Steady Career Balances Out Robards’ Life

“Oh,” says the cab driver, suddenly interested. “This is Mr. Robards’ house.”

The reaction is understandable, for the big brick structure, no less than the career that purchased it, commands respect even in this hyper-affluent New England town. Jason Robards and his wife, Lois, have lived here for 26 years, and the six acres, the beautiful lawns and trees, the broad oceanfront view, tell of solidity, prosperity and peace.

After a slow start, Robards’ career turned into an American success story: uncompromising stage work over several decades, and regular, well-paid and sometimes highly satisfying appearances in the movies.

But if the career is all of a piece, the life has not been.

He’s at the open door as his guest pulls up, He’s looking comfortable in gray slacks and a yellow pullover, his friendly blue-gray eyes making contact over half-glasses. At 77, Robards appears not to prefer the past to the present and seems comfortable in either place. Maybe he’s simply glad to be alive, having survived a horrendous health crisis this year that kept him in the hospital for six months.

“They took a tumor out that was about as big as my little fingernail,” he says, making the problem sound roughly that size. “And they had no chemotherapy, no radiation, clean, everything.”

And then came a staph infection that almost killed him. “For almost three months,” he says, “I was in a coma.”

Robards remembers nothing about great stretches of his illness. “I finally said, ‘I’m never going in a hospital again--I’m going to get a midwife,’ ” he says and then laughs, dismissing the whole episode.

Robards, who recently was honored by the Kennedy Center in ceremonies that will be broadcast Wednesday on CBS, made his New York debut playing the back end of a cow. It was 1947, and, having ended a seven-year tour in the Navy, he had reversed an earlier, and very firm, decision: He now wanted to be an actor.

His father, Jason Robards Sr., had been a star of the theater and was playing Chicago in his greatest success, “Lightnin’,” when young Jason was born there in 1922. The Robardses’ marriage fell apart a few years afterward and, uncommonly for the times, Jason and his brother lived with their father.

The family settled in California, and Robards Sr. began a fitful, ultimately losing association with the movies.

Not Interested in Acting While Growing Up

“I didn’t want to be an actor as a young guy because at the time I was growing up, he was sliding downhill out in L.A.,” he says, adding, “He had been a wonderful actor, by the way.”

He ponders a moment. “I thought, the guy I loved the most in the world, who was my best friend, was hurting all the time. I didn’t want to enter that. So I went into the service.”

Robards was at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed and, later, at Guadalcanal. He freely offers those facts but little else about his stretch in the military.

“You make it or you don’t,” he says. “You can’t say anything. You can’t say anything.”

At one point, he was stationed on a ship with a large library, including plays--Shakespeare, Shaw, O’Neill.

“And there must have been some osmosis there, the old man must have seeped through, living with him,” he allows. “And so I said I want to be an actor.”

When the son told his father, Robards Sr. was succinct. “It’s heartbreak,” he said. “It’s heartbreak, kid.”

Young Robards settled in New York and studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. A newlywed, he scraped by financially and joined a troupe that staged children’s plays. “Jack and the Beanstalk” was his first.

“I was the stage manager,” he remembers. “And I was in the first scene, where they sell the cow. And the guy says to me, the farmer, ‘Well, I’m afraid we’re going to have to sell you, Bossy.’ They didn’t trust me with the front end, I think. Didn’t think I could act well enough.” He pantomimes his entrance, the lumbering first steps of one of the 20th century theater’s great careers.

For almost a decade, Jason Robards Jr. lived the life of most aspiring actors: occasional work and a lot of odd jobs. The marriage produced three children, and his wife struggled with emotional problems. By 1956, he remembers, “I was about to give up.”

One day, heading off for a $30 radio job, he learned that the brilliant young director Jose Quintero was planning an off-Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.” It was a huge moment: His favorite playwright’s reputation was in serious decline, and his plays were seldom being staged. “I dropped everything,” Robards remembers.

After badgering a skeptical Quintero into giving him an audition, Robards landed the part of Hickey, the seductive killer at the center of “Iceman.”

The production opened May 8, 1956. So impressed was O’Neill’s widow that she gave the “Iceman” team the rights to “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” which had never been produced. Robards took the role of James Tyrone Jr., the alcoholic elder son, and the searing family tragedy opened on Broadway that fall to tremendous acclaim. Robards received the first of his eight Tony nominations.

There followed a succession of stage roles perhaps unequaled by any other American actor of the period: a writer based on F. Scott Fitzgerald in “The Disenchanted” (1958), with Jason Sr. prominent in the cast; a charming ne’er-do-well in Lillian Hellman’s “Toys in the Attic” (1960); an iconoclastic uncle trying to raise his nephew in “A Thousand Clowns” (1962); a lawyer who comes to feel he’s serving his own success in Arthur Miller’s autobiographical “After the Fall” (1964), among others.

Moving Into the Realm of Films

Hollywood began taking notice in the late ‘50s, and the actor was--and remains--warily receptive. His earliest movies were undistinguished, but in 1962 Sidney Lumet chose him to repeat his stage role in the film version of “Long Day’s Journey.” The harrowing picture won raves.

His first marriage ended in divorce, and a second he says was so brief he chooses not to talk about it. In 1961, he began a 10-year union with Lauren Bacall, which produced a son, Sam, now an actor. It was a famous mismatch, although the two speak fondly of each other today.

In 1965, he scored a hit with a movie adaptation of “A Thousand Clowns.” He’s won Oscars for “All the President’s Men” and “Julia,” and an Emmy for “Inherit the Wind.” His other big-screen titles include “Melvin and Howard,” “Philadelphia” and “A Thousand Acres.”

His most recent stage excursion was “Molly Sweeney” three years ago. His latest movie is “Magnolia,” in the role of Tom Cruise’s dying father. It was filmed during his illness, and he was on oxygen when he played the part. He’s signed to appear next year in “The Sisters,” a film adaptation of “The Three Sisters.”

He’s made more than 60 movies but still can’t quite warm to the medium. “Because you know why, you’re not dealing with the audience like you are on the stage. Where you feel a sense of accomplishment as an interpreter of the playwright. That’s the basis of everything.”

For a long time, it appeared Robards wasn’t just O’Neill’s greatest interpreter, but a living, hurting, self-ruining character who could have been created by him.

“You use alcohol not to have a good time, but to say, ‘I don’t want to deal with that,’ ” he says, “instead of having a few drinks and being convivial, singing a few songs. I would do that, but the real reason was to say, ‘No, I don’t want to face these problems.’ And once I faced the problems, I didn’t have any problems.”

He stopped drinking after a near-fatal 1972 car crash. After so many years, there’s humor in the memories of boozing.

“I’d get sick and throw up,” he says. “I couldn’t take quantity. [Peter] O’Toole and those guys could drink. Unbelievable! I’d have about five drinks and”--he pantomimes a falling-down drunk--”they’d say, ‘This guy’s a pansy--get him home!’ ”

Then he repeats: “Finally, I quit avoiding things I had to face, and it was very easy to stop.”

Advising a New Actor, His Son

Now his son Jake--one of two children he and Lois have together, and recently graduated from Georgetown with a degree in government and a minor in French--wants to be an actor.

Even successful actors endure a lifetime of uncertainty and rejection and disappointment, and of course a lot of actors aren’t successful. What’s a father supposed to say?

“I could only encourage him,” Robards reports, smiling. “My dad told me when I said I wanted to be an actor, he said, ‘It’s heartbreak.’ ”

He pauses just a second, and the smile broadens. “But I didn’t tell that to Jake.”

After all, sometimes it works out just fine.