Long before Oscar Madison and Quincy, Jack Klugman had an important role in a little film that made big waves: 12 Angry Men. This month, the veteran actor hosts the film when he visits TCM Nov. 12 as part of its ongoing Guest Programmer series, also introducing a range of films that he cites as being vastly important to the development of his art: City for Conquest, None but the Lonely Heart and the controversial Inherit the Wind.
All of the titles have meaning for Klugman, who, at 85, still delights theater audiences nationwide. Understandably, 12 Angry Men, which put the young Klugman in a room with a number of heavyweight talents, including Henry Fonda, ranks particularly high. “I loved doing that picture,” he reminisces. “Everybody showed up every day — they were there every minute of every day. You couldn’t get that kind of a cast of talent in one room, today. You couldn’t do it. We did it for $500,000. And Fonda was just wonderful. He’s the best actor I’ve ever worked with. I did Mr. Roberts on the road for 15 months with him, and I played the second lead for six weeks, so I know he’s wonderful. He’s the best actor I’ve ever worked with.”
Despite his considerable experience and fondness for film, Klugman says he still dislikes making movies. He remembers what it was like going in front of the camera during the filming of 12 Angry Men, and how the stare of the lens really rattled his nerves. “One scene I had in which I described how you use a knife, it was on top of a very long scene, and I had the end of it,” he explains. “I was very scared at that moment. They say the camera doesn’t lie? Well, it does. I was very frightened that I’d blow it and we’d have to do it again. So I got through it, but Fonda was looking at me like, ‘Are you crazy? Are you the same guy I worked with onstage, who had no fear at all?'”
The continuous thread between 12 Angry Men and the other films he’s presenting for TCM, naturally, is the impact they’ve had on his life — not just personally, but professionally. “I’ve learned from these pictures,” he says. “The Cary Grant movie? I learned a great deal from that. I’ve seen it maybe 20 times. I have a copy of it and I watch it all the time. I watch it for the acting. I watch it for the texture. … From Inherit the Wind, I learned what a marvelous actor Spencer Tracy is, and Fredric March. I learned from the Cagney movie how to relate. Henry Fonda said to me, ‘Look the other actor in the eye and tell the truth.’ And that’s what I do. I’ve learned from these people.”
Klugman has built his career on what he learned from his film mentors, as well as from others with whom he’s worked along the way — in particular, his frequent television and stage comrade Tony Randall. “He was so good — you had to be onstage with him to know how good he was,” Klugman says of his late friend. “He was so dedicated. He loved theater. … He put about $8 million of his own money into his project, which he lost. And they treated him badly. [The New York Times Arts reporter] Frank Rich and all of those people treated him as a television entrepreneur trying to break into Broadway, but it was not true. I saw him with Paul Muni in Inherit the Wind — he was wonderful. He stayed with it two years because he loved the play.” Klugman can’t help but get emotional when he mentions Randall’s eventual vindication upon his death. “When they dimmed the lights the day he died, I realized they knew how valuable he was,” he says, with difficulty, before firming up his voice again. “But for those people in the papers that were bad to him, I just have no time.”
It hasn’t been easy for Klugman, surviving the loss of such an important and vital friend. “We never cared about money, or the title, or fame. We only cared about the work,” he insists. “And that’s what our chemistry was. We cared about the work.” Anyone who ever saw the two perform together on TV or onstage knows how true this statement is. But they may or may not know just how close their offstage friendship was, as well.
When Klugman underwent surgery for cancer of the larynx in 1989, he lost his voice for a period of years. (His voice remains very raspy, an effect of having lost part of his vocal chords to the operation.) “It was Tony that brought it back,” he insists. And once Klugman’s voice had sufficiently recovered, it was also Randall who helped to engineer his return to the stage, a beau geste that Klugman still finds overwhelming. He’s thankful that he had the opportunity to express his gratitude to him in Randall’s last days. “I saw him every day in the hospital, and told him how much he meant to me, and how much he was in my life, and how much he brought me back to the theater. And he acknowledged how much I had meant in his life,” he says. “But when he died, I realized I had not even begun to tell him how important he was in my life, because I didn’t know it. And when I lost him, I knew that I couldn’t imagine a world without him. I just couldn’t. He was always there for me. That phone call — ‘Hello, Jack. Tony calling’ — I miss that so much.”
In the years since his surgery, and since Randall’s death, life has taken a decidedly different direction for Klugman. “I wish it hadn’t happened, of course,” he says of his cancer ordeal. “But if it hadn’t happened, I would be playing somebody’s father on some sitcom, making a great deal of money. I wouldn’t be doing the theater that I’ve been doing. Somehow, they don’t hire me for movies and television. But I can do theater, where they mic me. I just did a play called The Value of Names with two wonderful people — Liz Larsen and Dan Lauria. Where would I get the opportunity to work with two wonderful actors in a play about the blacklists, which I lived through and knew? … I would be making money, but I wouldn’t be doing anything that I really liked as much as I like my life now.”
Klugman isn’t shy about his zeal for works that identify with those persecuted during the McCarthy era, as The Value of Names does. “I always wanted to be a muckraker, like Upton Sinclair,” Klugman says, enthusiastically. “He was my favorite author. I read him as a child. That’s all there was at my house, and I really, really loved him. … My favorite Sinclair book was the two volumes about Sacco and Vanzetti, called Boston. That is his best writing. I read it, I think, when I was 16 or 17, and I just fell in love with him. Then I went back, I read Oil!, I read The Jungle … I read all of them,” he says. “There was John Dos Passos. In school, I read all of his works. He was quite prolific. … But then he lost his faith in the communist party. Those were the kinds of guys I read and I was encouraged to read.”
Though the urge to be a muckraker never left him, it would be a long time before Klugman’s work afforded him the opportunity to employ his trade in the service of social justice — not until a role as a certain forensic pathologist came his way. “When I [first] read Quincy, I realized he was two heroes in one,” he remembers. “He was a cop, and he was a doctor. I said, ‘This guy could be a muckraker.’ … But the guy that really brought [the show] to life was not a muckraker. He promised me that he would do it, but he never did it, so I took over the show. I did shows about Tourette Syndrome, and shows about parent abuse — a lot of social injustices — and I became a muckraker. I loved that show, because now I was the boss. I was the boss of that show, and no word was ever put up on that screen that wasn’t approved by me, and I loved that.”
Actor. TV star. Muckraker. Cancer survivor. Friend. It’s been a rich, full life by any standard, and Klugman, who continues to work on the stage — as we spoke, he was preparing to head to New Brunswick, NJ, to star with veteran character actor Paul Dooley in a performance of The Sunshine Boys at the George Street Theater — feels that there’s nothing in his life that’s been left undone. “Since I did Death of a Salesman and The Price, it’s complete,” he says of two of his greatest stage ambitions. But even as his visit as TCM Guest Programmer has him looking back on the roots of his career, the urge to act still propels him forward. “I’m looking for a play,” he hints. “I’m hoping someone will write a play [that I can do] without playing a Jewish grandfather. … Something with meat on it, because I’m as free now as I’ve ever been. I’m older; I’m wiser; and I have nothing to hide anymore.”