Photo by Brett C Vermilyea
Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach in their West Side home
Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach: Act II
By Jerry Tallmer
The set is a room – Ms. Jackson’s office – in a comfortable Riverside Drive apartment well littered with posters, photos, and works of art, many of them by her and her husband’s three grown children. The time is 1:30 p.m. on a hot July day overhung with thunderstorms.
Act I was 43 years ago in a bedroom of what seems to the perhaps faulty memory of the Interlocutor to have been this very same apartment. It was perhaps earlier in the day, for the gorgeous Mrs. Wallach, a/k/a Anne Jackson, was then still in bed, her every wish, and there were many, being attended to by Mr. Wallach throughout the ensuing dialogue that appeared in play form in a New York City afternoon newspaper of some repute at the time. A small child or two was or were also on the scene, requiring attention.
Now, 43 years later, Mrs. Wallach is up and about, and has in fact this very morning been to the hairdresser – an exigency that required a change in the starting time of Act II. “You know how women are about their hair,” Mr. Wallach has said on the telephone, requesting a delay of some hours. That request having been met, the curtain now rises (there is no curtain) on Act II.
INTERLOCUTOR: I just yesterday, with the help of, God save us, the computer, figured out what had occasioned that thing in the newspaper back in 1963. It was the two of you being in Brecht on Brecht at the Theater de Lys, along with – get this – [bringing forth print-out] Lotte Lenya, Dolly Haas, Viveca Lindfors, George Voskovec, George Gaynes, and Michael Wager!
ANNE JACKSON [her jaw literally dropping]: Isn’t that something!
INTERLOCUTOR: But rather than start with the past, may we start with the up-to-the-minute present? Is that okay? What’s new in the lives of you people?
ELI WALLACH: We’re going out next week to Guild Hall at East Hampton to do a reading about Spalding Gray [the unique actor who disappeared off the Staten Island ferry a couple of years ago]. And we’ve just come back from Almeria, Spain, where Anne and I were invited to the 40th anniversary of [Sergio Leone’s] The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Lee Van Cleef is gone. He was the baddie. Clint Eastwood, the good guy, was editing his new movie about Iwo Jima – remember Iwo Jima? – and couldn’t be there. I was the Ugly and I was there.
INTERLOCUTOR: Eli, you were in the Army yourself in World War II, as I remember. In what branch?
ELI: In Medical Administration, in Europe. We ran the hospitals, to free the doctors. You know, like M*A*S*H.
INTERLOCUTOR: What was your rank? How long were you in?
ELI: Captain. I was in five years. Pearl Harbor was my birthday. [He was born December 7, 1915, in Brooklyn, New York,] Two weeks after Pearl Harbor I was on Maui. And Anne was –
ANNE: I was in school, Franklin K. Lane High School. I was born in Millvale, Pennsylvania [just outside Pittsburgh], and the family moved to Brooklyn when I was 8.
ELI: Her first cousin owns the Pittsburgh Steelers.
ANNE: That’s right, Pat Rooney, a darling man who went for a while to an acting teacher. His father was Big Art Rooney, my mother’s nephew, but he was older than my mother. Irish-Catholic families do that.
INTERLOCUTOR: Why do I think of there being some Yugoslave blood in your background?
ANNE: Because that’s right, my daddy was Yugoslav from Croatia. He met my mother in Pittsburgh –
ELI: And their daughter married a Jew.
ANNE: Eli and I met in an Equity Library Production of Tennessee Williams’s This Property Is Condemned directed by Terry Hayden, who started the whole ELT and is still directing things and has been fabulous all her life.
ELI: And then Anne did Summer and Smoke for Margo Jones on Broadway –
ANNE: A smash flop. Maggie Phillips was Alma, and she was marvelous. I played the kid who grows up and gets the guy. Then Gerry [Geraldine] Page did Alma down at the Circle in the Square –
ELI: And then came The Rose Tattoo [his own huge Tony-winning breakthrough, opposite the magnificent Maureen Stapleton in another drama by Tennessee Williams].
ANNE [to Interlocutor]: Did you know that Sal Mineo was one of the kids in that?
ELI: We did it on Broadway and took it across the country. By then Maureen had a little boy, Danny Allentuck –
ANNE: And nine months later I had a little boy, our son Peter. And yes, now two of our three children are in their 50s.
INTERLOCUTOR: I don’t know just how to say this, but a lot of theater and movie people are not always the best parents. You two, who’ve been in a million movies and plays between you, seem somehow to have beaten that rap.
ANNE: Well, I hope we’ve beaten that rap, but I sometimes feel there was too much leaving them and traveling around.
ELI: They all work. They don’t make much money, but they work. Peter’s an artist, a sculptor, a painter, and an animator. Roberta acts and coaches. She’s taught Method acting to the Japanese, and is at this moment on her way to New Zealand to coach a kid for a movie. And Katherine has a little house in Tuscany. She speaks Italian. She thinks she’s Italian –
ANNE: No she doesn’t.
ELI: She made a movie with Scorsese, The Gangs of New York, and a number of other movies, and makes wonderful jewelry –
ANNE: You know, Eli and I were once offered something by David Susskind. He had “Play of the Week” on television. Did great things like Judith Anderson in Medea. He wanted us to do three Chekhov one-acts on television in three weeks. We said we couldn’t do that, it’s impossible, so we did Lullaby instead, which he loved, and wanted to make into a series.
ELI: And he said –
ANNE: And he said –
ELI: He said: “If you two do this series, I will own one-third of it, the network will own one-third of it, and you and your family will own one-third of it. Your children will never have to work.”
ANNE: And in the taxicab going home I said: “Why shouldn’t our children work?”
ELI: And so we turned down the series. [Under his breath]: I’m not sure how the children might have appreciated that … You know, it was 10 years from the day we met to the first movie. [His first movie, Baby Doll, screenplay by Tennessee Williams, directed by Elia Kazan,1956.] Before that, it was all just plays.
ANNE: The first movie either of us ever did was So Bad So Young. [Gestures toward poster on the wall that shows Rita Moreno, Anne Francis, and Anne Jackson, age 23, in So Bad So Young, 1950.] That’s when we were living on Bank Street.
INTERLOCUTOR: The same street where you nowadays teach acting at the HB [Herbert Berghof] Studio?
ANNE: Yes. One day a week. I choose advanced students. I don’t teach the basics. There are not that many advanced students who are … [pause, smile] … advanced. But I’ve got some lovely, lovely actors.
INTERLOCUTOR: Where else have you people lived?
ANNE: MacDougal Street. Eighth Street. And 43 Fifth Avenue, where I lived when we met. I had a single room – a maid’s quarters. My father came to visit one morning. Eli and I were in bed. Eli jumped out of the window and ran. My father went home and said to my mother: “I don’t think the Anna was alone. I saw a man running down the street combing his hair.” My father always called me “the Anna.” My sister Beatrice was “the Beatrice.” My sister Katherine was “the Katherine.” And our mother was “the mother.”
INTERLOCUTOR: What was your father’s work?
ANNE: A barber and beautician – in Brooklyn, in Astoria, and before that in Pittsburgh.
ELI: My brother was president of the teachers’ union, but I couldn’t get into City College. Didn’t have the grades. So he found the least expensive oil-rich school, which was the University of Texas. The first-year tuition – this was 1932 – was $30 for the whole year. In my class at the University of Texas were Walter Kronkite, who was trying to become a newspaperman, and [actor-to-be] Zachary Scott, and John Connally, remember him? The guy who got shot in the same car with John F. Kennedy. Then came the war, and then I went to the Neighborhood Playhouse in the same class with Tony Randall. Gregory Peck was a year behind us. Then I made 50, 60, 70 movies, I can’t keep track of them, and every time Anne or I did a movie we rushed to do a play [appearing together in a great many of them]. The last one we did together was Anne Meara’s Down the Garden Paths [a sort of 2000-2001 two-family reunion, because also in the cast were daughter Roberta Wallach and Anne Meara’s husband Jerry Stiller and their daughter Amy Stiller.]
INTERLOCUTOR [to Mr. Wal-lach]: You seem to me to have played a lot more Mafiosi types than Jewish types over the years.
ELI: I went ethnically over the whole scene, until I got to be an old Jew, which is where I am now. [An old Jew who, back in 1997-98, when he was a mere 82 going on 83, had won raves and energetically filled the stage of Off-Broadway’s Union Square Theater for more than 300 hit performances of Jeff Baron’s Visiting Mr. Green. With two hip replacements yet.] I started with Mexicans. Then it was a Greek jewel thief. Then I began doing Italians. In The Lineup [1958] I was a hit man assigned to the docks. Drugs would be coming in, hidden in dolls or sets of silverware. My job was to go to the docks and hijack the stuff. By the time the movie was half over, I’d shot and killed four people. I’d take out my black case with the gun and the silencer and go Bppp-Bppp-Bppp. The fifth person was this little girl carrying a doll. I said: “I want that doll,” and she started crying. At the screening here in New York, Anne leaned over to me and said: “If you kill that little girl I’ll never speak to you again.” [Pause.] I had a great death scene of my own in The Magnificent Seven [1960].
ANNE: And you looked great.
ELI: My son Peter said: “Gee, Dad, couldn’t you outshoot Yul Brynner?”
ANNE: I was grounded from being Jean Arthur’s understudy in Peter Pan because I was pregnant with Peter. And that’s how our son got his name.
ELI [raising his hand]: I’ll tell you one thing about her [his wife]. She got a job with Frank Sinatra in a movie called Dirty Dingus Magee [1970].
ANNE: As the madam of a whorehouse.
ELI: And she said to the director: “I’m afraid of horses and I don’t like guns.” And the director [Burt Kennedy] said: “That’s the whole movie.” Her next director [of a big movie] was Stanley Kubrick, with The Shining [1980], and then came [A Woman Named] Golda [1982] –
ANNE: I played her secretary.
ELI: And she was with Walter Matthau in The Secret Life of an American Wife [1968] –
ANNE: One of those sexy comedies. I was so bad –
ELI: So what do you want me to tell you about my newest, The Holiday? It opens December 8, the day after my birthday, and it was written and directed by a young lady named Nancy Meyers who also wrote and directed Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton’s Something’s Gotta Give. which was a marvelous movie. The Holiday has two women stars, one of whom, Cameron Diaz, lives in California, and the other, Kate Winslet, lives in England – yes, in real life in both cases – and in the movie they switch houses [and countries]. And I play an old screenwriter who hates Hollywood. At one point Kate Winslet says to me: “Why do you always throw your mail away?” and I say: “Because they want to give me a tribute. I don’t want a tribute. And if I did, only 35 people would come to it.”
INTERLOCUTOR: Eli, is this the movie you meant when you and I were talking a few weeks ago and you said: “It’s the biggest movie I was ever in”?
ANNE [to her husband]: You said that???
ELI [shrugging]: Did I say that?
ANNE: You would be capable of saying that. It’s why I married you. Because you’re an optimist.
ELI [referring back to her and horses]: I learned to ride horses in Texas. And in The Misfits [written by Arthur Miller, directed by John Huston, 1961] you could see us really fighting with wild horses – Monty Clift and Gable and me [as Marilyn Monroe is screaming in protest in the background]. There were some doubles, but most of the fighting was real, and it was us. You can’t put a wild horse down. You can kill him, but you can’t put him down. An ASPCA guy would be watching when we made those scenes. He would finally say: “Okay, that’s enough,” and they’d take the wild horse out and bring in a ringer, a tame one, to finish up. Marilyn? When I was on Broadway in Teahouse of the August Moon [1954-56], Cheryl Crawford introduced me to Marilyn Monroe – Cheryl Crawford, co-founder of the Group Theater, co-founder of the Actors Studio. Anne and I are original members of the Actors Studio, since 1947. Well, I don’t think Marilyn had ever seen a play. She said: “How do you do a play for two hours?” I said; “I’ve been doing this one for two years. Come and see it.” She wanted to play Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov, and she was no fool. I think she was grossly underrated in The Misfits, and so was Gable. And I also think it was thanks to her that I got The Misfits.
ANNE: Tell about those women.
ELI: I wrote a book a couple of years ago, The Good, the Bad, and Me, subtitled In My Anecdotage – a word I invented. It’s published by Harcourt and the paperback is just out. So I turn the book in and my agent said: “It’s no good. Married 50 years, no scandal, no drugs, no prison. It’ll never sell.” So Anne said: “Tell them you want the book back so you can put in all the things you left out. All those women you slept with in all those movies.” Let’s see. [Counting them off on his fingers]: Jeanne Moreau. Audrey Hepburn. Marilyn Monroe. Kim Stanley. Jo Van Fleet. So I call the agent up and tell him all that, and he says: “That will help.”
ANNE: These days we do a lot of what we call our evenings.
ELI: Like an evening called In Persons, who are the characters in some of the plays we’ve done, or another evening, Tennessee Williams Remembered, or –
ANNE [raising her hand]: When we first went out to East Hampton and were asked to do an evening, our two daughters came with us in diamond tiaras and long dresses and it was a Poetry Evening –
ELI: And then we did one called Bits and Pieces –
ANNE: So what we’re calling it now is –
ELI: We’re Still Here.
INTERLOCUTOR: You can say that again, folks.
Curtain. (There is no curtain.)
