Friday 30 January 2015

The Odd Couple.. plus one!

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

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