Death of a Coat Salesman : After 30 years in the theater and six years in the fashion business, Ron Rifkin becomes an overnight success with a tailor-made role in ‘The Substance of Fire’

Like many an experienced actor, Ron Rifkin declined to read the reviews of his opening-night performance in Jon Robin Baitz’s new drama, “The Substance of Fire,” when it premiered Off Broadway last spring. A veteran character actor with more than 30 years’ experience, Rifkin was simply playing one more role when he took to the stage as Isaac Geldhart, a Holocaust survivor and haughty New York publisher who risks bankruptcy and the love of his children rather than compromise his principles.

“I didn’t think about it,” says the actor about that opening. “I mean, I haven’t read reviews in years. But somebody in the cast said, ‘Read this one. It will make up for all the other injustices.’ ”

In the capricious world of New York theater, where a single review can still make or break a career, the critical response to Rifkin’s performance has been unequivocal. Among nearly unanimous rave reviews, Frank Rich of the New York Times called Rifkin’s portrayal of Geldhart “career transforming . . . one of the most memorable and troubling characters to appear on stage this season.”

After three decades, Rifkin became the proverbial overnight success. “The Substance of Fire” became one of the season’s few must-see productions, attracting a steady stream of New York literati, Hollywood directors and studio heads to Manhattan’s tiny Playwrights’ Horizons theater. Rifkin won Off Broadway’s top honors--best actor from both the Obie and Drama Desk awards, while Baitz was peppered with offers for a film version of the play. Already there are several additional productions planned with Rifkin reprising his role next season at Lincoln Center, Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum in the fall of 1992 and possibly Broadway and London.

If not quite on a par with the Tony-winning comeback of actor Robert Morse two years ago for his portrait of Truman Capote in “Tru,” Rifkin’s performance does demonstrate a similar artistic alchemy--that rare marriage of actor and role that reignites a stalled or, in the case of Rifkin, an aborted stage career. Seven years ago, Rifkin walked away from his acting career to enter the family retail business full time.

“It’s nice,” says the actor, speaking of his late-in-coming fame during a recent interview in his Manhattan loft. “I’ve been acting 30 years, and nobody knows who I am. People think they recognize my face from a bar mitzvah or a computer convention. Now, I’m a 52-year-old guy who wins two awards. It’s thrilling.”

Indeed, until the success of “The Substance of Fire,” Rifkin had attained that kind of on-again, off-again career common to many Hollywood-based actors. Born and raised in an Orthodox Jewish family in New York, Rifkin attended Yeshiva and then New York University with the goal of entering the medical profession. He wound up studying acting, first at NYU and later with Lee Strasberg at the famed Actors Studio.

After several seasons doing summer stock theater, Rifkin eventually moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s, and he landed supporting roles in feature films (“The Sunshine Boys,” “Silent Running” and “The Sting II”), TV movies (“Concealed Enemies,” “The Winds of War”) and a couple of television series. A decade ago, Rifkin was a regular on the television situation comedy “One Day at a Time”; this season, he plays Sharon Gless’ boss, Ben Meyer, in the CBS drama “The Trials of Rosie O’Neill.”

The rest of the time, Rifkin trod the boards at regional theaters, particularly Los Angeles’ Taper, where he appeared in more than half a dozen productions, including “Ghetto,” “Three Sisters” and “Rosebloom.”

“It’s just how your life goes,” says the affable, bearded actor about that peripatetic career. “I had been working since I was 20, and sometimes I made huge amounts of money and sometimes I didn’t make anything. I don’t look like Robert Redford, so I’m not going to get offered those kinds of leading-men roles.”

Indeed, the success generated by “The Substance of Fire” holds an added poignancy for Rifkin. Not only was the part of Geldhart written specifically for him by the playwright--who has been a close friend since a chance meeting at a summer theater three years ago--but it marks Rifkin’s return to full-time acting after that six-year absence. In 1984, Rifkin turned his back on his 30-year career to enter his father’s fashion business.

“I stopped for many reasons,” Rifkin says. “But mostly it just wasn’t happening. It’s OK to be working for $100 a week when you’re 30; it’s OK to be earning $350 a week when you’re 35. But I was in my 40s and I decided I needed to be a grown-up about it. Even though we don’t have kids, there wasn’t any life insurance and my wife and I were frightened. And there was this family business. . . .”

It was at his father’s urging that Rifkin and his wife, Iva, opened a West Coast office for Ronlee coats, an apparel line started by his father several years earlier. “It was horrible,” says Rifkin with an only partly rueful laugh. “Every time a buyer came in, Iva would show the line and I would go into the office and put my fists literally through the walls.”

Although the couple eventually worked for California designer Carole Little (“Between the two of us we were selling our coats to everybody, Saks, Bendels, and we were making very healthy salaries”), Rifkin says that “after four or five years I started to feel like a part of me had died.”

He was in Korea on a buying trip when a call came from a director urging Rifkin to try out for an Off Broadway play. That role, playing Judd Nelson’s father in “Temple” at the American Jewish Theater, led to a part in a revival of Arthur Miller’s “American Clock” at the Williamstown Theater Festival. It was there that Rifkin was introduced to Baitz, then a virtually unknown 26-year-old playwright who was so taken by the actor that he asked him to star in the production of his drama “Dutch Landscape” that was being done at the Taper later that year.

“When I saw Ron come on stage at Williamstown, he was so fluid and had a kind of post-hip physicality. I thought, ‘Bingo,’ ” Baitz recalls.

With one foot still in the coat business, Rifkin read for the part, but despite his numerous appearances at the Taper, he did not get the role--a disappointment to both actor and playwright and one that was compounded by the production’s subsequent box-office and critical failure.

Partly as an apology to Rifkin and partly as a way of exorcising himself “of feeling responsible for the failure of that production,” Baitz wrote “The Substance of Fire”--the story of a brilliant but self-destructive intellectual who puts his artistic and moral principles ahead of family and fiscal responsibilities.

“I had become very curious about the urge to self-destruct,” Baitz says. “And I wrote the part of Geldhart for Ron because I saw in him all those dichotomies--hysteria and strength, turn-on-a-dime savagery and the need for stillness. I wrote it for him right down to his inflections.”

As performed by Rifkin, Geldhart is a particularly charismatic protagonist, a seductive mixture of guilt and anger, arrogance and intelligence--a publisher who spurns his children’s advice to print popular fiction, preferring to court bankruptcy by producing a six-volume history of Nazi medical experiments. “He’s a complex guy,” Rifkin says. “He is smarter than everyone around him, but he can’t show love and that creates problems.”

Rifkin dismisses any questions about the nuts and bolts of his performance. “It’s just the craft part of it--I don’t know where I get the accent and why I hold the cigarette that way.” But he does acknowledge that “there is so much of me in Isaac, so much interior monsterishness--all the passion and anger.” Rifkin describes finding an outlet for those emotions on stage as “a joy beyond belief.”

Daniel Sullivan, the director of “The Substance of Fire,” suggests that Rifkin’s performance is due to that blend of craft and emotion. “Ron is an excellent theater man,” says Sullivan, who compares Rifkin to British actor Paul Scofield. “He’s got that rock facade like Scofield, but he is very tender underneath. He is so emotionally available, and that sensitivity makes Isaac vulnerable, makes an unattractive character attractive.”

Here in his spacious loft in Manhattan’s famed Tribeca district (he also has a house in the Hollywood Hills), Rifkin seems the antithesis of the controlling, preening, viciously intellectual character he portrays on stage. In a white T-shirt, Girbaud khakis and sneakers, Rifkin bustles around his kitchen making Saturday brunch. He has only recently--and somewhat apologetically--hired a public relations firm to deal with the response to his performance. “For so long I thought there wasn’t enough of me to discuss,” he says with an almost sheepish smile.

For most of the two hours, Rifkin plays less the seasoned actor than eager-to-please host and friend in the making. “Are you sure you like your coffee this strong? Let me make it again,” he says, jumping up from the table. Later he will demonstrate the use of his home exercise equipment, get out his wedding photographs and offer his visitor a ride uptown.

Rifkin constantly interrupts the de rigueur narrative of his own career to talk about other theater productions and recent film releases. “What did you think of ‘Thelma & Louise’? Did you see ‘Tatie Danielle’? What a disappointment! I wanted it to be so good!” His enthusiasm for all things thespian belies his departure from the field seven years ago.

“Definitely I’m a better actor because of the coats,” Rifkin says about that career hiatus. “You know how it is: You become an actor when you’re 20 and you spend the next years in a community of artists. But when I did the garment business, I got exposed to this whole other side of life.” It was a humbling experience that Rifkin says proved he wasn’t “that special.” It was also a time that the actor began to rediscover “all those things inside me that I never knew I could use (in acting).”

As for Rifkin’s career now? He returns to Los Angeles this summer to resume filming “Rosie O’Neill,” which he says will benefit from his months on stage. “The producers came and saw ‘Substance,’ ” Rifkin says with a small smile. “And they said to me later, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting if Ben Meyer had a little more of Isaac Geldhart in him?’ ”

Later in the year, Rifkin will shoot a small part in Oliver Stone’s John F. Kennedy film. There have been meetings with other directors, including Stephen Frears, but nothing definite yet. “Rosie O’Neill” may be extended beyond January, and that would require additional months in Los Angeles. And there’s also the possible film version of “The Substance of Fire.”

Meanwhile, Baitz, who Rifkin says has become “like a son,” continues to write parts for his favorite actor. They include a screenplay, “End of the Day,” which will be broadcast on PBS’ “American Playhouse” series later this year, and a full-length stage play--probably produced at Playwrights’ Horizons again--with Rifkin to play the protagonist.

But mostly Rifkin seems content to wait for “The Substance of Fire” to reopen at Lincoln Center--from which it could move to Broadway and make Rifkin eligible for a Tony nomination. “I see how this play, this little play in this little theater, has affected so many people in New York, and it makes me feel like I contribute a little bit, which is what an actor always dreams of doing,” Rifkin says.

Then, as if he still can’t believe his changed fortunes, he adds: “Last year I was selling coats, and now I’m here. What is that about? It’s about magic, it’s about dreams and lost dreams.”