Stars of David

Stars of David Read Free Page A

Book: Stars of David Read Free
Author: Abigail Pogrebin
Tags: Fiction
Ads: Link
Mike was saying with his usual wry humor, ‘What can we do about his nose?’ Or, ‘He looks like he has one eyebrow’; and they plucked in between my eyebrows. Dear Mike, who was, on the one hand, extremely courageous to cast me, in the end was at the same time aware that I looked nothing like what the part called for.” Hoffman laughs.
    We’re having breakfast in a Columbus Avenue restaurant near his apartment in New York City. He arrives in buoyant spirits, dressed in jeans, white T-shirt, and blue blazer. Right away he befriends the waitress—“Where did you grow up?” She turns out to be from his childhood neighborhood in Los Angeles: Orlando Street. “Oh my God,” he says, “I grew up on Flores!”
    He orders very specific “loose” scrambled egg whites with one yoke thrown in, plus onions, salsa, and garlic. “Not too dry, no milk, no butter; a little olive oil.” Hoffman shakes his head when I order my omelet. “Omelets aren’t the best way to go,” he advises me. “Scrambled is tastier. But you go ahead with your omelet.”
    Back to 1967: Nichols, who had seen Hoffman in an off-Broadway play, invited him to California to audition: “I flew out to L.A. with very little notice, and of course hadn’t slept,” says Hoffman. “I was very nervous. And in my memory, it was an eight-page or ten-page scene in the bedroom, and of course I kept fucking it up. I distinctly remember Mike taking me aside and saying, ‘Just relax; you’re so nervous. Have you ever done a screen test before?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘It’s
nothing
; these are just crew people here; you’re not on a stage. This is just film; no one’s going to see it. This isn’t going into theaters.’ And I nodded and I was so thankful that he was trying to soften me; but then he put his hand out to shake mine, and his hand was so sweaty that my hand slipped out of it.
Now
I was terrified. Because I knew, ‘
That man is as scared as I am
.’
    â€œI felt, from my subjective point of view, that the whole crew was wondering, ‘Why is this ugly little Jew even trying out for this part called Benjamin Braddock?’ I looked for a Jewish face in the film crew, but I don’t think I sensed one Jew. It was the culmination of everything I had ever feared and dreaded about Aunt Pearl.” He’s referring to his Aunt Pearl, who, upon learning that “Dusty” wanted to become an actor, remarked: “‘You can’t be an actor; you’re too ugly.’” “It was like a banner,” Hoffman continues: “‘
Aunt Pearl was right!
’ She’d warned me.”
    Hoffman reaches into the bread basket to break off small chips of a baguette. “It was probably one of the more courageous pieces of casting any director has done in the history of American movies,” he continues. “And an act of courage is sometimes accompanied by a great deal of fear.”
    Obviously the film went on to become a classic and made Hoffman a star. But even after becoming a Hollywood icon, with memorable roles in such films as
Midnight Cowboy, Marathon Man, Kramer vs. Kramer, Tootsie
, and
Rainman
, at the age of sixty-eight, Hoffman says he’s still being “miscast”: “Someone told me about a review of this movie I did,
Runaway Jury
, which indicated that I was miscast because the part was a Southern gentleman lawyer. Which must mean to that critic, ‘He shouldn’t be Jewish.’ The unconscious racism is extraordinary—as if there are no Southern gentlemen Jews. So he implied I was miscast. And I mentioned that to my wife and she said, ‘Well, you’ve always been miscast.’ And she’s right. The truth is that you’ve got two hundred million people in this country and I don’t know the number of Jews—are there six or seven

Similar Books

The Way We Live Now

Anthony Trollope

The Mapmaker's Sons

V. L. Burgess

Echo Soul Seekers

Alyson Noël

Dark Reservations

John Fortunato

The Running Dream

Wendelin Van Draanen

The 500: A Novel

Matthew Quirk