The midnight cowboys squint in the afternoon light. Neon pierces the sky on the Accutron sign as a gang of toughs shove an old lady against the plate-glass window of a pornographic bookstore which announces “Paperback Special Today—Dyke Farm!” “Shocking! Lustful! Unusually Excellent!—Variety” blasts a movie marquee as the smell of sour custard and cheap perfume and onions fried in stale grease permeates the air. This is The Street—peeling and rotting in the harsh glare of daylight. The same 42nd Street that wore out the taps on Ruby Keeler’s shoes has a different face now, its energy re-channeled from tango to torment.
Faster than a bullet, the image is punctured. Standing in the film of nausea settling over Times Square, Jon Voight looks as distinctly out of place as if the white knight in the Ajax commercials had suddenly stepped out of the tube and found himself in a tenement living room in Harlem. His blond hair and pink fingernails are so clean they sparkle in the sun. His pants are pressed, the navy-blue knit turtle-neck sweater he wears under his corduroy blazer makes a distinctive decorator contrast to eyes clear and blue as periwinkles, and his teeth are straight and white as sugar cubes. People stare suspiciously at the invasion of all this sanity and good cheer, because in the teeming violence of The Street he looks like the captain of an Olympic swimming team who has just stepped off the wrong bus.
This may be the last time Jon Voight ever walks The Street without being mobbed. After Midnight Cowboy, he’ll be like Paul Newman—a movie star for whom anonymity is only a nostalgic memory. From now on, they’ll stare—but for completely different reasons. In the movie, he plays an orphaned Texas hick named Joe Buck who, among other things, gets gang-raped on the hood of a car by a bunch of toughs, comes home from the Army to find himself alone in the world, heads for New York to be wined and dined by beautiful women because somebody told him he was “one helluva stud,” and ends up on The Street, cheated and kicked around by the coldness of New York until he builds a wall around himself and his only friend, a deformed, crippled, diseased wino named Ratso, played by Dustin Hoffman. It’s a tough movie—grim and hard to take, and the worst indictment against the city of New York ever captured on film—but Voight plays a male hustler with such heart-piercing naiveté and humorous tenderness that it is not possible to dislike him for a single moment. It’s the kind of role that makes super-stars out of nobodys.
He walks, happy about the few last days of his terminating anonymity. “Look at these people. Do you believe this?” he asks. His blue eyes swallow everything, like a child at a birthday party. “John Schlesinger brought us down here to shoot Midnight Cowboy and I came several times on my own, dressed in my cowboy stud clothes. I learned a lot about this place. Men would come up to me and try to pick me up and I would keep them talking for a long time before they would get the message and go away. You wouldn’t believe some of the stories I heard. It’s like a real community unto itself, you know? Crowds would gather around us when we were shooting, like a family neighborhood, and we’d film them doing their things. I really felt good about some of the things we learned here.”
He stops in front of a blood bank where the 42nd Street flotsam sells its blood for enough money to exist for another few days of clockless eternity. “One night we shot a scene where I sell blood. In the movie, they show somebody else’s arm with a needle in it, but it shows me going inside. This woman started coming down the street right toward the camera. She was overly made-up and singing and dancing—a bizarre creature you could only find in a place like this. She had really freaked out. All the things than can happen to you in New York had hit her very bad and she had left the scene goodbye. When the crowd saw her, they started laughing. But it’s like they laughed with her, not at her. And when she saw the camera, she just stopped singing and said ‘Nope!’ and walked away like a completely different person. Even in her madness she had dignity. I was really proud of her. She was goddam right not to let us photograph her. None of these people should have been used unless they wanted to be used. It felt undignified somehow to exploit them. They all stick together here. The hostility we encountered from these people was directed at the cameras and actors, not at each other. We were the phony world. We were spoiling their street, invading their privacy.
“The thing I learned rubbing elbows with these people is compassion. The person Dusty plays in the movie is ugly. You see people like him every day and you don’t need a translation. You look at them and see them for what they are. But if you were taught to look at them a bit differently maybe you could learn to understand why they became that way. Then when we understand what happens to people maybe we could rid ourselves of the callousness that seems to be everywhere. I’m no psychologist, but I feel if we could break down some of our prejudices we’d learn we’re not too different inside from these people on 42nd Street. We all hurt in the same places.”
A matronly woman eyes Jon curiously, walks quickly ahead of him, then turns around and stops him. Will she scream rape? Will she beat him about the face and eyes? No. She’s just a moviegoer who saw his picture in the ads. Jon grins sheepishly. Then the woman does ten minutes on how she’s writing this doctor’s thesis on “Victorian Literary Responses to Renaissance Art.” She moves on. It’s something he’s got to get used to but isn’t yet. He’s still worrying about it when he accidentally trips over a drunk moaning in a garbage-strewn doorway. He doesn’t run, repulsed. He kneels down and screws the top back on the bum’s wine bottle. “You OK, buddy?” The bum groans and rolls back his eyeballs. Red mucous runs down his cheeks, making a river in the dirt. Jon moves on, obviously touched. It’s a quality he has which saves Midnight Cowboy from being the most depressing movie ever made, and now it seems obvious—the quality does not stem from a screenplay based on James Leo Herlihy’s novel, but from the pure deep-down apple pie niceness of Jon Voight. “A few years ago, when I was in a revue called O, Oysters in the Village, I got to know some of these bums. They used to hang around on the Bowery and take care of each other like a gypsy band. There’s an unwritten law in the Bowery—every bum has a buddy and they split everything 50-50. It’s very beautiful. Like the relationship between Dusty and me in the movie. It’s really a love affair, although it never becomes sexual. But it’s still love. Loneliness can drive people to feel a lot of things. Everyone wants to be Mr. Terrific and I’m no exception, but there will be people who don’t like me because of this character. I can’t worry about them. I want people to go away from it realizing that people like these have a kind of stature, you know? I don’t want people to merely be glad they are better off. I want them to have compassion for the ones who aren’t.”
Jon Voight has always been lucky. He has never been a midnight cowboy. He’s never even been a 12:00 noon cowboy. He was born in Yonkers 30 years ago and his father, who is the golf pro at Westchester’s Sunningdale Golf Club, started him off as a caddy, hoping he’d follow in the old footsteps. “For a while I played in the low 70s, but I was a rebel. Then I played an 80-year-old man in a school play and acting was all I wanted to do after that. Then my family wanted me to be a lawyer—anything as long as I had some kind of status. But I came to New York in 1960, after I graduated from Catholic University, and studied with Sandy Meisner and, although they disapproved, they put up with my first sophomoric on-my-own arrogance. I guess they realized I would never be a lawyer, so they adjusted. People always do. They have to. But I never had to be a bartender or wash dishes to pay for acting classes. I always knew I could get money from home if I needed it. I always had security. And I worked in projects I was interested in. I was lucky. I never had to do a TV series or anything like that.”
Like Dustin Hoffman, he was no overnight sensation. He’s done a lot of things nobody remembers. Like singing “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” to Lauri Peters in The Sound of Music for six months on Broadway. “My instincts were good but my singing was lousy,” he grins. He married the girl. It lasted five years. Roles followed in the off-Broadway revival of View from the Bridge and with Irene Papas in Frank Gilroy’s ill-fated That Summer—That Fall. He has two other unreleased movies, a low-budget job called Out of It, and Mike Nichols’ Catch-22, in which he plays a young Nazi type. All of it leaves him confused, intense, critical, too intelligent to hitch his wagon to any particular star. Even Catch-22 fails to set him on fire, although everything about it impresses him except his own contribution to it. “I was down in Mexico with all those guys sitting around all day with nothing to do, and I felt intimidated. All that cleverness and wit. It rained a lot and Mike Nichols and Dick Benjamin and Buck Henry and Art Garfunkel and Martin Balsam would sit around all day and tell jokes and I couldn’t think of anything to say. I don’t have that much to do in it. It’s Mike’s picture and I only have a small part of the puzzle. So I’d just listen and finally it got to the point where everyone was talking about each other because there was nothing else to do. The night Orson Welles arrived I remember they all wondered what it would be like if he sat up talking all night and somebody said about five in the morning, he’d probably say, ‘And then I was four …’”
But Catch-22 is a long way off. Right now, he’s got Midnight Cowboy to think about and the kind of stardom Dustin Hoffman had handed to him in The Graduate staring him in the face. “My friends tell me I’m avoiding stardom, that I’m self-destructive,” he says, staring at a pair of lace panties in a window with the derriere missing. “They say I don’t give in to vanity enough, or enjoy compliments. That’s true, I guess. I’m neurotic about all that. I distrust it. I want to avoid childish game-playing and make all my statements through my work. Dick Benjamin has been able to do that, and Dusty. I really like Dusty. I was around watching it happen to him, all the fans pulling his clothes and all. He has really developed a wonderful way of coping with stardom. Of course, he goes to a psychiatrist at least five days a week.”
Somebody grabs him around the waist suddenly and lifts his six-foot-plus frame off the sidewalk. It’s Raymond St. Jacques, on a day off from shooting Cotton Comes to Harlem. “Hey, baby, I hear you’re too much in Midnight Cowboy!”
Jon blushes and changes the subject. The old put-down again. “He taught me fencing at the San Diego Shakespeare Festival one year.”
“You were a great Ariel,” says St. Jacques.
“That shows what a crummy actor I must’ve been,” says Jon, as St. Jacques vanishes in the crowd. “I played Romeo that year too, but he doesn’t even remember. It was nice of him to come up to me, though, don’t you think? When you make it, people’s attitudes change. His didn’t. He seemed genuinely glad to see me, don’t you think? Maybe I won’t create much excitement with this movie after all. That would be a blessing. Then I could go on with my life the way it has been and never give anybody a chance to get an overblown opinion of me.”
He’s still putting himself down as he wolfs down two hot dogs at Nathan’s. Two mippy-dippys at a nearby table get so zonked out over his movie-star looks they spill mustard all over their vinyl raincoats. He tries to ignore them. “My looks inhibit me. I can’t play real people. I’d like to play a Greek or a Jew but I’ll never be able to do much with age or ethnic characters. I hate type-casting. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern should be played by Simon and Garfunkel, like Borscht-circuit comics. I think everybody should play everything, but it doesn’t work that way. I wanted to play the Al Pacino role in Does the Tiger Wear a Necktie? They want people today who look like Dusty. I want to be a character actor. I will never let them turn me into a Tab Hunter and I will never go to Hollywood unless they offer me the right properties. I want to go back to class. I may direct a rock musical version of The Tempest with wild lighting and a new kind of theatre both constructed by Jerry Brandt, who built the Electric Circus. After Midnight Cowboy I felt drained. I didn’t know if I ever wanted to work again. I had so many doubts about everything I did. I felt I made a lot of mistakes. I still feel that way. I know there are so many things I have still got to learn.”
Night is falling and out on The Street the creep show is in full swing. Jon Voight wanders past the windows where the “Last Four Days Before Close-Out” signs have sucked in the tourists for the past five years, watching what his movie is all about in action. Past the 15-cent piña colada stands and the 25-cent all-girl nudie peep shows. From nowhere, a butcher steps into the crowd from a doorway, fresh blood running down his white apron. The Street fills with hawkers and drunks and pimps and prostitutes and girls with wild, vacant panics in their eyes and needle bruises on their arms, all looking like vampires in search of a transfusion. It’s as though the doors of Charenton are suddenly flung wide open and all the inmates are running free.
“See that drag queen?” says Jon, pointing to something in purple stretch pants with an orange wig and a face full of acne scars. “You wonder what a person like that does at night, what he picks up on a street like this, where he goes. But there’s something to be said for being ready to admit to anything being possible. If you cared enough to stop him and really talk to him, I’ll bet you could learn to understand him. That’s what Midnight Cowboy is about. I wanted to try not to intellectualize the study of loneliness and insecurity, because it wasn’t that personal a thing for me. In a way, I feel I have no right to be in the picture at all. I don’t know anything about homosexuality or transferring the feelings I’ve had for girls in certain sexual situations to what I might feel for a boy. I think it’s a love story, but I’m not enough of a psychologist to explain how I felt about it. It’s not whether I am that person or not that matters; it’s whether I have the compassion for that kind of person or not. I don’t want to say to an audience who doesn’t know anything about hustlers ‘I’m right and you’re wrong.’ I just want to say ‘Let’s share something.’”
He heads for a taxi, which will take him uptown to the garden apartment he shares with Jennifer Salt, the actress who plays Crazy Annie, his old girl friend back in Texas, in Midnight Cowboy. He turns and takes one last look at The Street. Three imitation midnight cowboys with their flies unzipped dance by, running pocket combs through the streaks in their hair. Jon Voight, who has just played either one or all of them in a role which may make him a celebrity for life, does not laugh. “I have this apartment, you know? It’s nice and clean. Very comfortable. I’m very aware of how comfortable it is. But then I think of all these people who don’t live that way, and I know having a nice apartment or being a great success has nothing to do with me as a person. These people have their own kind of dignity.” He closes the taxi door. “Dignity has nothing to do with where you live.” Soon the midnight cowboys are just dots in the rear-view mirror.