Some new old interviews from over the years..
Over the last more than twenty-odd (often very odd) years of working as a journalist I have met and interviewed a lot of big names ranging from TV and Movie stars to rock stars to authors and producers, etc.. etc....Anyway, every week I'm going to publish here on my Blog some of the best or more interesting ones of them.
I won't run some of my least favourite interviews...no names, no pack drill, but...there was the one where a very well known male singer tried very hard to get off with me... I won't post another where a big name actor with a lovable, friendly image was one of the most objectionable, rude oafs I ever met, and can't run one (as it never happened) where the very big name comedian/actor reckoned that even though I'm mixed race I wasn't Black enough to do an interview with him....!
....and I definitely won't include the one where a fading sex-goddess asked me back for a drink at her place and I chickened out. Something to do with the fact my girlfriend was waiting for me outside....
Anyhow, this first one from 1996 is one of my favourites, prompted by the imminent arrival of a new TV update of the show starring Matthew Perry from Friends....
ODDFELLAS
They
started playing the parts on Broadway thirty years ago, went with it to
television where it ran for five years in the early 70's and now they’re on
the London stage reprising their roles as slobbish sports writer Oscar who
takes in his best friend, the prissy and neurotic Felix, who has just been
thrown out by his long suffering wife.
John Sinclair chats to that older Odd Couple Jack Klugman and Tony Randall.
Mention the hit play/ film/ TV
series The Odd Couple to people and
they automatically start whistling that irritatingly catchy theme tune. And so
it was that I found myself walking through London's Whitehall on my way to interview the
neurotic half of the twosome, whistling that damn tune and wishing it would go
away.
Probably best known for his many
major film roles with everyone from Jayne Mansfield to Doris Day to Marilyn
Monroe, Tony Randall has also starred on Broadway and on TV where he had his
own show as long ago as 1953.
They say that life seldom imitates
art but if there was ever an actor destined to play the odder of the Odd
Couple, Tony Randall is that man. His rented flat was a marvel of taste and
restraint with everything
just so, and Tony himself dapper in cravat, loafers and slacks.
We began by talking about how the show
was being received.
“Oh,’ he laughed, “all the reviews
were great, but all of them said how Jack and I were too old to play the
characters! Seriously though, I think that Neil Simon’s play is so sharply
written, so deep, that it’s universal. It doesn't matter how old we are or how
decrepit; if anything maturity brings a new depth to the parts.”
On the subject of growing up
gracefully – or not, as the case may be, somehow Marilyn Monroe cropped up in
the conversation.
“Marilyn? She was a pain in the ass!
You know, I don`t think anyone who ever worked with her could be tortured into
saying a good word about her. You’d show up for make-up at 8.30 and she’d show
up at five. Let me put it like this, the shine went off the situation very
quickly.”
Tony had worked with another great
50’s sex symbol; Jayne Mansfield in Will Success spoil Rock Hunter.
“Dear old Jayne, what a woman! It’s
sad, but she was really a take-off of Marilyn, but then Marilyn was a take-off
of Marilyn! When Marilyn died, so did Jaynes’ career. The funny thing about
that film is it reminds me of Groucho Marx. The closing line of the film is
"You Bet Your life”, his TV catch phrase at the time.
"Now, about 20 years later they
started to re-run his old game show You
Bet Your Life, and America went crazy over him again - and he was a very
old man by then. Anyway, my 12 year old nephew Ben was besotted with him, and
one day I ended up having dinner with Groucho. I took along a little tape
recorder, and asked him to say a few words for my nephew. Well, he leaned
forward, picked up the machine and said. ‘Hello Ben .... you son of a bitch!”
“The boy took the cassette to school
and played it to everyone.”
Later, as we were leaving the
building when he discovered I was Welsh he burst into song. In Welsh....!
Everyone in the crowded lobby stopped to listen and applaud, and he told me that he had
learnt that more than thirty years ago for the Broadway production of The Corn Is Green.
On discovering that I didn't speak
the language he shrugged and said, “Darn, I've been waiting all these years to
find out what I was singing about!”
What was that about ideal casting?
Where Tony’s apartment was light, airy and neat, Jack’s dressing room was
untidy, poky and eerily like Oscar’s apartment in the play.
After he finally found somewhere for
me to sit we talked about his amazing career.
The list of people he has worked
with is incredible; everyone from Rod Steiger to Jack Lemmon, but mention Henry
Fonda and his eyes light up.
He sat back in his chair and chuckled,
a deep throaty gurgle, unaffected by the surgery he had for cancer a few years
ago. “If it wasn't for him, maybe I wouldn't be where I am today. After l did a play with him in ‘52, he asked me what I was going to do. I said I’d had some
Hollywood offers and he stopped
me right there and said to go back to New York and work at it. I was good, he
said, but Hollywood would ruin me.”
Jack came out with a surprising
titbit; he had actually acted with Humphrey Bogart!
“Yeah, we did The Petrified Forest for TV in 1954, and Betty Bacall played the
Bette Davis part and I was one of the hoodlums. Let me tell you, Bogey was short,
bald, scarred, but he was the sexiest man who ever lived. You couldn't keep
your eyes off him!
“He gave me the second best piece of advice I
ever had. He said he was about to do ten guaranteed weeks at re-shoots on The Left Hand Of God, and I said ‘so
they guarantee you ten weeks?'. And he grabs
my arm, really hurting me, pulls my face to his and growls in that Bogart
voice. 'No kid, I'm guaranteeing them
ten weeks!'
Despite everything he is still best
remembered for and as Quincy the medical
pathologist of the mid-seventies.
“I loved that show! And you know, we
managed to get laws passed because of that show. We got Congress to allow pharmaceutical
companies tax breaks to research rare diseases. Man, that was fun. Hard work
though – I ended up producing as well as starring, but man, the rewards were
huge.”
The show that evening was as fresh
today as the day it premièred in 1967. The pairing of Randall and Klugman was a
classic example of opposites attract; their different persona's fairly crackled off each other.
Despite their ages, despite their
familiarity with the play, these two consummate professionals gave the packed audience
a night they’ll never forget.
And
there’s nothing odd about that.
Pen:
John Sinclair
