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FILM COMMENT
January /February 2004
CRACKED ACTOR:
CONTINUATION
Grover Lewis interviews Timothy Carey, one of Hollywood's most feared - and fired - character actors of all time
Left: Poor White Trash
I'm still trying to digest the fact that you passed up a role in The Godfather.
I was offered a spot in both The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. To play Luca Brazzi in the first one, and the Mafioso boss who gets killed on the stairs at the opening of the second one. But I didn't do either show, because if I had, I woulda been just like any other actor - out for the money. Francis wanted me on the show, but I kept saying no. To get out of going to New York, I kept saying I wanted more money, and they got tired of it, I guess. Francis asked me to do The Conversation, and when I signed for it, [co-producer Fred] Roos wanted it in the contract that I wouldn't get paid for the dubbing. I said, "Well, you're going to have to mow my lawn then." I made them put in a clause where he had to mow my yard. Then I caught a little cold during rehearsals with Gene Hackman, and Roos said to Coppola, "Let's get another actor." They cast Allen Garfield in the part.
What kept you out of Godfather Part II?
I went to talk to Francis at Paramount. I already had the part, but I still wanted to do a scene. Francis and his pals were sitting around his office and I brought a box of cannolis and Italian pastries as gifts. I said, "I brought you this gift to pay respect to my friends," and I reached down into those dripping cannolis and pulled out a gun - boom boom! - and blew the hell out of all of them. And then I shot myself and staggered over and fell on Roos's desk - all the contracts went flying. And Coppola grabbed my blank gun and shot me back - bang bang! - like a kid. It was byootiful - I took 'em completely by surprise. Francis was stunned, "How much do you want?" But Roos didn't like it, so he went to work and influenced Coppola against me.
One guy, a little guy, was sitting there watching everything. A young kid with a camera, but he wasn't filming. He just sat there with a mean, kind of miserly . . . I could tell he was afraid by the lines on his face. Like he needed two inches of Chinese tonic. It was Martin Scorsese, somebody said.
It sounds as if you were hard to get along with.
Yeah, but . . . not really. Not to a director who knows me. Not to Stanley Kubrick, say. I don't think Coppola and me will ever get together, because I'd be doing my own sort of thing, and I'm always trying to suggest little bits, you know. That was one of the things that kept a lot of directors from working with me.
It's amazing how people get so afraid and weak. I was up for a big part in Bonnie and Clyde, but Arthur Penn took one look at me and almost fainted in my arms. He'd heard that I'd gotten into a punch-out with Elia Kazan on East of Eden. Which wasn't true. But because of the garbled story and Penn's weakness, I didn't get the part. The same with Stephen Frears years later on The Grifters - weakness. The same with Harvey Keitel's weakness on Reservoir Dogs. Tarantino brought me in to read. He'd done a terrific script with my name on the top - inspiration by Timothy Carey. Harvey Keitel didn't want me on the show. He was afraid - I could tell when I walked in. He had the right to say yea or nay to any actor. Larry Tierney got the part. Larry's a good friend of mine, and he called me up later and kind of apologized.
No offense, Tim, but did you ever drink a lot or use drugs?
No, I'm a teetotaler. I never even smoked. People were always offering me grass or cocaine. I got my own cocaine - my own personality. i am cocaine. What do I need that stuff for?
So, basically, you didn't have any vices at all?
Oh, yeah - I loved gambling and women. I used to live in Watts and go with black women all the time.
All I have to go on is a list of your pictures and some wild stories I've heard around town. For instance, did you once tie up Otto Preminger in his office to get a role?
False.
. . . throw a snake into a closet where Ray Dennis Steckler was loading a camera, on the shoot of The World's Greatest Sinner?
Yeah, well, that's what he claimed.
And there's this infamous screening of Sinner at Universal, where you stood by the door with a baseball bat and wouldn't let the executives out.
Naw, that's one of the stories Cassavetes loved to tell, but we didn't even screen the picture. We were up there to discuss a project of mine that John was promoting, a TV thing called "A.L.," which is L.A. in reverse. But, no, I don't use tactics like that. But my menace was my idea. I said, "When I work, nobody sits down and relaxes." Cassavetes said it scared Ned Tannen. He and Danny Selznick were the ones who were there at the meeting.
Who else did you have trouble with?
With Marlon on The Wild One [53]. When I shook up a bottle of beer and let the foam go into his face, he didn't like that. But he would be up-front about it. When I worked with him on One-Eyed Jacks, he told me, "I hope you're not going to throw any more beer at me." Marlon was great, but Karl Malden was kind of skittish. In our scene when he kicked me, he kicked me a lot, so I said, "Marlon, if this guy kicks me again I'm gonna clobber him." But he kept doing it. He had a touch of Richard Widmark in him. Widmark stomped me bad in a Western we made in Arizona, The Last Wagon [56]. He stomped me while I was down, kept going at it for five minutes, just because I reacted when he mock-stabbed me in the scene. He apologized later, but I wouldn't accept it.
So you had a lot of trouble with other actors.
A few of them didn't like what I was doing, yeah. I did a show with Bob Ryan once - he was great, but he wouldn't allow a lot of takes. "This is it," he'd say. Adolphe Menjou didn't care much for me, either. He was a man of the old school, and when we were in Munich shooting Paths of Glory, he thought I'd disgraced the company with my behavior. I had a toy monkey with me, and I was walking around with holes in my shoes.
James Harris, the producer, told me you embarrassed the crew, that the Germans wanted to throw the whole company out of the country.
Harris fired me. He made sure I'd done all my scenes, then fired me the next day. Emile Meyer, the guy playing the priest when we are being executed, also didn't like me. He wanted to punch me because in my death scene I was biting his arm, saying, "I don't wanna die, I don't wanna die" [laughs]. Kubrick pulled me aside and said [menacing whisper], "Make it good, Tim. Kirk doesn't like it." When he fired me, Harris said, "You've already stolen all the scenes!"
You got fired from your first job, didn't you?
That's right. Billy Wilder fired me from Ace in the Hole [51]. I'd just gotten out of drama school in New York, and I'd gone to California, where they threw me out of Columbia Studios. So on my way back, I stopped to look up Wilder in New Mexico, where he was shooting. I said, "Mr. Wilder, I'm here, I'm Timothy Carey, I studied the Stanislawski method." He said, "Ja, okay, you go sign up, tell them I sent you." So I was in the show, playing one of the workers trying to dig the fellow out of the hole. And I'm watching the camera, angling to get myself in a full shot. I wanted to be in that scene so much I stood in front of Kirk Douglas. I wanted to be seen by the guys back in Brooklyn, you know. But all of a sudden someone taps me on the shoulder. "The director doesn't want you anymore." He gave me five vouchers, each worth $7.50. First show I worked on, first show I got fired from.
I heard about a Clark Gable show shooting in Durango, Colorado, so I started hitchhiking. That was Across the Wide Missouri [51], and I went right up to Gable's trailer. He at first took me for the guy playing the other lead. When he realized his mistake, he didn't talk to me again. I played a dead man with my face down in the water. They made a big thing of it in Brooklyn.
Looking back, is there anything you would have done different?
[Long pause.] I wouldn't conceal my farts. I wouldn't change anything. I've always wanted to do things my own way. Same with the play I've been writing for some years now, The Insect Trainer [about a man tried for murder after farting on a woman, more or less based on the French entertainer Le Petomane (a.k.a. The Fartomaniac). The play, funded in part by Martin Scorsese, was produced by Romeo Carey and premiered at the Heliotrope Theater in Los Angeles on May 30, 1996]. I know it's not gonna make it. Somebody else said that, too . . . . But that's the kind of thing I like - something that reaches out.
The University of Texas Press will publish Splendor in the Short Grass, an anthology of Grover Lewis's writing, in the spring of 2005.
© 2004 by Grover and Rae Lewis
