Hollywood's Flying Object

A close encounter with Richard Dreyfuss

If you are ever playing trivia and someone asks for the corniest lines you've ever heard, try the following: Girl (approaching an actor she has seen only on the screen): I love you. Actor: Give me two minutes and I'll love you right back.

That exchange says three things about the actor, hereafter identified as Richard Dreyfuss, the star of Jaws and two of this year's best films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Goodbye Girl: 1) he is brash, 2) he is never at a loss for words and 3) he knows what he likes when he sees it--he and the girl, Lucinda Valles, 23, have been together, off and on, ever since they met in a Manhattan restaurant three years ago.

Add to the first three a No. 4: sometimes he doesn't know when to shut up. Faster than you could say William Shakespeare, Dreyfuss was reciting one of the bard's sonnets over the coffee cups: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment..."

The list could go on, but one word sums it up: energy. In person and onscreen, Dreyfuss, short, gat-toothed and, until recently, distinctly chubby, generates enough electricity to light up a small town--Cleveland or Chicago, say. "He has an energy that just flies off the screen," says Neil Simon, who wrote The Goodbye Girl. "He doesn't fall into any of the usual acting categories. He's not a handsome-man type like Redford or a dramatic-actor type like Pacino or De Niro. Rick can do anything--and he is funnier than any of them." Not a victim of false modesty, Dreyfuss agrees. How does he think he is in Goodbye Girl? Just ask him: "I think I'm wonderful."

He is right, of course. He is good as the star-struck hero in Close Encounters, but he is nothing short of wonderful as Elliott Garfield, the brash but vulnerable actor in Goodbye Girl. In fact, the character is so like the real-life Dreyfuss that Simon would have saved everyone some trouble by just calling him Rick in the first place. The part was so natural, admits Rick himself, that "I could have done it as a 9-to-5 job for the rest of my life. Imagine! Sixty years old and still shooting The Goodbye Girl!"

Only halfway to 60 now, Dreyfuss has already had at least 60 years of acting experience. He can hardly remember a moment when he was not acting--if only for himself. He was born in New York City and spent his early childhood in Bayside, a pinkish nook of Queens. His grandmother had been private secretary to Socialist Leader Eugene Debs. His father was a passionate Zionist, and his mother was always peddling leftist petitions. "When you were poor and Jewish in New York," says Dreyfuss, "you were either a left-winger or you were dead."

When Dreyfuss was eight, his family moved to Beverly Hills. Rick was in his first production at the local Jewish center when he was nine. "I never got less than the lead after that," he boasts. By the time he was twelve he was reciting Shakespeare before the bathroom mirror. His dream--then, now and probably for-evermore--was to play Cassius in Julius Caesar. Though the world has made a villain out of Cassius, the leader of the plot to kill Caesar, the scion of political iconoclasts knew that he was really a good fellow. "Cassius was sympathetic to me," he says. "He hated tyranny and he was anti-authoritarian." Also, he adds, "Cassius was the smartest man in the play."

After graduation from Beverly Hills High, Dreyfuss put in a year at San Fernando Valley State College. Because he was a conscientious objector, he spent the next two years in alternative service, as a clerk at a Los Angeles hospital. Carefully mapping out his life, the Cassius side of Dreyfuss planned on ten years of acting apprenticeship. But before he could get started, he says, in a voice that wavers somewhere between woe and wonder, "the movies happened--boom! boom! boom!" American Graffiti led to The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which led to Jaws--which led to the beginning of a breakdown. The movie was just a big fish story, says Dreyfuss, and he "felt like a whore" acting in it.

Still suffering from the sulks when shooting ended, he auditioned for Joseph Papp's Lincoln Center production of Julius Caesar. At last he was to be Cassius. "I went home, and for the first time I did homework," he says. "It felt so good to struggle over a part!" Two days into rehearsal, however, Papp canceled the production, and Dreyfuss "just went crazy. For about a year and a half I went berserk, I took drugs, and I started drinking a bottle of cognac a day."

What pulled him up, ironically, was what set him down: Jaws. Nothing is so good for an actor's ego as a hit, and Dreyfuss's ego, which Jaws had punctured and which Papp had exploded, returned to its normal enormous size. He now calls Steven Spielberg, the director of Jaws, a genius, and admits that the movie was not the "dreck" he once thought it was.

Today Dreyfuss can have almost any part he wants. He is currently playing a hookah-smoking private eye in Jeremy Kagan's The Big Fix, and next spring he will portray a ruthless director in Bob Fosse's All That Jazz. With what sounds almost like resignation, he admits to being content. Friends say that Lucinda, a Puerto Rican who worked as a TV researcher, has brought a new stability to his life. After six weeks on a liquid protein diet, this former junk-food addict--"I still dream of Twinkies," he sighs--has even lost his famous baby fat. For the first time he is ready to play that "lean and hungry" hero-villain Cassius.

And yet something is wrong. Dreyfuss is afflicted with that mock disease of the talented and the very lucky--nostalgia for struggles past. "From the time I was nine to 25,1 had to go for interviews and hustle jobs. I had to be better than the next guy. Now I get sent scripts, and the competition isn't there. There is no edge any more. I'm just not used to my life yet--and haven't been for five lousy years!" He adds: "I don't know what I know any more. I'm lost!" Time for a Twinkie, Rick.

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