How I Got to Be Whoever It Is I Am (10 page)

But then came a week when Jeff chose not to run my piece, and I resigned, just as many a newspaper columnist has after similar
circumstances. My rationale was if there was an option of my piece not running, it could happen on any given week.

I could have lived with that as well, but these commentaries were all I was doing, because my contract called for total exclusivity—meaning
I couldn’t do movies, which I was being asked to do, or commentary elsewhere, which I was asked to do on what was then called
Court TV. Henry Schleiff, then head of Court TV, made the point to Jeff that I had a substantial cable following that would
help build a following on
60 Minutes II
, but Jeff wasn’t buying that argument.

Looking back, I think I made a mistake in at least not giving the broadcast notice instead of leaving immediately, as the
then head of CBS News, Andrew Hayward, a very good man, asked of me. I should have realized that when a columnist for a newspaper
resigns, there are other columnists there. Of course, I was the only commentator on
60 Minutes II
. I was and am so fond of Jeff Fager, I now feel I owed him that. All these years later we remain friends and talk on the
phone from time to time, which I so enjoy.

Oddly enough, the experience at
60 Minutes II
that really sticks in my mind didn’t involve Jeff or my two producers.

Once when I was working with an editor on one of my pieces, I gave him some notes that would take ten minutes or so to execute,
so I walked out of the small editing room to go back to my office, which was at the end of a long hall and around a corner.
As I stepped right outside of the editing room, I saw for the first time a large lounge area with lots of windows and TVs.
No one was there, so I walked in, sat down, and turned on the news.

In a few minutes, a man appeared and sat across the room. After a moment, he said to me, “Doesn’t your office have a window?”
I said, “No. Actually my office doesn’t have a window.” He said, “This is the editors’ lounge.” I said, “Oh, okay,” got up,
and as I left saw a sign that read
EDITORS’ LOUNGE
. Oddly, there were no correspondents’ or commentators’ lounges. I went to my windowless office and knew I had a story worth
telling.

I can’t even imagine what Andy Rooney would have said if an editor said that to him, but on the other hand no editor or anyone
anywhere would ever say something like that to Andy.

All in all, the
60 Minutes II
experience was wonderful, and I’ll always be grateful to Jeff Fager for giving me the opportunity.

When I left the broadcast, I sent an e-mail to everyone saying how much I would miss them—even the editor who wouldn’t let
me sit in the editors’ lounge.

I
n my second Broadway show I again played an unusual character, the nerdy Wharton Business School graduate with glasses and
bad posture, and the same thing happened as in my first Broadway play. People assumed that was what I was like.

Joe Schoenfeld, who was cohead of the William Morris Agency’s movie department, came backstage to say hello to me after the
show, and when I opened the dressing room door, he saw someone without the glasses and the bad posture and said, “I’m looking
for Charles Grodin.” That moment began an important relationship with Joe, who I believe was about thirty years older than
I was. He became a real promoter of mine.

My biggest promoter was Harry Ufland, who had asked Joe to go backstage to meet me. From the time Harry became my agent in
the early sixties, he never stopped telling everyone, “Charles Grodin is as good as it gets no matter what he does.” Harry’s
in my will.

Joe Schoenfeld was second only to Harry. I once went to his office to ask if he had any advice for me. I was a guest star
on television shows about a half-dozen times a year, which grossed me six thousand dollars—a thousand a show. This was 1966.

Even though I was considered a successful and highly regarded young actor, I had gone from making $7,000 a year on Broadway
in 1962 to $6,000 a year on television in 1967. (A lot of big movie stars of the forties and fifties died broke.) Again, I
had a wife and child. I asked Joe if he had any thoughts. As he pondered my question, his phone rang. A picture shooting in
Yugoslavia called
Castle Keep
with Burt Lancaster and others was having some problems. Joe represented a number of the principals involved. Millions of
dollars were at stake.

After the call, I said to Joe, “I see you have much bigger issues to deal with. I’ll come by on another day.” He said, “Not
at all, Chuck, this happens all the time. Please go on.”

There are not a lot of people I will always cherish, but Joe Schoenfeld, who has been deceased for years, remains in my thoughts.

Another time, the legendary Abe Lastfogel joined Joe and me for a drink in Joe’s office at the end of the day. At some point,
Abe said, “Why don’t we go into my office and have our drink under Johnny’s picture.” Johnny was Johnny Hyde, who was Abe’s
partner when William Morris really became William Morris, around 1930.

I have no point to make in the following two stories about two other William Morris agents I knew in the sixties, one in California
and the other in New York, but I think they’re worth telling.

Cy Marsh was a flamboyant Hollywood agent who actually stood on his desk as he talked to me. I was asking if he could help
get me considered for bigger television shows.

He proclaimed, while standing on his desk, “I represent Rod Steiger.” Compared to Rod Steiger of
On the Waterfront
fame, I was relatively unknown. Cy said, “How am
I
, who represents Rod Steiger, going to look if I ask, ‘Anything for Charles Grodin?’ ” I found him hilarious, even though
I don’t think he
ever
asked, “Anything for Charles Grodin?”

Rod Steiger was a guest on my cable show in the nineties about thirty years after Cy talked to me standing on his desk, which
I assume looking back must be some kind of power move. It wasn’t obvious at the time. The power move I
do
find obvious is when people in positions of authority speak in something slightly above a whisper in a private office. I
have some hearing loss. But not that much. They speak in something slightly above a whisper.

Anyway, Rod Steiger was on my show thirty years later. I was doing a program on depression, and he was one of three or four
guests who battled that terrible scourge. My mother and my brother have both suffered from depression, so I obviously don’t
mean to be funny, but Rod Steiger was so depressed on the show that even though he wasn’t with me in the studio but was on
the satellite,
I
started to get depressed.

The agent for William Morris in New York who was Harry Ufland’s boss when he and I first connected observed of me, “He’s probably
going to be another Eli Wallach, but who’s got the time?”

This agent was widely known for reaching for any male’s scrotum that came within his reach. He never made that move on me—something
about my attitude, I guess. On the few occasions when he called me, I felt I better take a pill of some kind, because his
energy was so high. He died young. Call me crazy; I liked him, too. Characters! I’ve often said sometimes the agents should
be the performers!

A
critic for
Variety
, Art Murphy, who called himself Murph, said of me in my second leading role in a movie in 1974, “It would be sad to think
an acting career lay ahead.” The next year, I won a best actor award on Broadway in
Same Time, Next Year
, and the year after that I was in
Heaven Can Wait
. That critic is now deceased. When articles appeared about him after his passing, it was reported he was snappish around
the office and enjoyed dressing in women’s clothes.

I honestly don’t look down on how anyone dresses, as long as they’re properly covered. Snappish around the office or anywhere
is
way
over the line to me.

I’m more sympathetic to a local critic in Santa Monica who said of a movie I wrote,
Movers & Shakers
, “If you want to know what it feels like to die sitting upright in your theater seat, go see this movie.” The late ABC critic
Joel Siegel said of the same movie, “You’ll laugh till you cry.”

While I don’t believe it was as good as Joel Siegel said, I obviously don’t agree with the Santa Monica critic. It probably
never occurred to him that the movie was too hip or inside for him to get. I mean,
I
don’t get a lot of things, and I almost always believe it’s my shortcoming.

I mean, how bad could the movie be? The cast included Walter Matthau, Steve Martin, Gilda Radner, Bill Macy, Penny Marshall,
and Tyne Daley, among many others who’ve had a job or two, including me. Inside? Yes. Bad? No.

One of my closest friends was a critic, Richard Watts, Jr. From the early seventies until he died at the age of eighty-two
in 1980, Dick was the theater critic for the
New York Post
and before that a movie critic and later a theater critic for the
New York Herald Tribune
. He and I and a changing group of three or four others would meet every Friday night at Manhattan’s “21” Club for drinks
and then have dinner there or go to other restaurants around the city. I loved Dick Watts. He was as kind a man as I’ve ever
met and knowledgeable on so many subjects.

The late Clive Barnes, formerly the drama critic of the
New York Times
and later a critic for the
New York Post
, wrote about Dick after he passed. He said among other things that Dick’s opinions were informed by knowledge, love, and,
very significantly, compassion. He said his writing was modest, and he had the honesty almost to protest his subjectivity.

Dick once gave a mixed review to something I had produced and directed on Broadway. He said that most likely part of his problem
with the play came from some hearing loss he was suffering, as there were a number of lines spoken offstage. That Friday at
“21,” I read into his ear a review from another major critic. He listened carefully, and when I finished turned to me with
a big grin and said, “Why, Chuck, that’s a
rave
!”

There was only one Dick Watts. He knew he was subjective, as we all are, and he genuinely came to the theater wanting to like
the production.

Maybe, in fairness, all critics want to like what they’re reviewing. Personally, I couldn’t handle going to see a play or
a movie five nights a week or so. I mean, I’d come
in
in a bad mood, and that of course wouldn’t be fair to the people putting on the show.

N
o matter how many times I’ve written about or said to people that I did not turn down the lead in
The Graduate
, the question always comes up in interviews. “Why did you turn down the lead in
The Graduate
?”

I had read about twenty pages from the script for the director, Mike Nichols; the writer, Buck Henry; and the producer, Larry
Turman; with an excellent actress reading the role of Mrs. Robinson. Mike called me that night to say, “You’re our number
one choice. We don’t have a second choice.” He also said, “When I close my eyes and listen to you, you’re perfect, but when
I look at you…” It was a typically gracious Mike way of saying, “Lose some weight.” It wasn’t that I was heavy, he just thought
that being thinner would make me look younger. I was thirty-one. The character was supposed to be early twenties. He said
they wanted to do a screen test, but only for “photographic purposes.”

In order to do a screen test you must first agree to the fee they will pay you, if they choose to hire you. They offered me
$500 a week to star in
The Graduate
, plus a seven-year contract with modest increases, all with their option, of course. I was making more than that for a three-day
guest spot on a television show, and I simply thought it was unfair. It really had nothing to do with the money, but the fairness.

This attitude, which first reared its head on the CBS Sunday morning shows, manifested again. Even though I have sometimes
worked for scale in really low-budget movies, in this case I thought the salary was inappropriate, and I still feel that way.
We went back and forth and finally agreed on a thousand dollars a week.

It seemed that within an hour my doorbell rang, and somebody delivered a large packet of pages from
The Graduate
that they wanted me to memorize before going in front of the cameras the next morning. That’s the kind of thing you deal
with if you’re doing a soap opera, but to get to the level of acting they had seen me do in the office reading the script
would be impossible. A note enclosed in the envelope read, “If you have any questions, call Mike Nichols,” and they gave me
his home phone number.

Now I believe he might have subconsciously known something wrong was happening. I called him and said, “With this many pages
to memorize overnight, I can’t be at the level I know you’d expect.” By then, I had studied acting for ten years and done
a lot of theater and television. He again said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s only a photographic test,” and alluded to my need
to lose weight to look younger. When I showed up on the set I had lost so much weight that Mike didn’t recognize me. However,
it wasn’t only a “photographic test.”

I absolutely didn’t know the lines. I asked if I could improvise. The answer was no, and when Mike asked me if I would jump
up and down on the bed and I asked why, it confirmed his feeling, a false one, that I would be difficult to deal with.
I was not offered the role.
I thought the whole thing was handled inappropriately. I’m sure that none of the people behind
The Graduate
realized that. I know Mike and Buck, and they’re really nice guys. Later, when I did work with Mike on
Catch-22
, he discovered what everyone learned when they worked with me: I wasn’t difficult to deal with.