After a Deli Breakfast, Walter Matthau Okays An Interview and Leads the Way to his House
He’s smart, funny, exuberant, a happy family man; he also has a serious side he keeps to himself.
The Washington Star, July 9, 1978: LOS ANGELES… Neither Charlie Matthau, 15, nor his mother, Carol, were at home one sun-kissed day last week, but their presence was literally in the air. As actor Walter Matthau opens the front door of his sparkling white house in the Pacific Palisades, there is a sweet floral scent; baskets of blooming plants are scattered in the hall and fill the sunroom. This house — and an additional house Matthau had built adjacent to it for offices. A changing room for the pool and a game room is furnished with the comfortable style and taste of a woman who is not awed by money and knows how to use it well.
In the garden there is a peach tree, its fruit still tiny, just beginning to ripen, the fuzz barely visible. Matthau, 57, is using the fruit as a way of describing how he feels about his absent son. He takes a finger and rubs it gently over the side of a peach: “Coocha, coocha, coocha,” he says softly, ‘Doesn’t it look like Charlie? It almost looks like a little chickie coming out of an egg.” There is that small shy smile on his face — an expression, among many others, known to millions of Matthau fans. “Coocha, coocha, choocha,” Matthau whispers.
Charlie, who shared a small scene with his father in the movie, “House Calls,” is touring Europe with 20 other students and two teachers, his first trip away from home; clearly, he is missed.
“He’s just brilliant,” Matthau says. “He calls up from London, terribly, terribly homesick. So his mother says, ‘Do you want me to come over or Poppy to get you?’ He said, “No, I have to learn what life is like without this umbilical chord. Believe me, it is rough. I realize what a majestic, noble, paradisical life I have more than ever now. Most of the kids here are glad to get away from their homes. I’m not.’ “ Matthau repeats his son’s words slowly, savoringly, coming down hard on the last two.
We begin at Zucky’s in nearby Santa Monica, a noisy delicatessen restaurant Matthau has chosen. Not, obviously, because of the food, which is, at best, filling. “See,” he says, happily, his mouth full of soup and corned beef omelette, “it’s a great place for an interview because nobody can hear you.” The waitress delivers Matthau’s eggs before he finishes his soup, so he merely dumps the contents of the bowl onto the eggs.
“Do you think she really cares?” remarks Regina Gruss, the publicity woman who accompanies him. “She doesn’t give a s-,” he says, chomping away.
“Walter just hurt his rib again, during the shooting of ‘California Suite,’ “ Gruss continues, without skipping a beat. Breaking his ribs, Matthau explains, is an occupational hazard. “I keep doing it. Usually it’s connected with a curvaceous young lady. In ‘California Suite,’ I had to throw a hooker down on the bed. She’d passed out from too much tequila and I’m trying to get rid of her. I have her in this fireman’s carry and I have to dump her on the bed. After a few times, the effort was too much and I fell on her and hit her knee, breaking two ribs.”
In “The Sunshine Boys,” Matthau was “just kidding around with this voluptuous nurse. I was in bed and I grabbed her toward me and her knee came up in self defense and broke three of my ribs.” He cogitates and adds, “There’s no way to rape a girl by the way; all you do is raise your knee.”
All this is delivered in the laconic tone most moviegoers associate with Matthau. Usually his words are attached to a small, non-committal smile. It is nearly impossible to know whether he is kidding or not; just when you think you’ve got him figured out, you find you couldn’t be wronger. Is he not now a middle-aged sex-symbol? The inquiry is made with good humor, but the subject is not one that can be fruitfully pursued.”Sex is such a singular thing.” Matthau is a bit on the defensive. “Would you like to have an affair with a hippopotamus? No, I guess. And yet a female hippopotamus would. You know what I mean.” Not quite.
The Walter Matthau one sees on the screen — Jack Lemmon’s slovenly roommate in “The Odd Couple,” the gruff-but-marshmallowy coach in “The Bad News Bears,” the sexy doctor in “House Calls” — sounds and seems in many ways like the one you meet at Zucky’s. He graciously dispenses autographs to a mother and daughter, using both sides of an envelope so that each will have one. Recognized on his way out, he smiles benevolently; he allows himself to be set up for a gag by the would-be comedian who mans the the parking lot: “Say, aren’t you Walter Matthau?” “Yeh,” Matthau says, forging ahead purposely toward his car, on which the license reads: WALTZ. “Funny,” calls out the the parking lot attendant, “You don’t look like Walter Matthau.”
Matthau is wearing a dapper brown-striped Countess Mara jumpsuit with one zipper that starts at the top and another at the bottom.nHe is being droll. Sometimes you can tell. “ ‘California Suite,’ ” he is telling you, “was the most physical picture I’ve ever been in. It was yanking that hooker in and out of bed, hiding myself, hiding my clothes.” He pauses, for effect. “The bedroom is a trap. You gotta watch out in the bedroom. All kinds of terrible things happen in the bedroom.”
What kinds of terrible things? Matthau lowers his voice: “I’m going to leave that to your readers’ imaginations.” This time, it is possible to interpret the smile as impish. “You’re being an imp,” Regina Gruss confirms, fondly. “Imp,” responds Matthau. “I thought you said pimp.”
Sometimes it is as if by cutting himself up, he’s beating others to it. Earlier, he says, “Someone once said to me, you’re the dumbest Jew I ever met. I thought that was funny. Funny that he thought all Jews were smart.” Matthau does not have a cheerful view of the human race. “At a moment’s notice, 40 percent of the people in the country can become very sick,” he says. “Didn’t 40 percent vote for Goldwater?” He laughs, but he is not being funny. “As Freud said, mankind on the whole is a pretty sorry lot. What it is, everybody is scared to death. We’re all only a half-hour out of the cesspools of the reptilian stage. There are very few people who are advanced to the civilized state.”
And what concerns Matthau is that at any time that 40 percent will fall back into the cesspool and make life unendurable for the other 60 percent. Such thoughts darken Matthau’s seemingly bright life in this beautiful, cool, tasteful house that contains all he loves.
This day, Matthau is probably as relaxed as ever. He’s finished with his part of the shooting of Neil Simon’s “California Suite” (in which he plays opposite Elaine May). The film will be released during the Christmas season. His special star status has been secure since 1965, when he became famous in Simon’s “The Odd Couple,” which co-starred Art Carney. “If it weren’t for Neil Simon,” he says, “I’d still be an obscure character actor.”
When “The Odd Couple” was cast for television, Matthau turned down the role. And he says he’s never watched the show, not once. Nor does he encourage television scripts (he gets about 20 movie scripts a week, claims to reads them all, and does about one movie a year). “Television is an insatiable monster,” he says. “It constantly must be fed. It’s very rare you can constantly get good scripts. The trouble is, a pilot script may be good, but then you’re stuck for five years.”
So he has time for himself and his family. At the moment, he’s spending his days catching up on chores: hiring a plumber, attending to fan mail. He says he answers it all, with the help of Ray-Ray, a woman who was Charlies nurse, and Aram Saroyan, Carol Matthau’s son by her first husband, author William Saroyan.
Gambling, once an obsession, in now a thing of the past. He attends baseball and football games with friends. He has a massive pool table in the game room. On the walls are a number of Al Hirschfeld drawings, family snapshots: Charlie, in several eras of his life; a picture of Carol Matthau’s daughter, Lucy Saroyan. “Beautiful, beautiful,” he says, proudly. A family man, no doubt.
He met Carol Matthau (he has two children, Jenny and David, by his first marriage, to Grace Johnson) in 1955, when they were both appearing on Broadway in “Will Success Spoil Rock Hudson?” He had a leading part; she was in a minor role. She hasn’t done much acting since.
“She takes care of a lot of people, houses. Taking care of me is a full-time job. I’m a terrific pain in the ass.”
Joking for the moment, aside, Matthau explains why his wife, although “an excellent actress, actually,” never really was an actress. “Carol doesn’t have the competitive drive that actresses need. Carol can’t compete. If she had a loaf of bread and someone came to get it away from her, she’d simply give it to him.”
Matthau tells a story about his wife’s early days. “She was with her friend, Gloria (Vanderbilt) Cooper. Now at the time, Gloria had a few million dollars and Carol had $27.14. And a bum on the street told them each a story, and Gloria said, no, as I would have done. But Carol gave him all her money. She didn’t leave herself with any money for eating. So she didn’t eat the rest of the day and she called her father the next day and got some more money. I know this is true.” In his oblique way, Matthau is praising his wife to the skies.
He traces his beginnings as an actor to his parents. “Genealogically speaking,” is the way he puts it. He grew up in the ghettos of New York, but his father “had a very good voice and was interested in the pursuit of arts and culture.” His mother, who lives in Florida, “has a magnificent voice, a loud, clear piercing voice and a talent for mimicry. I can still hear her today, 3,000 miles away, if she starts hollering at me.” How old is she? “One hundred and seven.”
It’s talk like this that results in the sort of interview he later deplores. “There was this headline in the Soho News: “Walter Matthau Hates His Mother,” he tells you, adding that as soon as he saw the reporter, it was what he expected.
“She looked like something you would have dragged from under a rock,” he reminisces. “I don’t know why, the first thing I said to her was, ‘How long ago did you have an abortion?’ She said, ‘About two weeks ago.’ She said, ‘How did you know?’ I said, ‘Something about you. How much did it cost?’ She said, ‘One hundred thirty-five dollars.”
“Very few people know how to capture what I say.”
…from Judy’s notebook:
As far as I know, this may be one of the most uninhibited interviews Walter Matthau ever gave. His assistant had told me before that he seldom gave interviews. And at some point it hit me that the reason he met me at Zuckys first was to determine whether or not he wanted to go ahead with the interview. After he finished breakfast he drove at a reasonable rate as I followed him in my rented car up to his Pacific Palisades home. Matthau led he way out to his back terrace where he held forth, particularly animated when talking about his family.
A Droll Mr. Matthau: And Glimpses of a Dark Side
