John Randolph: An Actor’s Life Overlaps Art, Activism

Maybe you saw it on television. John Randolph was the guy at the White House last winter hugging Mikhail Gorbachev.

“It didn’t feel like nerve,” the actor recalled. “I really meant it. I couldn’t conceive of hugging Reagan, because I violently disagree with his obsession to wipe out Nicaragua--or saying that what’s going on in South Africa is just ‘tribal.’ But whatever I feel about Reagan as President, what happened at that summit was a tremendous step for mankind. A first step. You have to make sure it continues.”

It’s not hard to get Randolph talking politics. A self-described “old radical,” the 72-year-old Bronx-born actor has almost made a second career of “standing up for what I believe in”--with current causes numbering Amnesty International, medical aid to El Salvador, TransAfrica and Athletes and Artists Against Apartheid.

“How could you not become radicalized during the Depression?” he asked. “You’d have to be an idiot not to be radical with 17 million unemployed. Also, I went to a wonderful college, City College of New York, and the ferment there was extraordinary. It opened up a communist point of view, Socialism, Marxism, Henry George, all of that. There’s nothing wrong with challenging. There’s nothing wrong with absorbing new ideas and testing them.”

Yet, Randolph’s activism is only part of the picture. In 50 years his familiar face has appeared in “Guys and Dolls” and “Paint Your Wagon” on Broadway, “American Clock” and “Twelve Angry Men” on local stages. His films include “The Naked City,” “Earthquake,” “Heaven Can Wait,” “Frances,” “Prizzi’s Honor” and the coming “Wizard of Loneliness.” On TV he’s been in “The Bob Newhart Show,” “The Missiles of October” and “Sandburg’s Lincoln.”

Randolph is now at work on an untitled Mary Tyler Moore show, playing “a kind of geriatric Kate and Petruchio” opposite Eileen Heckart. Last year he won a Tony Award for best supporting actor as the “Trotskyite, communist left-wing grandfather” in Neil Simon’s “Broadway Bound.”

In honor of the Tony, and his work as chair of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, Mayor Tom Bradley has proclaimed Sunday as “John Randolph Day.” A luncheon at the Universal-Sheraton Hotel will include tributes from such colleagues as Gordon Davidson, Ellen Geer, Agnes de Mille, Dennis Weaver and James Whitmore.

“ ‘John Randolph Day,’ no less,” Randolph grinned, relaxing in his trailer at CBS. “Whether you believe it or not doesn’t make any difference. This ‘legend’ business is a riot. They’re also giving me a day in New York next week.”

He laughed roundly. Awards were the last thing on his mind when he came out of the service and began rallying for better housing for veterans, for the striking miners in Harlan County (Kentucky), against the death penalty for Willie McGee (he was executed for raping a white woman in Mississippi) and for convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

It was also about that time that the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began its investigations of the artistic community in California. When the first Hollywood personalities were called to testify, a group of Broadway actors--from “Command Decision” (in which Randolph was appearing) and “Streetcar Named Desire”--went to offer support. “Then we went back to Broadway and talked about it,” he said. “But before you could get up and talk at a union meeting you had to say, ‘Look, I’m not a communist; I’m anti-communist.’ Without that waiver you were in trouble.”

As Randolph soon found out. His outspokenness and defense of other accused figures resulted in a scarcity of jobs. For 15 years, even when he worked--usually on stage--the targeting continued. A day before he was to tape a show at CBS with director Sidney Lumet, the station was warned of a smear campaign unless they fired “that commie, John Randolph.” They didn’t.

Over and over, colleagues and friends rallied around him. Louis Calhern, who’d hired Randolph to play opposite him in “Wooden Dish,” sent a comforting telegram the day newspapers ran adjacent reports of Randolph’s casting and his coming appearance before HUAC.

“I’ve always felt close to the people I worked with,” Randolph said. “I didn’t believe in hiding what I felt. There (was) nothing to hide. Instead of feeling that I was alone in the world, I went to people around me. I said, ‘Listen, I need money. I’ve gotta go back and forth to New York every day to meet lawyers.’ They set up a collection. When we had a meeting, they told me to take the Fifth Amendment, not give in. I’ve always felt the strength of others around me. Even if (people) disagree with me, I think they know I’m honest in my opinions. I’d just like to see a better world, that’s all. I’d like to see peace.”

He concedes that although his own confidence rarely wavered, it must have been hard on his family.

“My wife (actress Sarah Cunningham, who died in 1986) became very strong,” he said. “She came from the South--from the old DAR--and rebelled against race prejudice. And we brought up our children under the worst kind of conditions, not knowing if we’d be eating or not. Working on Broadway, you don’t earn that much money. So you struggle--and you don’t waste any time feeling sorry for yourself. You just get angry at the carnage around you.”

For all the fire in him (Randolph fondly recalls his Romanian-Russian family spiritedly conversing “at top pitch”), there is no evidence of bitterness.

Says his old friend James Whitmore, “It seems there’s a low quotient of neuroticism in John Randolph. I did a show about Will Rogers, who had the same capacity: being able to keep his ebullience, humor, lust for life--and make others in dire straits feel better. There’s an awful lot of love in John.” Echoes Dennis Weaver, “He’s a man of great integrity. He has such buoyancy. You couldn’t fake that for 40 years.” As for Randolph’s personal/political passions, Weaver said, “With John, you can’t separate the two.”

In the last few years, life, art and politics have overlapped even more. First came the death of his wife; three weeks later he was told he had a coronary occlusion that required quadruple bypass surgery.

A month after the operation, he segued into “Broadway Bound,” and the resulting Tony. (“When you get nominated, you take pictures with your so-called rivals--and it’s so warm, so beautiful to see that kind of feeling among actors.”) At the same time, while continuing his activities with the Screen Actors’ Guild, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and Actors’ Equity--and serving as president of the local Ensemble Studio Theatre--he was approached to chair the Council of American-Soviet Friendship.

“I’d started this whole exchange business before it was popular,” Randolph noted, “before Afghanistan, because I really felt it was important for actors to meet other actors. We were being flooded with Soviet directors on Broadway. I’d organized seven delegations to the German Democratic Republic.

“Once the blacklist broke, I wanted to see all those places myself. I’d organized a delegation to Cuba when I was in ‘Broadway Bound’ and I was invited to the Havana Film Festival--not because they knew me as a commie. It was about reaching out.”

The time, he stresses, is right. “In 1985 in Geneva, the United States and the Soviet Union made an agreement of a cultural, scientific and educational exchange that was extraordinary. For the first time in years, the doors were opened wide. It blossomed in ’86 and ‘87--up to now.”

What with his own exchange visit to Russia last year, meeting Gorbachev and the current spate of work projects, Randolph says this is “a good time for me. That doesn’t mean I’m ever going to stop fighting.”