Tony Randall at 100 — Once a Rosenberg, always a Rosenberg
Tony Randall Image by Getty Images
By Benjamin Ivry February 25, 2020
The American Jewish actor Tony Randall, beloved star of the TV sitcom “The Odd Couple,” whose centenary is celebrated on February 26, was an example of a professional façade covering a persistent search for Yiddishkeit. Born Aryeh Leonard Rosenberg in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Randall was the son of Mogscha Rosenberg, an antique and objet d’art dealer who moved West to sell home furnishings to prospectors who had struck oil.
During a January 2005 interview on CNN, Randall’s widow informed Larry King that her late husband was “borderline atheist. He had a strange upbringing with his father who was an Orthodox Jew, and made life very hard. So [Randall] kind of rejected it totally. But I did have a rabbi at the funeral.”
Enamoured of the arts from a young age, and apparently rejecting religious observance, Randall worked ardently to make his roots cohere with his professional obsessions. This quest included two years of psychotherapy, which he valued enough to object to what he saw as disrespectful jokes about psychiatrists in the screenplay for the comedy “Pillow Talk” (1959).
Stanley Shapiro, the screenwriter of “Pillow Talk,” had spent many years in analysis. Shapiro expressed his resentment of the ordeal through Randall, who reacts to co-star Rock Hudson’s duplicity by exclaiming: “I should have listened to my psychiatrist. He told me never to trust anyone but him.”
Discord broke out on the set of the fluffy “Pillow Talk” because Randall and Shapiro disagreed over the value of psychotherapy.
In 1998, Randall recalled to an interviewer that he had delayed shooting to protest Shapiro’s lines, until he was reminded that the film’s Jewish director Michael Gordon (born Irving Kunin Gordon) was desperately trying to revive his career after languishing for years on the Hollywood blacklist.
Other teasing dialogue about identity also appears in Shapiro’s dialogue for “Pillow Talk.” At one point, Randall complains to Hudson: “The trouble with you is, you’re prejudiced against me because I’m part of a minority group.”
For a moment, cinema audiences may have speculated whether Randall could be referring to Jews or perhaps gays, due to his typically effete screen persona. Finally, Randall explains that the minority group he was referring to is millionaires.
Glen Gabbard’s “Psychiatry and the Cinema” notes that Randall was repeatedly typecast in screen comedies of the era as a guinea pig for psychotherapists.
In an earlier film, “Oh, Men! Oh, Women!” (1957), Randall is also in thrall to a therapist, while in “Lover Come Back (1961)” he is treated like an infant by a haughty psychiatrist.
This persistent spoofing of the search for roots of psychic trouble was at the core of Randall’s career success. His polished, mannered veneer originated with dance training at the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, vocal studies, and acting coaching from the noted instructor Sanford Meisner.
By the time he starred in “Odd Couple,” Randall had boldly applied and exaggerated his diverse performance skills to produce a flamboyantly affected, theatricality that captivated viewers. He was prissy and fussy, yet with a self-consciously grave, resonant baritone voice. His visible façade was made of cast iron, and so carefully composed that he even chose to narrate a recording of William Walton’s 1920s musical entertainment “Façade” with the Boston Pops Orchestra.
Appearances could deceive. In a 2012 interview, the comedian Will Jordan likened Randall, who was assumed wrongly to be gay by some colleagues, to the TV host Robert Q. Lewis (born Robert Goldberg), who was, in fact, gay: “[Lewis was] like Tony Randall; they were two very un-Jewish looking guys who were both very Jewish in real life. One was Rosenberg and the other was Goldberg, and they both came from successful families. Both had tremendous voices.”
Randall’s theatrically mannered ways suited the sitcom world, and he eventually became enriched by “The Odd Couple.” His long-time New York address of 15 Central Park West, where his neighbors included Beverly Sills, Isaac Stern, and Jerry Seinfeld, was so posh that it received an historical study
Decades earlier, as a less prosperous aspirant billed as Anthony Randall, he had the opportunity to work with theater legends Jane Cowl, Ethel Barrymore, Katharine Cornell, and Sir Cedric Hardwicke. In 1955, he incarnated a cynical reporter in “Inherit the Wind” on Broadway, acting alongside Paul Muni, a Yiddish theater giant who was born Frederich Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund). Studying all these powerful talents at work, especially Muni in what would be a long-running hit, was surely formative.
Randall’s virtuosity also made possible a sparkling dance number with the prima ballerina Alexandra Danilova in the Broadway musical “Oh, Captain!” (1958)
Yet other show business efforts revealed his limitations. In a 1961 episode of “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour,” he played an alcoholic businessman less convincingly than Cliff Robertson had done in the live TV version of “Days of Wine and Roses” (1958) or Jack Lemmon in the 1962 film version of that story.
Attempts to market Randall as a man of a thousand faces, akin to the English actor Alec Guinness, were stymied by the now-embarrassing yellowface in “7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964) and less-than-authentic Gallic accent as Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie’s “Alphabet Murders” (1965)
A more authentic attempt to stretch creativity occurred when Randall played what he described as an “aging Jewish homosexual” in a 1981 TV sitcom, “Love, Sidney.” Randall’s interpreted the title role of Sidney Shorr like an overbearing Jewish mother in the sentimental series, in which he rescues an actress and her daughter.
Randall was a comparable Jewish savior as Putzi, an effete comedian who dies under Nazi interrogation, in the TV film “Hitler’s SS: Portrait in Evil” (1985)
Part of Randall’s disinterment of the past included echoing early experiences onstage. In 1991, he founded a National Actors Theatre, in part to allow him to expand upon personal investigations into Yiddishkeit. A 1997 production of Neil Simon’s “The Sunshine Boys” with former “Odd Couple” colleague Jack Klugman, as well as a staging in 2001 of “Judgment at Nuremberg” by Abby Mann (born Abraham Goodman) were examples.
One of Randall’s last onstage appearances was in “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” (2002) Brecht’s 1941 satire mocking the rise of Hitler in pre-war Germany as a timely warning against fascism. In a prologue, Randall, as The Actor, explained the play’s content and plot to the audience, much as Randall himself would do in fussily didactic appearances on “The Tonight Show” and other TV chat programs.
His final films also alluded to the past. In “Down with Love” (2003), he played a male chauvinist publisher in a screen homage to the Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies; he also had a cameo in the posthumously released “It’s About Time” (2005), in which his character was Mr. Rosenberg, surely an homage to his birth name.
It is uncertain whether the homonym had influenced his co-narrating a 1990 documentary about Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, convicted as Soviet nuclear spies.
If so, one lesson to be drawn on the occasion of Tony Randall’s hundredth birthday might be that once a Rosenberg, always a Rosenberg.
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