PROFILE
‘Just Let Me Play the Pain in the Ass’
By Jerry Tallmer
In the elegant little antechamber to the dining room of the Hotel Carlyle, Ben Gazzara slipped an ice cube into his martini. “Makes it last longer,” he said. In fact he would nurse that one single martini through the next hour and a half, diluting it further from time to time with water and ice, while he squeezed out answers to questions about his life. “This is all in my book,” he said. “You’re making me regurgitate five years of work.”
The book is In the Moment: My Life as an Actor, (Carroll and Graf, 2004), and it’s pure Gazzara, meaning no bullflop whatsoever. If you care about theater, films, people, you’ll love it.
At a nearby table in that antechamber, purely by chance, the actress Elaine Stritch was deep in conference with her music director. “Hello, my love,” Gazzara had growled in passing at the handsome white-haired woman who, for a couple of years 50 years earlier, had indeed been the love of his life. Then, with a bullflopping straight-face to the press: “We still make love once a month. I service all my old girlfriends.”
Biaggio Anthony Gazzara, who has had more ups and downs in his 75 years than most of us, was born August 28, 1930, in the Italian Hospital on the Lower East Side of New York City. He has also been in more plays, more movies, and more TV shows than most of us. At the moment he has bounced back from deep depression and the 1999 removal of a throat cancer to win hurrahs across the country for the warmth and sincerity of his performance as one of the heroes of his youth, a certain Mr. Berra, in the one-man show Nobody Don’t Like Yogi.
“Finally, another Sicilian in this club,” was the tongue-in-cheek opener by Players Club executive director John Martello at a Pipe Night there in Gazzara’s honor last fall. Martello talked of how crucial Ben Gazzara had been for the self-esteem of young Italian-Americans like Martello himself growing up in this city in the 1950s and ’60s “before Pacino, before De Niro … He set a standard we could try for.” Author Gay Talese followed with: “[Ben Gazzara] made it easier for me to feel like an assimilated American … We had very few role models … We didn’t have an Arthur Miller, a Philip Roth … We had singers … [Gazzara] was a serious actor, not an ethnic actor.”
His father, bricklayer and carpenter Antonio Gazzara, arrived in this country in 1908, and the next year married a girl, Angela Cusumano, who had landed here in 1902. Seven years after the marriage their son Tony was born. Sixteen years after that, Ben. Grew up on 29th Street between First and Second Avenues.
An actor from the cradle?
“No, not really,” said the man nursing that martini in the Hotel Carlyle. “I would say I was shy. But I had my buddies, and right across the street from where I lived there was a Madison Square Boys Club. Somebody said: ‘Let’s go see Jackie Passalacqua’ – one of my buddies who was doing a play there. It was a play with lots of beards and head cloths, a play abut Arabs. I got jealous. If Jackie Passalacqua could do it … ”
The next day, Ben ran into Jackie on the street. One thing led to another, and all of it led to Mr. Sinclair at the Madison Square Boys Club, “a tall, handsome, distinguished looking man with silver hair and a pencil-thin moustache,” who had Ben read a passage from The Gods of the Mountain, a play by Lord Dunsany, also about Arabs. “Don’t try to act. Just be yourself,” Mr. Sinclair told the 13-year-old, words that would be reinforced a couple of years later when Mr. Sinclair took a bunch of Boys Club kids to see their first Broadway play, something called The Glass Menagerie by somebody named Tennessee Williams. The star was an actress named Laurette Taylor in the role of the mother. At the end of the play, Ben said: “Mr. Sinclair, what kind of acting is that? She didn’t do anything.” Howard Sinclair said: “Yes, Ben. She didn’t do anything but she did everything.”
A whole future had just opened up; an ethic been imprinted that would make Gazzara the kind of be-yourself actor we could fully believe all the way from swaggering, bullying Jocko de Paris of Calder Willingham’s End As a Man at the Theatre de Lys on Christopher Street in 1953 to the psychopathic father on screen 45 years and 40-something movies later in Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo 66, raging at his son across the dinner table or rushing up to lip-synch alone in his bedroom to Sinatra’s “Fools Rush In.” And everything else, betwixt and beyond.
How did your folks feel about your acting, back there when you were a boy?
“I never admitted to my father that I wanted to be an actor. He would have put me in prison,” Gazzara declares in his sandpaper rasp deepened by the oral surgery. “But in the end he was proud of me. He died in 1947. My mother was sympathetic, but I didn’t tell her till I was 17. She wanted me to go to college, get a career. So I did – I went to City College, and tried to push the acting out of my mind. But it was always there, waiting.
“Walking up and down that hill at 138th Street, I heard about a place downtown in the Village called the Dramatic Workshop of the New School, and the man who ran it, Erwin Piscator. Then I heard they gave scholarships, so I auditioned and got in. Went there a couple of years and supported myself with one job or another. Did silver and gold plating and buffing on Canal Street, which gave me red in my hair and ears. Jerked sodas at Grand Central. Even pushed racks in the Garment Center.
“At that time there were rumors flying all over New York City about this place called the Actors Studio and people who went there like Marlon Brando and Julie Harris. I went to see Brando by second-acting [stealing into the theater at intermission] Streetcar. I thought: This guy is terrific, I’d like to try out for that Actors Studio. People said: ‘You’ll never get in,’ which made me want to get there all the harder.” Louise Erickson, whom he’d met at the Dramatic Workshop – a peach of a blonde who as a young girl had been the star of radio’s A Date With Judy -- gave him moral support. She also became his first wife – “what I call a child marriage, a rehearsal,” he murmurs in a throwaway. “And I did get in to the Studio, in 1952, the same year that Strasberg took over the teaching apparatus there.”
Around then Gazzara had been reading a marvelous new book, The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger.
“I said to Freddy Sadoff: ‘Listen, I think this would make a good classroom project. All we need to do is lift the dialogue.’ And Freddy stole it from me – appointed himself adaptor, director, casting director, and would play the lead, Holden Caulfield. I said that’s all right, just let me play Ackley, the roommate with the pimples, the pain in the ass, and that’s what happened.”
Out of that Catcher in the Rye at the Actors Studio came two jobs, one for television, one for the stage. The director Sidney Lumet sent for Gazzara to star opposite Martin Ritt and Barbara Baxley in an episode of the half-hour Danger series on live TV – no stopping, no remakes, no going back to get it right. And a director named Sherman Marx recruited Gazzara to appear opposite star Claude Rains in a production of Jezebel’s Husband, by Robert Nathan, that would tour from Westport, Connecticut, to Provincetown, Massachusetts.
“Claude Rains! A man I grew up with as a moviegoer. The Invisible Man, Mr. Skeffington, and of course Casablanca. He was very kind to me. He and his wife Frances kind of adopted me. I spent weeks on the road with them. I played the prophet Micah. At the end of it all, Claude Rains said: ‘I think you’re going to be a very good actor, Ben.’ My heart jumped into my mouth.”
Meanwhile, back in the Studio, the young director Jack Garfein, a Holocaust survivor, had come upon a play Calder Willingham had written from his own tough autobiographical military-school novel End As a Man, and Garfein was rounding up a cast for it.
“They wanted me to play Marquales, the good guy, but I said: ‘Oh, no no, I want to play the evil one, Jocko de Paris, who gets all the laughs.’ And I did it. We did it for three performances in the Studio, and then we were going to go home, but the big shots were all there, Kazan, Strasberg, Tennessee Williams, Audrey Wood [Tennessee’s agent], and they told Jack: ‘You’re crazy not to keep this going.’ And Jack found an angel, a woman named Claire Heller, who gave us the $6,000 to put the show into Off-Broadway’s Theatre de Lys, and became its producer. Can you imagine? Six thousand dollars to open a show!”
Ben Gazzara is one of the few people who still to this day calls Elia Kazan “Gadge,” the nickname that goes all the way back to Group Theater days. How had Gazzara felt about Kazan’s naming of names in the HUAC era?
“Well, I was a kid. People in the Studio were yelling and crying. There was a meeting in Joan Copeland’s apartment. She’s Arthur Miller’s sister. She went to the phone every 10 minutes and came back and said: ‘Arthur says we should all resign’ [from the Studio]. My heart went into my shoes. Where would I be without the Studio? And needless to say, nobody resigned, and eventually Gadge came back, and he cast me in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and we did that. And I was very brave – ”
To play the quasi-homosexual Brick?
“Nooo. Because I was committed to [Ben’s pal Michael V. Gazzo’s] Hatful of Rain, and I told Audrey Wood [who by then was also Gazzara’s agent] that I had to get out of Cat in six months [of its year’s run] so I could do Hatful.”
It was in a second Mike Gazzo play, The Night Circus, that in 1958 – the year after a divorce from Louise Erickson -- Gazzara would meet the gorgeous dark-haired Janice Rule, who was then married to the writer Robert Thom, and would have an affair with her (hard on the heels of an affair with gorgeous blonde Eva Gabor) and marry her and have a daughter with her. Janice Rule is gone now, and so is Robert Thom, but her and Ben’s daughter Elizabeth comes back into this story in a little while.
A theater experience burned into more than one New Yorker’s memory is the 1963 Actors Studio production of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, directed by José Quintero with the all-star cast of, in Gazzara’s billing, “Geraldine Page, Franchot Tone, Betty Field, Pat Hingle, William Prince, Jane Fonda, Geoffrey Horne, and me.” The show started at 6, broke for dinner at 8, resumed at 9, and went to midnight – with audiences applauding on their feet. I myself never wanted it to end, and I’m not a big O’Neill fan.
Gazzara will wryly tell you that most people remember him, not for any role on stage but for the bouncer he played in a movie called Road House (1989) or as the man with his days spinning out in the 1965-1968 television series Run for Your Life. But true lovers of movies, and of acting – acting which seems not to be acting – will talk of the movie that was a central turning point in Gazzara’s and a number of other people’s lives. That was and is Husbands, starring Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, and John Cassavetes, written and directed by Cassavetes in 1970.
“The movie that was the beginning of another resuscitation of my career,” Gazzara says dryly as he stirs the ever more watery martini.
Resuscitation from what? “From three first-time hit plays in a row [End As a Man, Cat, Hatful] – what young actor ever gets that? And from Run for Your Life, what I call factory work, mechanical, boring, tepid, doesn’t call on you very much -- and in my third year at that work, I was hailed by John Cassavetes as he was driving out of the Universal lot. I had met Cassavetes two or three times when he was a baby writer [and struggling actor] back in New York. Now, from the car, he said: ‘Ben, did you hear, we’re going to do a picture together?’ He drove off and I forgot about it. But a few days later he called and invited me to have lunch with him at a Hamburger Hamlet.
“He had earlier invited me to a midnight screening of his picture Faces, at a theater he’d rented in downtown Los Angeles. When I got there, people were standing in the aisles. This was not for me. But as I was walking out, my eye caught a close-up on the screen. I’d never seen a close-up like that before in my life. I froze, and just stood there through the whole picture.”
They had lunch at Hamburger Hamlet. Cassavetes said he was going to Rome to try to raise money for a film about three married men whose lives are unraveling and who are brought together for a crazy week in London by the death of a fourth man who was a good friend of all of them. For his part, Gazzara first had to go to Prague to make a war picture. But he had no sooner got to Prague than he woke up in a room in the International Hotel that was shaking to the treads of tanks in the streets and the zooming of aircraft overhead. Summer 1968: the Russians had crushed in. The phone rang. It was Casavetes, in Rome: “Ben, don’t get killed. I got the money.”
And these three men, Falk, Gazzara, and Cassavetes, who contrary to appearances in the film, had hardly known one another before, would remain friends to the ends of their lives – Cassavetes being the first whose life would end, in 1989, with disastrous psychic impact on Ben Gazzara. But before that, he and Cassavetes had made three other films together, notably the unsung and stunning Opening Night, with Gazzara as the director of a Broadway-bound play with a leading lady on his hands – dazzling Gena Rowlands (Mrs. John Cassavetes) – who may smash the whole project to pieces with opening-night crackup.
It was also through Cassavetes that Gazzara met another lifelong friend-to-be, writer and director Peter Bogdanovich, who was 14 when he’d first seen Gazzara – in End As a Man at the De Lys -- and been knocked out by what he saw. In 1978 Bogdanovich made a movie called Saint Jack, adapted from a novel by Paul Theroux. The flick was set and shot in Singapore, and the unsaintly Jack was Ben Gazzara.
“We kept writing it as we went along,” Bogdanovich told the black-tie Pipe Night gathering at the Players Club last fall. “It was a movie about pimps and hookers. So,” Bogdanovich innocently observed, “we had to do a lot of research in Singapore. One night we did a lot of research … separate research. Next morning, Ben’s daughter Liz, who was 18 and an assistant on the picture, said: ‘Daddy, you look terrible. What were you doing last night?’ And Ben roared: ‘Thinking and writing! Thinking and writing.’ ”
It was soon after Saint Jack that Ben Gazzara fell in love – “sort of,” he says, slipping another chip of ice into that martini – with a woman the whole world was in love with, and still is. She was his costar on a thriller called Bloodline and her name was Audrey Hepburn. “A princess,” he says. “You couldn’t take your eyes off her. Real style. And then I went away to Korea to make Inchon and got smacked in the head by a woman who made my head spin.”
She was the German-born Elke Stuckmann, and in his book he describes his first view of her this way: “ … I turned to my left to see at the end of the table a stunning woman. She had soft blue eyes, silky smooth skin, high cheekbones, and a long, elegant neck. A knockout.”
Back at the Carlyle: “Now I was in bad shape. I had to tell my wife, Janice Rule, I was leaving her. And I had to tell Audrey Hepburn I was leaving her. It was a mess, and if it hadn’t been for Elke, I’d never have got through it.” He not only got through it, they’ve been married 23 years now, and if it also weren’t for Elke, he’d never have got through the dread depressions which began to hit soon after the death of John Cassavetes, or the cancer that a decade later struck at an actor’s most urgent organ, his voice box.
“Yes,” Gazzara says, “I’ve had some major depressions. No reason for it whatever. My career was going better than ever when I went into a black hole. I was thinking of suicide, was saving up sleeping pills. Elke and I were in Bali, where I was directing and starring in a picture I’d written, but it wasn’t working and they shut it down. I started drinking too much. We went to Rome, where they were cutting the picture without asking me. Elke said: ‘We’re going home,’ and we did, and back here I met this wonderful Dr. Wolfe, who put me on lithium, which saved me. The picture was still no good, and I wasn’t depressed. The human psyche – who can figure?”
He was on the tiny Mediterranean island of Pianosa, near Elba, working on a film called No Man’s Land, when, at dinner, his tongue and mouth were hit by a pain that stung “like a flamethrower – and again, and again, and again.” Home in the States, a Beverly Hills dentist said: “Mr. Gazzara, I don’t know what’s burning your tongue, but you’ve got something back here that needs a biopsy.’ And I knew right away …
“So I got cancer, and I was never depressed at all, not for a moment. Isn’t that odd? I don’t call us survivors,” says Ben Gazzara as the waiter finally comes to take away that empty watery martini glass, “I call us conquerors.”
