Cliff Gorman: Portrait of a Guy Who Was Robbed

travsd

Oct 13

The date on which I write this post on Cliff Gorman (Joel Goldberg, 1936-2002) has significances beyond the fact that it was his birthday. One is that it also happens to have been the birthday of Lenny Bruce, and Bruce (by way of Lenny) was Gorman's biggest and best-known role. And it happens to be Friday the 13th as I type this, the bad luck day. Ill stars kept Gorman from stardom despite his huge store of talent and the respect that went with it.

A Jewish kid from Queens, Gorman was of a type that clicked in the early '60s when he first broke into the business, tough-looking, urban, streetwise. Al Pacino was an almost exact contemporary. Gorman was on the small side, but compactly built. His biggest flaw from a casting standpoint was that he was wall-eyed, but that never held back Peter Falk. Having studied at Jerome Robbins' American Theatre Laboratory, and with a degree in education from NYU, Gorman began to get TV parts in the mid '60s, and was in the well-regarded and long-running Off-Broadway play Hogan's Goat (1965) with Faye Dunaway, Ralph Waite, and Conrad Bain. (When it was made into a TV movie in 1971, Dunaway was the only principal member of the original cast to reprise her role).

He replaced William Hickey in the original 1968 production of Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band and won an Obie for his performance. (Hickey had been let go for missing the first two days of performance; I can't help wondering if he struggled with taking on such a risky role. The part, like all the roles in that play, is a gay character. Gorman, like Hickey, was straight, but he went for it). Gorman reprised his showboating part as Emory in William Friedkin's 1970 movie of the play. Meantime, he'd also landed a small supporting role in the 1969 film Justine, directed by George Cukor. He played Abbie Hoffman in a 1970 TV movie of The Chicago Conspiracy Trial. In 1971 he was Kewpie in a TV production of Clifford Odets' Paradise Lost, with Jo Van Fleet, George Bartenieff, Fred Gwynn, Bernadette Peters, and Sam Groom. This already seems pretty lucky.

Then in 1972, his Tony winning turn as Lenny Bruce in Lenny. This was a career making event, but at a certain fork in the road, a wrong turn was taken, though not by Gorman. Though Gorman had co-star billing with Joseph Bologna in the 1973 caper Cops and Robbers and gave a harrowing performance in the TV movie Class of '63 (1973), Bob Fosse chose to recast the lead role in the 1974 film of Lenny with Dustin Hoffman. The rationale was that Hoffman was the bigger name, which he was, but many disapproved of the decision. As a kind of consolation prize, Fosse later cast Gorman in the pseudo-Hoffman-Lenny part in the self-referential All That Jazz (1979), a glimpse into a might-have-been (though the stand-up material in All That Jazz was written by Fosse and not Bruce).

Gorman was hardly finished at this stage, it's just that from now on he was a supporting player, whereas the part in Lenny was a potential Best Actor Oscar turn. But he carried on. He was third-billed in Otto Preminger's Rosebud (1975) with Peter O'Toole and Richard Attenborough. He was in the original cast of Neil Simon's Chapter Two (1977) on Broadway, and was in Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman (1978) with Jill Clayburgh. In 1980 he played one of the many psychopaths on his resume in Night of the Juggler (1980) with James Brolin and Richard Castellano. And he was Goebbels to Anthony Hopkins' Hitler in The Bunker (1981)

Mostly, Gorman was to appear in lots and lots of television: episodes of Police Story, Hawaii Five-O, The Streets of San Francisco, Trapper John MD, Murder She Wrote. He appeared in several of Richard Crenna's TV movies showcasing his role as NYPD Lieutenant Frank Janek. In the '90s he returned to the big screen in several high-profile films: Irwin Winkler's Night and the City (1992) with Robert De Niro and Jessica Lange; Danny De Vito's Hoffa (1992) with Jack Nicholson; Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai (1999); and Seth Zvi Rosenfeld's all-star drama King of the Jungle (2000) with John Leguizamo. His last movie, released posthumously, was the Alphabet City story Kill the Poor (2003). He was "New York", through and through, to the end.