Toast of the Town (Again)

Ben Gazzara had a front-row seat for the birth of the cool. Born to Sicilian immigrants in New York City in 1930, he was there for the glory days of jazz and Abstract Expressionism, and as a young man worked with the likes of Tennessee Williams, Duke Ellington and Elia Kazan.

A member of the Actors Studio, the legendary thespian petri dish that developed the naturalistic style of acting known as the Method, Gazzara was also part of the family of actors brought together by director John Cassavetes. The godfather of American independent film, Cassavetes gave Gazzara leading roles in three critically acclaimed films in the ‘70s.

As his resume might suggest, Gazzara was too cool to chase money and fame with the careerist zeal typical of actors today; consequently, he’s been largely absent from American movies for the past 15 years.

“I think people thought I was dead,” the 67-year-old actor says with a laugh over breakfast at a West Hollywood hotel. “Now the young directors are calling--and I look up and thank John for that.”

Young directors have indeed rediscovered Gazzara. He has seven films slated for release over a period of about 12 months, and all but one of them are by filmmakers under 40.

The run began last month with the release of the Coen brothers’ “The Big Lebowski,” which features Gazzara as a pornographer. Last week, David Mamet’s psychological thriller “The Spanish Prisoner” hit the screen, with Gazzara playing a slick corporate criminal. This summer, look for Vincent Gallo’s “Buffalo 66,” which stars Gazzara as a family man who flips between episodes of terrifying rage and shameless sentimentality.

Later this year Gazzara can be seen in “Happiness,” the second film by Todd Solondz; “Illuminata,” which co-stars Susan Sarandon and Christopher Walken and is directed by actor John Turturro; Wansuk Chin’s “Too Tired to Die,” opposite Mira Sorvino; and Mark Little’s “Shark in a Bottle,” a film the actor describes as “a Kafkaesque Grand Guignol. I play a diabolical character known as The Adjustor.”

Reflecting on the upswing his career has taken, Gazzara says, “Early in my career, I turned down so much work that I got the reputation of being a New York snob and people stopped calling. Actually I was scared. When you’re young, you fear that your honesty will disappear and you’ll be devoured, but I learned that if you wait for the delicious part, you work once every three years.

“My attitude toward work changed after 1979, when Terence Young called and asked me to come to Korea and be in a war picture called ‘Inchon.’ I told him I couldn’t do it, but he called again and said, ‘Don’t be an ass. Larry [Olivier] is doing it.’ I thought, Larry’s doing it? Maybe nobody will notice me. So I went, and it was there I met my wife.

“If I hadn’t done that picture, I wouldn’t have met Elke and I’d probably be dead. I was very unhappy before I met her--too much drinking and screwing around--and she saved my life,” says Gazzara, who maintains residences with his wife of 17 years in Manhattan, Sag Harbor and Italy. “So I’ve tried to make it a rule that if I’m available and a film comes along with a reasonable part, I do it. Something has to be really terrible for me to say no now.”

Gazzara’s parents were Sicilian immigrants who met in New York. “During the Depression, it was a struggle to put food on the table, and we lived in a cold-water flat with the bathtub in the kitchen,” he recalls.

“Immigrant Italians weren’t geared toward literature, so movies were our novels, and I grew up on the best: Cagney, Bogart, Cary Grant, Gable, Wallace Beery--wonderful actors. Then when I was 12, I was in a play at the Boys Club, and once I heard the applause I was sold.”

Though Gazzara says it was movies that made him become an actor, it was on stage that he established himself. “My career came young,” says Gazzara, who was accepted into the Actors Studio in 1951 and two years later was given the lead in its production of “End as a Man.” He received phenomenal reviews for his portrayal of the vain misanthrope who drives the play, and it led to his starring in the first production of Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” in 1955. That play too was a big success, and he followed it with another critically acclaimed performance in “A Hatful of Rain.”

“When Ben and I were starting out, he was the No. 1 actor on Broadway,” recalls Peter Falk, who starred with Gazzara in Cassavetes’ 1970 film, “Husbands.” “I still have a vivid memory of him in ‘End as a Man’ and used to admire him from a distance at a restaurant where actors hung out.”

Adds Peter Bogdanovich, who directed Gazzara in “Saint Jack” in 1979 and “They All Laughed” in 1982: “When I was a freshman in high school, I reviewed movies and plays for the school paper, and the first thing I ever reviewed was ‘End as a Man.’ The amount of electricity Ben gave off in that play was just extraordinary--I saw his first three hits in the theater, and I’ve never seen a more exciting stage actor.

“The first act of ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,’ for instance, is a scene between Maggie and Brick where she does all the talking. It was Maggie’s scene, and Kazan staged it with Benny standing to the side, drinking some booze. Ben just stood there hardly moving, but he was absolutely riveting in his silence.”

Gazzara appreciates the kind words, but that play is a painful memory.

“I was terrific in that part until we opened in Philadelphia,” recalls Gazzara of Williams’ play exploring a troubled marriage. “The first night in Philly I come offstage and there’s Tennessee whacked out of his mind on something. Tennessee says to me [speaking with a Southern accent], ‘If you like her that much, we have no play.’ I believed playing against the obvious was the best way to approach the role, but Gadge [Kazan] said, ‘Yeah, you gotta distance yourself from her.’ After that, the play got increasingly vocal and horrendous, and I couldn’t wait until it closed.

“Tennessee was sweet, though, and he liked me,” Gazzara adds. “I hadn’t seen him for years, then in 1974 I was doing Eugene O’Neill’s ‘Hughie’ on Broadway, and my dressing room door opened. There against the wall, gaunt and wasted, was Tennessee. He just stared. Sweetly though. We never discussed it, but I always felt that visit was his way of apologizing.”

By 1956 Gazzara had divorced his first wife, actress Louise Erickson, (they married in 1952), and in 1957 he got his first taste of movie acting with “The Strange One,” a film adaptation of “End as a Man.” The following year he met actress Janice Rule, whom he married in 1959, and his movie career picked up speed when he starred opposite James Stewart in Otto Preminger’s “Anatomy of a Murder.”

“Jimmy was lovely to me but you never saw him on the set, because he was always off with his assistant working on his lines--he took nothing for granted,” recalls Gazzara, who moved to L.A. in 1965 when he landed the lead in the TV series “Run For Your Life.”

L.A. was Gazzara’s home for the next 15 years, and he lived here as the city was swept up in the social revolution then rocking America. Was he involved in that? Did he participate in the LSD and free love?

“Illicit love, yes, but it was never free,” he replies. “The ‘60s were the most difficult decade of my life. I was sad all the time, and felt ‘Run for Your Life’ was below the quality of work I wanted to do. Playing the same guy in predictable situations year after year felt like factory work and I was bored.

“It was then that I became friends with Frank Gehry,” he adds on a brighter note. “I met people in the L.A. art community through Frank, and I’m thrilled for him now. He was so quiet and unassuming back then--he was the last guy you would’ve pegged to achieve all he has.”

Gehry--who met Gazzara when he designed a house for friends of Janice Rule’s--says, “When we first became friends I was this shy guy at the back of the room hanging out with the big movie star, but Ben didn’t treat me that way--he treated me like a brother. We haven’t seen each other much in the last few years, but he’s one of my favorite people in the world.”

The late ‘60s was also when Gazzara and Cassavetes found each other.

“As I was driving off the Universal lot in 1968 on the last day of ‘Run for Your Life’--which was finally canceled, thank God--I heard a voice like a guardian angel say, ‘Hey Ben!’ I look around and I see John. He says, ‘Did Marty [Baum, Cassavetes’ and Gazzara’s agent] tell you? We’re doing a picture together.’ I said, ‘Oh yeah? Good,’ then forgot about it.

“A few weeks later he called and told me the idea for the picture, which sounded terrific. He said ‘Peter [Falk] and I are doing this gangster picture some Italians are producing, and I think I can get the money for this picture. Shortly after that, I left to shoot ‘The Bridge at Remagen,’ in Czechoslovakia, and while we were there the Russians took over. The phone rings a few days later and it’s John, who says, ‘Don’t get killed! I got the money!”’

Thus began a fertile partnership that lasted until Cassavetes’ death in 1989.

“John and Benny had a great artistic understanding, and I think Benny was relieved to find someone like John, who took things as seriously as he did,”recalls Gena Rowlands, who was married to Cassavetes and starred in several of his films, including “Opening Night,” which co-starred Gazzara. “We felt it was important, the acting and the words, and there was a complete giving over of yourself to the work. Nobody read trade papers on our sets.”

“I did things with John that I didn’t do in other pictures,” says Gazzara. “John wasn’t interested in structure because he was looking for moments that would surprise even him, and he wasn’t afraid to explore.”

Adds Falk, who starred in “Husbands” with Cassavetes and Gazzara: “Ben and I were excited by the prospect of doing something where fame and money weren’t part of the equation, and the making of that film is a cherished memory.”

Cassavetes’ films had a big impact on actor Sean Penn, who became friends with the director during the ‘80s.

“Ben and John shared a celebratory spirit, a graciousness towards people and a kind of male warmth that’s very inviting and doesn’t exist much anymore,” says Penn, who got to know Gazzara through Cassavetes. “They were comfortable in their own skin--and that probably has something to do with the fact that Ben’s been absent from American movies for a while. The characters we’re following now aren’t comfortable in their skin, and contemporary writing is about smaller characters than Ben is. There’s something so energized and unapologetically male about Ben--he’s a throwback to an American archetype associated with Hemingway.”

Gazzara’s work with Cassavetes led to the two films with Bogdanovich, who says, “In 1977, John asked me to be an extra in ‘Opening Night,’ and after we shot the scene we went to lunch. John was paying for everything so he was the host, but Benny behaved as if he was the host.

“At that point I was trying to decide who to cast in ‘Saint Jack’ and when I met Ben I thought, my God, he’s Jack Flowers--he was the host at all times,” Bogdanovich adds. “Making ‘Saint Jack’ was an extraordinary experience too, because my relationship with Ben was the best one I’ve ever had with an actor. Benny has the conscience of an artist, which is a rare thing. John had that too and I think they recognized it in each other.”

Then came the ‘80s. Gazzara’s marriage to Rule ended in 1979, and the work dried up. “Things went flat for me in America, but offers came from Italy, so I went there and made some films I’m proud of,” says Gazzara, referring to Marco Ferrari’s 1981 film “Tales of Ordinary Madness,” and “Il Camorrista,” the 1985 film by Giuseppe Tornatore, who later did “Cinema Paradiso.”

The resurrection of Gazzara’s career in America began three years ago when Mamet tracked him down for “The Spanish Prisoner.”

“I don’t know why Ben and I haven’t worked together before, because he’s never not wonderful,” says Mamet. “He never makes anything obvious, and that’s the best thing you can say about an actor.”

“The Spanish Prisoner” also stars Steve Martin, Ricky Jay and Rebecca Pidgeon as characters who may or may not be plotting against an inventor played by Campbell Scott. Scott’s memories of Gazzara go back to when he was 13, and he saw the actor in a 1976 production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” co-starring Scott’s mother, the late Colleen Dewhurst.

“Ben played the character of George as an intensely repressed intellectual, and it wasn’t until years later when I saw him in Cassavetes’ films that I realized what an achievement his work in ‘Virginia Woolf’ was,” says Scott. “He was a joy to work with on ‘Spanish Prisoner’ too. Ben’s very Italian in that he simultaneously seems like the wisest man in the world, and like a 10-year-old boy.”

Gazzara’s work in “Virginia Woolf” also made an impression on Solondz, whose 1996 debut film, “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” was a critical hit. “Ben was terrific in that play,” says Solondz, who cast Gazzara in his upcoming film, “Happiness,” in the part of a family man who suddenly decides he wants a divorce. “Ben brings such depth and range of experience to his performances, and is an actor of extreme economy--so much can resonate with the little that he does.”

It was Gazzara’s performance in a 1970 TV movie, ‘The Death of Richie,’ that made Vincent Gallo cast him in “Buffalo 66.” “Ben played the father of a drug-addicted teenager played by Robby Benson in that film, and I was so moved by his performance that I never thought of anyone else for the father in ‘Buffalo 66,’ ” says Gallo.

Gazzara is gratified by the shift in his fortunes over the last two years, and says, “I’ve been part of some wonderful creative collaborations in the last two years, and that’s the thing that will stay with me.

“With a success, you gloat and celebrate for a couple of days. Failure hurts for a week. The only thing you really remember is the work on the floor, and when you’ve had experiences like I had with John and Peter, the friendship is bound by something really strong. Those are the real rewards of the actors’ life.”