In Jack Klugman’s memoirs, he expresses incredulity that Tony Randall could have passed away before he did. It does seem unlikely. Klugman had battled throat cancer, was a dedicated smoker and gambler and appeared to have depressive tendencies. Randall was the puckish workhorse who seemed to live on TV talk show stages when not running (and tirelessly fundraising for) his ambitious National Actors Theater operation. But Randall died nearly eight years ago at the age of 84 and Klugman just a few days ago at 90.
Garry Marshall, who directed and produced the TV version of The Odd Couple, has a bizarre memory of how Klugman joined the show, one he recounts in his book My Happy Days in Hollywood:
The studio pitched Jerry and me some possible combinations: Martin Balsam and Eddie Bracken, and Dean Martin and Mickey Rooney. But no combination seemed up to snuff compared to Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, who had done the movie. We needed to get closer to Matthau and Lemmon. I remembered an actor I had seen opposite Ethel Merman in the Broadway production of Gypsy. He played the stage manager, and basically for two hours Merman sang loudly and sprayed saliva on him while he faced her with his back to the audience. At the end of the show people in the audience were in love with him. I had never seen such stage presence before, nor a more expressive, regular-kind-of-guy face. I asked the casting department at Paramount to find Jack Klugman, and they sent me a man named Jack Kruschen, who had a mustache.
While Klugman and Kruschen are similar names, the appeal didn’t compare and only one had a mustache. So when Klugman finally came into my office, I knew I had my Oscar.
A few sentences later, Marshall writes, “Tony and Jack were reluctant to step into Matthau’s and Lemmon’s shoes, though. Who wouldn’t be?”
You might wonder what I find bizarre about that. A director has a casting idea in his head and seeks out an actor nobody else had thought of, who is brought in to audition, then worries about following another actor in the role.
Understandable… except that Klugman had been playing Oscar Madison on stage for five years before Marshall’s TV series premiered. He’d already followed Matthau in the role, on Broadway, and then opened the London production. As far as I can tell, he’d played the role more times than Matthau had. How could Garry Marshall not have known (or admitted) this? His book is not filled with vanity; he does not claim to have “discovered” anyone (except perhaps his own sister Penny).
But Marshall was right in that Jack Klugman was born to the role of Oscar Madison. I saw him play it live once, in the original Neil Simon version, on Oct. 28, 2001, at the Shubert in New Haven. It was a staged reading put together as a benefit for the Shakespeare Theater Project—a brief partnership between Louis Burke and Dandelion Productions, raising funds to reopen the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford. (Burke and Dandelion soon became competitors rather than partners. Neither got to reopen the place.)
It was billed as a staged reading, but Klugman was off-book for the entire performance, and Randall for most of it. They had their scriptbound castmates racing to keep up. And this was some accomplished cast: consummate character actor Bob Dishy as Murray, Electric Company’s Judy Graubart and Randall’s wife Heather Randall as the Pigeon Sisters, Rik Colitti as Roy, Edward Malin as Vinnie and Tyler Bunch (then a little-known actor who studied with Burke, now a Sesame Street muppeteer) as Speed. Dan Lauria, the local celebrity who attended Southern Connecticut State University and grew up to play the dad in The Wonder Years, had been asked to participate, but thought he had a scheduling conflict, and ended up in the audience instead, and was hounded by autograph-hunters at intermission.
There was a proper set—Oscar’s apartment, into which Felix moves in—but because of the whole script-in-hand thing there were no props, except for the disinfectant spray and vacuum cleaner bits when the lead characters first become roommates.
That reading could have been a shambles, a slog through a script which the stars could understandably have been irate to have typecast in. Instead, it was both a marvelous stunt—I have expected Klugman to do his lines while standing on his head—and a solid, easy to follow, emotional and involving production of the play. Neil Simon’s comedy of divorce and male-bonding has an existential underpinning as sharp as Sartre’s somewhat similar play No Exit, and it holds up splendidly under the darnedest circumstances.
Especially when Jack Klugman was in it.
It’s become common in recent years to try new casting concepts for The Odd Couple, and I’m all for that. Oscar has been played by Nathan Lane, Craig Ferguson, John Larroquette and others. I saw Jamie Farr be Oscar in a national tour (opposite his M*A*S*H castmate William Christopher) which stopped at Southern Connecticut State University in the late ‘90s. Even back in the mid-70s and early 80s, within a few years of the Klugman/Randall series going off the air, Oscar was portrayed in further TV versions by Demond Wilson and a cartoon dog.
But it’s hard to imagine an actor more comfortable in a role than Jack Klugman appeared to be as Oscar Madison. More comfortable than Walter Matthau, who showed his discomfort in the 1998 film sequel Odd Couple II he did with Jack Lemmon. More comfortable than Klugman seemed in other roles, such as Quincy. Watch a few old Odd Couple episodes and marvel at his timing, his natural expressions, even when faced with hackneyed plots and an overacting supporting cast.
We lost Jack Klugman this week, but we also a legendary interpretation of one of the great theater characters of the 20th century. Klugman’s Oscar should be up there with Joseph Jefferson’s Rip Van Winkle or James O’Neill’s Count of Monte Cristo or Carol Channing’s Dolly. I hope, as with Jefferson, somebody names an acting award after him someday.