Actor's rumpled image hid a poet

Editor's note:

Former columnist Harriet Smith talked with Walter Matthau nearly 11 years ago while he was filming in Colorado Springs. Her column was published in the Gazette Telegraph, as The Gazette was known, on Sept. 3, 1989.

Maybe it's the Felix Unger in me responding to the Oscar Madison in another; I've always liked a man with some rumple and slouch.

An aggressively clean-cut fellow with military bearing might be impressive to look at, but a lived-in face and easy tailoring have always been my idea of the poetry man. Something about the healing reasonableness of a little slovenliness in the life of a woman too attached to tidiness.

My husband appreciated this. After all, he chose me even though I cleaned grout with a toothbrush, and I chose him - rumple, slouch and all. We were in that way an odd couple.

So he'd smile when we watched the tape of "Charade," one of our favorite older films. He knew that when Walter Matthau and Cary Grant played their scene, I'd be watching Matthau. And when the scene was over, he'd recite Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," just by way of letting me know that he admired my taste.

The production people for "Incident at Lincoln Bluff" said that Matthau wouldn't be giving interviews while in Colorado Springs filming the TV movie. He's grown impatient with interviews, they said, and has decided to save wit, wisdom and direct quotes for his autobiography.

As it turned out, he did have the patience for a chat; not a real interview with question-list and tape-recorder, you understand. Just a little time to talk. Black coffee and chocolate cake in his trailer at the set.

But no swearing to silence.

So, in the certain knowledge that I am not the only middle-aged Walter Matthau groupie out here, yes, there's a blush and a rush at meeting the man. And yes, he is very like the larger-than-life, fast- talking, joke-cracking cynic/innocent he's played so often.

He also recites Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard," which he memorized 60 years ago. "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air" seems to be his favorite line.

He travels with tapes of Isaac Stern playing Mozart's Violin Concertos. A Panasonic boom-box on the kitchen table sends the intricate melodies through the trailer. The concertos will be his funeral music. But not for a long time.

He meant to be a journalist. He studied for that at Columbia University, but discovered early on that journalism was not his forte.

He says "fort," not "fortay." Later, the dictionary tells me his pronunciation is preferred. . . . Anyway, he tried acting and discovered that it was his forte. Acting was easy for him, and the ease with which he did it entertained him and impressed the people with roles to offer.

He demonstrates. He is playing a role in which he learns that his son has been killed. As actor, he decides he will not react; especially, he will not cry. Then all that has gone on before in the script, and maybe in his life, all that he has absorbed about loss, surfaces. His body shakes, the tears come, and the big, loose face is filled with a father's grief.

So he's been busy for 41 years.

He bristles at the word "retirement." There would be no point to his retiring because retiring means you stop doing what you don't like to do and start doing what you do like to do.

He smiles at the words "Hollywood marriage." He's had a long one, 30 years, and he has the secrets to its success. His wife, of course, and having the good sense to know that making love for a movie is faking love for a movie. Arousal in a love scene is natural; acting on that arousal is idiocy. If the marriage comes first.

He's no housekeeper, judging by his trailer.

At home, polishing the kitchen counters, I see how very neat my house has become. Too neat, even for me. There's nothing for it but to be my own rumple and slouch.

I sit on the couch and put my feet up on the coffee table. I recite to myself from Wallace Stevens: "I do not know which to prefer, the beauty of inflections or the beauty of innuendoes, the blackbird whistling or just after."

Copyright 2000
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