The faded and streaky polaroid picture above was taken backstage at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in 1962. I ‘m the one on the left. (I was even skinnier than the tie.) Rod Steiger is on the right. He was the first actor I ever interviewed.

It was the autumn of 1962 when I opened the entertainment pages of the Toronto Star and saw an ad for a pre-Broadway production of “Moby Dick”, adapted from Herman Melville’s novel by Orson Welles and starring Rod Steiger. Rod Steiger live! I ordered a fifth row center seat for opening night and put $5 (yes, five dollars! ) in an envelope and mailed it off to the Royal Alexandra Theatre.

At 14, I had studied drama with Eli Rill, a teacher at the legendary Actors Studio. Rill flew into Toronto from New York for the weekends and was hesitant to include a fourteen year-old boy in a class of adults, who would be performing scenes by Tennessee Williams, William Inge and other sexually charged playwrights. But my friend Sharon Acker persisted and I became the enfant terrible of the class. I sat for hours listening to Rill analyze scenes, critique performances  and drop names like Brando, Newman and Steiger.

A year later, Rill was no longer commuting to Canada but I was by then a dyed-in-the-wool Method convert. I had to talk to Rod Steiger. But how?Wasn’t I a veteran of  O’Keefe Centre press conferences? Even if I didn’t have a forum for my interviews? So I went to the first night of Moby Dick and - with the demented brashness of all 15-year-olds  - arrived in Steiger’s dressing room after the performance. The burly, bearded 37-year-old actor stared at me curiously, then told me to come back after the Wednesday matinee the following week.

We spent an hour together in his dressing room while I scribbled notes (long since lost) on a spiral notepad. He told me about an actor I’d never heard of at the time. A Frenchman named Harry Baur, who was Steiger’s idol. Baur’s was the career Steiger wanted, playing the likes of Beethoven, Rasputin, Valjean, Volpone etc. He wept when he discussed working with the late Humphrey Bogart. I’d never seen a grown man cry before. Let alone a movie star. Then he pointed to somebody’s name scribbled on the wall  and warned me: “People who write on dressing room walls never get anywhere.”

This was all before “The Pawnbroker”, “Dr. Zhivago”, “The Loved One” and his Oscar-winning performance for  “In the Heat of the Night”. Over the next few decades I would think fondly of that hour I spent with Steiger and regret not having a tape recorder or even publishing the interview somewhere, anywhere.

So in 2002, after 40 years,  I decided to re-interview Rod Steiger. With a tape recorder. I’d seen and read many Steiger interviews in the intervening years but none ever mentioned Harry Baur. I did some research on Baur and discovered he had been tortured to death by the Gestapo in 1943. But what really intrigued me was his birthday: April 12th, 1880.  Steiger was born two days later in 1925.

Steiger greeted me expansively in his Malibu home, La Maison du Petit Prince (complete with a huge painting of St. Exupery’s Little Prince on the exterior stucco wall). The interior walls were adorned with posters from his films and priceless Impressionist paintings.  He was  still a huge Harry Baur fan. And thrilled to discover their birthdays were so close. Kindred spirits.

CD:When you did  the try-out of ”Moby Dick” in Toronto, do you remember what your life was like then? The movies you appeared in at that time - “13 West Street,”  “Convicts 4 “- weren’t your most memorable.

RS:What year was that?

CD:1962.

RS:I don’t know if I was between wives, that’s what I’m trying to figure out. Did I live in Brooklyn Heights then?

CD:I don’t know.

RS:I think I did. And if I did, I was still married to Claire Bloom.

CD:She had just made “The Chapman Report”.

RS:And I did “Moby Dick” because I wanted to do something they wouldn’t do in the movies and wouldn’t do on television at that time. Also, it’s so difficult to work in the theatre, for me personally, because of the fear of failure and everything, that I had to challenge myself to do it. “Moby Dick” was - I don’t know if you ever saw it . . .

CD:I was at opening night.

RS:Was I any good?

CD:You were fabulous! I loved that show. Don’t forget, I was a kid. It was magic – you coming in from the back of the house while they were rehearsing King Lear on stage.

RS:It didn’t get very good reviews, I don’t think.

CD:You opened in the newspaper strike.

RS:Oh, was that what it was?

CD:That’s what killed you in New York. The play closed after 13 performances.

RS:They’ve done it again a couple places.  I think it’s a real theatrical show, you know, it’s real theatre.

CD:  It’s “Our Town” at sea.

RS:     I’m going to put my own show together. “One Evening With Me”. And I’m going to do it as soon as I get it organized – and get somebody interested. When I work, I improvise a lot. And paraphrase a lot. I think the most important thing for an actor is not talent, not imagination, but the feeling of comfort when he works that allows his imagination and talent to feel free to flow. Comfort. And that’s hard to obtain.

CD:Your parents were a song-and-dance team?

RS:Yeah. Well, I never met my father.

CD:Ever?

RS:No. In fact, a couple of years ago, a picture was sent to me of my father and mother when they were young. It was the first time I ever saw him.

CD:You were raised by a single mother? Did your mother remarry?

RS:Oh, yeah. My stepfather was wonderful to me. And, they broke up because of alcohol. She had a big problems with alcohol. And, then she pulled out through AA. The last eleven years of her life, she was great. I was so hurt and furious. I had no use for her during the drinking period. I was living with neighbors, and I was embarrassed. The kids were merciless in the neighborhood.

CD:Where was this?

RS:Newark, New Jersey. The back yard of New York.

CD:You said that being in the Merchant Marine taught you to act.

RS:No, the Navy. When I was about 16 and a half,  I decided to get out of it all.. I went to go in the Navy, but you had to be 17. But if you got your parent, or parents, to sign a paper, saying it was okay, that you were close enough to 17, you could go. Then I had to go look for my poor mother, who I found in this terrible boarding house in downtown Newark.

CD:Where were you living?

RS:With my step-father. I found my mother and I forced her to sign it. She was in very bad shape. She wasn’t sober – I’ll never forget it. It was this terrible little room and I said, ‘You have to sign this,’ and she said, ‘I’m not going to sign it,’ so I said, ‘I’ll break your arm if you don’t sign it,’. Both of us were crying through all this. I took her arm and put it behind her back and said, ‘You sign it,’ and she signed it. And I ran all the way to New York and I got in the Navy. We had 280 different men on the ship. You went different places, different foods, different customs, different religions, different everything. And I never realized that by osmosis, I realized years later it was a great experience if you were going to be an actor.

CD:Had you shown any gift with dialects before that?

RS:No, I never even knew I was going to be an actor. I only became an actor because we were trying to chase the girls, you know. But,  when I started to work, like “In The Heat of the Night” there was a guy on the ship who used to talk like that whose name was King. Things like that came to me. And, thank God, they stuck. So I was lucky that way.

CD:When did you see the Harry Baur movies?

RS:In New York City in the 50’s, there was this theatre called the Thalia. And during the summer they had a festival. For instance, you’d see Harry Baur in “Crime and Punishment” and ...

CD:Beethoven.

RS:Yeah. I always wanted to do the detective in “Crime and Punishment.” And you’d see Jean- Louis Barrault in “Children of Paradise,” which may be the best movie ever made.  You could tell who the actors were in the neighborhood, I mean the actors who were serious because by the end of the  30 days when the festival was over, all the actors, who were serious, their eyes were bright red from sitting every day watching two of these pictures at the Thalia. And that’s where I discovered Baur and Raimu. Jouvet was always a little too technical for me. Jean-Louis Barrault, Emil Jannings, all the great actors.

CD:You’re about the closest we ever came, to that kind of an actor in this country.

RS:I believe that an actor is supposed to create different human beings and I don’t understand these actors who say ‘That’s bad for my image,’ I say, the poor son-of -a- bitch, you only got one image, my heart bleeds for you. Also there’s more excitement - unless you are truly narcissistic - to play a leading man all the time in some of these things, must become pretty dull. I did things you weren’t supposed to do. I got some bad reviews sometimes ‘cause I would cry if  it was in a scene where my mother or daughter or somebody was killed. I don’t know what happened but by the time 1957 came somebody gave the okay, men could cry, I didn’t know that. So they thought that was a little too much, you know. I also must say that no matter how much we get involved in films, we’ve only scraped the surface of reality. I learned that when I sat in on a murder trial.

CD:Really.

RS:Remember Judge Liebowitz in New York? Sam Liebowitz, the great criminal lawyer, who became a judge. I won  the  Sylvania Award and I was so proud because the jury was made up of Raymond Louis, the designer, Judge Liebowitz, and people like that, who had nothing to do with show business. But extremely intelligent. So they gave me the award and Liebowitz, who was at the dinner, or whatever it was, said:‘You ever see a murder trial?’ I said: ‘No, I never saw a murder trial.’ And he says: ‘You want to see one?’ Funny conversation. I said: ‘I don’t know. I feel like I might be intruding.’ And he says: ‘You are an actor, you should see one.’ I said: “All right.” So for three days, I sat in on a murder trial and saw things we’ve never come near on the screen. The man on trial for his life fell asleep twice. And somebody told a joke, the defendant laughed hysterically. If I would have been the actor now and the director said: ‘I’ll tell you what you do here, fall asleep,’ I would have said: ‘I’m on trial for my life! How can I fall asleep?’ It was amazing. What does it is, when you are at a trial, you concentrate on every word. And, after 3 o’clock  if it’s a murder trial you triple concentrate. You could see Judge Liebowitz put his glasses on top of his head. He closed his eyes and he’s sitting with his hands over his eyes. I said to myself: ‘My God, the Judge is falling asleep at a murder trial!’ And all of a sudden he’d say: ‘Don’t try that in this court, Charlie, I did that 30 years ago,’ He was awake, but he was just trying to rest a little. He really got groggy. But  I learned things I never saw before.

CD:Any regrets about not doing  “Marty” on screen?

RS:Yeah. In one way. It all depends. Your beliefs are only as strong as you are on a particular day.

CD:You can always see your “Marty” at the Museum of Broadcasting.

RS:Yeah. What happened was that I went to see Hecht-Lancaster and they said: ‘We want you to do “Marty”. I was very pleased. I said: ‘All right.’ And they said: ‘You have to sign a seven-year contract.’  I said, ‘Well, I don’t know, I don’t believe in slavery . . . maybe for “Marty” I’ll do it. But who chooses my parts?’ They said: ‘We will.’ I said, ‘I reserve the right to make my own mistakes. I reserve the right to sleep with whom I please.’ And I lost it. The thing that saved me from getting depressed was two days afterwards, I got a phone call from Fred Zinneman, the director of “Oklahoma!,” who said: ‘You’re going to do Jud!’ Six or seven months had gone by since I did the test for Jud, I figured, ‘Forget it.’ But they were so busy trying to get the two leads.

CD:But you did “Waterfront” before that?

RS:Yeah. So then I had to do that and I was scared to death. I had to sing, which was funny, ‘cause I studied opera for two years. I have a very good dramatic tenor voice.

CD:So your daughter [Anna Steiger, an opera singer} may have picked up a gene from you.

RS:Thank God, she didn’t pick up the fact I have no ear. I studied for two years and  the pianist would stop when we were working and I’d say: ‘What’s the matter?’ And she’d say: ‘You changed key.’ So I became an actor. And my teachers went mad because I used to come in and always tease them. I’d sing and they said ‘That’s a B – B – B,’ and I said: ‘Is that good?’

CD:You did better than Brando did in “Guys and Dolls”.

RS:Oh, please! Please. I don’t want to get into him.

CD:I suspected that. So I’ll try and stay away from the usual . . .

RS:No, it isn’t that.

CD:Have you ever run into him through the years?

RS:Once – two years ago in Montreal  at the Chinese restaurant.. I got the Montreal Film Festival award. Lifetime Achievement – which is the polite way of saying you are on the way out. So, I did the award and they read a telegram from him. I haven’t seen him for 44 years. And, he was in town doing something.  Brando likes to show off his vocabulary – I guess he’s trying to get rid of the image of Kowalski - and he wrote this thing about I am a king, and the screen and the whole thing. I couldn’t believe him. You know the story about the taxi scene where he left me alone . . .

CD:He wouldn’t do the reversal for your close-up.

RS:He was gone, yeah. And acting is reacting. What the hell did I have to bounce off of? Anyway,  the next night I go to a Chinese restaurant in Montreal and who’s sitting at a table with a bunch of people but Marlon. And I’m saying to myself, ‘Well, I can’t be as shitty as he was. I gotta thank him for the telegram.’  I went over and  he got up and rubbed our heads together. I said: ‘Is that a Tahitian greeting or something?’ He was so glad to see me – which must have been bullshit but anyway I said: ‘Well, I’m sorry you sent the telegram.’ He said: ‘Why?’ I said: ‘Because I can’t talk so shitty about you anymore.’ He knew what I was talking about. And that was it. Isn’t that funny? Forty-four years later. But, I don’t think he likes himself because his weight gives him away. You like yourself, you don’t tempt death, like he does. Three hundred and some - forget it.

CD:I have a question about “The Big Knife”.

RS:What?

CD:You did a thing with your hands to protect yourself in ”The Big Knife,” the scene with Palance. I got a feeling this may not have been acting. Were you defending yourself for real?

RS:No, what happened was, we were doing the scene and I said, ‘You’re through,’ and all that. I had fun with that because I was only to say, ‘You’re through,’ but I said: ‘You’re through, your wife’s through, the paintings go,’ I just kept going. And as I turned, I heard him run towards me and I got scared so I turned and covered my head with my arms. We get along very well. He’s very professional.

CD:Would you be interested in doing “The Big Knife” again,  now that you’re the right age to play him?

RS:Oh, yeah. There’s a couple of pictures I wanna do again. One’s “The Big Knife”, one’s “The Sergeant”, and the other one is “Across the Bridge”.

CD: I loved that movie. And no one ever talks about it.

RS:You don’t see it over here that much.

CD:      I saw it in Canada.

RS:J. Arthur Rank.

CD:I think that’s the first film where you had a chance to do a dialect.

RS:Maybe, I don’t know.

CD:Graham Greene wrote the original story.

RS:Yeah, yeah.

CD:It was really good. Very compelling.

RS:And the guy who directed it couldn’t direct at all.

CD:Ken Annakin.

RS:Oh, Jesus. I directed it when I was in my scenes, you know. I coulda killed that son of a gun.

CD:His autobiography just came out.

RS:Who’s gonna read it?

CD:      Let’s talk about “The Harder They Fall”. Eli Rill worked on that and he told me you guys had a lot of fun teasing each other printing fake newspaper headlines.

RS:Mr. Bogart and I got along very well. He was a lovely man, and I got tipped off that he had a fake newspaper made which said: ‘Brando Back, Steiger Leaves Town,’ right? So, I went out and had a newspaper made. Now, I’m waiting in my dressing room, which was like a hotel – we were sitting like on a street corner and in he comes and says, ‘I got something for you, I got something for you.’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he starts to hand me his paper, and out of my bathrobe I pulled my paper and I give it to him, and mine says, ‘Steiger Back, Bogart Suicide.’ He laughed. But, I’ll tell you how stupid I was, I was shooting one day and he came down through the gate and I said, ‘What are you doing here – you got work to do,’ and he said, ‘I gotta do some close-ups,’ and I said, ‘What?,’ and he said, ‘My eyes are watering.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ Two weeks later, when he died, I said to myself, ‘What a jackass you were.’ This man was in pain. And his eyes watered. But he was there at nine and he left at six and he never said – the only thing is, he would scream at the writer, ‘This kid’s killin’ me!’ And I said to him, ‘Bogie, Mr. Bogart, I’ll exchange parts with you.’ And he said, ‘Nah, it’s got nothing to do with you, it’s got to do with the writing.’ Of course, he could have done what a lot of big stars – like Joan Crawford and them. You would do a two shot and there would be a ¾ shot on you and there’s a full close-up shot on them. And he never did that. He was wonderful.

CD:He used to rib all of you guys in The Studio about ‘internalizing’.

RS:Oh, yeah.

CD:One day, he ‘found a moment’ in a scene and somebody presented him with the headline: ‘World Shocked, Bogart Internalizes.’

RS:Oh, yeah. I remember once we did one scene and I’m talking to Bogart and behind him is the gym with the big bag. And there was an actor on the screen who was always trying to get attention in the scene. And he hits the big bag, you know, the big long bag, and it’s swinging back and forth and back of Bogart and I said, ‘Wait, hold it, wait a minute.’ He said, ‘What’s the matter,’ and I said, ‘This guy hit the bag and it’s going back and forth and it’s a bit distracting.’ He was nice.

CD:You did “The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell” for Otto Preminger.

RS:That was funny because everyone said: ‘Oh, my God. Steiger’s going to work with Preminger. They’ll kill each other.’ So I came to work and we got along so well that if I went and brushed my hair, he’d say:‘You going to do a close-up?’ and I said, ‘Otto, I’m just brushing my hair.’ And the point was very simple. If you were professional, he had great respect for you. It’s the one’s who weren’t that started the stories about him. Lovely man.

CD:Gary Cooper?

RS:I think he was very frightened at that time because he was getting older. I think he felt his power was fading. And he was one of the sweetest men you ever met in your life, this man. I remember the picture was finished and they asked Cooper to do a scene from the picture on the Ed Sullivan Show. I don’t think Cooper had ever acted on a stage before in his life. And he was scared to death. But, he said: ‘I’ll do it if Rod does it.’ So, I said, ‘Sure.’ We did the scene where I cross-examine him. And he got through it. Twice I had to say: ‘Now, listen to me, Colonel.’ But he did very well and I never in my life saw before, perspiration was dripping off his cuffs of his jacket. You couldn’t see it, but I could. But he did it. I liked him a great deal. I liked Bogart a great deal, too. Very nice people.

CD: “Cry Terror! “ That was an interesting film in that everything was shot on location,. No studio interiors at all.

RS:It was directed by Andrew Stone, who was so stubborn. In the first place, there are very few directors I’ve ever worked with who talk about the scene – they talk about the shot. A good director can help an actor that’s in trouble. If he can’t, he’s not a good director. I don’t care if he knows every lens in the business. If you don’t believe who’s talking, your budget means nothing. You’ve got a twenty million dollar budget we’re shooting and if you don’t believe it, it becomes a disaster. Anyway, we’re shooting  in the subway. And Inger Stevens - wherever she is, may she have fun - we’re down there and I’m down by the tracks – the current’s been turned off, where the train comes. And all of a sudden there’s a man on the crew who has an epileptic fit. And his brother, who works on the crew, put a pencil under his tongue and got him out. Somebody else fainted and somebody else got very tired. And what it was, was this idiot had put the generator down in the subway and carbon monoxide was being pumped out by the hour and finally began to get to people. Inger Stevens came running toward me in the scene and when she passed camera, she passed out and I caught her. And I said, ‘That’s it, Andy.’ And, we went upstairs. There’s three ambulances, two fire engines, two police cars and people on stretchers and this idiot said, ‘Let’s do one more shot.’

CD:Where did “Rashomon” fit in to all of this?

RS:I don’t know, 1957. There again I did something you couldn’t see every day. We had a pretty good run, we ran about seven months for a play that serious.

CD:Akim Tamiroff and Oscar Homolka were in it with you. What a combo!

RS:Oscar Homolka was really terrible. Always he was saying, ‘Akim, you, silly ass, you.’ And, when they did the scene, the three guys by the gate, he had this piece of business – I don’t know where Peter Glenville was, as the director, because he’s sitting there . . . and I said, ‘That’s a little upstaging,’ And he had a little stage fight with Akim. And one night, Akim bit his ear and oh, he came off stage, you should have heard him – Oscar. And he was a bit of a sadist, really. He said:  ‘I understand you like paintings,’ and I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘You come. I show you some paintings.’ I go to his apartment and there’s Pissaro, Cezanne, all the great painters. He was a gorgeous looking guy when he was young. He was a matinee idol in Europe and he had all these paintings.

CD:Speaking of paintings, Edward G. Robinson was your co-star in “Seven Thieves”.

RS:Oh, well, that’s a different thing.  We worked with Henry  Hathaway, who had a habit. He’d pick on some of the small people in the crew, or something like that, and scream at them. Before the picture, he’s all charm – the nicest guy in the world. So, Edward G. Robinson comes to me and says, ‘I don’t know what to do,’ and I said, ‘What do you mean, Mr. Robinson?’ Anybody who’s got twenty years in this business I call Mister. ‘Well, he’s upsetting me. I’m losing my concentration. This man’s screaming.’ I said, ‘Tell him. Tell him.’ Well, Edward G. didn’t do anything right away. But, we’re doing a scene and when we finish it I said, ‘I’d like to do another take,’ and I hear, ‘Oh, of course,’ then,under his breath, ‘The goddamn people from the Actor’s Studio.’ And I screamed out, you could hear me in the Coliseum in Rome: ‘Don’t fuck with me, Henry!’ He went white. I said: ‘You got something to say, you say it to me!’ And then I said: ‘Mr. Robinson, by God, you are a great star – for years.’ Two days later he stopped everything – Robinson – and said: ‘Henry, you and I have been doing this stuff for a long time and I’ve always been happy to have you as a friend. But I don’t know what happens when you work, but you have been picking on people who can’t fight back and you have brought a tension on the set that interferes with everybody’s work. And you’ve got to stop that.’ So he was good for about three days and then... you know.

CD:“Al Capone”.

RS:I didn’t want to do “Al Capone”. I read the script, which wasn’t that good and said: ‘I don’t want to do it.’ They said: ‘We’ll give you two dollars, give you three dollars, give you four dollars, five dollars, six dollars.’ I said: ‘You don’t understand. I don’t like him.’ They said: ‘Will you come in and talk to us at least?’ I said, ‘All right.’ So I go in and said: ‘Look, I don’t like this man. I can feel nothing towards him. I just don’t want to do it. And the script – it’s not very good.’ Now I have a funny way of living and challenge has a lot to do with it. I love to get a good challenge. So as I say that, one of the people in the office says: ‘Well, if you don’t like it, why don’t you rewrite it?’ You don’t say that to Wyatt Earp, right? You don’t do that. I said: ‘Give me the fucking script.’ I went home, rewrote it for a month. I came in with a cast list, Nicky Persoff, all these people they had never heard of. – Marty Balsam, people from The Actor’s Studio. And the guy couldn’t direct.

CD:Nothing of Orson Welles had rubbed off on him.

RS:Huh?

CD:Richard Wilson had been Orson Welles’ associate.

RS:His big thing was Esther William pictures, or something. And they got him for “Al Capone”. That shows you how much they knew. Anyway, we did it together, all of us.  I’ve done a few films, a lot of them that way. . . But, anyway, now I go back and I say: ‘I still don’t want to do it.’ Then they said: ‘Come on.’ I said: ‘No.’ Then I get hit with this idea. I said: ‘I want ten days rehearsal.’ Unheard of in Hollywood.

CD:For a ‘B’ movie, absolutely.

RS:Yeah – ten days rehearsal. They said: ‘With nothing on the screen?’ Forget it!’ I said: ‘Okay, forget it.’ So I’m back at my little house here in Malibu and I’ve forgotten about it. The phone rings and the producer said: ‘We’ll give you seven.’ I said to him: ‘We’ve been playing poker here and you called my bluff. Let’s see what the hell happens.’ And I got seven days rehearsal and that helped rehearsal come into movies in Hollywood. And I remember the real payoff was, I was doing a scene and Fay Spain, who played the woman I loved, who was the wife of a man I killed,  was trying to get me to admit I killed him. And, Al Capone was very bright. He’s not going to tell the woman he wants to be in bed with he killed her husband. And, in the script he does. I said: ‘Wait. No way. It’s got to happen through something – character weakness or something. I’ll tell you what. Give me a tape recorder and leave Fay and I in a room alone, and we’ll see what happens.” ‘Cause in the scene she asks me. And, we got into the room and I said: ‘You keep asking me.’ I had the tape recorder on. And she  kept asking and I finally yelled: ‘Yes, I did it!’ He lost his temper. So we came in and we shot it. That’s how you should do movies anyway.

to be continued......

in the next installment of “paid to dream”, rod Steiger talks about david lean, sidney lumet, lee j. cobb, elia kazan, arthur miller, kim stanley, james lipton and the strasbergs.

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