Elliott Gould comes to town to host Chicago event.

by Pauline Dubkin Yearwood, March 2006

Elliott Gould isn’t anxious to talk about himself (”I’m very uncomfortable with ego and vanity”) or his career. (”That word means, it’s defined as emanating from a Spanish word, it means an obstacle course like a racetrack. My career sometimes has appeared to be a joke. My career is in the minds of others.”)

The things he does like to talk about? His parents, Bernard and Lucille Goldstein, of whom he was “the only issue” and who made him into what he is: “a dreamer and an idealist.”

In a somewhat surrealistic phone conversation from his Los Angeles home (where he answers the phone himself), the outgoing actor does talk about his visit to Chicago next week, where he will host a dinner for the Midwest Region of the American Committee for Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem.

“It’s a great hospital that has been so consistently of service to people for such a long time,” he says. “I’m going to come and lend myself to help support the hospital, to fulfill my responsibility to come to Chicago, to meet people and put a light on the wonderful work they’re doing at Shaare Zedek-to learn to say it properly,” he adds. Then, realizing that part of the hospital’s name means “righteous,” he goes to the dictionary again to look up that word. “Acting in accordance with what is just or moral,” he reads.

That reminds him of “something I wrote down that I’d seen outside of a government building in Ohio about 10 years ago.” It is: “Education and morality constitute the force and majesty of free government,” he says, in a voice that is friendly but just a bit world-weary.

Gould, of course, is not as big a star as he once was when he appeared in his seminal role of Trapper John in Robert Altman’s 1970 movie “MASH” (the original before the TV show) or in the then-daring sexual farce “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” in 1969, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. (Time magazine once called him the perfect anti-hero for an uptight age.) But at 67 he has gained a new generation of fans for his recurring role as Jack Geller, Ross and Monica’s father, in TV’s “Friends.”

That role is “a stereotypical, formulized two-dimensional parent,” he says. “But I enjoyed it. It was nice to be a part of it. I realized some time ago that I didn’t have to do too much, I had already succeeded and made it,” he says pleasantly. “But I will always be interested in integrating with newer and younger people, to continue to grow and evolve and become a part of something more.”

“I’m very interested in the truth and the feelings that we all have in common,” he says. “My belief is that in the here and now we’re all the same age, just some of us have been here longer than others.”

An actor since he was a child, Gould continues to appear in movies, including “Ocean’s Twelve” in 2004. “I live to work and work to live,” he says. “My priorities are the health and welfare of my family and I continue to seek gainful employment to make more money to contribute to my family-to live, learn and communicate, to gain education and to educate. I believe there’s nothing of value except to share.”

He has a son and a daughter by Jennifer Bogart, whom he married twice (in 1974 and 1978) and a son, actor Jason Gould, by Barbra Streisand, to whom he was married from 1963 to 1971.

Unlike some in Hollywood, he is not “a political animal,” he says, but simply “a union man”. The union is the only entity that had anything appropriate for my family and me, and I decided I wanted to see who’s who and what’s what there. That’s part of the whole spectrum of democracy, how things are. I’m not political but I need to know what’s what and who thinks what.”

Is he involved in other Jewish causes? “To be Jewish is a cause,” he says. “I do what I can when and where I can. I’ve had some accomplishments but I also am very much aligned with true modesty and humility,” he points out.

He does allow as how his parents were first-generation Americans from an Eastern European family, and his father’s family members were Orthodox Jews. “That’s how I came to became a dreamer as far as having an ideal- peace and harmony, which is a dream, but I’ll always work for it.”

He started out in show business as a child, he says, because “I was very shy and withdrawn, inhibited and repressed. I thought if I could memorize routines, I could communicate.” It worked, apparently.

Gould doesn’t like to define himself as an actor, but says that “when I became successful, I let myself be defined. You are what the other person thinks you are, but the most important thing is what you think. I see, I have vision, I feel. I can define myself as being the offspring of my parents, the friends of my friends, the father of my children, the grandfather of my grandchildren and the husband of the women that bore me the children and that I married.”

To end the interview, he looks up and quotes “something I wrote down in Latin. “Translated into English, it is: “To live honorably, to injure nobody, to render to all their due.”

He copied it down from “some wall someplace,” he says. “It’s the writing on the wall.”