A Triple Threat Chameleon
Actor Austin Pendleton hits the mark on stage, screen and TV and now behind-the-scenes

By Jerry Tallmer

Now you see him, now you don’t.

The triple-threat man: Austin Pendleton.

Now you see him on stage or on screen; an actor who is always superbly on the mark, be it comedy, be it tragedy, be it anywhere in between, from the hapless stuttering defense attorney of Hollywood’s smash-hit “My Cousin Vinny” to the careworn suicidal Prussian warrior-monarch of Romulus Linney’s off-Broadway “The Sorrows of Frederick” to the poor schnooky timid son of Arthur Kopit’s screwball “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad.”

Now you don’t see him unless you’re an actor or a playwright or a stage manager, for this Austin – call him Austin 2 – is directing the show.

And now you really don’t see him because Austin 3, playwright, has written the show and is off in a room somewhere, rewriting, fixing up a crucial scene.

Actor, director, playwright. “And teacher,” says Austin over a turkey sandwich grabbed on the run. He teaches at the HB Studio in New York’s Greenwich Village.

Quadruple-threat man.

He sings a little too, when called upon.

Quintuple-threat man. Perhaps New York’s Abingdon Theatre Company put it best in an honors awards this recent fall, adjudging “his influence on the theater community” as “incalculable.”

“Oh no,” says Austin when reminded of something he’d said that brought down the house that evening at Tavern on the Green, “I would never direct a play that I had written. Because as a playwright, when I’m in the rehearsal room I forget anything I ever learned about acting, so to a confused actor who’s asking me a perfectly legitimate question, I’ll snap (astringently, un-Austinly): ‘Just say the lines and it’ll all come out all right.”

Even as these words are being written, Austin Pendleton has one play he directed, Michael Weller’s “Fifty Words,” on the boards at Christopher Street’s Lortel Theater; is about to open as an actor in the title role of Wendy Kesselman’s chamber musical “The Black Monk,” from a story by Chekhov, at the Samuel Beckett on 42nd Street’s Theater Row; is getting ready to direct Chekhov's “Uncle Vanya” at the CSC on East 13th Street – “where I played Uncle Vanya 20 years ago,” he throws in – and is meanwhile learning his lines as co-star this spring in the Abingdon Company’s world premier of Romulus Linney’s new play, “Love Drunk,” which distills Ibsen’s “The Master Builder” into a two-character drama about an older man’s infatuation with a much younger woman.

“Perhaps Romulus Linney’s greatest play,” Austin says of the friend and colleague he first met half a century ago – 1957, to be exact – at the Williamstown, Massachusetts, Summer Festival, and for whom over the years he has starred so brilliantly as Frederick the Great in three separate productions of another incredible play by Linney.

“Such a great role, his Frederick the Great,” says Austin now between bites of turkey sandwich. “It’s like Hamlet and Lear all rolled into one. “I played it three times, and each time I played it I had a slight nervous breakdown. It really screwed me up.” Split-second pause. “But I would do it again tomorrow.”

Williamstown, Massachusetts, is where a lot of things began for the stage struck boy fresh out of Warren, Ohio (birthplace, March 27, 1940), and heading for Yale University (BA 1961). It is where Austin met a girl named Katina Commings whom he would marry and still be married to as he and I talked this lifetime later. They live on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and their daughter Audrey is a third-year medical student.

Williamstown is where Austin had come of age, first as an apprentice for two years with the Williamstown Music Festival, then for one year as a member of the acting company.

It was at Yale that he first started writing the book for college musicals, in particular for one about Edwin Booth, great American actor (1833-1893); it won a Yale Drama competition and, says Austin, “kicked around for years as a musical done here or there; then one day somebody said: ‘You should turn it into a play,’ so I did. I wrote it, my first play, as a 50th birthday present to myself” – a play simply called “Booth” – “and it was done at Williamstown, at the Long Wharf (in New Haven), and by the York company here in New York; a great success every time, mainly due to a spectacular performance by Frank Langella in all three productions.”

Of even greater interest to this playgoer is the Pendleton-penned “Orson’s Shadow,” the Orson of course being Mr. Multi-talented himself, Orson Welles.

Austin was still in school when a fellow actor told him he was right for the part of Jonathan in Arthur Kopit’s “Oh Dad, Poor Dad”; more important, told an agent named Deborah Coleman.

“The play had been published at Harvard. I was in Grand Central Station, going back to Yale, when there it was in a bookstore, and I bought it and read it on the train. I thought: I could play this part, though I didn’t know if I wanted to. But I went to see Deborah Coleman. She said: ‘I just got off the phone with the ‘Oh Dad’ casting director. They can’t find the guy to play Jonathan.’

“So she sent me to see the casting director, a tiny woman named Terry Fay. I got to her office at 6 p.m. on a Friday, and she was exhausted. She said they’d seen a lot of the best young actors in New York, and would call them back and call them back, but it wasn’t working. ‘Well, look’ Terry Fay said, ‘you don’t have many credits, but I might as well get you to audition for Jerry Robbins’.”

That would be Jerome Robbins, director of the Phoenix Theater’s daring venture into ‘Oh Dad, Poor Dad.”

Austin went and auditioned “and Jerry Robbins got all excited, but the second audition didn’t go well at all. To make a long story short,” says Austin, “after the sixth audition I got the part, mainly I think because of Barbara Harris” — his counterfoil in the auditions and in the play.

After that, Austin Pendleton never had to look back. He was all of 22.

Many actors and others would have thorny relations with Jerry Robbins and vice versa. Not Austin. “He was tough, but we always got along, all his life. We did two shows together, you know: ‘Oh Dad, Poor Dad’ and ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ ” – in which young Austin was Motel the tailor. Also in which a one-of-a-kind named Zero Mostel would terrorize and/or tickle everybody in the cast with his surreal on-stage improvisations and antics.

“He freed me as an actor. He would do anything – anything at all that came into his head. Whatever he did would somehow relate to the show. Once he came on stage – Tevye the milkman – carrying a Picasso. Well, why not?”

Austin left “Fiddler” after a year; he wanted to go back out to Warren, Ohio, his home town, to direct a production there of Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie,” staring his mother, who had been a professional actress, Frances Manchester Pendleton, as Amanda Wingfield, the mother in the play.

Much more recently Austin has gone back to Warren to join Alice Playten. Judy Kaye, and Judy Kaye’s husband, Arthur Green – old friends, all – in programs of show tunes with the Warren Philharmonic.

Warren, when Austin was growing up, was a thriving industrial community. His father, Thorn Pendleton, had a small tool company there.

And today?

“Oh!” he exclaims – sighs – unhappily. “Last time I got a car and just drove around. Heartbreaking. I don’t know why people stay there. The only industry that’s still there now is a General Motors plant, and how stable can that be?”

The normally affable, good-hearted Austin Pendleton at least once lost his cool and indulged in a furious dispute in a theater lobby with a notorious dragon lady (and great playwright) named Lillian Hellman.

This was when, in 1981, he was directing Hellman’s “The Little Foxes” at the Martin Beck (now the Al Hirschfeld), on Broadway, in a production starring Elizabeth Taylor and Maureen Stapleton, among other notables.

“She” – Ms. Hellman – “was giving me one criticism too many,” Austin had told this writer during an interview a couple of years ago, “and I started kicking the wall and yelling: ‘This is the worst fucking night of my life!’ And she bangs her cane on the floor and says: ‘Every time I see this fucking production is the worst fucking night of my life!’ She loved that sort of thing,” Austin had added with a smile.

To this day he doesn’t know how he got that particular directing assignment. “I’d had a few slight directorial successes in New York, but was not on anybody’s A list. I had to be interviewed, first by Hellman, whom I knew because I’d been in a Lincoln Center production of ‘The Little Foxes’ 14 years earlier, under Mike Nichols’s direction. When I told her that Mike Nichols should now play the older brother, Uncle Ben, she got all excited. Of course he wouldn’t do it. Then I had to go see Liz Taylor, the sweetest person in the world.”

Life with the Abingdon Theatre Company might be a little easier than all that.

Movies!  You pump up the Internet Movie Data Base and Austin Pendleton is all over the place, 109 movie or TV credits since 1968, 32 such credits since 2000.

“In the last ten years I’ve done ten or eleven independent films,” he says off-handedly. “Some not seen by anybody. Some on DVD or cable CD. Some have been good, some not. You might work three days and forget you ever did it. The wonderful thing is the broader range of roles than I’ve had in many years. In one of them I was a drug lord who would just routinely kill people for no reason at all. When they sent me the script I couldn’t figure out who they wanted me for.”

From the drug lord to Henrik Ibsen and Romulus Linney’s master architect atop his tower, besotted with love. A stretch? Zero Mostel could tell you how to do it.