 1969, I directed a Simon and Garfunkel special for CBS. Because of Paul and Art’s prominence, they were given a prime-time slot on Sunday night. My television directing credits at the time were my two firings from Candid Camera.

  Actually, Paul and Art didn’t ask me to direct the special. They asked me to go out and meet with the leading documentarians in the field, which I did. They were all impressive but were talking about something other than what we had in mind. Eventually, I said, “I think I should direct it.” Paul and Art said, “Fine.”