The following is the first of a two-part column.
I miss Rod Steiger.
It’s been nearly two years since his death and hardly a week passes that I don’t expect him to phone with either an out-and-out insult, a request for local assistance (“How do you spell Cosentino’s?”) or maybe just a raspberry and a hang-up. How our relationship progressed in depth and silliness is unique to my experience.
We were nearly neighbors. I first set eyes on Rodney in Malibu’s Colony Market (now Ralphs). He appeared to be absorbing the frozen peas. (1973 sounds right.) I’d gone to school on his artistry since “On the Waterfront” in ’54 and was determined to create a brief encounter. I had never before had the opportunity to thank a mentor, unconscious of his contribution to the development of my particular craft. Bravery was the lesson I had in mind.
My thank you was clumsy. In a barrage of second thoughts, I mumbled it-rushed it, gushed it probably. And my larger than life icon, whose habit was finding the top and scaling it, was a little shy as well. He glanced my way, thanked me for thanking him, and returned immediately to the vegetables. And that was that. Till the following weekend when I found myself in a men’s doubles game opposite him in Malibu Colony. Rod Steiger played tennis as if he were taking Sodom and Gomorrah.
Other than a few bad calls, his first real words to me were: “Ya wanna come over the house for a swim, Kid?”
Had I, during the next couple of hours, been informed my mother was clinging to life, I’d have passed on a trip to her bedside. I am swimming naked with God in His own pool, and it looks as if He and the Missus are going to pour me a Scotch after we dry off. Her name was Sherry. She was warm and funny and welcoming. My lady was Anne. Miraculously, delightfully, we became a local foursome.
“God” had to go.
But not right away.
Our original scenario was this: Rod picked up the check-he was fanatically mindful of my limited income-at Valentino, Chasen’s, Chinois, Peppone, Musso’s, Mr. Chow, Trader Vic’s, Yamato (where to his delight I fell through a shoji screen into a stranger’s tempura), Beechers (a Malibu family restaurant, replaced in ’79 by La Scala and thence by Tradinoi), and of course, our neighborhood landmark, the Colony Coffee Shop. Meanwhile, I absorbed lessons in acting, timing, tennis, women, E.E. Cummings and life itself … often from a position of oration. He was a teacher/showman and he recognized devotion when he played to it. I very nearly took notes. We cooked, we ate, we played, he loaned me money, he embraced my parents. He put me to work in two of his films, and became a guest lecturer at an acting class I taught in Hollywood on Wednesday nights, which sent me over the moon in the esteem of my students.
A difference of opinion seemed necessary.
It came to pass at a gala. A benefit Rod had arranged at a good-sized theater on the West Side for a therapy clinic where he battled fits of depression: an evening in two parts. First, a screening of “The Mark,” a film he’d made in l961 in which he created a chain-smoking, coffee-drinking Irish therapist who, thanks to the star’s devotion to research and improvisation, was 10 years ahead of the mental health industry. Part two consisted of Rod reading his own poetry from the stage. The film was moving, the poetry strong, and his reading of it … I felt was a overly theatrical. Almost British in delivery and after all, he hails from New Jersey. And that the work stood on its own and suffered from embellishment. The applause thundered otherwise. On our way out of the theater, he spied me across the aisle and over the crowd.
“How ’bout that, Kid?”
I shouted back, “The film was brilliant.”
“What about the poetry, Kid?”
“Let’s talk in the morning,” I said, as if I was loathe to encroach on his after-theater plans. Nevertheless, I walked to my car flush with the fact that I was prepared to cross a bridge in dense fog. Either into intimacy or oblivion.
I meditated on the possibility he’d let it go. But no. The following night we’d planned to meet the ladies and others for dinner at La Scala, and he asked me to pick him up at his house. (One of the classic old Malibu beachfront homes just outside the Colony-since demolished to accommodate a three-story orange crate.)
He stopped me at the gate. “So tell me.”
So I did. Emphasizing that the rendering of his poetry in my view required nothing but simple belief-a note he might have given me had the situation been reversed. Rod thanked me and hugged me and I hugged him back with love and apprehension, and we drove the three or so minutes to La Scala, going over the weather.
It was in lieu of a toast that he announced to the table and several surrounding diners that I had informed him his poetry reading sounded British. Some at our table protested my effrontery, indicating their disbelief … mumblings to that effect. And maybe they were right. Right was not in question. I remember telling myself to keep my head up. To avoid concentrating on my plate or the silverware, but to look directly at my complex friend-to whom I owed so much-with loyalty and equality, and to prepare to cross that bridge a second time. “Theatrical,” I said, as simply as one can utter that particular word. And Caesar rose, lifted his glass and took stage, as he so often did. I think he was wearing a caftan. How I wish I’d recorded what was probably only a moment in time, but I remember it as a rather extensive and moving crescendo on the co-existence of love and difference in perception. He quaffed his wine, leaned over the table and kissed me on the mouth with vigor and finality.
Next week, Paul Mantee’s column on his friendship with Rod Steiger will conclude.