The Patriot Post® · 102 & Counting

On consecutive days last week, I had the unusual experience of having lunch on Wednesday with my oldest friend and, on Thursday, lunching with my oldest friend, and they weren’t the same person.

I’ll explain before either your head explodes or you conclude that mine has. My lunch companion the first day was Hank Hinton, who’s been my pal since 1958 when we discovered that we knew more about movies than anyone else working on Satyr, the humor magazine at UCLA, even though Joel Siegel, who would soon be reviewing movies on the Today Show, was among our colleagues.

Hinton, who went on to have a brilliant career in advertising and as one of the nation’s best caricaturists, has been my friend for nearly sixty years. But when it comes to actual longevity, nobody I know even comes close to matching my actor friend, Norman Lloyd, who turned 102 on November 8th.

Although he is not a household name in most households, Norman has had a long and distinguished career as an actor, as well as a director and producer. He is probably best known to movie fans for falling off the Statue of Liberty in “Saboteur” and as the pessimistic soldier in “A Walk in the Sun” who had a tough time focusing on World War II because he was already anticipating World War III, which he was certain would take place in Tibet. Younger fans would probably know him best from his seven-season run as Dr. Auschlander on “St. Elsewhere.”

One of the original members of Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater, Lloyd had a remarkable experience on opening night of Welles’ production of “Julius Caesar,” which the young genius had re-set in a modern fascistic state. At one point, Lloyd gave a speech before dying. I had read that the audience broke into applause that lasted three entire minutes.

I asked Norman if it had really happened that way. He assured me it had. I then asked: “Did you think it was ever going to stop so they could proceed with the play?” “I hoped it wouldn’t. It was glorious.”

When Welles was brought out by RKO, he took the entire company with him — a troupe that included Joseph Cotton, Agnes Moorehead and Everett Sloane — with the plan to make a movie based on Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” When RKO insisted that Welles cut $50,000 from the proposed budget, and Welles decided he couldn’t, the production was shut down.

Even though that meant that the actors were no longer on salary, Welles told them he had another idea in mind and asked the company to stay in L.A. Norman considered it, but when one of the other actors called to say he was heading back to New York because he couldn’t afford to wait it out, Norman and his wife decided that was the wisest course.

As the more cynical among you may have guessed, the other actor didn’t pack up and leave. Instead, he stayed in town and got to appear in “Citizen Kane.”

If anyone could lose out on a role in a classic film and wind up having it change his life in a good way, that person would be Norman Lloyd. It just so happens that Alfred Hitchcock was about to start filming “Saboteur” and was looking for someone to play the title role. When he asked John Houseman, Orson’s friend and associate, if he had any suggestions, the name he got was Norman Lloyd’s.

The good luck wasn’t limited to getting the memorable role, and following it up with “Spellbound,” opposite Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman; Lloyd also wound up with a friend for life in Hitchcock.

The importance of that came clear some years later when because of his liberal politics, Norman found himself caught up in the Hollywood blacklist and unable to make a living. It was then that Hitch, as Norman inevitably refers to him, offered him a job co-producing his TV series, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”

Even though Norman wasn’t going to appear on screen, the network told Hitchcock that he was still on the blacklist and wouldn’t allow it.. Hitchcock told the network that if he didn’t get Norman, the network wasn’t going to get his show.

It is sometimes worth being reminded, especially when some people insist on making movies about Hitchcock that ignore his talent, instead portraying him as a one-dimensional letch, that even aging letches may have their admirable and redeeming qualities.

Reminiscing with Norman Lloyd is a little like strolling down Hollywood Blvd and carrying on a conversation with those bronze stars imbedded in cement. This is a man, after all, who played tennis with Charlie Chaplin on Chaplin’s court, and later appeared in Chaplin’s last movie, “Limelight.”

This is a man who was friends with and worked with Hitchcock and Orson Welles. This is a man who worked with and was friends with Lewis Milestone and Jean Renoir. It seems that at one point Norman considered moving from the home in which he’s lived since 1958 to a larger house, but Renoir advised against it. Norman stayed put. As Norman puts it: “Only a fool would ignore advice from Jean Renoir.”

One of the more startling facts about Norman is that he was married to his wife nearly as long as I’ve been alive. As he tells it, two days before her death, she had grown quite weak. But at one point, as he sat beside her bed in 2011, she whispered: “Norman, how long have we been married?”

When he leaned over and replied: “Seventy-five years,” Peggy nodded and said: “I think it will last.”

I forget how we got onto the subject of Walter Matthau at lunch, but Norman told me that one year Matthau and his wife, Carol, both of whom were Jewish, took a trip to Europe that was to include a visit to a Nazi concentration camp. The evening before the tour of the death camp, Walter and Carol got into an argument over one of those trivial matters that husbands and wives will often manage to turn into World War III even if they’re not in Tibet.

When the shouting was finally over, Matthau announced: “Now you’ve done it! You’ve gone and ruined Auschwitz for me!”

Perhaps what is truly remarkable about my friend Norman isn’t just that he’s still a working actor (Judd Apatow’s “Trainwreck,” 2015) or that he has the memory of an elephant at an age when even elephants are beginning to forget where they left their glasses and their car keys, but that he is so decent and amiable that he and I, who are diametrically opposed when it comes to politics, could discuss the results of the recent election without raising our voices or coming to blows.

For which I will be eternally grateful. In a day and age in which people can’t even sneeze without having it caught on 18 cameras, I wouldn’t want a picture of me with a nose bloodied by a guy who was born the year that Woodrow Wilson created Mother’s Day, that Babe Ruth made his major-league debut and that the Panama Canal was opened for business, going viral.