Steamrollered to Stardom

by Maggie Paley

How does it feel to stand in smoking hot tar, wired for sound, your feet wrapped in asbestos under your socks, while a steamroller bears down on you? For Elliott Gould, one of the few people to whom it’s ever happened, the experience was pleasant. It was all in a morning’s work, just a small sequence from Move, his fourth movie in a row.

Two years ago Elliott Gould was a temporarily unemployed actor known best as Barbra Streisand’s husband. Today the Goulds are separated and he’s what’s called a very hot property. But conclusions cannot be drawn. They were living together when he made Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, the movie about the new morality and the young married middle class that, as he puts it, “turned everything around” for him. “And that could have been a disaster and we’d still be separated.” He’d already proved, in a number of unsuccessful plays, that he was a good actor, but that’s simply not the same thing as being “discovered.” Now the days of looking for work are over. Elliott Gould is a big movie star.

Today movie heroes have to be real—and he is

Scene: Columbia Pictures, Hollywood. Elliott Gould is in bed with Candice Bergen on sound stage 12, finishing up interiors on Getting Straight. Elliott Gould is Harry Bailey, an angry, outspoken graduate student who tries, and fails, during the course of the picture to make a kind of peace with the Establishment. Candice Bergen is his girl friend, and they’re having a serious talk with Director Richard Rush over the scene they’re about to do—an argument following a love scene following a campus riot. It will be a difficult, emotional scene, and the atmosphere is tense. When Rush goes back to his camera, Elliott Gould looks up at the catwalk above the set where several technicians sit. “Who is sleeping?” he yells. “Who is that snoring up there?” Everybody laughs. The day before, waiting for the technicians on a similar scene, Elliott Gould and Candice Bergen fell asleep in the bed.

Scene: West 56th Street, New York City. Elliott Gould stands on the smoking tar for the sequence in Move. When action is called, the steamroller driver, a consummate professional wearing sunglasses, a cap and a blue work uniform, begins his slow, inexorable run. “I’m stuck,” says Elliott Gould, for the camera. “I can’t move. Stop. I can’t move.” The steamroller rolls on. “Listen, I can’t move.” One of the rakers down the street forgets that he’s in a movie and turns to help Elliott Gould. “Cut,” says Director Stuart Rosenberg.

Elliott Gould’s special appeal is his realness. He’s 31 now, and he grew up on the movies, seeing them as a fan, studying them as an actor and thinking about the changing climate in which he could become a star. “I used to look at the films of the ’50s,” he says, “and see the kinds of people that the movie companies, the Establishment, would project, to create a certain kind of glamorous image, and I used to think, ‘Oh my God, there really are those special people. I could never look like that, and I could never act like that,’ because they acted in a certain specific, staccato, definite kind of way. But life isn’t definite, and I think people are getting much more curious and sophisticated now, and want to see themselves personified, rather than creations of Hollywood.”

He is natural and unmanicured, good-looking, but nothing like a movie star. In Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, his Ted, the square husband exposed to sexual liberation, is so believable, every moment, it makes all the other performances, good as they are, seem like performances. The movie hasn’t gotten all good reviews, but Elliott has. Everyone in the business knew he would, ages ago, when pieces of the film were shown, and word got around. He went right from Bob & Carol into M*A*S*H, a comedy about a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War. Then came Getting Straight, and 10 days after shooting finished on that he was in New York to rehearse for Move. New scripts keep piling up for him to consider—as an actor and as a producer, too. With a partner, Jack Brodsky, he has a production company, and they now plan to make movies of The Assistant, The Days and Nights of Beebee Fenstermaker, and a Jean-Luc Godard version of Little Murders, which Elliott starred in on Broadway.

The first time anyone heard of Elliott Gould was in 1962, when he had the Broadway lead in I Can Get It for You Wholesale. Also in the cast, in a small but noticeable part, was Barbra Streisand. They met and fell in love and married, and she became the biggest star of her generation. It took him quite a few years longer, and people like to think he was held back, living in her shadow. He doesn’t.

“Having this success now is a coincidence,” he says. “Maybe if you really break it down there is no coincidence, but it would be foolish to say there was any correlation, and nonsense to think it. Things just happen.”

“If anything,” he continues, “living so close to Barbra’s success has helped me to understand certain values. It’s helped me to deal with my success very realistically, and not to be seduced into thinking that it is the ultimate thing.”

He laughs when he talks about his success, with a mixture of delight and embarrassment. “I’m absolutely thrilled with what’s happening,” he says, “but sometimes I don’t respond that way, because I think that’s not as important as understanding it, and not taking it, or yourself, too seriously. People teach you that you’ve got to be something before you find out who you are, and I think it’s very dangerous. I’ve discovered that work is very important to me, and that you can’t live it or it corrupts you. Also that it’s not what you do, but what you are that matters.”

As he talks, Elliott is usually pacing or smoking or eating sunflower seeds by the handful. He had sunflower seeds with him in his blue suite high in the Sherry Netherland Hotel, he stocks them at the house he’s rented on the beach at Malibu, and they’re in his pockets wherever he’s working. “They’re high in protein,” he explains, “and they’re great nerve food. I’m very energetic. It’s something to do.” He’s big and friendly and homey, and they probably remind him too of his Brooklyn boyhood, when they were called polly seeds and cost 2¢ a box at any candy store. He was a great Brooklyn Dodger fan then, and still is, though both he and they have left Brooklyn far behind. He remembers, especially, a World Series game when the Brooklyn Dodgers played the New York Yankees. “The Dodgers were great, but they always lost to the Yankees, and at this big, important game, Vice President Nixon was there. I remember he was asked what team he was rooting for, and he said, ‘the winning team.’ Unbelievable.”

In his few free moments these days, Elliott is likely to relax listening to sportscasts or shopping in antique stores. “I shouldn’t go into them,” he says, “because I get compulsive about buying, but I love old things and bizarre things and funny things.” He’s livened up the bland California modern in his rented Malibu house with a few big antique pieces, including a cockfight-bookmaker’s chair, but he’s especially “compulsive” about what he calls “chatchkys.” Yiddish for “little things.” One recent lunch break, at a store called the Hobby Horse, he bought, among other chatchkys, a Buster Brown teapot, three old Coca-Cola trays, a Grover Cleveland plate, a few strips of old baseball tickets, some hand-painted toy soldiers and a china John F. Kennedy-sitting-in-his-rocking-chair salt and pepper set. One of his favorite possessions is a J.F.K. music box—a tin President in the rocking chair that plays Happy Days Are Here Again, which he’s saving for Godard.

Elliott has spent some time in psychoanalysis, and in serious conversation he has the analysand’s habit of minutely dissecting his actions and motives, the analysand’s fervor to get to the bottoms of things. Bottoms are usually murky, and sometimes he gets almost painfully bogged down in his efforts to be honest. “I’m just finding myself,” he says. “What the success means, besides a great deal of ego gratification, is that you have an opportunity to do things you might want to do. I don’t know, really, what my range is as an actor, and I’d like to find out. I want to take chances. Not only for the sake of taking chances, but because, to find out how good you might be, you’ve got to be able to find out where you’re going to be bad.

“I’m aware of the possibilities now to enhance my life and my lifestyle, and that’s what I really want to do. I want to spend time with my son Jason, and I want to see where I want to live and how I want to live. I know I don’t think life is meant to be lived alone.

“I think work is a great part of your life,” he continues, “and I’m so enjoying working at my work, but I’ve barely stopped working since Barbra and I have been separated. I don’t know yet what my life when I’m not working will be. I haven’t really found it.”