Still Running

"Tea", explains Ben Gazzara, "is for sissies."

That's a good start to meeting Gazzara for drinks at the Hotel Carlyle. The waiter adds to the absurdity by then asking if Gazzara would like some fruit with his "very, very, very dry martini." I expect Gazzara to reply that if he wanted a goddamn breakfast plate, he would've asked for one. Instead, Gazzara politely explains that he would like olives.

Gazzara is, after all, a gentleman. He's also one of this city's neglected icons of cool. Sure, he gets plenty of respect for his late blooming as a reliable regular in indie films. People just forget that Gazzara was also the greatest character in the history of 60s television. As dying lawyer Paul Bryan on Run for Your Life, Gazzara roamed exotic hotspots as a sardonic shroud of death between 1965 and 1968. Hippies spouted drivel while Bryan discussed philosophy from behind his Foster Grants, methodically enjoying a plastic-fantastic lifestyle that came with an expiration date.

All that's mostly skipped over in the pages of In the Moment: My Life as an Actor. Gazzara's autobiography is a moving and modest account that dwells more on his amazing contemporaries. Run for Your Life also meant a lot more to his fans than to Gazzara. For example, a goofball writer can ramble on for a long time about the episode with the amazing acting duel between the show's doomed hero and Mel Tormé as a psychotic lounge singer.

"I don't remember that one," Gazzara replies. "I remember Mel, but not the show. Come to think of it-and I rarely think of it-but the people on my show were some extraordinary actors. I'd like to get a list of all those. But I consider Run for Your Life a dark period in my life. It went on too long. Exhausting. Thirty one-hour shows each year. I was in every shot. At the end, I could have telephoned it in."

To be fair, Gazzara spent three seasons playing a character who was supposed to be lucky if he lived two more years. The actor still appreciates some of the freedoms that came with the role. For example, Paul Bryan ditched all of his commitments at the end of every episode, which made him one of the rare television characters with a license to sleep around.

"I was with a different leading lady every week," Gazzara recalls, "so I got the reputation of sleeping with them. One day I decided, I've got the reputation-let me get laid. So I zeroed in on one of my leading ladies, who shall remain nameless, and I was stepping off the set to go to my bungalow with her when I hear the assistant director say, 'Ready on the set, Mr. Gazzara!'"

Gazzara laughs, pauses, looks back to me: "You know who was fucking all my leading ladies? My chauffeur."

So maybe Gazzara was happy to be freed up when John Cassavetes drove by and announced that they'd be making a film together. "I'd seen John's work," he recalls, "and I knew it was going to be exciting stuff. I was dying to do good work. All my best acting up until Run for Your Life had been character roles. I just sensed that something special would happen."

The result was 1970's Husbands, wherein Cassavetes, Gazzara and Peter Falk serve as the Three Stooges of great American tragedy. It's an amazing character study rarely seen in its complete splendor, and one that firmly pushed Gazzara out of our country's living rooms.

"Thank God I didn't like boats," says Gazzara. "I didn't like Jaguars, Rolls Royces, fancy restaurants. John and Peter and I became friends because nobody knew what to do with us in the mainstream. We had to find our own way-and the way we found was to go where you're loved. If some crazy kid wants to do a picture with you, let's do it. Don't assume that because I've worked with all these people, I believe they were talented. I rolled the dice."

Gazzara got lucky often enough to have an amazing life. In the Moment would be an important read if it just chronicled the making of Husbands. Or his past 10 years working with amazing directors. Or his romance with Audrey Hepburn, or the early years hammering out the play that would become Gazzara's insane 1957 screen debut as Jocko DeParis in The Strange One-a wacko homoerotic showcase that would've destroyed most actors, but was the logical launching point for Gazzara's own career.

"I don't know if any actor ever got better reviews the first time out," Gazzara recalls of his forgotten classic. "All the major critics. Anyone who sees that one just says, 'Wow.' It was a brutal film. Still is."

Gazzara would make a lot of brutal films. A few are almost as forgotten as The Strange One, including Convicts 4-"I knew we were in trouble when they changed the title from Reprieve"-and his bold work as the title character in 1975's Capone. He'd get another prime role from Cassavetes with The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, before ruling the European film festivals at the end of the 70s with Peter Bogdanovichs's Saint Jack. That set him up to spend the 80s overseas in daring indie dramas. Most have gone unseen, but plenty of viewers were amazed by Gazarra's turn as an ersatz Charles Bukowski in Tales of Ordinary Madness.

And with the exception of the giant fish saga The Neptune Factor-"unwatchable" says its star-there isn't an exploitation film to be seen.

"I couldn't get them," Gazzara explains. "I would've done exploitation films in a minute, just for the salary. The only other one you might name is Road House. I was always working in a part of my industry that was, let's say, out of the system. I was out of the system. Some of those people weren't only out of the system, they were out of their minds."

Gazzara can spin yarns all day, whether it's about Tyrrell, or legendary madman Timothy Carey, or that stint working with Italy's finest directors as a "middle-aged stud." Gazzara even has great gossip about one of my favorite films-The Swimmer-and the guy wasn't even in the movie. Run for Your Life even comes up when he reminisces about Claudine Longet and the episode that introduced the airy pop tunes of Antonio Carlos Jobim to an American audience.

It never even occurs to me to bring up the reliable topic of Vincent Gallo and Gazzara's work in Buffalo 66. I'm too busy listening while Gazzara goes on about his generation's challenge of saving the theater at the same time they were inventing televised drama.

Try to imagine listening to Ethan Hawke going on about the challenges of his generation. And the old guy doesn't sound bitter when he sums up the problem with kids today: "They don't judge you by your ability to fill a theater, to fill a character, to fill a moment, to bring it from beginning to end."

Remember that the next time you're at the multiplexes and wondering why all the actors are shot in close-ups more appropriate for television.

In the Moment has sold surprisingly well for a moving memoir that skips dirty details. A Barnes & Noble reading brought in a crowd during last month's blizzard. Gazzara hasn't released a film in the U.S. since 2003's Dogville, but he's about to go on tour with his one-man Yogi Berra show. That's not bad for a man who has to dilute his martinis with water to take the edge off the alcohol. It's a little-known side effect of radiation treatment for oral cancer.

Despite an original hipster resume, though, Gazzara never sets himself up as a bohemian legend. "I was in tv before the big money," he notes. "I wonder what would've happened if I'd been making today's money. Would that have been the worst thing? Years ago, I'd wake up with my heart pounding. I'd have this anxiety, thinking, what would I have done if things had gone differently? I hadn't prepared for anything else. I really took a stab. I didn't finish college. What the fuck would I have done?"