From oblivion to stardom to oblivion to stardom…. Whew !

by Guy Flatley, April 1976

“I love Jennie and consider her a part of my life,” Elliott Gould says gently, “I have been sick over our failure to overcome the problems which we brought to one another.”

In his struggle not to come unstuck, Elliott has had to overcome more problems than the break-up of his second marriage. But he seems to have survived with his faculties more or less intact. “I want you to make comparisons between the way I was then and the way I am now. I think you’ll be surprised to see how together I’ve gotten.

Now, at first glance, does seem an admirably together time for Elliott. A time to live the charmed life of a bachelor father; a time to roll about on the floor of his Beverly Hills home with Molly and Sam, his two beautiful children by Jennie Bogart, and with Jason, his sterling son by Barbra Streisand; a time to reassert himself as a box-office biggie in Harry and Walter Go To New York, Columbia’s lavishly budgeted comedy which teams him with James Caan as a couple of endearingly crooked song-and-dance men; and a time to dally with Valerie Perrine and other less-celebrated but equally fun-loving dollies.

But the then-time he wishes to recall is something else. Three years ago, on a dismal morning in a rumpled Manhattan hotel room, I sat and listened as a bleary-eyed and unshaven has-been mournfully droned of his dizzying descent from the top of the Hollywood heap. Puffing feverishly on a leftover cigar and running his nail-gnawed fingers through tangles of jet-black hair, he spun horror stories of big-studio chicanery, of deceitful friends and venomous advisers, and of the mountainous burden of being expected to live up to his public image as America’s most lovable schnook, the bumbling rebel from Brooklyn who graduated from the chorus line to Broadway leads and from the ego-sapping role of Mr. Barbra Streisand to that of undisputed king of the superstars, the gruffly vulnerable, amiably erotic clown of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, M*A*S*H, and Getting Straight.

Sadly, Elliott’s overnight success was to be followed by overnight oblivion. A spate of ill-chosen, fast-buck flicks threw him into a sweat and sent him scurrying to Sweden in search of artistic redemption at the hands of the master, Ingmar Bergman. But The Touch, in which Elliott played a crude and sullen wife-stealer, proved more than a touch disappointing to the critics, and the public, too, pooh-poohed Bergman’s tortuously downbeat drama. Most damaging of all, however, were the nasty bulletins emanating from the set of still another Gould movie, A Glimpse of Tiger – vivid reports that the wonder boy from Brooklyn had gone bananas, that he had exchanged blows with director Anthony Harvey, that his antics frightened Kim Darby half to death, that he had pulled an unscheduled and highly vexing vanishing act, that he was freaked out on drugs. Superstardom, it seemed, had made him super insufferable.

Elliott screamed “frame-up,” but in the end A Glimpse of Tiger was scratched and the courts ordered him to pay the whopping production costs, “I was innocent and ignorant, a winning combination, and they all made a goat out of me. I made the error of hiring a lawyer who became the instrument to nail me up. Warner Brothers collected on an insurance policy that said I was crazy, and in my mind they are an eternal urinal that I keep peeing money into.” Money that was becoming alarmingly scarce as more and more Hollywood doors slammed shut in his face. Finally, Robert Altman, the maverick director of M*A*S*H, flew to his rescue – though the uptight authorities at United Artists refused to okay Elliott as private eye Phillip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye until he promised to take a mental test. “They sat me down with a psychiatrist who asked me all sorts of questions and then they put nineteen needles in my head to see if I was sane,” moaned Elliott on that morning in Manhattan. “Well, I may be starting at the bottom again, but I’m the original rubber man and I’m bouncing right back.”

The bounce back to the top took longer than Elliott anticipated. Although The Long Goodbye and California Split reaped warm words from the critics, moviegoers turned a cold shoulder to them both. And it would be painful to envision a more tragic trio of comedies that Elliott’s Busting, S*P*Y*S and Whiffs. But thanks to I Will, I Will… For Now, a loony lark in which Elliott and Diane Keaton try to work out their marital kinks at a sex clinic, and especially to Harry and Walter Go To New York and A Bridge Too Far – Joe Levine’s $25-million, all-star, World War II whopper – it’s a safe bet that there will once again be box-office gold in the name of Gould. And he’ll soon be enjoying a whole new life as a director with A New Life, the Bernard Malamud story in which he will also star.

Elliott’s personal life is perking up, too, and there is no hint of hostility when he speaks of Jennie Bogart, the girl who lived with him while still a teenager, bore him two children, and eventually -briefly- became Mrs. Gould. “Jennie and I didn’t have to marry in the ways of the community. We were already married, and we had our children to cover ourselves with when we’re done with living. We just were not able to grow together.”

The sun streams into Elliott’s huge Beverly Hills living room, and his mother can be heard puttering about the kitchen. Outside, in a yard scattered with tricycles and dolls and squeak toys and plastic dishes, Molly and Sam are tossing a ball, and Jason’s dog Sadie, is barking her disapproval. Elliott’s eyes are alert, his hair is tidy, and his face clean-scrubbed. He’s dressed neatly casual, like a fifties freshman, in blue corduroy slacks, a chequered button-down shirt, and a bright yellow V-neck sweater. His nails are bitten nearly to the point of bleeding.

In a little while Elliott will be bundling Molly and Sam off to Jennie’s house, where they live during the week. And tomorrow he’ll pick up Jason, who spends weekends with Barbra Streisand and hot-blooded hairdresser Jon Peters. Are these boarding arrangements working out to everyone’s satisfaction ?

“Arrangements ? Fuck arrangements, man. Understanding is what counts. But there is a touch of conflict. I mean, how much can you give? You’ve got to leave time and space for yourself. It doesn’t matter who my children are with, so long as they’re with people who love them and nourish them. It doesn’t matter how often I see them, even if it’s a decade, so long as they know that if they want to see where they come from and who they are, I’ll always be there.”

Possibly Jon Peters will always be there, too. How does Elliott rate him as a part-time father figure for Jason ?

“I have no reservations about Jon Peters. But I have no reservations for Jon Peters, either, which you can read any way you please. Whatever makes Barbra happy cannot be bad for Jason. Basically, what I’m trying to do is see to it that my children don’t go through the pain I went through. I never played much, and I was afraid to feel things. By the time I was three, I knew that my parents didn’t understand one another, but they stayed together for twenty-seven years.

It’s painful to see children becoming aware of problems and trying to work them out in their embryonic minds, and it’s painful to bring your own children back and forth, painful to take them home. I feel their home is with me, but in our structural chemistry the home is said to be with the mother. Well, I don’t want to have to worry about my lack of presence when I can’t be with them ; I want them to be here, with me.

“What I’d like to do one day is buy a farm where we could rotate the family, in terms of all of us. That’s my dream, a fun farm where Jason and Molly and Sam can play and never get bored. How can you get bored when you’ve got things that depend on you? Chickens, cows, horses, corn, mud. And there’ll be a barn with a full basketball court, and an old trolley car converted into a diner. I always wanted to a short-order cook.” It’s conceivable that Elliott will be cooking for an even bigger brood than he has now, since he’s firmly convinced that marriage is a model institution. “I think it’s an ideal relationship, because it’s one-on-one. This may be old-fashioned of me, but I feel that since the male form and the female form are so similar, so close, my attraction to a woman must be particular. I don’t like sex objects. I want just one woman, and I believe in fidelity. It’s possible to have relations with more than one woman, but I don’t think it’s possible to be in love with more than one woman at a time.

“Marriage means a marriage of minds. But I had no mind when I married, just a brain. I didn’t know who I was, and I was afraid of my mind. To be able to touch one’s mind is to touch one’s soul, and through that communication we can share our bodies. When one mind connects with another mind, when two hearts beat as one and you can feel the other person’s presence on the other side of the earth, then you have a marriage. If that sounds romantic, well, basically I’ll take romance.”

It was recently rumoured that Elliott was taking romance with Valerie Perrine, a girl who’d surely make a wow of a wife. ‘Valerie was attracted to me, and I liked her. I saw her as a highly intelligent, talented girl who seemed on the verge of fucking herself up. I said to myself, ‘She needs the reassurance of knowing there is somebody else there.’ Valerie would like to have a stable life, to live on a ranch. The reason she lives the high life is that there is nobody there for her. For me, it was a friendship, somebody to share something with, but we’ve stopped seeing each other. Valerie is a terrific girl, but she talks too much. Who you fuck is your business, and you don’t want it talked about.’

It’s true, Valerie has been known to talk, but when I asked her about her relationship with Elliott, her remarks were laudably ladylike, even borderng a bit on the inspirational. “Elliott was very helpful to me when I wasn’t getting along with myself. He became my friend, somebody to rely on, a big brother. He’s one of the kindest, sweetest, real persons I’ve ever met. He’s like a big teddy bear, and there’s no phoniness about him at all. And there’s something else, something in the way Elliott smiles, a kind of sexiness. Elliott is really very sexy.

Elliott smiled sexily upon Jennifer O’Neill a couple of years ago, and to his astonishment she instantly announced to the press that they were engaged to be married, an announcement that also came as a decided jolt to the impetuous actress’s newly acquired husband. Not to mention Jennie Bogart, who had at long last become Jennie Gould. “That was madness,” Elliott says now, “a very unfortunate form of friendship between Jennifer and me.”

Although Elliott did go on to make whoopee with Jennifer in Whiffs, there is no encore in the offing. Most of Elliott’s movies, in fact -from M*A*S*H to Harry and Walter – have been cut from the buddy-buddy mold. What does he think of the vanishing female in films ? “Most men have disappeared too. Today, they seem to develop boys. But I do look forward to seeing films about men and women before long. There’s talk now of doing stories about a man and two women or a woman and two men. That seems healthy to me, as a way of getting back to one-to-one.”

- What about a man and a man, or a woman and a woman ? Where does Elliott stand on the burning issue of Gay Lib ?

- “Marvin Gaye is one of my favourite writer-composers.”

- And bisexuality ?

- “Uh, what do you mean ?”

- Bisexuality. You know, having sex with women and men.

- “Oh. Well, I bat from just one side of the plate myself. The right side. I’m no good on the left. But I have nothing against bisexuality. Whatever gets your juices going is okay. Yet men are meant to have relationships with women, purely in terms of the nature of our work here on earth. If you can’t have relationships with your sexual counterpart, though, it is essential to have a relationship with somebody. It can’t be wrong. Just let it flow.”

Spoken like a true shrink. Has Elliott found comfort on the couch? “I finally stopped going to my analyst when he began having me explain things to him.” Whatever his psychological hang-ups, they’re scarcely rooted in sex. “I used to feel funny, sort of shy and sensitive, about sex. But now I just enjoy. I’ve been able to sustain crudity by just being what I am. I’m not rude, but I am crude sometimes. I just will not suppress certain bodily functions because of what people might think.”

Obviously, Elliott is not one to agonize over what people might think or not think of him. Still, he must have felt slightly wounded when United Artists thought him such a shaky mental risk that they forced him to submit to psychiatric testing. “No, they just wanted to check me out to see if I was crazy for giving up the biggest career to date. After all, I was a war baby, I’d come from a very humble background – a two-room apartment in a big apartment house, asphalt on the street, the subway, the neighbourhood, and I thought, literally, that was all there was. And all of a sudden, I was having a billion dollars thrust in my hands, and I was pushing it away from me. I didn’t want to be beholden to my success, to the image that had been created for me.

That’s why I couldn’t do A Glimpse of Tiger, why I was willing to give up my career in pursuit of myself, to let it all go and start over again. I knew fame and fortune were nothing but the means to an end, and I had to go through with my testing of the whole system, this system that was denying me growth. People look at you as an object. It’s sad, but I guess that’s the lot of the artist.

“So I said fuck it, I want to have my life while I’m living it. I refuse to be the product of somebody else. I want peace of mind, I want to find out who and what and why I am. Having confirmed myself as an actor, through working with Ingmar Bergman, I now had to make a decision for a change. So I changed, but I did not collapse. If anything collapsed, it was the people’s image of me. I was maturing, my mind and body were relating to each other, and I had found harmony.”

But he has yet to find a smash to equal M*A*S*H, though two of his most vital, subtly shaded performances were in Robert Altman’s later, less commercial films, The Long Goodbye and California Split. “Altman gives me more space than anyone else would ever dare to. I very much enjoy working with him.”

The feeling is mutual. “I feel very protective about Elliott,” Altman told me. “He’s a genius of a performer. The well he’s got to draw on is phenomenal. I wish he wouldn’t do so much, though; he’s popping up in everything, and people tend to pass that off as craziness. But he’s really just striving to be honest. Elliott is totally misunderstood by almost everybody, and we will probably destroy him for it.

Elliott seems a mite more optimistic. “I don’t feel I’ve yet been able to express my range as an actor, but I do feel my range has been drawn out, leaving it open for further development. I’ve been asked to play Nietzsche in Europe, and I find that encouraging. But here they ask me to play a clown or somebody in the pits trying to get out.”

At thirty-seven, does Elliott ever fret about the approach of the fearful forties? “I’ve taken a great many chances in pursuing my character, and occasionally I’ve looked in the mirror and said, ‘Hey, wait a second, what am I doing ?” Then I notice some hair coming out. But luckily, I’m gifted with so much hair. Hair comes from inside, you know. In truth, every man has to deal with growing up, with anatomical change. You’ve got to be able to go with it.

Wise words indeed. Has Elliott’s newfound wisdom made him any more happy than he was on that grim Manhattan morning three years ago? “Happy? What about Dopey and Doc? I’m happy when things are going well. I’m beginning to enjoy being myself. I really know what it is to be me. I was very far away and very scared, but now I’m okay. You can’t be happy all the time, though. Life’s no party. It’s hard work staying alive, in a place that has cancelled life… and kept time. Fortunately, we still have Sports Illustrated. And the earth is still here, somewhat beneath the concrete. Even the air, which we’ve fucked up, is still here. And technology is still here, scientific progress which is causing us to lose perspective on why we’re here. Technology and leisure time -conveniences- have become our religion. Jesus, do you know how much I hate electricity ? And commercials. I detest that beer commercial on TV, the one that goes ‘Drink with gusto!” Elliott frowns, groping with a properly profound thought with which to conclude his sermonette. “Now,” he says finally, “if they would only say fuck with gusto, whenever you can, I’d buy that.”