Cinema: Triumph of a One-Man Trio

Director Billy Wilder once ecstatically claimed that Walter Matthau “could play anything from Rhett Butler to Scarlett O’Hara.” For more than a decade Matthau was as unpredictable as his facial expressions: an adamant sheriff in Lonely Are the Brave, a psychopathic killer in Charade, an ambulance chaser in The Fortune Cookie, the libidinous suburban husband in A Guide for the Married Man. Of late, his roles have yielded an amusing but unvarying character: the rumpled crank whose shpeesh shoundsh ash if it wash making itsh way around a shigar. Plaza Suite happily puts him in reverse. In Arthur Hiller’s rigid transcription of Neil Simon’s Broadway one-acters set in Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, Matthau essays not one part but three. Each is unique, all are achingly comic.

In the curtain raiser, fluttery Karen Nash (Maureen Stapleton) books a suite, trying to rekindle the lust hopes of her 23-year-old marriage. But saturnine Sam Nash proves as remote as room service. The reason, Karen correctly deduces, is Sam’s office fixture, a Miss McCormack. It is not only the affair that grieves the wronged wife, it is the businessman’s lack of enterprise. “Everyone cheats with their secretaries,” she wails. “I expected something better from my husband!” But beneath the holy acrimony are wounding truths. Successful Sam is no longer struggling; he wants the arrivé’s most inaccessible prize: a destination. His plaint, “I just want to do it all over again,” is a caricatured truth on the verge of tragedy. But, as always, Simon pulls back when the laughter stops. His comic mask seems to hide not wisdom but embarrassment.

In the second playlet Matthau is a case of acute satyriasis billed as Jesse Kiplinger, Famous Hollywood Producer. When his New York schedule frees him from 2 to 4 p.m., Jesse books overcoy Muriel (Barbara Harris). He had stolen her maidenhood 17 years earlier in suburbia; now he wants to return to the crime, if not the scene. Acting under an assumed mane, the red-wigged Matthau is a Narcissus whose self-love is contagious. But Muriel is immune until Jesse discovers the secret: big names. Dropping them like rose petals, he strews the path to the bedroom…Frank Sinatra…Paul Newman…Troy Donahue…Lee Marvin…

The movie’s zenith is reached in the closer. A florid father, despite misspelled names on matchbooks and overcharging musicians, is trying to give Daughter Mimsey a first-class wedding. Mimsey gives him a first-class crisis instead: she refuses to come out of the bathroom and goto the altar. As the afternoon degenerates, the bridled father’s assaults on the bathroom door leave him and his cutaway looking like Salvation Army rejects. His face a frieze of capillaries, Matthau ultimately makes King Lear seem a whining serf.

All three skits are only mildly illuminating front-line communiqués from the sexual wars. But when Simon is writing them and Matthau reading them, substance seems almost beside the point. This has been a drab year for domestic comedy; in the valley of the bland, the one-joke man is king.

Neil Simon notwithstanding, Walter Matthau employed Matthau Method Acting in defining the nuances of the three character portraits he puts on display in Plaza Suite: he developed his own miniature biographies for them. In a benign, Lower East Side growl that reaches the ear about midway between W.C. Fields and a gramophone winding down, Matthau says: “That first guy now, he had a Jewish father and an Italian mother, grew up poor and got rich in the garment business. The second guy is half Jewish and half German, grew up in Tenafly, N.J. The third guy, he was raised over on Tenth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen. Worked on the docks, eventually got a good job in the union and saved a lot of money for his daughter’s wedding. He’s Irish, German and Swedish.”

Matthau will settle for the life he has made for himself. Twenty-five years ago he was a 50¢-a-night extra in Yiddish theater; at age 50, he now commands $500,000 a picture and 10% of the gross. There is little doubt among those who have worked with him that he is worth the price. Says Jack Lemmon, who has twice co-starred with Matthau and just finished directing him in a new film, Kotch: “He’s the best actor I’ve ever worked with.” The trade papers have declared him one of the ten top box office stars. “I’m Number 10,” Matthau announces with a mixture of ego and irony. “Right under Barbra Streisand. Can you imagine being under Barbra Streisand? Get me a bag, I may throw up.”

The Plutonium. He is about as likely a candidate for superstardom as the neighborhood delicatessen man. He walks with a combination of soft shoe and shamble, and his shifting, slouching posture makes him look like a question mark with an identity crisis. The clothes, though subdued and expensive, lose the contest to the walk and the slouch: he seems the part he played—Oscar, the dilapidated sportswriter in The Odd Couple. “Every actor looks all his life for a part that will combine his talents with his personality,” Matthau says. “The Odd Couple was mine. That was the plutonium I needed. It all started happening after that.”

It almost stopped not long afterward. Matthau went from Broadway to a role in Billy Wilder’s The Fortune Cookie and from there into a massive heart attack at the age of 45. He was out of action for almost half a year, but returned to finish the picture. He won an Oscar for it: “They wanted to give me something for all my long years of achievement before I died.”

Matthau was a wildly enthusiastic gambler, but he is hedging the action a little since the heart attack. Lemmon remembers that “if you couldn’t find Walter on the set you looked in the phone booth. He’d be placing a bet.” He still visits the track for some immodest but not extravagant betting (he is part owner of nine race horses), and limits himself to an occasional game of cards. It is a high limit, however; he recently took $1,300 from Polly Bergen in a single hand of poker. To keep in decent shape, he runs five miles a day on the beach near his home in Pacific Palisades. Under the watchful eye of his wife Carol, he keeps his weight at about 180, munching on fruit and raw vegetables. He no longer smokes; friends say they have seen him walk up to strangers and deliver a lengthy and vehement antismoking lecture. Now he jokes about the heart attack, telling shaggy thrombosis stories which find him experiencing the first stabbing pain, snapping his fingers fatalistically and saying, “Shucks, it’s a little coronary.”

Attila the Hun. He professes to have more serious concerns. Elaine May, for one. “Have you ever worked for Attila the Hun?” he asks with feigned hurt. “Martin Bormann? Rudolf Hess? A New Leaf was two months late, two million bucks over budget, and when Paramount asked her why, she said ‘It’s all on account of Matthau. He keeps trying to grab me, and by the time he finally succeeds it’s 4 o’clock and too late to do any work.’ Now I’ll admit I was certainly interested in grabbing Elaine, but making that the reason for the picture going so far over…”

Then there are the critics, a few of whom have experienced something less than rapture over a few recent Matthau performances. He retaliates with indignant but anonymous letters, condemning their shabby prose and shopworn aesthetics. When one critic dismissed him as “a good beer and undershirt comedian,” Matthau fired off a reply saying “that’s like calling Albert Einstein a good pinochle player.”

Ultimate Luxury. Playwrights are not immune from the Matthau missives. When Neil Simon declined to change a line in The Odd Couple about doubleheaders that particularly bothered Matthau, the actor took to his typewriter and sent Simon a letter, signing it with the phony name of a “professor” at the University of Berlin. The letter took pedantic but persuasive exception to the line that had bugged Matthau. Impressed, Simon cut it out.

Matthau also allows himself a hint of self-mockery, the ultimate luxury of the secure man. He even pretends to be worried about work. “I figure I can go for a year and a half without a job, then I hit the unemployment line and it’s all over,” he says. In fact, he has just rejected one offer at his usual fee because he does not like the script and is haggling over a second assignment. “Let’s face it, I really like all this money,” he says. “It looks like I’ve been moving toward it all my life.” ∙Stefan Kanfer