The Adulthood of Duddy Kravitz

How many times have you rented a movie at one of those places?"

Richard Dreyfuss asks the question and sits back. The beginnings of a grin play at the edges of his mouth. "You know," he adds, "those video places. How many times have you done that?"

Well, I stammer--wondering if this is some kind of trick question--renting movies is something I do for fun sometimes, but also for research. If I'm about to interview, say, Richard Dreyfuss, I'll probably rent American Graffiti and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Down and Out in Beverly Hills....

"But you've done it."

Yeah, of course.

"How many times?"

Hundreds, probably.

This is the answer he has been waiting for. The fledgling grin turns into a big self-satisfied smile, and Dreyfuss makes an announcement:

"Once."

You've rented one movie?

"Yeah. That's how out of it I am. Every time I go into one of those stores, I look at the new releases. And I don't give a shit about any of them. Or I say to my wife, 'Honey, I promise, this week I'll take you to a movie.' And then I look at the ads and I don't wanna go to any of them."

He shrugs. "Movies today--including the ones I make--are made on small themes, about small people. I like great, sweeping sagas, cavalry charges, thousands of people storming the Bastille. You wanna make Lawrence of Arabia again, I'll go. Until then, you'll have to drag me kicking and screaming into a movie theater."

In other words, Richard Dreyfuss--who at one point had appeared in three of the top-ten-grossing films of all time, who won a best-actor Oscar and then weathered a mid-career crisis to star in a string of successful films over the past few years and who's now starring in Always, his third Steven Spielberg movie--is out of the pop-culture mainstream. Absolutely no videos. No movies. No pop music, either; in his car, he listens to taped history books. And on top of everything else, he swears that he can't remember the name of the one movie he rented.

Dreyfuss thinks about it all and laughs. "The phrase All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy comes springing to mind," he says. "I don't know why."

•

Richard Dreyfuss is on a roll.

He's in his office on the old MGM lot in Los Angeles. He has been talking about his life and his career, but now he's talking about history. This is something that interests--you might say fascinates, you might even say obsesses--him. There is nothing glamourous or flashy about his looks, his demeanor, his attitude--but watching him, even in this setting, you can almost see how Dreyfuss, as a young Jewish kid without a single conventional leading-man trait, transformed himself into a movie star. He didn't do it with suavity or charm or anything like that but with dogged tenacity, with a force of will that ultimately made him impossible to ignore.

"His tendency is to do something to death or not at all," says his longtime friend Carrie Fisher. "To run pretty fast or stand perfectly still." And right now, he's running fast as he ticks off the famous people he wants to portray.

Teddy Roosevelt: "He epitomized his time more than anybody. He was America. There's this great line in a biography that says it was the only time in American history when the most interesting man in America was the President of the United States."

Adolf Hitler: "Everyone plays Hitler as a screaming madman--and by doing that, they contribute to the idea that he was not human, that he was evil incarnate, and therefore, we're not responsible for what happened."

Ulysses S. Grant: This is the finale, the man who stokes the fires in Dreyfuss. Pacing in front of a bookcase--volumes on everything from history to Hollywood, politics to war strategy--he outlines Grant's remarkable life with equal parts of passion and precision, often interrupting himself with a volcanic laugh. It's the kind of hyperactive, irrepressible performance that ought to be familiar to anyone who (continued on page 150)Dreyfuss(continued from page 130) has seen his movies; at the same time, the deeper he gets into the story, the more he seems to be a character he has yet to portray: a giddy, impassioned college professor.

"Grant, twice in his life, went from the bottom of the pit to the top of the heap," he says, fascinated by the story he's relating of a man whose father browbeat him; who was a reluctant soldier but a natural horseman; who was drummed out of the Army after the Mexican War and wound up almost destitute; who volunteered for the provisional Army when the Civil War broke out and became the most important and successful general in the Union Army; whose postwar popularity won him the Presidency twice but whose political career was tainted by scandal; who contracted throat cancer and ran a desperate race against death, working to complete his memoirs before he died so that his wife and kids wouldn't end up in the poor-house. "He finished the book on July fourteenth, died nine days later."

The tale finished, Dreyfuss slumps back in his chair and shakes his head. "I wanna tell that story," he says quietly. "Scott Fitzgerald has this great line: 'There are no second acts in American lives.' Grant had a second act."

Does this sound vaguely familiar? It should. We're talking about Richard Dreyfuss, the popular personification of the second act. Aspiring actor at the age of nine, when he went to his first audition at Los Angeles' Westside Jewish Community Center. Working actor at the age of 15: plays, TV series and stuff like that sandwiched between classes at Beverly Hills High School, where his classmates included Rob Reiner and Albert Brooks. Movie star at 25: American Graffiti, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Jaws. Academy Award winner at 30: The Goodbye Girl, the same year he also starred in Close Encounters. Box-office flop and heavily into drugs at 35: On screen, he had The Big Fix, The Competition, The Buddy System and a few others; off screen, he did things such as running his Mercedes into a palm tree, flipping it over and winding up in the hospital and under arrest for cocaine possession. Cleaned-up comeback kid at 40: Down and Out, Tin Men, Stakeout, Moon over Parador, Nuts.

He listens to this line of reasoning. Then he firmly, politely, takes issue. "In the long run, really, I think I had a dip," he says. "I certainly was resurrected--I mean, there was a second act in my career, I won't deny it. But in the long run, I hope it will be perceived as a dip."

He leans forward. "But that isn't what drew me to Grant. My interest in Grant preceded my death and resurrection."

He stops for a minute. "What I find interesting," he says finally, "is that I have a whole shitload of projects that, when you scrape all the specifics away, are really one story of what happens when a man realizes he's something else, or wants to be something else, or has to be something else. I'm always drawn to stories that have to do with the mid-life crisis, though it isn't the mid-life crisis that I'm interested in. It is that process of becoming someone else that, over the past few years, I find central.

"It's clearly part of my life. The past couple of years, I've been aware of a sense of change. There are things in my life that I concentrate on much more seriously than I used to and some things that I don't concentrate on as seriously as I used to. And it all has to do with that mid-life time. I mean, everybody jokes about it, but it's true: When you get into your late thirties and early forties, whatever it is you've been doing isn't enough."

•

Here are a few things that Richard Dreyfuss is concentrating on more than he used to:

Family.

"The classic cliché," he admits, pointing to an oil painting of his two children, six-year-old Emily and three-year-old Ben. "I didn't get married until I was thirty-six, after years of a confirmed belief that I'd never get married. And I'm a different person."

Directing.

Another cliché, of course. "Everyone says, 'You should be directing,' " he admits. "And half of my impulse is yes, I should be directing. But then I stop and say, 'Yeah, but I should be directing something I want to direct.' So I'm constantly looking."

Adds Judith James, his partner in his production company, "I know he's going to direct before long. A year, tops."

Producing.

Dreyfuss and James met eight years ago when he was reading unpublished plays for a playwrights' workshop program she was directing at L.A.'s Mark Taper Forum. "He was trying to get his feet under him after the drug period, trying to find the ground," she remembers. "I knew he was a star who had fallen, but he was also this articulate, interested person who was fighting to get himself back together. And he was so talented it took your breath away." When they discovered they had a favorite book in common, a biography of Richard III, they bought the rights and tried to turn it into a BBC television program; that never happened, but later they formed a production company.

The company has two goals, Dreyfuss says. "One is to be a commercially successful small production company that actually does film and television projects. And the other is to see if I can get my own eccentric private loves"--you know, those historical projects--"into the culture."

And politics.

This one he has been involved with for years: He was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war, an active crusader for various causes in the Seventies and, for years, "one of the usual group of suspects they ask to work for liberal causes." In the mid-Seventies, he even told interviewers he wanted to run for a Congressional seat someday. "Only recently," he says now, "have I come to the realization that I don't have to run for political office. I am political. I live in a political community, and I work within it, and that's as satisfying to me as any fantasy of being a Senator from California."

Today, his political involvement takes a different form. He and James produced an ABC television special on the anniversary of the U.S. Constitution and are at work on another dealing with peace in the Middle East. That show, which they're producing for PBS, approaches academics and think tanks from all of the area's warring factions and poses a simple scenario: It's 2020, or 2030, and your side has won. Of what does that victory consist? The answers--which, among other things, ought to reveal how much compromise is possible--will form the basis for a book and a television program due to air within a year.

"It's a lot of fun," he says, "because I've been an actor for so long, and I've been a smart actor for a long time, but I've never given my brain to anything other than my work. And this is very intense and very satisfying in a way that acting isn't, really."

And this leads to the one thing that Dreyfuss is concentrating on less than he used to:

Acting.

"I was in love with my work," he says. "I like my work now, but I'm not in love with it. I have an addictive personality, and I had an addiction to acting. It was an affair, it was lust, it was hot. I don't have such an affair anymore. In a sense, that's freeing."

The affair ended, he says, "when I was resurrected. I think it could be said that I loved being on the make. I loved being a hustler and proving things to people. And then I won the Academy Award when I was twenty-nine. Although it had never been a goal of mine per se, I won it too soon. And it took the fire out of me. I had nothing to prove anymore, and I was too young and immature not to have something to prove. And somehow, that's when things got to taste bad."

He frowns and his words become quieter. "I wanna have a love affair," he says, "and if it's not with acting, it should be with something. Then again, maybe I'll find that I don't need to have a love affair. I'm forty-two, and I believe that forty-two is the absolute peak, somehow, of your life. And you've gotta make the rest of your life up, or else it's just downhill from here."

Carrie Fisher recently interviewed her old pal to help flesh out "an intense, powerful guy" who's a character in her next book. "I don't necessarily notice that Richard's different, except that I don't have to worry about him anymore," she says. "He's still up to his elbows in intensity. But I guess we're both bad kids who grew up. I mean, we hear the same song, singing to us from somewhere deep in the forest, but now we don't necessarily respond to it."

Fisher's first book, incidentally, was a somewhat autobiographical comedy that began with the line "Maybe I shouldn't have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares?" In the upcoming film version of Postcards from the Edge, Meryl Streep stars as the character loosely based on Fisher--and in a cameo, playing the doctor who pumps her stomach, is Richard Dreyfuss.

•

It's a photograph of children, and the faces are what grab you. A few youngsters stare toward the camera with outright wonder, another looks frightened and one little girl is thrusting her arm in the air and opening her mouth in what seems to be sheer delight. Crouched behind the curtain at a puppet show in Europe in the Forties, photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt captured the gamut of childhood emotions, and the photo now hangs on a wall in Richard Dreyfuss' study.

But at the moment, dozens of variations on that photo are spread out on a desk in Dreyfuss' office. A local design company was given the Eisenstaedt photo and asked to use it to design a logo for Dreyfuss and James' production company; now two of the designers are back with some samples, and a number of staffers are gathered around the table, admiring the stylish, striking work.

And then Dreyfuss walks in and, with one sentence, blows the designers out of the water. Maybe this is to be expected: After all, Dreyfuss is a guy who has long had a reputation for being hard to please, demanding of himself and his co-workers and dissatisfied with some of his best-received films. "He has extraordinarily high standards," says Judith James. "He knows when he can play a part truly, if we're talking about him as an actor. And if we're talking about him as a producer, he wants the I's dotted.

"I can't tell you," she continues, "how many people have said, 'I didn't know he was that smart!' He's extraordinarily articulate, extremely well read, he can look at something from fifteen ways, and his style is to examine things inside out. If you want to work with him, you'd better be ready to sit back and listen. There are people who find this exciting and people who find it a pain in the ass."

Dreyfuss knows that his methods have alienated people and his reputation hasn't always been the best. "Don't you read?" he asked one reporter in 1979. "I'm an arrogant asshole. I'm a loudmouth s.o.b."

But Dreyfuss' fabled arrogance--variously attributed to his insecurity, his drive to succeed when nobody else believed in him and his frustration in dealing with people who expect actors to shut up and do what they're told--is nowhere to be found as he looks at the sample designs for his logo. Instead, he's soft-spoken, genial and charming. He rejects the designers' work, to be sure, but he makes them feel good about themselves as he does so.

"I didn't mean for us to just duplicate the picture," he begins apologetically. "I want you to use the idea of children listening to a storyteller. And it really shouldn't be--I guess I wasn't clear about this--it shouldn't be the figures of this picture."

The designers exchange anxious glances; this is news to them. But, as Dreyfuss points out, a logo featuring European children in dated clothing could raise more questions than answers. "This picture, unless you really know the whole proscenium, is going to look like Little Berta on the battlements," he says, and then grins and points at the child with her arm raised. "This looks like the Bugsy Malone version of Les Misérables." He switches to a high squeaky voice and shouts, "To the barricades, Pee-wee!"

The room explodes in laughter, everybody loosens up and Dreyfuss alternately praises the work that has been done and enthusiastically outlines the kind of thing he really wants. Finally, as the meeting winds down, his publicist clears his throat. "Let me just ask one really kind of stupid question," he says. "Since we're doing it realistically, what kind of an ethnic mix do you want in those faces? Do you want a black kid? Do you want an Oriental kid? Do you want a Mexican-American kid? It should be discussed."

Dreyfuss puts his head in his hands. "Don't ask me," he groans, "if I'm politically correct at this moment."

"I didn't mean it as a political question," says the publicist, "but I think it's something that we have to consider."

"Well, I'll leave it up to you," says Dreyfuss, turning back to the designers. "See how it feels in terms of design. If you want to use a black face or a chicano face, or...."

"Oh," says one designer with a grin. "Throwing us the ball?"

There's a familiar eruption of laughter. "Got that pretty good, eh?" Dreyfuss says. "The buck stops ... over there." He flashes a triumphant problem solver's grin. "And thank you very much for coming in."

•

Another day, another meeting. This one's with the UCLA professor who designed Dreyfuss' Middle Eastern book/TV project and the leader of an Israeli-based centrist think tank. And this time, the meeting's being held not in Dreyfuss' office but in the home he's renting in Hancock Park while his own Hollywood Hills home is being renovated.

Located in Los Angeles' classy, old-money enclave, the house is spacious, comfortable and clearly decorated with a knowing eye. The living room is a skillful but seemingly casual mixture: two large flower-print couches dead center, a baby grand piano in the corner, a few antique bookcases and desks around the perimeter and lots of artfully arranged bric-a-brac.

He's quick to credit his wife's interior-decorating skills. "My wife has many wonderful qualities," he says, "and one of the incredible things--you won't believe me when I tell you--is that Jeramie made this house look like this in one day. She was able to put up every fucking thing in this house and make it look as if all the chotchkies had always been here, in one day. And the only thing I corrected in the entire house was that in the kitchen, she put the silverware farther away from the center of action than it should have been."

Dreyfuss met Jeramie Rain in January 1983, married her two months later and was a father by the end of the year. Jeramie's not home today--she's in Northern California with her family, because her father died earlier in the week--and their first child, Emily, is nowhere in sight; three-year-old Ben, though, has just come home from preschool, and when his meeting ends, Dreyfuss grabs him and carries him over to a huge canvas that dominates one wall of the living room. The oil painting was done on the set of Down and Out in Beverly Hills, and it shows the actor on Venice Beach, signing an autograph for a comely bikini-clad woman while the film crew and a phalanx of bystanders watch.

"Where's your dad?" Dreyfuss yells, dangling Ben in front of the picture. Ben points to a corner, singling out one of the film set's crowd-control cops.

"No, that's not your dad," groans Dreyfuss with feigned exasperation. "That's just some shmoo."

Ben runs away, and his dad watches him go. "The two of them are astonishing," he says softly. "You know, I've loved women, I've loved my parents, I've loved my work ... but I've never had an experience that's so stark. The contrast is like going from black and white to color, from something that is muddy to something vivid. I'm not a great dad and I'm not a great husband--I'm just a good guy, and that makes up a lot for my not being a great dad or a great husband. But inside, I found this astonishment of love." He's almost whispering. "I stare at my kids and I try to remember: Did my mother stare at me?"

Ben returns with two glasses of water and a couple of spoons, sticks a spoon into his dad's water glass and announces, "Let's pretend this is tea."

Dreyfuss groans; if he agrees, he knows Ben will be stirring his water for the foreseeable future. "No," he says evenly, "let's not pretend this is tea. Let's pretend this is water. You can futz with your own water here, you can do all kinds of things to your own but not to mine."

"No," says Ben, adamant. "Pretend you have something else to drink."

His dad relents. "OK," he says, "I'm drinking ... Coca-Cola."

"And I'm drinking Coca-Cola," says Ben immediately.

Dreyfuss grins and between interruptions tells of the time when Emily, then 18 months old, suddenly became very sick. Ignoring all the logical responses, he says, he threw her into the car and drove through the Hollywood hills at breakneck speed, desperate to get her to the nearest hospital; when he got there, the doctors took one look at Emily and treated him instead. Then, four days later--he'd been working on Down and Out and hadn't seen her awake since that night--he arrived home and Emily ran into his arms and hugged him. "I burst into a flood of tears like I hadn't cried since I don't know when," he says, adding that that's when he knew that fatherhood had taken him over completely. "I highly recommend it," he concludes. "It's a tidal wave that hits your house, and you go with it."

And now part of that tidal wave is back, in the person of a spoon-wielding Ben Dreyfuss. "Stir some of your Coca-Cola up," Ben says, proffering the utensil.

"No," insists Dreyfuss, "I don't need any stirring. I want my Coca-Cola left exactly the way I like it: dark brown, with ice cubes." He takes a sip of water. "Mmm, pretty good Coca-Cola."

Ben reclaims the spoon. "I'll stir mine," he says. "Mine is great." Excited, he can't help but tangle his syntax. "Am I great?" he asks. "Do I have great with cola?"

His dad grins from ear to ear. "You," he announces proudly, "are great with cola."

•

Richard Dreyfuss is not on a roll.

In fact, he has reached something of a conversational impasse, sitting on his couch for the second day of discussions. The talk has turned to his movies, particularly Always and whatever else he has planned for the future--and for a guy who says he doesn't even believe in the Universal Studios Tour "because I don't think anybody should know how movies are made," discussing unmade or unreleased projects doesn't come easily.

"I don't like to talk about things that haven't happened yet," he says, frowning. "It's bad luck. I mean, I didn't even want to talk to you about this peace project. And when I found myself telling you about it yesterday, half of me was going, 'Richard, what are you doing?' It's so out of character for me to do that. No, I don't like to talk about a project before it has happened--and as you know, I don't like to talk about a project after it has happened." He grins. "So that kinda leaves us in a quandary."

Still, he manages to take a quick trip through his recent movies, from the ones he liked (Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Tin Men, Stakeout) to the ones he didn't. In this latter group he puts Moon over Parador ("It should have been a lot funnier; everyone looks a little tight-assed in that film") and especially last summer's box-office flop Let It Ride. ("I thought we were making a rude, funny, edgy, impolite, make-you-nervous kind of comedy--which we weren't successful in achieving when we shot it. The studio wasn't happy with that ambition, either.")

His complaints aside, though, it's not a bad line-up for an actor who has gone from casualty to bankable star in a few years. His recent crop of movies hasn't included anything as flamboyant or star-making as some of his earliest films, but it's the work of a man who has become what Dreyfuss seemed unlikely to become: a steady, dependable working actor whom the studios can rely on without worrying about that once-troublesome reputation.

"I have a good, solid career as an actor," he says of his current status. "I'm not in a position, like a few people might be, where I can scribble something on a cocktail napkin and get it done--nor am I in a position of not being able to get an appointment. I'm a member of the community."

He stops and considers how mundane this all sounds. "So far," he says, "it sounds to me like we're doing an article about the normal, business-as-usual life of Richard Dreyfuss: kind of a movie star and kind of, you know, a middle-class guy."

Well? Is that what his life's like?

He nods. "It seems like a normal life, you know what I mean? I have my family, my kids, and I go to work, and once in a while, I'll do a movie or a play, and then I come home and go swimming. Kinda middle class, suburban. I think I always wanted to be provocative, and now I've lost my desire to be a provocateur. But there's a part of me that still says"--here he drops his voice to a whisper--" 'You're boring.' "

So boring, it seems, that his ambitions for the future as often as not have nothing to do with show business. His greatest wish is that his children have healthy, happy lives; after that, he says, he'd like to make his mark in another field, maybe directing or producing and maybe teaching.

"Had I not wanted to pursue a career as an actor," he says, "I might very well have been teaching in a high school all this time and been very happy." He shifts into a booming voice. "I wouldn't have been driving a 560 Mercedes two-seater, pal.... But what the hell?"

In the meantime, there are always movies. Currently, for instance, there's Always. Dreyfuss has a particular fondness for this movie, partly because he's again working with the friend who directed him in Jaws and Close Encounters, partly because it's based on one of his favorite old movies, A Guy Named Joe.

The original was directed by Victor Fleming in 1943, four years after he'd made The Wizard of Oz and (with a little help) Gone with the Wind; it starred Spencer Tracy as a reckless World War Two flier who's killed in action but returns to earth to watch over fellow pilot Van Johnson and one-time girlfriend Irene Dunne. In the new version, the action has been changed to a national park, where Dreyfuss' character flies fire-fighting planes.

"It was a lot of fun, and I would have done it for free," Dreyfuss says, and grins wickedly. "I want Steven to read this, because he paid me a lot of money, and I want him to think, That son of a bitch...."

Again, the sharp laugh. "I have a conceit," he adds. "My story is, I told Steven to make the movie. I have a memory that I told him about A Guy Named Joe when I did Jaws. He thinks that either he had the idea already or he got it from someone else. But I know the original script line by line, and I've known it since I was ten. It's a favorite movie of mine."

But, of course, he can't say much about it. Ask if it's safe to assume that Spielberg will bring his characteristic sense of wonder to the film and he grins, says, "One could assume that," and clams up. Ask why he likes the original so much and he's no more forthcoming.

"I feel awkward talking about it," he says. "Although I know that Steven breaks this rule all the time, he's always asking people not to talk about the old movie, because he says people will make comparisons. So let's not talk about it. Suffice it to say that Tracy is an idol of mine, and that he taught me a great deal about acting, about women, about walking and talking and breathing. And lots of times on this movie, I just blatantly imitated him, but no one's gonna know it."

Certainly, no one's going to expect it. Richard Dreyfuss, who made his reputation playing brash, fast-talking schemers with something to prove--and who might have been a little like those guys in real life--is taking his cues from an actor known for being solid, low-key and reliable, a man who liked to claim that acting wasn't a profession that required much brain power. Twenty years ago, or 15 years ago, or maybe even ten years ago, you wouldn't have watched Tracy and thought of Dreyfuss; but now that Dreyfuss is not so driven, not so frantic, the comparison might make sense.

"He has found a calm life to be intense in" is the way Carrie Fisher puts it.

"He has made choices" is the way Judith James puts it.

James elaborates: "When I met him, he was looking for a way to heal. I mean, he was seeing the world through unhazy eyes for the first time, and I could see a man who was saying, 'Now, wait one second. How the hell did I get here, and what do I really want in life?' And the healing process had to do with getting married, it had to do with getting up on stage again, it had to do with going to work on Down and Out, it had to do with getting good scripts again, it had to do with the Constitution project, it had to do with finding a way to use his mind.... I guess that I saw a man, and up until then, people had been looking at a boy."

And now the man sits back in his living room and considers his maturation, his life juggling movie stardom and suburban fatherhood and the mid-life crisis he's eager to explore in his work. He doesn't seem hyperactive today; he just seems grown up.

"You know," he muses, "the perfect aspect of when you get into your forties is when you start to say things like, 'I used to know things, now I don't know things.' "

Richard Dreyfuss, youthful provocateur turned suburban dad, aging and happy, thinks of the cliché and laughs. "Well," he says, "I used to know things about acting and about my work. Now I don't know things. And maybe that's better."