Of course, my first benefactor was Eleni Kiamos, my classmate at Uta Hagen’s who as I’ve said introduced me to a woman friend who put me in a lead in a off-off-Broadway show, which led to my getting an agent. Eleni then introduced me to Lee Strasberg, then to a casting director, which led to my starting to work in television. It’s only all these years later that I realize how much Eleni did for me when I was beginning, when you really need a benefactor. I always adored her without fully grasping how many doors she opened for me.
Then, of course, there’s Gene Wilder, who put Renée Taylor in touch with me, which led to my meeting Elaine May. I always considered Gene a major benefactor of mine.
I first met Elaine May at Gene Wilder’s apartment. She walked over to me and said, “Gene says wonderful things about you.” In a misguided effort to amuse, I said, “Boy, you’re really coming on.” She looked at me as though she had no idea what was happening. When she left, I gave her my coat, because I thought she’d be cold outside. Talk about a confusing encounter.
In a later meeting, Renée Taylor and Joe Bologna asked me if I would mind if Elaine May came to see Lovers and Other Strangers, which I directed when it was previewing on Broadway. I said, “I’d love to hear anything she says.” All I remember about that meeting is Elaine prefacing every observation with something like, “I’m sure Chuck has already thought of this.”
A couple of years later I was directing Renée and Joe in a piece they had written for Public Broadcasting. It was a scene with a couple in bed. Halfway through rehearsal I said to Joe, “You should be directing this (Joe was a director), and I should be playing your part.” Joe said, “Well, we based the character on you.”
I climbed into bed. Joe took my seat in the director’s chair. Elaine May saw the piece and told me she was being asked to direct movies, and she was going to put me in the next one that came along that was right for me. That was The Heartbreak Kid, which a lot of major stars wanted to do, but she said she wanted Charles Grodin. Most people in show business had never heard of me at that time.
Elaine then persuaded Warren Beatty to put me in Heaven Can Wait. I then did Ishtar with her. I believe that movie may be too hip for a lot of rooms. People familiar with the nightclub circuit might be very surprised by who’s onstage at times. I got excellent reviews in Ishtar, and that had something to do with my being cast in Midnight Run.
I’ve known Elaine May for over forty years, and since that first meeting I’ve never had one uncomfortable moment with her. As I’ve said, she’s always been my biggest supporter in show business. She was once quoted as saying about herself, “I’m not warm, but I’m polite.” Around me she’s warm as well as polite. As a director, she never criticizes. She’ll suggest something else.
Of course, I love Elaine May.
Once, in the 1960s, I was delivering a handwritten script (which is how I still write) to Studio Duplicating, a typing service on West Forty-fourth Street in Manhattan. I can still hear George, the nice man who always answered the phone, “Hello, Studio.”
One day when I delivered my latest longhand script to be typed, he said for reasons still not entirely clear to me, “Do you know Herb Gardner?” I later learned that Herb Gardner delivered his scripts printed in longhand. I, at least, wrote in what is known as script. There were probably other reasons why George asked, “Do you know Herb Gardner?” He was prescient, because circumstances or fate got Herb Gardner and me to meet about a year later, and I’ve never had a closer friend than Herb.
Before I met Herb, I had heard him on the great Jean Shepherd’s radio show. Herb presented himself as the PR man for the Atlantic Ocean. “We’re deeper. We have more fish.”
My first interaction with him came when Elaine May told him to get me for a role in his play The Goodbye People, which they were going to do in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. My girlfriend at the time was going to be in it, and I would be there anyway.
I told him I didn’t know how to play a character who says whole sentences while he’s sleeping. Looking back, I’m amazed he didn’t persist, because as I later discovered he was known to be endlessly persevering. I didn’t do the play, but we instantly became friends. The brilliant Bob Dishy played the part, and he pulled it off beautifully.
Herb taught me so much by what many saw as his “odd behavior” and I saw as artistic courage in action. In many ways he became a role model to me, and I know to many others—not only by what he wrote, but by who he was.
Herb died in 2003. He had been in the process of dying for several years, no doubt because of his lifelong habit of always having a cigarette in his mouth or at least in his hand. One of my biggest regrets in life is that I not only didn’t say anything to him about smoking, I apparently didn’t even notice sufficiently. There was so much about him that would keep you from noticing the cigarette. He was as compelling a personality as I’ve ever met. He wrote A Thousand Clowns when he was in his twenties. If you choose to read it, you won’t be sorry.
A good example of Herb’s integrity came during a period when he was getting many offers to turn A Thousand Clowns into a television series. He really could have used the money but he declined, saying, “Because I wouldn’t be able to oversee the quality of each segment.”
I worked with Herb in 1974. His play Thieves had opened in New Haven and Boston and gotten bad reviews. Marlo Thomas called me in California where I was making movies and asked if I would come to Boston to take a look at it. She was considering going in and replacing the lead actress. I flew to Boston and watched the play, with Marlo sitting next to me taking a quick look at me every minute or so to see my reaction. Herb and Marlo and I met afterward and I said, “I don’t know how good I can make it, but I can make it better than this.” That was enough for Marlo to step into the leading role.
One evening after a performance, Herb and I sat in the back of the theater and two women walked up the aisle, saw us, and snickered in disdain. “They’re trying to fix it!” The producers left the play, as well as the director. I became the director and the producer along with my friend from all those years ago in summer stock, Richard Scanga, who actually had experience as a producer, which I didn’t have. I began to work with Herb on the script. I asked him to cut certain passages I felt didn’t work, and he refused even though the play hadn’t gotten good notices. Herb simply said, “I’d rather close it than cut those sentences.” Instead of that attitude alienating me, it intrigued me. He did agree with me on enough changes that the play opened in New York, and despite getting mixed notices, it became the longest-running play in New York that season. The run, of course, had a lot to do with Marlo’s ability to draw a crowd.
Among the many things that Herb did for me over the years was to suggest me for Same Time, Next Year. He also gave me the idea for my play The Price of Fame. He introduced me to many people I probably never would have met. I became friends with Paddy Chayefsky, Jules Feiffer, Shel Silverstein, Dick Schaap, Jule Styne, Jimmy Breslin, Elaine Stritch, and Bob Fosse.
One night at a gathering at Herb’s apartment, Bob Fosse started to tease me about my plan to open on Broadway in a two-character play, Same Time, Next Year. He said, “With two characters they’re going to have to love everything you do. They’re going to have to love the way you sit, the way you stand, the way you walk.” That was Fosse’s sense of fun, which frankly I enjoyed.
Herb stepped in to stop him from talking to me that way, but then I said to Fosse, “Well, in the movie of [and I named a movie he directed], you had lots and lots of people, and that wasn’t successful.” Although we traded insults, Bob Fosse and I really liked each other. I once took a very glamorous movie star who was onlya friend of mine to a party at his apartment. He took one look at her and was immediately smitten and made his move. Then feeling guilty—believing she was my girlfriend—he went to another room and gave me a CD of the original score of Evitabefore it opened on Broadway. He and my movie star pal shared great times together.
Later in my relationship with Herb, he and his wife, Barbara, took me aside and told me they felt I was dominating their dinner parties too much, which is definitely a flaw of mine. Instead of retorting by saying, “Well, you… ,” I accepted their valid criticism, simply because I agreed with them. If somebody’s not on, I will jump in and take over, in hindsight even in myopinion inappropriately.
On the other hand, at some gatherings after that when there would be a lull, people would look at me, but I didn’t jump in. Over the years I listened to other criticisms from Herb, some of which I didn’t agree with, but I chose not to rebut him because I knew he was coming from a place of genuine love for me. Here’s an example of what I mean. It’s a quote that he gave me for my first book, It Would Be So Nice If You Weren’t Here.
One of Grodin’s best performances: bringing to his writing the same insightful humor and persuasive humanity that he brings to his acting, he has come up with a kind of intrepid explorer’s guidebook through that most treacherous of terrains—the dark valleys and paper mountains of show business. Like the best of Grodin’s comic roles, it’s about the survival of all of us who believe we are sane in a world gone mad, a world we need to be part of that seems to need no part of us. When you finish this book, I think you’ll be glad as I am that Grodin is, in fact, and will remain, here.
I’ll always cherish Herb Gardner, even if he had chosennot to give me a quote.
Herb once went to a screening of a movie I had written and coproduced. Afterward he was barely speaking to me because he felt I had cut so much out of my original script, which he loved. We got back on track after I explained to him that we had originally screened it with all that I had written still in it, and it just didn’t play as well. At that screening with about a thousand people in the audience, there was only one person consistently laughing out loud—Elaine May.