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FILM COMMENT
January / February 2004
CRACKED ACTOR
Grover Lewis interviews Timothy Carey, one of Hollywood's most feared - and fired - character actors of all time
Left: Poor White Trash
Grover Lewis died on April 16, 1995, before he could complete this portrait-interview of Timothy Carey for Film Comment. Goodbye, If You Call That Gone - the memoir he had contracted for the previous year - was also left unfinished. During his career as a freelance writer, Lewis wrote on film and popular culture for publications such as The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and The Los Angeles Times. His reporting from the set of The Last Picture Show, and his portraits of Robert Mitchum, Aldo Ray, and Lash LaRue, are legendary and can be found in his out-of-print collected journalism, Academy All the Way.
But Grover had completed the introduction to the piece, and the Q & A has been shaped and ordered according to his notes. I drove with him to El Monte for his third encounter with Carey, when the actor locked us up in his TV room and forced us to watch his pilot for Tweetâs Ladies of Pasadena in its excruciatingly full-length splendor. Once released, Grover just mumbled to Carey, ãNot your strongest suit. . .ä
Timothy Carey passed away on May 11, 1994, the birthday of his hero, Salvador Dalí. - Philippe Garnier
The work of certain low-billed jesters, sidekicks, and tough guys runs through movie history like the veins in a granite cliff. They're fond and familiar figures in our collective dreamscape - recognizably real or almost real people - but their professional paths are rough, dehumanizing trudges, even at the upper end. Supporting actors leave few footprints on Hollywood Boulevard. Like everybody else in the business, they hunger for dignity, status, accolades, and financial security. Always angling for one more credit, one last score, they usually settle for less tangible scraps of bounty, and in time - cloutless and stuck fast in subcelebrity - they tend to drink too much, or take drugs, or fall off golf carts, or just get too old to remember their lines. Sometimes they end up so ornery and embittered they turn their capacity for low-jinks or menace inward, and then there's trouble in Angel City.
Consider Timothy Agoglia Carey, a rough-hewn, riveting beastie who, starting in the heyday of noir, slouched his way toward some backlot Bethlehem. He first hit a public nerve as a slurry-voiced gunsel in André de Toth's B-grade sleeper Crime Wave (54) and was last seen in a trifling part in the trifle Echo Park (86). In between he appeared in nearly four dozen films, ranging from the sublime - a pair of Stanley Kubrick's earlier and arguably best features - to such artsy turkeys as John Cassavetes The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (76).
Usually restricted to playing loathsome genre heavies, Carey's strongest performances offer the kind of mixed signals associated not so much with art or craft as with pathology or the twisted mysteries of DNA. Paralleling his psycho roles, Carey's dark personal legend encompasses 40 years of dedicated, or perhaps just helpless, eccentricity - zany behavior shading off into the macabre. Since the era of The Killing (56), Paths of Glory (57), Kazan's East of Eden (55), and Brando's One-Eyed Jacks (61), he'd hung in my mind as one of the first Method character actors, embodying all the follies and fevers of that holy-roller theatrical regimen. Even in throwaway parts - opposite The Monkees in Head (68), for Chrissake - you could look into his hooded, jittery eyes and sense real danger. Prankster or madman? Crusader or wise guy? The choice was hard to make when, in the dog days of August 1992, Carey materialized after almost a decade off-screen for an evening of manic schtick and pitiless self-revelation at the Nuart Theatre in West L.A.
A program highlight was a screening of The World's Greatest Sinner, possibly the most bizarre vanity-cum-auteur vehicle on record (see sidebar). The 77-minute black-and-white feature credits Carey as star, writer, producer, director, and distributor. He plays a bored insurance salesman who changes his name to God, develops a youth following and a nasty lust for power, and winds up believing his own con. In the end, he blasphemously challenges the heavenly powers and, I think, realizes the enormity of his hubris. (Make that His hubris.)
Finally released in 1964, the picture never found its rightful place in the grind houses and drive-ins of the period, where Carey was at the time being hissed by millions in the exploitation hits Mermaids of Tiburon (a.k.a. Aqua Sex) (62) and Poor White Trash (61). This one-night-only screening was the fifth commercial play date for Carey's brainchild. At the intermission, the long-legged Carey, wearing his sparkly Sinner getup, loped to the stage, his big-time weirdo persona ingrained and ageless. His voice was like a meat grinder full of nails. He began speaking about the joys of public farting. In a sort of jive disquisition, he cited Salvador Dalí on the benefits of breaking wind as a social activity. "Me, I fart loud - I can't be a hypocrite. I get these parts, but I never get to play 'em because I fart out loud. Why can't we all fart together ? Let thy arse make wind!"
Yikes. The hamola-as-radical-sage metamorphosing into the Guru of Bodily Functions. The implications were not slow to sink in that Carey had literally farted his career away. Nervous laughter ran through the theater as I shifted uneasily in my seat. Carey spritzed on, telling fart jokes, basically - potty-mouth stuff. He gibbered in baby talk, made faces, sang off-key, declaimed on his back, chanted against Hollywood's "rotten money culture," and ended the monologue by lifting his leg and imitating the sound of a wicked blast. It was a spacey gag that went on too long - half-funny, half-cracked.
Applause at the end faded quickly. Carey took up a position in the lobby, wearing a fixed smile, ready to sign autographs. But the audience filed silently past him. I walked by close enough to see that he believed his own blather. You could tell he was somewhat twisted in the melon, but not plain gaga - a primitive artist and a primitive human.
Back in the Fifties and Sixties, I'd gone to movies because Jack Elam was in them, or Neville Brand - or Timothy Carey. Perhaps only the camera truly loved these kinds of mavericks and marginals, but I'd always regarded the skull-faced Carey as one of the quintessential hard-boiled actors, and I now found myself savoring his mix of gaucherie and ballsiness in taking on, among others, the sensitivity police of the Nineties. As he held his smile and we made passing eye contact, I thought I'd like to pick his lock. For hours afterward, I wondered at Carey's cockeyed grace in handling the crowd's rejection, and I dreamed about him that night in his matchless performances - the condemned soldier who kills a cockroach in Paths of Glory, the feral assassin who fondles a puppy and talks mayhem with Sterling Hayden in The Killing.
Setting up an appointment with Carey was tricky. He is, for one thing, a recluse. On the other hand, as a benched performer, he craves attention. Finally, Romeo Carey, the actor's [then] 32-year-old filmmaker son, smoothed the path for a series of encounters at the modest Carey family bungalow in the L.A. suburb of El Monte, not far from the Santa Anita racetrack. The neighborhood, quiet and working class, seemed far in psychic miles from Hollywood.
I'll say it was a gas meeting Carey and get that out of the way. The character and the actor meshed seamlessly, and he responded to my interest like somebody who'd been in solitary and couldn't stop talking once he started. If he was often over-the-top in his comments, he also seemed painfully insecure, even as his long index finger jabbed the air. He struck me as a man of high ideals, however curious - at once a show-off and a fragile dreamer. He answered my questions perched on a mock throne in his cluttered backyard studio, once again wearing his glittery Sinner costume. To add to the general bizarrerie, Romeo Carey filmed portions of the proceedings for a documentary-in-progress. - G.L.
Are you generally known around the industry as a farter?
Yeah, well, there are two responses, pro and con. Some take it as a joke, and others call me gross. I met a producer - Roderick Taylor, who did some sci-fi movies at Universal and was a former rock 'n' roll celebrity or something - and I did a strong report in front of him and his co-producer. And I have a really loud intestine, see. You know what they did? Ran out of the studio! It was incredible. Sometimes even John [Cassavetes] would be sort of embarrassed, like this one time when I let out two big, double-barreled blasts in his office at the Burbank studio. "Shhh, Tim!" And his face turned all red, because of the secretaries there, and it was - I dunno - just byootiful to look at him. I felt more than close to John - he was my hero. But the funny thing was, he told me, "Tim, you're my hero." I did Minnie and Moskowitz [71] and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie with him. The first one was around the same time as The Godfather. They wanted me for that and Cassavetes said I had to do it, but I said, no, I'd rather work with you. He was such a genius, such a creative guy. But he was so real, and he had time for everybody. He also put up most of the money for a TV pilot I did, Tweet's Ladies of Pasadena. The character Tweet Twig looked like a canary who was run over by a lawnmower - shredded Tweet, a village-idiot guy who always gums up everything. Every episode was going to show Tweet on a new job because he got fired from the last one. The little old ladies were the kind who knit and garden. Everybody loved the combination except the network people who could help me, and they just walked out. I shot thousands and thousands of feet of film, and I spent all of Cassavetes's money, all of my own money. I kept working on it up until about 1981 or '82, and it was like life, you know. We slip, we bleed. Cassavetes taught me that. The truth is, I never really cared about conventional success. I was probably fired more than any other actor in Hollywood.
