Another Really Odd Couple

I had been at Paramount Studios only a few weeks when I received a call one morning from Sergeant Grass of the LAPD.  It was serious.  My neighbors were accusing me of unthinkably gross public indecency.  And I thought they were nice.  What made them turn vicious?  Oh, I caused a bit of flooding in the downstairs apartment once, but it really wasn't my fault.  Sali didn't warn me about the shower.  She was a friend who graciously allowed me to room with her when I went to work for Garry Marshall.  Sali was the personal assistant to Connie Stevens, and went to Las Vegas with her boss for a memorable meeting with Elvis right after I moved in.

Now, as I listened to the charges against me, all I wanted was to escape on a bus and head back home to San Francisco.  My face burned with embarrassment, my heart thumped, and breakfast threatened a return engagement.  Sergeant Grass used words I didn't know--even after an education at UC Berkeley--to describe obscene acts I couldn't imagine, but supposedly performed nightly in a parked car near Sali's apartment building.

I was innocent, of course, but how could I prove it?  Sergeant Grass claimed there were several witnesses who saw everything. Making my case wouldn't be easy, especially since I was trembling too hard to speak.

And there was a problem.

It was true that Tony Randall drove me home every night and, yes, he often parked the car and we talked for a while.  Talked.  That was all.  We discussed life, politics, and "Odd Couple."  One night he handed me a copy of the play and asked me to read it.

The next evening I was ready for him.  That was a Friday, when the cast and staff gathered for a catered pre-show dinner.  Tony and I went to the corner table where we generally sat and talked in private while we ate before the filming.  Tony asked what I thought of the play.

Still under the pernicious influence of University-speak, I babbled that the pervasive silliness of the show precluded an examination of human incompatibility which I believed was Neil Simon's original intention.

Jerry Belson, who was Garry Marshall's partner, but rarely participated in the show, happened to be at the dinner that evening, and joined Tony and me at our table.

"Mara just said the most interesting thing," Tony reported.  "She thinks we've lost sight of what the play was about, and..."

That was all Jerry needed to hear.  He stood abruptly, flung his napkin on the table, and delivered a tirade about the difficulties of doing a weekly show, as opposed to the ease of writing without a schedule or deadline.  And given the obstacles they faced, he thought they did a pretty good job.  Then he stormed out, leaving his dinner behind.  I normally have a big appetite, and hate to see food wasted, but somehow I had lost my desire to eat.  Jerry's plate went untouched.

Tony, bewildered by the spectacle of a producer unappreciative of criticism, gave me his innocent little boy look.

"Gosh, Mara," he said.  "I hope I didn't get you in trouble."

Amazingly, he didn't but I was in trouble now.  Sergeant Grass was about to haul me down to the station and charge me with crimes I was much too naïve and inhibited to ever imagine, let alone commit.

A pitiful gasp or gurgle, or involuntary cry, triggered laughter.  Yes, Sergeant Grass was laughing at me.

"I really had you going, didn't I?" he chortled.

It was no longer the stern law-and-order officer, appalled by my disreputable behavior; it was that schoolboy prankster who lurked inside Tony Randall and frequently unleashed himself on unsuspecting victims.  He was never intentionally cruel; his antics gave him the attention he craved, and relieved the tension of a tightly-wound life.  His playfulness allowed him to dispel an inner sadness by laughing, even though it was never the genuine, easy laughter he envied in others.

Jack Klugman once commented that everyone thought Tony is so sophisticated "because he reads and loves opera," but really, "he's just a kid."

A kid, yes, but not just a kid.  The sophistication was there, too.  On an excursion to an art exhibit in New York--where the museum director emerged to personally thank Tony for his support and fundraising--we wandered into a ghastly world of human torment.  On first sight, my instinct had been to flee.  I saw despair and desperation as hands reached out of smokestacks and bodies lay contorted on crooked, cracking streets.  The artist--or perpetrator--is now forgotten (or mercifully expunged from my memory,) but the images of anguish remain.  And irritate me still.

Tony felt exhilarated.  His professorial lecture on the cultural implications of the worldwide anti-industrialization movement was impressive.  And also irritated me.  I feel insulted with artists resort to hideous depiction of the horrors of life, of man's inhumanity to man, because they feel the need to teach us that suffering exists.  If we don't know that already, it's unlikely that a third-rate art exhibit will do that.

Tony saw things differently.  As an actor, he wanted to believe that art had the power to change people; make them better.  He felt he had that power.  Even if it often took the form of acting like a particularly goofy frat boy.

If Burt Reynolds only knew that...

But that's for another post, another day.