In the spring of 1971, a film crew waited in Central Park for one of America’s most celebrated actors. The star never showed up. When a producer finally went looking for a pay phone to call the studio and halt production, he found something strange: the wires in the phone booths at that end of the park had been cut. The man they were waiting for had been, just two years earlier, the brightest face in American cinema.
A Brooklyn kid, an Oscar nominee, a Time magazine cover star, and the husband of the most famous woman in the world. Now Elliott Gould was hiding across the city, and when he finally appeared, he looked like a stranger. Long coat, a six-day beard, and an American flag tied around his waist, like a man auditioning for the end of the world. Within days, the film was dead.
Security guards were hired to keep the star off his own set, and the town that had crowned him began spreading rumors that he had lost his mind. What no one in that park knew was how he had gotten there. Gould was born Elliott Goldstein on August 29, 1938, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. He was the only child of a marriage that drained itself over 27 years.
His father Bernard bought fabrics for the clothing trade, and his mother Lucille sold artificial flowers to beauty salons. The Goldsteins were working-class, non-Orthodox Jews descended from immigrants from Ukraine, Poland, and Russia. They were ambitious for their boy, even if they had no idea what to do with him. He was a painfully shy child who lived on radio serials and stories of Sherlock Holmes and Pinocchio.
One of his earliest memories, he said decades later, was being told at age two: “You don’t know how to feel, and you don’t know how to think, and we’ll tell you. ” Lucille had a plan for all of it. When he was eight or nine, she took her withdrawn son to the Charlie Lowe School of Theatre, where he learned singing, dancing, and mimicry. It was there that someone decided Goldstein was too hard to pronounce, and changed it to the more Anglo-Saxon Gould, without bothering to consult the boy who would carry the name.
She installed herself as his primary critic. “My mother used to say, ‘I’m your toughest critic, and all you have to do is please me,'” he recalled. He understood the deal: he could only please himself after pleasing her. He later admitted his parents feared he was slow, a worry that planted a lifelong terror of being seen as stupid.
Performing became the solution he invented to prove them wrong. He became a child model, walking in shows around the city until work stopped when he was about 12. He graduated from the Professional Children’s School and never really enjoyed any of it. He simply discovered that if he memorized a routine, he could appear, for a few minutes, to be a person who communicated well.
As a teenager he worked in the Catskills doing dance and comedy at the Grossinger’s hotels, holding onto a Webster’s dictionary given to him by a dance teacher who “pushed me mentally and didn’t treat me like a child. ” He held onto that dictionary for more than 60 years. “The theater rescued me,” he said, “or at least gave me a place to belong. ” In 1957, at 19, he made his Broadway debut in a forgotten musical called Rumple, and never forgot the smell of that theater.
Small roles followed, along with the usual humiliations of a young actor. There were stretches when he worked as an elevator operator to pay the bills. Then, in 1962, the tall, curly-haired 6’3″ young man was cast as the villain Harry Bogen in Harold Rome’s musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale. His life changed entirely at the audition of a 19-year-old girl from the same neighborhood.
Her name was Barbra Streisand, and she was reading for the small comic role of the lovesick secretary Miss Marmelstein. Gould sat through her final auditions and saw something in her that unsettled him, a kind of mutual tension wrapped in nerves. “She presents herself the way I feel about myself,” he said. When the producers thanked her and she stood there, confused, not knowing what would happen next, she called out her phone number into the dark empty theater and asked if anyone, anyone at all, could call her.
Someone did. “I remembered her number and called her,” Gould said. They married in Carson City, Nevada, in 1963 before a justice of the peace, while Streisand was in the West performing for Liberace. For a very short time, they were just two hungry kids from Brooklyn who had gotten lucky at nearly the same moment.
Then the ground shook beneath them. Streisand’s breakthrough made her an overnight star. Within a year she had a Tony nomination, a Tonight Show appearance, and a debut album that made her the best-selling singer in the country. Their son, Jason Emanuel Gould, was born December 29, 1966.
The marriage was already tearing violently off course. She was becoming Barbra Streisand, top-billed star. He was becoming a line in a gossip column, Mr. Streisand.
The humiliation was relentless and public, especially in an era of peak macho showmanship. He had been the star of the show she auditioned for; now he was the man photographers ordered out of the frame so they could get a clean shot of his wife. For years, the offers he got came through her. “We didn’t grow together,” he said, “and the reason is that she became more important than our relationship.
”
Instead, Gould turned toward the counterculture. In 1969, director Paul Mazursky cast him as Ted Henderson in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a smart, anxious satire about wife-swapping in California, where two modern couples convince themselves to the brink of a foursome in a Vegas hotel room, then lose their nerve at the last moment. Gould, playing the most conventional and frightened husband, was the film’s hidden engine. People who had never heard of him left theaters repeating his lines.
Roger Ebert put his finger on the quality that would define Gould’s next decade. “Gould emerges not as a star so much as a character,” he wrote. “He’s very funny. ” The film earned Gould an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and 20th Century Fox, sensing which way the wind was blowing, signed him that same year to four non-exclusive pictures.
Just as Hollywood decided it no longer trusted the slick, handsome boy next door, this plain man from Bensonhurst, with ethnic features and a slightly rumpled look no one knew how to market, became a postmodern movie star and, strangest of all, a symbol of allure. The first of his Fox films permanently carved his image into American cultural memory. Robert Altman’s MASH, released in January 1970, was a war film whose only gunshot ends the first half of a football game. It made Gould, as the irreverent field surgeon Trapper John McIntyre, a full-fledged icon of the New Hollywood.
Altman had initially wanted him for a different role. Gould turned it down, a rare and useful moment of self-awareness. “I told him I’d never questioned an offer before, but trying to prove myself as a Southerner would drive me crazy,” he recalled. Instead he asked for Trapper and got it.
The Hollywood Reporter review read like prophecy: “If Elliott Gould keeps choosing and playing his films as he has so far, people may start coming to the movies just because he’s in them. ”
A famous legend grew around Gould and his co-star Donald Sutherland’s relationship with Altman, one that seemed to turn into rebellion. According to the story, repeated in dozens of documentaries and by Altman himself, Gould and Sutherland, baffled and resentful of Altman’s style, overlapping dialogue, exhausting attention to extras, and the unsettling feeling that no one was in charge, went to Fox producers to try to get the director fired. Altman believed this until his death.
Gould always told it differently. “Bob thought we wanted to get rid of him, which is absolutely untrue,” he said. “We were just uncomfortable with that working method. ” Whatever happened, the dailies convinced the skeptics and validated Altman’s approach.
Sutherland never worked with Altman again. Gould became Altman’s favorite leading man and, eventually, his close friend. MASH made him a full-fledged star. In 1970 he was suddenly everywhere: in Getting Straight, as a Vietnam veteran turned campus agitator; in the sex comedy I Love My Wife; and in September of that year on the cover of Time magazine under a surreal painting of his face, with the line “A Star for a Nervous Age.
” The article, titled “Urban Don Quixote,” was a long, ironic marvel that this ordinary, shaggy, unmistakably Jewish man had been made a hero by the young. It noted that Gould, in its words, only landed in the middle of social and sexual tensions. It also revealed a detail or two about the man behind the glint in his eye. His gambling had at some point become obsessive, “even to the degree of betting on both teams,” which might be a sickness or a strategy, and perhaps both.
“As of the day before yesterday,” Gould told the magazine, “I stopped being a tormented person. ” He said this at the height of his glory, on the cover of Time, married to a superstar, with the industry at his feet. But he was not telling the truth. He wanted more than being a public figure; he wanted to make things himself.
In January 1969 he founded a production company with Jack Brodsky, and in February 1971 they released Little Murders, Alan Arkin’s directorial debut, adapted from a Jules Feiffer play about a young man so numbed by New York’s violence he no longer feels pain or pleasure. Gould produced it, starred in it, and loved it without a shred of reservation. That same season, he took on the most unlikely assignment of his career. Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish master of interior dread, chose Gould to star in his first English-language film, The Touch, as an archaeologist who lures Bibi Andersson away from her husband, played by Max von Sydow.
It was not a good film by Bergman standards, and their on-screen chemistry was faint, but Gould treated the experience like a mountain to climb. Asked much later what the most dangerous thing he ever did in a film was, he did not hesitate: working with Ingmar Bergman. By this point, the marriage was effectively over, even if not yet legally. He and Streisand had separated in 1969.
But the collapse of his marriage, however painful and public, would soon shrink beside the collapse of the man himself. The instrument of his fall was a modest, odd film called A Glimpse of the Tiger. Gould bought the rights to Herman Raucher’s novel about two bohemian grifters and set it up at Warner Bros as part of a two-picture deal, producing and starring opposite Kim Darby, who had just come off the huge success of True Grit. It should have been a smart move for an actor who wanted to run his own shop.
Instead it became the most famous failure of his generation. Something inside Gould broke. He was living hard on marijuana and LSD, with industry reports of harder substances too. He had convinced himself that after producing Little Murders he had “earned the right to be the boss.
” He fired director Anthony Harvey, who had just completed The Lion in Winter. He showed up on set so fully merged with his wild, unpredictable character that his colleagues could no longer tell where the role ended and the man began. “I scared people on the Tiger film, but only because of my personality,” he later admitted. “I showed up with a six-day beard, a cigar in my mouth, and a long coat down to my knees.
Around my waist I wore an American flag scarf. ” Kim Darby was genuinely frightened of him, and the production hired security guards, partly, as one producer admitted, to calm her nerves. Then came that morning in Central Park. Frank Wells, a Warner Bros executive, had left strict instructions: if Elliott didn’t show by 11:00, the film would be shut down.
He didn’t show. When the production tried to call the studio, the crew, in a frantic attempt to save months of work that a shutdown would destroy, had cut the wires of every nearby phone booth so the call couldn’t be made. Finally someone drove to a booth at the far edge of the park and reached Wells, who spoke the three words that ended everything: “Shut it down. ” The film collapsed after about four days of shooting.
Gould’s own telling of the disaster carried the wounded grandeur of a man who had reshot the scene in his darkness ten thousand times. “In a sense, I sank my own ship,” he said. He spoke of being “sabotaged by people working for me, cosmic embezzlers taking and taking and never giving back,” and of being threatened by men on the set of his own film. The result was brutally simple.
“I couldn’t work for almost two years,” he said. “I was blacklisted. ”
Then came the final stab. Warner Bros wasn’t ready to let the project die entirely, so they handed the wreckage to director Peter Bogdanovich.
He kept almost nothing of it but a passing idea and built something entirely new on its ruins: the madcap comedy What’s Up, Doc? The lead role was rewritten from a man to a woman. And the woman they chose was, of course, Barbra Streisand. Gould’s ex-wife, opposite Ryan O’Neal, took the film he had destroyed trying to make and turned it into one of the biggest hits of her career, while he sat unemployed amid the ruins of his own.
The divorce from Streisand was finalized on July 9, 1971, the same terrible year everything else collapsed. The most famous woman he ever loved had, through no real fault of her own, inherited everything, including the crime scene. Yet, the bond with Streisand never completely broke, and the two went on to spend the next half-century as cautious but affectionate co-parents to Jason, who grew up to become an actor and singer himself. Hollywood is a corporate town, and its real industry is insurance.
Being a profitable star means, in the final analysis, being insurable. The whispering charge of Gould’s madness made him a liability no insurance company would touch. “They were the establishment, and without examining me, they got an insurance policy based on my being crazy,” he said. “And I wasn’t.
” He conceded what was true. “I didn’t know the limits. I thought I had earned the right to be creative. ” For almost two years, the phone never rang at all.
Finally, he underwent a humiliating ritual designed to prove he could be trusted to work again. “Then they stuck 19 needles in my head to see if I was sane,” he said. The needles, along with nearly seven years of therapy, apparently did the job. Salvation, when it came, wore the face of the man some blamed for driving him crazy in the first place.
Robert Altman received The Long Goodbye from studio head David Picker and wanted Gould and no one else to play Raymond Chandler’s private detective, Philip Marlowe. It was a role completely owned by Humphrey Bogart, and Altman’s conception bordered on heresy. He would take Marlowe, dress him in a rumpled suit amid a permanent cloud of cigarette smoke, and have him wake up as a man lost in 1973 Los Angeles. Gould, who drove his own 1948 Lincoln Continental in the film, gave what many consider the best performance of his life.
He was stumbling, self-aware, and deeply wounded, something he might only have found in himself after visiting the bottom. “Altman,” he repeated many times, “gave me more space than any other director. ”
The exile was over. In 1974, they made California Split together, a spontaneous, sad, funny film about two compulsive gamblers, played by Gould and George Segal, wandering through cheap poker rooms and racetracks, getting beaten up in parking lots, chasing a high that always evaporates the moment they reach it.
Screenwriter Joseph Walsh had recovered from his own addiction and chose Gould for the part because, in his words, “Elliott lived the gambling life. ” It wasn’t just a metaphor. Gould was a genuine thrill addict, and the film’s most memorable scene, sitting at a table with a bandaged nose and stacks of hundred-dollar bills stuffed in his shoe, looked more like a home movie shot without his knowledge than a performance. For many, it remains the best of the small Altman films.
He danced through the role with a spontaneous joy like a man who had just been released from some kind of prison, because, in a way, he had. His private life in those years was a high-stakes bet in itself. Even before the divorce from Streisand was final, he had become involved with a young woman named Jennifer Bogart. They had a daughter, Molly, in November 1971, and a son, Sam, in January 1973, and did not marry until after that.
That marriage ended in 1975. They remarried in 1978 and split for good around 1989. In the end, it left Gould a twice-married man with three children and a reputation for a private life just as improvised as his favorite director’s films. He remained a beloved, slightly erratic presence on television through those years.
He hosted Saturday Night Live six times between 1976 and 1980 and was a founding member of what the show later called the Five Timers Club. His final appearance there was hosting the first episode of the show’s disastrous 1980 season. He walked into Studio 8H to discover the entire original cast and producer had been replaced by strangers he had never met. He never hosted again.
Still, for a while, he landed distinctive roles. He was among a battalion of stars in Richard Attenborough’s 1977 war epic A Bridge Too Far, and he was genuinely excellent in two taut thrillers: Capricorn One in 1978 as a journalist exposing a fake Mars mission, and The Silent Partner that same year as a quiet bank teller who outwits a killer thief played by Christopher Plummer. But the momentum of the early seventies never returned, and Gould, by nature and perhaps by mysterious design, kept choosing strange, personal, unprofitable projects over the safe road back to stardom. By the end of the decade he had drifted into work he could barely defend.
He made two Disney films in 1980, The Last Flight of Noah’s Ark and The Devil and Max Devlin, and kept his trademark candor about his movies. About one mid-seventies comedy, Whiffs, he said simply it was “a piece of crap. ” He traveled abroad on European financing and faced some explicit embarrassments. A familiar face in unfamiliar places.
By 1984, the man who had graced the cover of Time was starring in a short-lived CBS sitcom called E/R, set in a Chicago emergency room. Curiously, two of his co-stars later appeared in the famous nineties drama of the same name: George Clooney and Mary McDonnell. The eighties for Elliott Gould were one long, quiet afternoon. Beneath the career turbulence ran a deeper current he didn’t bother hiding much.
Asked once whether he had smoked marijuana, he answered loudly, almost shouting: “Of course I smoked marijuana. ” Asked during psychoanalysis whether he realized he was out of touch with reality, he fired back like a man who’d been studying that question all his life: “Whose reality? ” Asked directly if he had a drug problem, he delivered the sentence that should be carved over an entire decade of his exile. “No,” he said.
“I didn’t have a drug problem. I had a reality problem. ” He had actually been telling people some version of this since he was two years old, when someone told him he didn’t know how to think or feel. The astonishing thing isn’t that he eventually lost his balance.
It’s that he ever found it again. Recovery came gradually, through supporting roles, that long, unglamorous second act of a distinctive actor. In 1991, Warren Beatty cast him in Bugsy as Harry Greenberg, the paranoid, doomed mobster. With his worn face and full humanity, Gould reminded Hollywood he could still quietly break your heart.
Then in the mid-nineties came the two roles that would make him known to an entire generation that had no idea he was once a top-billed star. In Friends, he played Jack Geller, the sweet, oblivious father of Ross and Monica. Through a handful of episodes, he became, for millions of people born long after The Long Goodbye, just a nice, embarrassing dad. In 1998, he delivered a stunning performance in American History X as Murray, a Jewish teacher dating a young man’s mother, enduring a table of racist ugliness with unbearable dignity.
In 2001, Steven Soderbergh cast him as Reuben Tishkoff, the aged silk-robed casino mogul who finances the heist in Ocean’s Eleven, a role he’d reprise in two sequels and a spinoff. The lifelong gambler had, in the end, become the casino owner. He kept working far past the point where most men slow down. He was an epidemiologist in Soderbergh’s eerily prescient Contagion in 2011, and a psychiatrist in the charming indie Ruby Sparks in 2012.
He had a long, moving run as the tormented teacher Ezra Goldman in Ray Donovan, and appeared in The Kominsky Method and Grace and Frankie. A hoarse-voiced ghost of old Hollywood, wandering peacefully through the era of prestige television. He collected stories the way others collect grievances and told them at any time, for the slightest reason. There was Groucho Marx, who watched Gould change a light bulb standing barefoot on a mattress and called out, “That was the best acting I’ve ever seen you do.
” There was Elvis Presley, who asked Gould to meet him in his Las Vegas dressing room, where he sat with a gold . 45 in his belt, his father, and Colonel Tom Parker beside him. The King wanted to know one thing: why Gould had split from Barbara. When Gould urged him, in his words, to “get out and be free,” Presley looked at him and said, “You’re crazy, man.
” Gould replied, “Elvis, I’m not crazy, I’m scared, just like you. ”
He always described himself as a man of very deep Jewish identity, and in those final decades the circle closed. There was voice work for Holocaust commemoration and an endless parade of rabbis, grandfathers, and Jewish elders. In his eighties, he was still working doggedly, appearing in Ryan Murphy’s television empire and lending his distinctive voice to documentaries, quietly outliving periodic internet rumors of his death.
At 82, he sat on a patio in Los Angeles. He hadn’t been cast as Hamlet; no one had offered. He simply decided it was finally time to learn the “To be or not to be” soliloquy by heart, for no reason other than that he wanted to. Altman, one of the few who truly understood him, had once said Gould was a genius who might destroy himself because of it.
Altman turned out to be half right. Gould was indeed destroyed, briefly and spectacularly, then rebuilt himself. Perhaps his old partner Donald Sutherland put Gould’s whole outlook best in a line Gould loved repeating to the end of his days: “What’s the point of knowing everything when you don’t understand anything? ”
It’s easy to overlook the significance of Elliott Gould because he always made it look like an accident.
For a few dazzling years at the dawn of the seventies, he was the true face of a new kind of American movie star. Shaggy where the old stars were sleek, restless where they were smooth, neurotic and real in a way the studios spent decades polishing until the distinction faded. Alongside Hoffman, Pacino, and De Niro, he proved the movie hero could look and move like someone you might actually know from your neighborhood. And in his three films with Altman, he helped invent the spontaneous, mumbling, unmannered style that half of American actors have been trying to imitate ever since.
The men who burn bright young are supposed to stay that way. The beautiful ruins are supposed to remain ruined and attractive and finished. But Gould did the unmannered, unmythic thing. He went to his therapist.
He took the supporting roles and did his work for another fifty years, until that frightened boy who was told at age two he couldn’t express his feelings became one of the most expressive faces in cinema. He said only that he had a problem with reality. In the end, reality was lucky to have him.