I like to be nude in life….

“Elliott Gould says some things that don’t make sense – and some things that do.”

by Arthur Hill Playgirl, 1975

Elliott Gould is a big man. He stands 6′3″ and weighs 205, evenly distributed, with a minimum of flab. His neck is the size of a French poodle’s midriff, and his hands are the width of cabbage leaves. He has a very limp handshake. Whether it’s because he associates tight hand grips with big business deals and political candidates who stand at subway stops, or whether it’s because firm handshakes aren’t, in Elliott’s mind, an assurance of masculinity – either way, he drops his paw into your reach, where it stays for a moment, then gently lifts it away, like some contessa performing a nicety at a court reception, except his fingernails are chewed to the half moons.

Elliott showed up at my apartment and said he’d talk about anything, well, almost anything, “just ask me questions and we’ll see how far we get.”

Ups and downs have been the name of the game since the day Elliott Gould toddled out of the womb thirty-six years ago. He has had more declines and falls than the Roman Empire and he’s climbed more peaks than Peter Finch in Lost Horizon. Recently, he underwent another resurgence with a brilliant performance in California Split, but what comes next is anybody’s guess. Inconsistency is his middle name. “That’s the way it is. Life goes up and down. You ride the roller coaster.”

Inconsistency. Take his clothes. The suit is new, obviously, because it looks new and he say it’s new. It’s white, and the pants are just a little tight around the thighs. His sport shirt is silk and open at the neck. When asked if the suit is “Gatsby” he fidgets, like he doesn’t want to know from current trends. But the look is really “fuck-you Gatsby.” Because just below the trousers, and out of nowhere, stick two outrageously large feet, minus socks, in brown loafers. The bare ankles, which show when Elliott’s legs are crossed, are a statement, a declaration of independence, a sign that he’ll go so far, but not a step farther.

Two days before, a well-known fashion photographer had put Elliott through a session. Elliott’s pithecanthropus-like exterior, which registers like gang-busters on the screen, was registering like a dead bromo fizz. “This guy wanted soul,” explains Elliott. “Show me soul,” he said. So I picked up my shoe and put my sole next to my head. You can’t see a soul, you’ve gotta feel it.”

Feeling Elliott’s soul, however, requires tenacity and 3D glasses. It’s there, but it’s not worn on his sleeve. One fishes for it, and sometimes there are problems hooking. For instance, Elliott has a way of averting eye contact. Whether it’s the shyness of a fightened baby-man or a preoccupation with what’s going on inside his own brain – always racing, racing, a hundred miles a minute. He claims, “I love to be anonymous. Basically, I relate to myself as nobody. I have a separate life from Elliott Gould’s.” Interestingly, in The Long Goodbye and California Split, (films in which he was allowed to improvise dialogue within given situations), Elliott made comic references to Claude Rains’s The Invisible Man.

The question is, then, why is Elliott in movies? Is it ego replenishment? Certainly, no one is more visible than a film star. “What’s the name of Woody Allen’s first picture?” He asks. “Take the Money and Run,” I reply. “That’s it,” he drones, “but I walk.”

During his promenade, he’s managed to pick up and discard a couple of wives. The public relations biographies, as expected, neglect to mention their names. They inform us that “Elliott is the proud father of Jason Emmanuel (age 8), Molly Sapphire (age 3), and Sam Bazooka (age 2). “Would it be wrong to guess that only three people in America are dumb to the fact that Elliott’s first spouse was Barbra Streisand? Details of their 6-year marriage kept movie magazines in business for years. Their scenario was Busby Berkeley crossed with Imitation of Life. It started early in ‘62. Elliott was starring in I Can Get It For You Wholesale on Broadway. Barbra managed sixth billing, but sang a show-stopping song. The kids had a lot in common. Both were from good Brooklyn Jewish families, both were getting their first whiffs of stardust. They fell madly in love. For a year, they lived together in a tiny apartment on Third Avenue. They haunted the antique shops on the Upper West Side and shared corned beef sandwiches and pickled tomatoes on the Lower East Side.

Then they married. Ironically, the blushing bride’s career started zooming. Barbra was signed to play Fanny Brice in Funny Girl. Rave Reviews. New York loved her. She sang “I’m the Greatest Star.” And she began to believe it. Meanwhile, the Goulds moved into a plush fortress overlooking Central Park. Their bedtables were equipped with refrigerators for late-night noshes. Everything was Shangri-La. Except for one thing. Elliott’s career.

There was the nightclub act he put together for Anna Maria Alberghetti. There was the film with Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland in which he played a deaf mute, except the film never got released. There was summer stock till alfalfa sprouted from his nose. Down went his ego, and into his life came an analyst.

In 1967, Barbra was signed to recreate her role in the movie version of Funny Girl. And wouldn’t you know it, she began dating Omar Sharif, her leading man.

Elliott was not delighted. He mouthed his displeasure to Sheilah Graham. He told the syndicated columnist. “My wife is ambitious for a number of reasons. She gets most of her acceptance from her performance and from the people who see her, but she shouldn’t depend on an audience to like her. Barbra’s success hasn’t made her any more secure, absolutely not.” The following year, Barbra got an Oscar for Funny Girl and Elliott got a bid to play Ted, the square bumbling lawyer in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a milestone film which was to start the ball rolling for him. That year was also memorable for Elliott’s run-in with the Manhatten Traffic Court. They claimed he had delinquent, ninety-eight traffic summonses and fined him $795.

Ambition. A word that’s anathema to Elliott. About an hour into the interview, Elliott flew into a tirade against Jack Nicholson. He criticized Nicholson for his performance in The Last Detail and said, “Jack’s not a movie star, he’s a guy from New Jersey.” Elliott finished his word-spank with “he happens to be very ambitious and I hate ambition.”

Obviously, the Barbra marriage left Elliott with Grand Canyon-deep wounds. Had his career skyrocketed early and Barbra’s late, there may still have been trouble in paradise. But with all of his flower-child talk, a word here or there indicates that Elliott has one foot in tradition – man is the breadwinner and woman looks up to man.

When Elliott flew to the Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic for a quickie divorce, he wore a colorful dashiki, neckerchief, dirty suede pants, and a week’s growth of stubble, and was accompanied by his pregnant nineteen-year-old girlfriend, Jenny Bogart. He told reporters then, that he would never remarry. But in December 1973, after Jenny had given birth to their second child, Elliott did an about face and married her. Apparently, the certificate put a jinx on their arrangement because five months later, they split. But before the tears could trickle, Elliott found another Jenny – Jennifer O’Neill, the model-actress star of Summer of ‘42. It took only two torrid months, this time, before the flame was doused, leaving nothing but smouldering embers. As of today, Gould and O’Neill are “just good friends.”

Although seemingly beset by ambition, which terrifies him in others, Elliott manages to deadpan, “I don’t think of movies or theatre as career. My life is my career.”

Life, as it is, encompasses forays into Manhatten playgrounds with the neighborhood kids in Greenwich Vilage. In the old section, where Elliott lived with Jenny Bogart, he is known as the Pied Piper of Morton Street. Street action, in fact, is more up his alley than world politics. “Most political news is a reflection of the past,” he says, sipping a cream soda, “so I stay out of it. I helped McGovern in the primaries until I discovered it was his wife who was running the campaign.” Can this statement be construed as antifeminist? Does Elliott have anything to say about men’s liberation? There’s a long uhhhhh. “Men need liberation from the female mind,” he philosophizes, “but we’ve got to face it – there are no eggs without hens.” Does he approve of consciousness-raising groups for men? “It would be great. But men usually are too proud to do that. There’s just one thing to be proud of – being alive.”

To listen to him, with his tangents and his flights of non sequiturs and his left-field observations, sometimes profound, sometimes irrelevant, one wonders if he’s seen too many Claude Rains movies or if he’s been gazing at his navel too long or if he’s just impatient to get to the nearest lot for a game of stickball. He doesn’t try to impress. None of that movie star bravura. He doesn’t ask questions, either. His eyes occasionally wander to a huge Chinatown poster which covers half a wall, but there’s minimum animation, like a little boy who’s told to mind his business in the orthodonist’s waiting room. His dialogue sounds as if it’s been computerized – very little feeling coming from him. Some of his sentences might have been lifted from a manual on how to be a hippy in Haight-Ashbury, circa 1967, programmed and automated and served with a twist of irony, a sprinkle of bitterness, a dash of masochism, a pinch of humanism, and an overdose of self-protection.

But there’s never a laugh or giggle. But very funny flights. From out of nowhere: “I like The Three Little Pigs. Did you know that Jack Nicholson is triplets? One had his house blown away and the other had his house blown away and the other had a brick house. Barbra sang a song. “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” Followed by “Egos, egos. It’s just a reflection of insecurities.” Followed by a story about Shelley Winters. “I played gin rummy with her when we were on tour in Luv. One day, she said, ‘Elliott, let’s play $100 a point.’ ‘C’mon, Shelley,’ I said, ‘I know your act. If I beat you, I don’t collect, if you beat me, you get every penny.’ Finally we played and I just knocked her brains out. She lost fifteen hundred bucks. She gave me half and said she’d give the other half to Israel or the Actor’s Studio.”

Show talk comes easy to Elliott. That’s when the enthusiasm shines through. Right now, he’s itching to get back to singing and dancing. Call it a dream fantasy, but a production of Guys and Dolls is what he craves “with me as Sky and Dustin Hoffman as Detroit. It wouldn’t cost more than a couple of million to make. Diana Ross would be Adelaide. You know who else would be great as Adelaide? Bette Midler. Actually, Barbra would be terrific. That would be the ideal casting. She’d be fahhhhhhbulous.” He catches himself and doesn’t say another word about wife number one, and gulps down the last of the cream soda.

Money and power and ambition are often linked together and money, obviously, is a very important cog in the machinery that motivates Elliott. Yet, the dollar sign doesn’t show on his person. No sapphire rings or golden pendants, and at a film symposium last summer, Elliott appeared in an outfit that looked like Army-Navy surplus. Jenny Bogart, recently characterized her separated husband as a penny pincher, and was annoyed because she felt “he lavished gifts on his son from Barbra, but is very strict with our two babies.”

Still, no guilt drips from Elliott’s mouth when he talks from both sides. We get integrity from the right, and money-equals-worth from the left. Integrity won over the dollar sign in Elliott’s episode with Ingmar Bergman. At a period when Elliott’s career was at peak form and his marriage to Barbra Streisand was on the rocks, the Swedish director selected America’s favorite underdog to play the part of a moody, mean-tempered archaeologist who makes an illicit dig into a stable marriage in The Touch.

“Bergman saw me in Getting Straight and decided I was right for the film,” reports Elliott, jutting out his lower lip which hangs like a weeping willow over a wide expanse of chin. “Hell, I was surprised. First of all, I’m usually hired to play roles very close to myself. Secondly, Bergman uses Swedish actors – I was the first American he’s used in one of his films. This was my big moment of truth. The script was like a seventy-eight page novella, with an insert on page twenty-two: ‘Violent intercourse with Bibi Andersson.’ And the character I played was Bergman – the movie was based on an experience he was having while I was there. Since then, he’s married that girl.”

Unfortunately, The Touch was panned by most critics and seen by few people. And Elliott was clobbered. His flat tones which worked just right in comedies like M*A*S*H and Little Murders worked just wrong in The Touch. Newsweek put it this way: “Oddly, it’s Gould who seems to be speaking a second language, enunciating carefully as though trying to explain traffic directions to a Swedish chimney sweep. How else can one explain Elliott Gould’s afternoon soap opera declaration?”The moment of truth was false. In order to get Elliott to comment on items that have made the dailies, we open old wounds. Sometimes the response is a scratch of the leg, other times silence. “I used to be scared because I could feel people thinking before I met them,” he says, and I ask if the gods have gifted him with psychic powers. “Sure,” he answers, “but I try not to use them. I try not to want anything. I try to find my own personal contact, and I can’t do this without harmony. Without flats, the sharp notes stickout.”

Still, scars of epic proportions like those left by his reviews in The Touch surely have left their mark on Elliott’s psyche. I ask him to comment. Silence again. Then slowly, with his eyes glued to his shoes: “I isolate myself from critical response. Bad notices don’t put me in the doldrums. Consistent discouragement does have its effect, though. I try to make myself not need too much of anything.”

Much of the recent output follows the now standard Hollywood formula of male-male buddy-buddy couples: Elliott with Robert Blake as vice cops without wives, girls, or pasts in Busting; Elliott with George Segal as gamblers who care for each other, come crap or baccarat in California Split; Elliott with Donald Sutherland as CIA agents who work and play together in S*P*Y*S. In The Long Goodbye, the closest Elliott gets to female companionship is his devoted cat (”actually played by two cats,” he says). In Who? he’s an FBI agent whose passion is to reveal the true identity of a metal man. Nowhere is there a nubile lady – no Julie Andrews, Sophia Loren, or Barbra what’s-her-name. As close as he gets to a love scene is the drinking sequence in California Split with George Segal. Mesmerized by each other’s company and slightly blotto, Segal whispers, “Twenty dollars says you can’t name the seven dwarves.” Elliott acts as if he’s been proposed to, poises his shoulders – shoulders which would take a dwarf a half an hour to walk across – and answers, “Dumbo wasn’t in that cast, was he?” It’s the sort of scene that Jean Arthur and Jimmy Stewart used to do brilliantly.

Elliott says there was talk of teaming him with Elizabeth Taylor in The House of Blue Leaves. “They were going to say “Elliott’s back and Elizabeth’s got him.” Who would he like most to scorch the screen with? I throw out Faye Dunaway’s name . He catches it with “I have to get prepared to work with crazy ladies. To live with crazy ladies is one thing, to work with crazy ladies is something else.”

Elliott’s back with ladies for the first time since The Touch withWhiffs and “good friend” Jennifer O’Neill’s got him. She plays a nurse to Elliott’s paranoiac army private in the Brut production to be released early next year.

Kindness? Ambition? Soul? Control? Whatever – the ambiguity is shining through the tan again, and it’s getting late and Elliott’s shuffling his tootsies in his loafers and mouthing irrelevancies – Buddha combined with Donald Duck. “Donald Sutherland,” he says about his favorite co-star, “has a farm near Quebec. He lives part-time everywhere. He lives full-time in the sky.”

Then, the mosaic that is Elliott, politely shakes my hand, strolls toward the doorway, and splits for the airport, en route to California, where he, himself, lives very visibly, full-time in the sky.