| Going for Gould The Daily Mail Interview Actor ELIOTT GOULD'S life has been a roller-coaster ride: sudden rise to stardom, three marraiges, including one to Barbra Streisand, then a fall from fame. Yet happier times have come around again, he tells Grace Bradberry Elliott Gould was what you might call a late developer. 'I didn't learn to ride a bike until I was 15. I didn't consummate a relationship until after I was 20, with Barbra Striesand.' During the eight-year marriage that followed, he loved Streisand with rare intensity: 'a bath of lava' was how he once described their relationship. But it is 32 years since they divorced and you might think he would have got over it some time ago. You would be wrong. 'It has taken me all this time to transcend my bitterness and disillusionment. My love for her was pure and it still exists. Even through times where I've had a big mouth, or behaved improperly, I've always been in good faith.' he adds. His honesty, or 'good faith', has not always helped their post-divorce relationship. Over the years, Gould has taken pot shots at Streisand. He once remarked that she bothered to call only when she wanted something, was angry or was looking for their son Jason. Just four years ago he compared her to Marie Antoinette, remarking that she was 'unaware of the facts of common existence'. Yet somehow, it seems, they have become friends again. 'I am now friendly with Barbra and James (Brolin), her husband. He's very good for her, and for her to be happy, that's good for me as well, in terms of what she meant to me and means to me as the mother of my first child.' They are now on such good terms that the four of them - Streisand, Brolin, Jason and Gould - have been out to dinner together. Getting to this point has not been easy. 'It's been painful, difficult. Who wants to be so exposed for so long?' he says of the spotlight that has been trained on both their lives, but particularly Streisand's for years. Megastardom came to both of them. Streisand rose to the top in the 1960s, and won an Oscar for Funny Girl in 1969. After languishing in her shadow for five years, Gould finally caught up, with lead roles in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) for which he won his own Oscar nomination, and MASH (1970) But while Streisand went on to become one of the world's biggest celebrities, Gould had only one triumphant year before things started to go wrong. His fall from grace was precipitous. In 1970, Time magazine put him on its cover, and hailed him as 'the standard bearer for the Western World's hung-up generation.' The following year, Hollywood decided he was not so much hung-up as outright crazy, after he behaved so eccentrically on the set of a film that production was halted after four days. It was two years before he worked again, giving a brilliant performance as Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman's film version of The Long Goodbye. His reputation as an actor recovered; his price tag never did. Shaky taste in scripts led him to make some poor films, while a gambling habit and some bad business decisions put him into debt. Finally, aged 64, he is debt-free, having paid back the U.S. taxman 'every red white and blue cent' after two years of well-paid work. There's been his recurring role in Friends, playing Ross and Monica Geller's father, and the part of a gay Las Vegas casino owner in the all-star remake of Ocean's Eleven. Now he is starring in an adaption of Spike Milligan's novel Puckoon. 'I always admired Spike and his perspective,' he tells me - a remark that won't exactly reassure anyone still wondering about Elliott Gould's sanity. He plays a Jewish doctor in a small Irish town where the border between north and south runs through the churchyard. While filming in Belfast, he also struck up an unlikely friendship with two cobblers. It is one of the curious aspects of Gould's strange celebrity status that while he is instantly recognisable he is not the kind of person you point at in restaurants. So while Streisand lives in the seclusion of a multimillion-dollar estate in Malibu, Gould manages to blend in amid the nondescript area of west Los Angeles where he rents a one-bedroom flat. He lives modestly. His version of the celebrity home gym is a small blue trampoline in one corner of the living room. 'Try it if you like,' he suggests. There is no sofa, and the room is dominated by a large desk. To one side there is a table filled with family photographs, including one of Streisand with their son Jason, and others of Gould's second wife Jenny, and their two children Molly and Sam, as well as Molly with Gould's grandchild. (He is still married to Jenny, though they have been separated since 1989.) On the wall above hangs a drawing by New York caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, showing Gould and Streisand in the Broadway musical, I Can Get It For You Wholesale. Gould first set eyes on Streisand at the audition. It was 1962, and they were two kids from Brooklyn hoping to make it big on Broadway. She shouted her telephone number across the lights and Gould, who had been cast as the lead, memorized it. 'I called Barbra and she wanted me to come and see her performing that night,' he recalls. This wasn't Gould's idea of a first date. 'I said, "No. When we start rehearsals I believe you're going to have the part of my assistant. From the beginning, he seems to have had anxieties about whose career was dominant, and whether his love was being returned. I ask, for example, whether there was a crackle of chemistry when they first saw one another. 'I don't think she saw me,' he says. In retrospect, he sees himself as the more needy, insecure person in the relationship. 'I had never been with anyonne. Nor had I ever lived with anyone,' He soon moved into her apartment, and in 1963 they were married. To begin with, he was a little more famous than she was. But she soon overshadowed him and cruel observers began refering to him as Mr. Streisand. In the past, he's said that Streisand didn't know how to love him back, and that the marriage, to her, 'was just like business'. Now, he's more generous. 'Barbra was very kind. She took care of me in my younger days.' Does he mean emotionally? 'No, I mean Barbra paid the rent. I wasn't making very much money. Whatever I gave to Barbra had to do with my heart and soul. That's difficult for a man, to be dependent on your wife.' A couple of years into the marriage, they went into therapy together. 'It wasn't my idea,' he remarks. But though she may have pushed him into it, he was certainly a convert. 'There's nothing better,' he remarks. It didn't save their marriage, however. In 1969 they agreed to a trial separation and soon afterwards Gould became involved with 18-year-old Jenny Bogart. Amateur psychology suggests he might have been seeking the chance to run the relationship this time around. 'Oh no, it all repeats. There's no escape,' he says wryly. 'Nobody runs Jenny.' Streisand changed her mind and decided she wanted him back. She flew to Stockholm, where he was filming The Touch with Ingmar Bergman. 'I said to Barbra. "If you want to get back together, so do I, but you'll have to be patient. I can't and I won't discard this life that has been with me for this amount of time." In other words, he wouldn't dump Jenny on the spot. 'Of course, that couldn't be. It had to be momentary,' he says, clicking his fingers. 'It would be foolish to have regrets. It's painful, but who isn't in pain? That's part of the covenant of being conscious and alive. We started our relationship before we understood or even knew who we were.' Which is to say that he doesn't sometimes look back and wonder, 'What if?' 'I'm sure that I would not have made the same errors of judgement if Barbra and I were together during my success, ' he says, which is probably true. Streisand is shrewd, Gould is apt to be naive. He says he was losing his identity in the marriage. 'Sometimes I've thought. "What if I had stayed?" But the only way I was going to find myself was to leave.' Streisand was awarded custody of their two-year old son Jason, and by Gould's own admission he was not the best father. 'It was very tough for Jason,' he concedes. 'Both Barbra and I were very young, and she being as successful as she was, and me being how I was. We had a great Scottish nanny,' he adds, in a way that suggests she was the one saving grace of Jason's early life. Jason, now a 36-year-old writer-director, is gay. 'It's his choice and it has enlightened me,' says Gould. 'When he comes here, that's his bed. When he moved to New York he gave me his car. He and I are so close.' It seems odd that Jason doesn't choose to stay at Streisands's lavish Malibu pad. 'He's extremely modest and completely down-to-earth.' Says Gould, warily, 'The illusion of stardom, of importance, of significance is basically that, an illusion.' I suggest to Gould that even the most liberal parents secretly long for their children to go through the conventions of marriage and parenting, and are slightly disappointed when a child is gay. 'I would say that's short-sighted, and shallow and unevolved,' he says 'Our children will turn out the way our children have to turn out.' But in the past, Gould has wondered aloud whether it might have been nurture as much as nature that led to his son being gay. 'I thought perhaps my not being there might have had some influence on that,' he concedes. 'But it is what it is. I would only hope for anyone to be able to know someone like Jason.' Neither he nor Streisand will comment on unconfirmed reports in the American media that Jason is HIV positive. If true, it might explain Gould's reconciliation with his ex-wife. Only recently, he says, they were reminiscing about the 1969 Oscars, when she won for Funny Girl, and he was her date for the evening. 'We were already separated, but she asked me to take her to the Academy Awards. I said to her, 'The only thing that I'm sorry about is that I should have told you not to wear that dress which was so transparent, the Arnold Scaasi dress. I wasn't thinking that you were going to walk up, and that your back was going to be to the audience. We don't want to see that...' He smiles to himself at the memory. And how did Miss Streisand respond? 'She said, "Yeah, why didn't you tell me?" In another conversation 'I told her about a dream I had recently - I was so close to her and really loved her, and she didn't have to wear make-up for me.' This seems rather an odd term of endearment, until you consider that Streisand probably doesn't let many people see her without make-up. His relationship with his second (and third) wife Jenny has been almost as complicated. They had been living together for four years and had two children, Molly and Sam, when they married. The marriage lasted only three-and-a-half months. In 1978, Jenny asked if they could remarry, so they did. A year later, in 1979, they separated again, but a year after that Gould moved back in and stayed until 1989. He is vague about whether he currently has a girlfriend - 'I have a friend, you know, somebody that I spend time with and see, but I live alone.' Though he remains as 'hung-up' as when Time wrote about him, he seems to have dealt with most of his demons. He no longer gambles and doesn't smoke tobacco, let alone marijuana - I don't want to give up my clarity for anything.' In Hollywood, his problems in the early 1970s were put down to the fact that he was dropping acid. he says this was the the symptom, not the disease. 'As I said on a late-night talk show, I never had a drug problem, I had a problem with reality.' So was he ever crazy? No, he says, but anyone who has dreamed of making it as big as he did 'would say you'd be crazy to throw it away, or put yourself in a position for it to be taken away from you'. He admits he lost any perspective, and by the time he came to shoot A Glimpse of Tiger, a month after his divorce from Streisand, he had got carried away with his own ego. 'I had no judgement,' he says. He fought with the director, and one day, as a joke, he arrived in set wearing his MASH helmet, a stocking over his face and sucking a baby's dummy. First the lead actress and the director announced they would be hiring security guards, then production was shut down. Eventually, he had to undergo a humiliating psychiatric examination before he could work on his next film. It still rankles that people in Hollywood really believed he was mad, although, 'I remember seeing Dirk Bogarde," he says - the two starred in A Bridge Too Far in 1977. 'He said, "You weren't well." I thought, "Who are you? You don't even know me. We've never met. What do you know about me?" It seems unlikely that anyone would have doubts about Elliott Gould now. He has a repuatation as a consummate professional, and a fine actor to boot. But his name alone will not guarantee that a film gets financed, and he is painfully aware that had he behaved more wisely earlier in his career, he might still be topping the A-list. Of course, he could still win that Oscar, and his financial situation looks likely to improve - there is talk of a sequel to Ocean's Eleven, to be called Ocean's Twelve. Gould won't pin his hopes on it - I have learned not to speculate,' he says, 'Life and nature humble us all." |