Gould Plays Second Banana to Muppets

By Harry Harris

Although it’s his rare prime-time appearance on TV that’s getting top billing and all the drumbeating, movie star Elliott Gould insists that ABC’s Out to Lunch, Tuesday at 9 P.M. (Channel 6), isn’t HIS special.

“It’s not my show,” he keeps saying. “It’s The Electric Company’s. I honestly feel privileged to be a part of it. I’ll be appearing with children and the Sesame Street Muppets. When I did a skit with the Cookie Monster, I knew I was in the presence of a REAL star!”

The program, marking the first nonpublic television enterprise of CTW Productions, the extracurricular fundraising division of the nonprofit Children’s Television Workshop, is an hour-long spoof of TV.

It purports to show how Gould, Barbara (I Dream of Jeannie) Eden, Electric Company’s Rita Moreno and assorted Muppets gleefully “fix” ABC’s programming while the network’s executives are out to lunch.

“Ace anchorman” Kermit the Frog, for example, “covers” a Grand Canyon leap by “Grover Knover.”

Gould sings, dances and clowns in this, his third prime-time special. In the others—Carol Burnett’s 1964 Once Upon a Mattress and Tom Jones’ 1972 Special London Bridge Special—his participation was strictly secondary.

With Carol (who returns the favor via a running gag) he played Jester to her Princess.

With Jones “I was the Bad Guy, in a beard, like Simon Legree. That was for a day and a half (in scenes with Jones that were taped without Jones), no work at all compared to the intense effort that went into Out to Lunch.”

With Miss Moreno, who won a 1961 Oscar for her singing and dancing in West Side Story, he dances “like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, straight, but in rather peculiar situations.”

With the Cookie Monster, cast as host of The Nighty Night Show, he engages in a sky’s-the-limit poker game—“We raise each other chocolate chips, oatmeal cookies and lady fingers!”

Gould has had other variety show invitations, but “didn’t pay too much attention.”

What snared him for this one is that he—and his three children (Jason, 8, with Barbra Streisand; Molly, 3, and Sam, almost 2, with second ex-wife—to be, Jennifer Bogart)—are Sesame Street and Electric Company buffs.

“I called to tell them what I was doing. Jason was thrilled! I’ve never seen myself sing or dance before, and I’m kind of excited myself about seeing myself with the Cookie Monster!”

His emotional response to making TV appearances used to be fear or anger. But that was long ago, and under considerably different circumstances.

Gould’s a video veteran—since age 10, 26 years ago.

“I guess my first time on TV was in a local show, Country Style, when I had to sing and dance with a girl. That’s when they told me I should use ‘Gould,’ instead of my real name, Goldstein.”

Two years earlier his mother had enrolled him at a Broadway show-biz school for youngsters, asking only that something be done to improve his diction. Instead, Gould once recalled, he was given “blow-your-nose lessons, dance lessons, wipe yourself lessons, masturbation lessons, bunko.”

“I was on Stop the Music,” he recalls. “I was part of a group of kids who sang or danced with Bert Parks. And I was on Milton Berle’s show several times.

“Once I was very upset, because I had to be on a Berle show and that meant missing an Abbott & Costello double feature playing around the corner. Instead of getting $5, I’d much rather have seen the movies.

“I cried, because I didn’t want to go stand under those hot lights and feel all that pressure!

“I did two very early commercials on tape, around 1949, before I was a teenager—for Fox’s You Bet Chocolate Syrup and Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy. It was the first time I had an opportunity to see myself on TV, staggering! and I didn’t like what I saw—a little chubby kid!”

He vividly remembers his one That Was the Week That Was stint—“I had a sketch with Elliott Reid in which he was a Presidential candidate who went to a Method school to learn how to act earthy. I went up in my lines and improvised the whole thing.

“It was OK, it came out on time, but I left the studio before I could see anybody. The audience couldn’t tell what was going on inside me. That’s what I generally work for—in films and everything else. I don’t want anyone to be embarrassed and I want to be at ease.”

It was “purely for myself, to feel comfortable,” he says, that he showed up on the last Tony Awards telecast wearing a tuxedo and black and white shoes.

“TV shows are sometimes a little pressure-packed. Guests are intimidated by routine and a seeming lack of interest. That’s why I went on a Dick Cavett show wearing walking shorts and sneakers.

“That’s the way I’d been dressed all day, and as long as I was clean and didn’t smell bad, why shouldn’t I appear as myself?

“I took my sneakers off, and I got him to take his shoes off!”

During his temporary eclipse as a performer, while married to Streisand, he was the “El” half of the Elbar TV production company which developed various series, but never sold one.

“I sort of helped develop some ideas,” he says, “but I didn’t get any encouragement from CBS. It was purely a toy to keep Barbra’s husband occupied. I got some experience, but otherwise the only thing good that came out of it was Barbra’s special.”

He has thoughts about moving into TV—in various capacities—in the future.

His druthers do not, however, include joining Howard Cosell in the Monday Night Football booth.

“Howard has asked me. I like listening to him, he really weaves a spell, but I’m not terribly verbal. I can be, but expressing opinions turns me off. I don’t consider myself an authority on anything but myself.

“I’m a sports fan, but I’m basically not an exhibitionist. I like playing in the street, anonymously, with kids. And when I play basketball, I’d rather pass than make the basket.

“I’m looking forward to doing many things I haven’t done yet—which is almost everything!”