Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,949

This is the grave of Tony Randall.

Born in 1920 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Randall grew up in that city’s small Jewish community, pretty well off. He went to the public schools in Tulsa and then got out to go to Northwestern University. Not sure Tony spent a lot of time in Oklahoma after that. He was already into acting and dropped out of Northwestern after a year to study the subject at the Neighborhood Playhouse and he got some work in a play with Ethel Barrymore. He was delayed though by World War II. He spent the war in the Signal Intelligence Service, which was important work. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant by the end of it.

After the war, Randall returned to New York and got quite a few pretty good Broadway roles, including working with Charlton Heston and Maureen Stapleton in Antony and Cleopatra in 1947-48. What really made Randall a star was him playing the Mencken role in the Broadway production of Inherit the Wind between 1955 and 1957, with Ed Begley and Paul Muni in the other major roles. He was already doing a bunch of TV, where he would be a welcome face his entire career. Mostly this was the giant world of televised theater that filled so many hours in the 50s and which it’s impossible to imagine Americans watching today. But Inherit the Wind meant some bigger movie roles. He costarred with Jayne Mansfield in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Then came The Mating Game, with Debbie Reynolds, and Pillow Talk, where he had the top supporting role alongside stars Doris Day and Rock Hudson. Basically, Randall was great at lighter comedy and satire and would be throughout his career.

Randall still did theater as well during these years. He won a Tony for the 1958 revival of Oh Captain, although the play itself did not do well financially. He did both theater and movies in the 60s, with his supporting and sometimes leading roles in light but smart comedies his bread and butter. No question, he was really good at this kind of thing. He was in Let’s Make Love, a 1961 film with Marilyn Monroe and Yves Montand that was pretty similar to his role in Pillow Talk. He worked again with Doris Day and Rock Hunter in 1961’s Lover Comes Back. He could do other things of course. He did some acclaimed work in a 1962 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents where he played an alcoholic advertising executive whose drinking led to increasingly desperate and depraved behavior, for example. He also did all the parts and voices in 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, a 1964 western-fantasy-comedy that reads as completely bizarre. Maybe I need to watch this.

But let’s be clear, the reason we remember Tony Randall today is his role as Felix Unger in The Odd Couple. The film of course starred Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, one of their perfect pairings. It might have been a tall stretch to adapt this into a sitcom, but casting Randall with Jack Klugman worked very, very well. Garry Marshall developing it from the Neil Simon play certainly didn’t hurt–this was a big time investment for ABC and it paid off pretty big. The show ran for five seasons, from 1970 to 1975. After ABC initially insisted on the show being done with a laugh track, which Randall, Klugman, and Marshall all hated, by the second season, it was presented as a play every episode without any of that garbage. It was never at the top of the Nielsen ratings, but it was always respected work.

Randall became a guy who was good in everything. Think about his small but hilarious role in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) as the director of the NASA-like control room for sperm. After The Odd Couple, Randall had his own program, The Tony Randall Show, in the mid 70s, though it didn’t do a whole lot. He also starred in Love, Sidney, which ran from 1981-83 on NBC, which was interesting for the point that the star’s sexuality was intentionally muted; in fact, it was originally written for a gay man but it became ambigious for TV. Still, such a thing was unusual.

After that though, Randall went back to Broadway full time. He’d occasionally appear on TV, but he always really was a theater man all the way and at this point in his career, he decided to do what he loved. He founded the National Actors Theater in 1991. That became a core part of the New York theater scene for the rest of his life.

The other thing Randall became known for was doing talk shows. He was very good at this. Randall held the record for most guest appearances on The Tonight Show, with 105, at the time of his death. He did all the game shows. He was a guest for both Letterman and Conan repeatedly, including the latter’s first show. He was also a game show guy and was on all of those.

For all the characters Randall played that felt sorta gay, even if that was never really played up to the extent it might have been later, he was always in relationships with women, including marrying a 25 year old woman when he was 75. This was after his first wife died at least. In fact, they had two children so I guess there was some sex in there at least. Huh. Randall was also a deeply, extremely private man, despite his constant time on TV. As he stated, “The public knows only one thing about me: I don’t smoke.”

Oh also, Randall was on the expanded version of Nixon’s Enemies List.

Randall had heart surgery in late 2003 and didn’t recover from it. Pneumonia set in and he died in 2004, at the age of 84.

Tony Randall is buried in Westchester Hills Cemetery, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

If you would like this series to visit some of the people Randall worked with over his long career, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Jayne Mansfield is in Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania and Debbie Reynolds is in Hollywood. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.