Jack Klugman Shines Spotlight on Friendship With Tony Randall

The usual book for an actor to write, after years of success, is his memoirs. And that's the very book Jack Klugman -- the veteran stage and screen performer, star of the fondly remembered TV series The Odd Couple and Quincy -- tried to write a few years ago, with the help of collaborator Burton Rocks.

But, said Klugman recently, the project never came to completion. "I didn't really want to talk about myself ... so we forgot about that."

Jack Klugman

After the 2004 death of Klugman's friend and Odd Couple co-star, Tony Randall, though, Rocks approached Klugman with another idea: "He came to me and he said, 'What about us writing a book about Tony and you?'" Klugman told BTW. "So I put down the incidents, and he sorted it out; and we ... worked very well."

Klugman's two grown sons also helped prepare the text and select its many illustrations, and Paramount Studios allowed the use of some Odd Couple outtakes on a DVD to be included with the book. To keep everything in the family, as it were, the author-actor decided to publish the work himself.

The result is the just-released Tony and Me: A Story of Friendship (Good Hill Press, distributed by Client Distribution Services), a loving reminiscence of Randall, which also incorporates stories and photographs from Klugman's own history.

Klugman chose to self-publish in order to keep control of his book's content. "In 1956, I wrote two live-television shows -- one starred Walter Matthau, one starred Cliff Robertson -- and [the TV producers] sat all over me," he explained. "'You can't write this, you've got to write young kissable girls in' -- just terrible. So, this was a tribute to Tony, and I didn't want anybody to tell me what to write and what not to write about."

Self-publishing is "very expensive," Klugman found, but, he said, "I could afford it. I could lose a lot, but I don't care."

On the other hand, if he makes a profit, Klugman hopes to donate some of it to the National Actors Theatre, the troupe founded and funded for years by Tony Randall.

"My main goal," he said, "is to get a theatre named after Tony; that's what I really want .... I see Broadway theatres named after guys that worked for Shubert, for God's sake! That's disgraceful. Tony put eight million dollars of his own money in the National Actors Theatre.... He worked on that project for 15 years! He put on some of the best plays -- The Crucible, Saint Joan -- that I ever saw. And then he invited the kids from schools. It cost him $35,000 a week, to bring in the kids from the schools. But he said, 'I want to introduce them to good theatre.'

"I mean, he cared! Critics called him 'the television entrepreneur' -- which he wasn't. He knew more about theater than anybody. But the day he died, that night they dimmed the lights on Broadway, so I knew at least they knew his worth.... He was a star; he was a brilliant actor."

A New York theater background was something Randall and Klugman shared and took pride in. Some of the most evocative parts of Tony and Me are its author's descriptions of the Broadway he encountered as a young man some 50 years ago.

"I saw Death of a Salesman with Lee J. Cobb for a dollar eighty!" Klugman exclaimed. "I saw All My Sons with Ed Begley, Arthur Kennedy, for a dollar eighty! I saw Patricia Neal in Another Part of the Forest. I saw Born Yesterday for two eighty, with Paul Douglas and Judy Holliday.

"Today you pay a hundred dollars, and you don't see Arthur Miller, you don't see Tennessee Williams, William Inge, O'Neill, Sherwood. You don't see them. You see crap. And you pay a hundred bucks! My God, in those days, I'd walk down that street -- and I appreciated it. I knew it then! They were wonderful plays.

"The only regret I have in my life is I stood outside Glass Menagerie in 1945, and I'm reading the reviews, and I say: 'Aah, I don't think it's a play I want to see.' And I didn't go in. Tony said, 'You missed -- !' the greatest performance he ever saw ... Laurette Taylor, yeah. He middle-named his daughter Laurette, I think."

With the publication of Tony and Me, Klugman, whose long career encompasses Broadway, live-TV, filmed TV, and movies, is now playing a new sort of venue: bookstores. Having just completed three weeks of events, spanning from Manhattan to San Diego, he was about to embark on a November trip, which would take him to places such as Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Pittsburgh and Powell's in Portland. (His itinerary can be seen at www.tonyandme.com.)

"I just answer questions" at such events, said Klugman, a throat-cancer survivor whose voice today is raspy but quite audible. "When I had the operation, I had no sound at all, right after. So now that I have a sound, I love to talk.... They ask me a question, and I go on for like 15 minutes."

And Klugman is getting something in return, at these events: intimate feedback from total strangers about how much his work has meant to them.

"You know you do a show," the actor said, "and you do the best you can. We used to work until eleven o'clock every night on The Odd Couple, to make it good. Now it's 30 years since it's been off the air, and I go around, and people say: 'I grew up with you. I sat on the couch with my mother or my father, and we laughed with you.' And suddenly the people have faces, and names, and feelings. It's been invigorating! You know, you don't count on that; you don't know that you're really entertaining people, or having an effect on people's lives. I had a guy from Sports Illustrated who did an interview with me say he became a sportswriter because I was a sportswriter on The Odd Couple. Yeah, it's like: wow, you're kidding! Now I'm getting this in person, and I really love it." --Tom Nolan