{"id":77527,"date":"2014-10-01T12:27:30","date_gmt":"2014-10-01T16:27:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=77527"},"modified":"2014-10-01T12:46:55","modified_gmt":"2014-10-01T16:46:55","slug":"everybody-knows-me-an-interview-with-walter-matthau","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/01\/everybody-knows-me-an-interview-with-walter-matthau\/","title":{"rendered":"Everybody Knows Me: An Interview with Walter Matthau"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matthau would be ninety-four today. The poet Aram Saroyan, his stepson, spoke to him in 1974 about the vagaries of fame.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"MatthauPaycock\"<\/a>

Matthau, left, with Maureen Stapleton and Jack Lemmon in a 1974 production of Juno and the Paycock<\/i> at Los Angeles\u2019s Mark Taper Forum. Photo courtesy of the author<\/p><\/div>\n

This interview took place at the kitchen table in the Matthau household in Pacific Palisades between two and three thirty in the morning on Monday, December 17, 1974. I was staying overnight in the guesthouse and had returned a short time earlier from a concert in Century City when I happened to catch Walter up and in a talking mood.<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019d known him since I was fourteen and he was thirty-seven, a well-established Broadway actor with a string of rave reviews in a succession of commercial flops. After his marriage to my mother, Carol, in 1959, I knew that he made occasional trips to Hollywood for movie or TV work, but understood that he was a \u201cNew York actor\u201d and made the trips for money. After the Broadway smash he had in <\/em>The Odd Couple in 1965, he began the move West and the transition from stage to screen, which, culminating in the screen version of <\/em>The Odd Couple, established him as a movie star. During the transition, he had very nearly died of a coronary, an experience he was never noticeably reticent about.<\/em><\/p>\n

Older than most stars\u2014in his fifties by the time the dust settled again\u2014Walter seemed to take fame in stride. But seeing him for the first time ensconced in his Pacific Palisades home with the high-powered trappings of Hollywood success, after having known him in what was by comparison a New York artistic bohemia, I couldn\u2019t help being struck by the magnitude of the change. One felt that he relished being a movie star and at the same time regarded it with a certain skepticism, which extended to the business and his colleagues in it at large. When a movie he\u2019d starred in received bad reviews, he sighed and said to Carol, We\u2019re going have to start being nice to people again.
<\/em><\/p>\n

You\u2019re back on the stage again in Juno and the Paycock<\/em>. What\u2019s that like, after ten years in the movies?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s very satisfying. Doing a good play on the stage is like eating a good meal at home\u2014assuming your wife is a great cook, or that she\u2019s hired a great cook. Doing a movie is like eating five hundred canap\u00e9s at a cocktail party\u2014you\u2019re never really full. You don\u2019t feel as though you\u2019ve eaten a meal, and yet you can\u2019t eat anymore. You\u2019ve had a little hot dog here, and you\u2019ve had a little caviar there, and a fish here, and a sardine. The feeling is just marvelous, especially if you\u2019re good at what you\u2019re doing, and I think I work much better on the stage because I have things to offer a stage that don\u2019t show up in movies. <\/p>\n

Like what?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Presence\u2014number one.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t you feel your presence comes through in the movies?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not as strong as it does on the stage. I remember when I first went on the stage, when there were three or four people on stage, people were looking at me almost automatically.<\/p>\n

Why was that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s the x<\/em> factor, I don\u2019t know. Whatever it is, there\u2019s also this need I have to grab someone\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n

Is it the same factor that has made you a movie star?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It really puzzles me because I never had the stuff that was necessary to be<\/em> a movie star. Billy Wilder in 1953 had me do a test for The Seven Year Itch<\/em>. And when I finished the test Wilder said, Look, as far as I\u2019m concerned the part is yours. Eighty-three percent is the number he used. But it didn\u2019t work out.<\/p>\n

At that time what had you done on Broadway?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I had done about five or six plays, five or six leads\u2014Twilight Walk<\/em>, Fancy Meeting You Again<\/em>, One Bright Day<\/em>, The Burning Glass<\/em> \u2026 In 1953, I was thirty-three. Thirty-two and a half.<\/p>\n

Wilder must have sensed something or other. It never occurred to me<\/em> that this would be the direction of movies, but your audience has certainly picked up a lot. I watch a lot of old movies on television, and some of the scripts were not to be believed\u2014and some of the actors. Maybe it was the scripts that made them so unbelievable, but I don\u2019t think the actors were all that good, the leading actors, thirty years ago, twenty years ago.<\/p>\n

What do think of the quality of acting right now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wouldn\u2019t say it was at a high point, but then I\u2019m not as interested, perhaps, in watching other people now as I was when I was younger. In any case, I don\u2019t know how you can tell a good actor in the movies, I really don\u2019t. I think you simply just do the part and hope to God that the director has a good cutter and a good editor, and it\u2019ll all get cut and put together so that you look good in it.<\/p>\n

And yet there are great actors on the stage who can\u2019t make movies.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s almost as though it were tennis and Ping-Pong, movies being Ping-Pong and the stage being tennis. They\u2019re different strokes. Some people can get into the swing of both of them, but a lot of people can\u2019t. I used to think when I did a comedy in the movies that if I made the stagehands laugh that I was going over well, but that\u2019s not the case at all. If you make the stagehands laugh, you\u2019re talking too loud. You\u2019ve got to bring it down a little. The best way to operate, I think, in a movie, is to do it for yourself, or for six or seven people around maybe, or three people. But you shouldn\u2019t\u2014and I used to do this all the time\u2014I used to project for the stagehands cause I used to think, Oh boy, here\u2019s a funny line\u2014now watch everybody laugh. I\u2019m gonna say this line and make everybody laugh. Well, that\u2019s fine for the stage. But when you see it in the movie, it may not be good at all. A movie is a whole different number\u2014it\u2019s really almost totally dependent on the director. I think you\u2019ve got to be very lucky to become a movie star.<\/p>\n

What about the physical pressure of actually making a movie\u2014or, as you\u2019re doing right now, performing a play each night?<\/strong><\/p>\n

You have to do something. There\u2019s pressure and there\u2019s pressure. You get demands on your time, on your money, on your energy\u2014and you have to budget all of it in such a way that you can function. You don\u2019t give everybody all your money, you don\u2019t give everybody all your time, and you don\u2019t give everybody all your energy.<\/p>\n

You said that you felt that your heart attack was preordained and that it took place before you became a movie star\u2014so when did it take place?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It happened during the making of the movie The Fortune Cookie<\/em>\u2014and I don\u2019t know that \u201cpreordained\u201d is the right word for it. But what I was trying to say was that everyone thinks of a heart attack in terms of tremendous stress. But it wasn\u2019t after I became a movie star, which comes with a lot of stress, that I got the heart attack.<\/p>\n

But you once told me that when you were under stress your heart beat faster.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, I remember the night of the heart attack I was talking to Elizabeth Burton\u2014Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs. Burton\u2014and I remember my heart reacting rather strangely as I was talking to her, and I thought, that\u2019s a strange sensation. I was at a dinner party. Mike Nichols was giving a dinner party for the Burtons, and Lillian Hellman and your mother and myself and Freddy Kohlmar was there.<\/p>\n

It was the first time I\u2019d met the Burtons, but I certainly am not going to blame my heart attack on Elizabeth Taylor. I mean, she\u2019s all right, but she\u2019s not that<\/em> great.<\/p>\n

Did your lifestyle change afterward?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, I stopped smoking, which immediately gave me an entirely different image, in terms of the public and in terms of myself. I no longer regarded myself as a cigar-smoking comedian. Somehow when you\u2019re smoking a cigar, people react to you in a certain way\u2014the same way they do if you\u2019re a person with a big mustache. So as a guy who was smoking a cigar, they had a certain image of me, and when I stopped smoking the cigar they had another image. I saw myself the way I had before I started smoking, strangely enough. When I was about eighteen I saw myself as a rather sensitive, delicate, poetic, romantic figure. And then I got into the Civilian Conservation Corps, and into the army, and I started smoking and drinking and being tough and getting muscles, and I had a whole different image of myself.<\/p>\n

You had a lot of fights in those days, didn\u2019t you? Why?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, I suppose because I was one of those hypersensitive, delicate, poetic, romantic \u2026<\/p>\n

But you\u2019re six foot four.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m six foot three, but I never weighed more than a hundred and fifty pounds. I was a natural butt\u2014every guy who walked around who was five ten was over a hundred and fifty pounds. I was always fighting guys ten times my size. For example, if a guy would say to me, Hey, schmuck-head, what\u2019re you looking at? I\u2019d say, I\u2019m looking at a stupid asshole. And that would start a little fracas. That was all it took.<\/p>\n

You wouldn\u2019t get into a fight today, would you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wouldn\u2019t go out of my way to avoid it. As a matter of fact, I was sitting with an actor recently and he galled me to such a point that I invited him out of the car\u2014I was sitting in a car with a crowd of ten thousand people around up in San Francisco\u2014and I invited him out of the car. We were discussing something and I said, Well, please don\u2019t do that anymore. And he said, What if I do? And I said, Well, then I\u2019d have to kick the shit out of you. I never thought of myself as a fist-swinging fellow. If I were directly challenged, I would certainly meet the challenge. I would have<\/em> to. But as far as looking for a fistfight\u2014I would consider myself one of the last people in the world to be looking for it.<\/p>\n

If I\u2019m cowardly in any way, it stays with me a long time and makes me not like myself, which I don\u2019t like to do. I don\u2019t like to walk around not liking myself. I always like to have a good opinion of myself. That\u2019s all. My God, look at Frank Sinatra\u2014he\u2019s fighting all the time. He\u2019s older than I am.<\/p>\n

Are you happy?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh, much happier than I was before I was famous, yeah.<\/p>\n

You are.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah, getting famous is nice. There\u2019s a nice feeling about it. Everybody knows me\u2014I go to visit my mother in a hospital and all the patients know me. I go visit all the patients. They all say hello. All the nurses are smiling. It\u2019s gotten to the point now that if a telephone operator doesn\u2019t know my name, I insult her. It\u2019s terrible. For example, today a telephone operator didn\u2019t know my name\u2014she said, Are you with the William Morris office? I was calling my agent and he wasn\u2019t home and his answering service at home picked it up. And I said, No, not really. I said, I used to be Vice President of the United States, but see, I resigned in disgrace, so I\u2019m giving this name of this movie star. She said, Oh \u2026 Well, I don\u2019t go to the movies much. I said, Well, I understand that. And then I felt kind of stupid. Because there are people who just don\u2019t go to the movies, or they don\u2019t watch television. They read. She was probably a very intelligent woman. I\u2019ll have to send her a letter of apology.<\/p>\n

Aram Saroyan<\/em> is a poet, novelist, biographer, memoirist, and playwright; he is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts poetry awards, one of them for his controversial one-word poem \u201clighght.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matthau would be ninety-four today. The poet Aram Saroyan, his stepson, spoke to him in 1974 about the vagaries of fame. This interview took place at the kitchen table in the Matthau household in Pacific Palisades between two and three thirty in the morning on Monday, December 17, 1974. I was staying overnight in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":722,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[639,13737,15492,13137,995,15490,81,13180,15491,15489],"class_list":["post-77527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-acting","tag-fighting","tag-health","tag-heart-attacks","tag-hollywood","tag-juno-and-the-paycock","tag-movies","tag-stagecraft","tag-stress","tag-walter-matthau"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nEverybody Knows Me: An Interview with Walter Matthau by Aram Saroyan<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 1, 2014 \u2013 Matthau would be ninety-four today. The poet Aram Saroyan, his stepson, spoke to him in 1974 about the vagaries of fame. 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