Jawing With Richard Dreyfuss
I don’t know,” said Richard Dreyfuss last December when I first called to ask about an interview. “I just don’t know.” His hesitation was understandable. The 27-year-old actor — a standout some months earlier as college-bound Curt in American Graffiti, followed by an equally impressive performance in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz — then in the midst of completing his latest film, Jaws — had just weathered singularly disastrous interviews, almost simultaneously, in two different New York newspapers.
“Perhaps Richard Dreyfuss really is Duddy Kravitz,” suggested the New York Times, having earlier described Duddy as one who “claws, connives and cheats his way to the top.” And the New York Post was no kinder; only less subtle.
“I don’t know,” Dreyfuss told me that winter afternoon. “Those interviews made me sound like an asshole.”
Sympathetic, I agreed, they weren’t.
“And I’m not an asshole,” Dreyfuss insisted. “That is, I don’t think I’m an asshole. And if I am an asshole,” he concluded firmly, “then I sure as hell shouldn’t be doing interviews.”
Asshole!” says Richard Dreyfuss to himself in the middle of a passport application line one spring afternoon deep in the bowels of the midtown Manhattan federal bureaucracy. He slaps his forehead loudly, spins around on his heels and repeats the observation.
A silver-haired woman in the rear of the line gasps audibly, but Dreyfuss takes no notice. He has just discovered that his previous three days of effort toward obtaining a new passport — only five days prior to an extended trip to London — had been altogether unnecessary: His earlier passport, stolen, can be renewed on the spot.
Dreyfuss groans softly and then heads off, at full-speed stride across the linoleum, in search of the proper window and clerk. No one but the silver-haired lady pays much attention: Dreyfuss is one of those screen actors who, thus far, manages to be almost unrecognizable in life. The plump, shiny-cheeked Curt in Graffiti, the equally plump but ferret-faced Duddy — neither comes close to Dreyfuss’s present incarnation. More than one interviewer, in recent months, has failed altogether to recognize the subject of the interview.
Today Dreyfuss wears a trim beard spotted with gray and grown originally for his role in his latest film, Jaws, along with baggy Levi’s, a work shirt and a well-weathered combat jacket. Hustling around the passport office, Dreyfuss looks far more like a guy who delivers Shoppers’ News in the suburbs at two cents a copy than one of the more talented young actors in the country today.
Dreyfuss is, on first meeting, immediately likable. His inexhaustible energy, which keeps him in a perpetual sort of Brownian movement around the passport office, is subtly different from the equally inexhaustible energy of his grasping, prying Duddy Kravitz portrayal. Duddy, poor-boy-on-the-make, used his energy to cut in front or to cut out altogether. Dreyfuss uses his to involve everyone around him in brief, irresistible scenes from the ongoing drama of Rick Dreyfuss’s existence — cops on the street, secretaries, airline stewardesses, waitresses; everyone gets pulled into a benign, swirling vortex of Dreyfuss energy.
How long Dreyfuss will be able to maintain that act remains to be seen. Jaws threatens to make him the sort of major star who can’t be quite so casual about playing on the street. The Time magazine cover story on Jaws pronounced it the major movie of the summer and called Dreyfuss’s performance “perfect. With a cheeky charm he manages to humanize the picture while stealing it.”
Which is not, all in all, a bad way to describe the way Dreyfuss approaches life. One passport clerk, young, Jewish, recognizes Richard from Duddy and efficiently locates an obscure form for him. “You’re beautiful,” Dreyfuss tells him, nearly reaching over the counter to pinch his cheek, and then shakes his head bemusedly, shrugging Duddy-style. “All this chazerai …” Moments later, Dreyfuss is back at the original window, presenting his new form plus passport. “And listen,” he asks the middle-aged, bespectacled clerk, “can you stamp it STUPID for me?”
Twenty minutes later we are in Dreyfuss’s borrowed Broadway apartment, upstairs over a residential hotel; an atmosphere midway between West Side crash pad and colorful hangout. The apartment is filled with magazines, partially empty half-gallon bottles of expensive Scotch and general disorganization on every level.
On a tapestry-covered grand piano sits a compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. In one corner, an immense bag from a Fifth Avenue bookshop, crammed with new books. “Thomas Paine,” Dreyfuss explains as he moves toward the telephone, which has been ringing since the moment he opened the door. “I just bought $121 worth of books about Thomas Paine.” Later this week, he says, he is to recite Paine selections at a counter-Bicentennial celebration near Boston. He answers the phone as I examine the bagful of Paine. Prominent among the books are both a quality paperback edition of the Torah and Confessions of a Winning Poker Player. “Pour me a drink?” Dreyfuss asks, hand over telephone.
“Ma Bell, you cocksucker,” Richard screams into his three-button telephone as his first call is accidentally disconnected. But by then another line is already ringing. “What’s cookin’, good-lookin’?” Dreyfuss answers. Another line lights up; he switches and answers and goes back to the first line, now with a note of desperation: “Can I call you right back? I’m long distance, can’t talk.” He goes back to the second line. “Schmuck! I know you’re going to Boston, I’m going got Boston on Thursday.” He pauses, listens. “Yeah!” he says. “Sure!”
Now a different telephone is ringing. Dreyfuss, telephone in hand, gestures desperately toward the bedroom. In the bedroom, over an unmade double bed, another three-button phone is flashing. I punch all the buttons, but get nothing except dial tones. I return to the living room, shrug at Dreyfuss; Dreyfuss shrugs back.
“All they’re interested in,” Dreyfuss is saying into the phone, “is getting anybody, Charles Manson, Rick Dreyfuss, Tab Hunter, on television. They don’t care,” he says, “if I get up there and go goo-goo.”
He listens briefly, then interrupts. “Listen. Why don’t you just do a leading role in a movie and then you can get taken care of too?”
Now Dreyfuss is scribbling frantically, phone crooked on his shoulder. “Tell them I’m going to do a porno in London,” he says. “Yes.” The other line rings. “Hold on. What? You’ve got to come to Washington. Don’t you know that pleasure and happiness are the goal of American society?” He listens impatiently. “It’ll be fun.” He pauses. “Listen, I’ll call you back.”
He switches buttons, the other line lights up, the telephone in the bedroom rings again. Dreyfuss pauses, glances at his watch, surrounded by telephones. “Listen,” he asks me, “you want to share a cab downtown?”
Stupid,” no matter how politely he asks, is one passport stamp that Richard Dreyfuss will probably never manage to earn. At out first meeting over breakfast in a Seventh Avenue delicatessen, Dreyfuss managed, in less than ten minutes, to drag the conversation onto an extended analysis of C. Wright Mills’s notions of “cafe society.” “Why,” Dreyfuss wondered, “are people interested in personalities? Why is it that I should get to do interviews? What do people get out of that?”
What readers get out of most personality interviews seems, in general, rather a mystery. What magazines get out of interviews is less obscure: readers. And what Richard Dreyfuss gets out of interviews may finally be even less obscure. “I’m going to do them,” he swears today, “until I get it right.”
Dreyfuss, it develops, is exceedingly serious about politics. A few months ago he told no less a record than the New York Times that his goal was to become a United States senator. More recently, on the Mike Douglas Show, assistant to the president Donald Rumsfeld challenged Dreyfuss’s harsh analysis of the state of the union by saying, “Well, maybe that’s because you’re in the acting business instead of going into government.” As Lily Tomlin moaned, “Oh, give us a break, Donald,” in the background, Dreyfuss came back to say that he planned to do just that, and when he did, his approach would differ both in style and substance from Rumsfeld’s.
Indeed. Thus it is, very early the next morning, I find myself in a nearly deserted Penn Station, waiting for Richard Dreyfuss and the first Amtrak express to Washington D.C.
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