Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson with daughters Roberta (left) and Katherine Photo by Tim Boxer

ELI WALLACH
Paramount Superstar
Ponders Price For Wife

STORY AND PHOTO BY TIM BOXER

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LI HERSCHEL WALLACH, who died in New York on June 24 at age 98, was expected to follow his brother and two sisters who became school teachers. After he earned a master’s degree in education from the City College of New York, he shocked his Polish Jewish immigrant parents, Abraham and Bertha, when he announced he’s going to become an actor instead.

Growing up in the Italian Red Hook section of Brooklyn, Eli Wallach used to cast a prying eye on the shady characters who would hang out at his father’s confectionary, Bertha’s Candy Store.

When he made a name for himself as a tough-guy character on the screen—a Mexican bandit in The Magnificent Seven, a Mafia don in The Godfather: Part III— he based those unsavory roles on the crude customers at his father’s store. He observed the ganbgbanger culture and skillfully managed numerous vile screen roles in the years ahead.

As a founding member of Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, he learned Method acting—in which you immerse body and soul into the essence of the person you’re portraying—and became one of Hollywood’s outstanding character actors. He was the go-to guy if you were casting villainy.

His first TV role came in 1949 in an episode of The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse. In 1945 he triumphed on Broadway in Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo, for which he earned a 1951 Tony Award as best supporting actor. In 1953 he was back on Broadway in another Tennessee Williams play, Camino Real. For his 1956 screen debut he portrayed a terrifying seducer in Baby Doll, also written by Tennessee Williams.

Eli did numerous performances with Anne Jackson, from an Irish family in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. They met in 1946 while performing in a Tennessee Williams play,  This Property Is Condemned.

Two years later, while working in a Broadway revue, Make Mine Manhattan, they decided to get married. Eli said, "That day we came to Sardi’s. Everybody kept sending us manhattans." Anne said, "I was the drunkest bride." They had three children.

Acting became a family trade in 1978 as daughters Roberta and Katherine joined their parents in The Diary of Anne Frank in Toronto. Roberta portrayed Anne; Katherine played Anne’s older sister. In an interview Roberta told me that "this was the first time in the history of the play that an actual family played the Frank family." (Except for her brother Peter, who was making animated commercials.)

Asked if he encouraged his kids to go into the business, Eli would say, "Would you push your child off a bridge? You have to be crazy! You have to love this more than anything. It is not fair; it is frustrating."

On Eli’s first visit to Israel, with Anne ("a lapsed Catholic") and his agent Peter Witte, a street vendor in Bethlehem tried to sell him pictures of the holy sites. "No thanks," Eli said. "I have my own Nikon and I’ll take my own pictures."

The vendor looked at Anne and said, "I’ll give you 10 sheep and 10 camels for her."

As Eli reflected on a proper response, his agent exclaimed, "Take it! Take it! I get 10 percent."

Danny Kaye came from his Broadway show Two By Two to congratulate Lauren Bacall on the first anniversary of her Broadway musical Applause at a party in 1971, at the Americana Hotel in New York Photo by Tim Boxer

LAUREN BACALL
Makes Hollywood Debut
Amidst Anti-Jewish Slurs

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AUREN BACALL, a leading lady of Hollywood’s golden age died on August 12 at 89 in her home in New York. Although she lived in a decidedly gentile atmosphere she never forgot where she came from.

Actually she came from the Bronx where she was born Betty Joan Perske on September 16, 1924. Her mother was Natalie Weinstein-Bacal, a Romanian Jewish immigrant; her father was William Perske, born in New Jersey to Polish Jewish parents. Betty is a first cousin of Shimon Peres (nee Szymon Perski).

Film director Howard Hawks discovered the sultry blond siren as a 17-year-old cover girl on Harper’s Bazaar in 1943. He brought her to Hollywood and changed her name to Lauren. In the following year she made her screen debut in Hawks’ To Have and Have Not, opposite Humphrey Bogart. She was hot. They named her The Look, for her tendency to pose seductively — chin down and eyes up.

As she matured, she became her own person. She was independent, determined to make a success of her life, and proud of her heritage. In an appearance on the Phil Donohue television talk show in 1980, she was asked her religious preference. "I have lots of faith and conviction," she answered. "I’m Jewish…I don’t practice the religion…I believe in it, though. I mean I believe in Israel…Now, at last, I’m very glad that I’m Jewish. I wasn’t always, but I am now."

Bacall concludes her 2006 memoir, By Myself and Then Some, with these heart-felt words: "Going back through my life until now, the Jewish family feeling stands strong and proud, and at last I can say I am glad I sprang from that. I would not trade those roots – that identity."