Chris Lemmon: The Hollywood Interview

Actor and author Chris Lemmon.

CHRIS LEMMON SHEDS LIGHT ON JACK LEMMON: THE MAN BEHIND THE MAGIC
By
Alex Simon

Contrary to popular belief, not all movie stars’ offspring had dysfunctional lives filled with drug abuse, domestic violence and self-destruction. Some children of stars have even gone on to live “normal” lives outside of LA-LA land, and hold their famous parents in high esteem. Take the case of Chris Lemmon. Born June 22, 1954 in L.A., Chris is the son of two-time Oscar winning actor Jack Lemmon and actress Cynthia Stone. Although his parents divorced when he was young, Chris remained close to both throughout their lives and penned a tribute to his father, (who passed in 2001) called A Twist of Lemmon in 2006, published by Algonquin Books.



A successful actor in his own right and a graduate of Cal Arts, Chris Lemmon most recently has collaborated with Sony Pictures Home Entertainment on a new boxed set of DVDs featuring five of his father’s earliest films, spanning his salad days beginning in 1954, to his pinnacle as the nation’s top box office draw in 1964: PHFFT!, Operation Mad Ball, The Notorious Landlady, Under the Yum Yum Tree, and Good Neighbor Sam all arrive from Sony June 9 in The Jack Lemmon Film Collection, which also features a brand new documentary, hosted by Chris, entitled Jack Lemmon: The Man Behind the Magic.



Chris Lemmon sat down with us recently to share memories of his father, his fathers’ films, and his own journey of self-discovery.

After reading your book and watching the documentary that’s included with the DVD set, I felt I saw some different sides of your dad, whom I’ve admired since I was a kid. Why don’t we start out with you just sharing some reflections about your father that come to mind.
We had a terrific relationship, and as I tried to portray in the book, there were some bumps in the road—it wouldn’t have been a real relationship if it weren’t—but he wasn’t just my father. He truly was my best friend, and I think that’s one of the most difficult things I’ve had to deal with since he left. Maybe that’s the reason it’s been so rewarding for me, the most rewarding endeavor I’ve ever undertaken, writing the book, and now to see it transform, hopefully, into one of its interreges into this terrific box set and documentary.

Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday in PHFFFT! (1954)

Was that your primary impetus for writing the book: to explore your relationship with your dad on a psychological level?
No, not at all. I truly wrote the book as a catharsis. It was strictly a defense mechanism. As I say in the book, I sat next to my dad in the hospital during those final months when he was there, but he wasn’t. I’d gone through the same thing with my mom years earlier, and I did the same thing with him as I did with her: I held his hand and just remembered. After he left, there was a great disparity in my life, and I started writing to combat that, literally as a defense mechanism. As I wrote these memories down, other ones would just open up, so it was a bit like peeling an onion, I guess. I began to realize that not only did it heal those broken areas, to paraphrase Hemingway; it started to turn into something more than just that exercise. I started writing about fathers and sons, about relationships and love and loss, loss of innocence, our journeys in life and finding our paths. I started to think that this had become something more than I was just doing for myself, and to give to my kids so they could know that side of Jack Lemmon that only I knew. Then I felt compelled to share that side of dad that only I knew with all those people out there who I knew loved him, too. To this day, I applaud Algonquin Books for having the guts to put out a “star’s kid” book that didn’t have any wire coat hangers in it. (laughs)

L to R: Jack Lemmon with daughter Courtney and son Chris.

And it became a best-seller, reprinted into paperback.
Yeah, the response just seems to keep on going, two years later. It’s been so positive and heartwarming and rewarding for me, so I want to keep Pop going as much as I can and for as long as I can. And obviously, all this has been tremendously rewarding for me, as well, writing this. So when Sony found out a year ago that I had been trying to develop a boxed DVD set of Pop’s films with the book as its core, they came to me and said “Look, we have five very special films we’d like to put together.” I love Sony SPE to being with. They’ve done a terrific job on all the collections they’ve done. They’re a class act, so I was immediately intrigued. Then when I looked at the titles they’d chosen, I thought ‘Wow, this is a ten year period of my father’s life, 1954-64, and they fall one every two years, and are really almost a biography in themselves, and look at the artist, who at the beginning is an up-and-coming star, and at the end of those ten years, becomes the number one box office star in Hollywood. It shows a cross-section of his work as an actor, and also a cross-section of his growth as a person, because he imbued so much of what he did with himself, and that, married with the concept of the book, allowed us to produce the DVD that we did, and that’s something that I don’t think has really been done before. It really is a cut above. Seeing this finished product, I think we did it. I couldn’t be more pleased. To use one of Pop’s favorite expressions: “I’m tickled pink.”

Lemmon and Kim Novak in The Notorious Landlady (1962).

Plus, these titles represent some of his lesser-known work, which are now available to a new audience for the first time in decades.
Absolutely, because most of these aren’t the kind of films you were going to find. To have them bring these out, clean them up, and put them onto DVD so, baby, they’re gonna be there forever, it’s gonna open up a whole other area that most people haven’t seen. For those people who adore Pop, you couldn’t ask for a better collection. And even individually, all these films rock.

Lemmon (second from left) in Operation Mad Ball (1957).

It was fascinating to watch this really early work of your dad’s—I discovered his work when he was middle-aged. The China Syndrome was the first film of his I saw in the theater—and what struck me was the fact that someone really blew it by not casting your dad and Tom Hanks as father and son in a film. Tom Hanks must’ve studied your dad’s early work voraciously as a young actor, because when you look at his work when he was this age, late 20s to mid-30s, their energy, their mannerisms, even their vocal inflections, were eerily similar.
You know it’s interesting you bring Tom Hanks up. Tom came to Pop’s memorial at Paramount after he’d passed away. My wife and I had a chance to visit with him and Rita (Wilson) for quite a while, and he’s just such a genuinely fine man, and I get asked a lot if I think there are the same kinds of stars and icons these days that are of the same caliber as my Pop, and there’s a few names that come to mind, with Tom certainly being one of them. So yeah, I agree with you. I think it would have been a hell of a good show, and they have a lot of similarities.

Chris Lemmon poses with dad's first Best Actor Oscar for The Apartment, in 1961.

One of my favorite stories in your book is when you and your dad chased his escaped Standard Poodles through Beverly Hills.
Walter and Virgil, yes. They were infamous. As with all the stories in the book, there was an underlying message that I was trying to tell humorously. The underlying part of that story was the fact that I had decided to not necessarily follow in my dad’s footsteps, because nobody wants to follow in King Kong’s footsteps, but that life had seemingly forced me to follow in my father’s footsteps, by deciding to become an actor so it was a very confusing time for me. So when I tell that story, that’s the underlying current. It was one of my favorite memories. There was Pop and I, and at that time, he enjoyed a wee bit of the grape, as they say. He later went AA and admitted he had a drinking problem, by the way, but at this point, we had gone out to a nice dinner, with some good wine, and some good fatherly advice and we went back to do the thing we loved to do together the most, which was play the piano. We could jam together all night long. Unfortunately, we’d forgotten to close the front door and Walter and Virgil, seizing upon the opportunity, immediately fled. We were summarily sent out into the night by Betty, the maid, to find them, which we did in typical Lemmon form, which was Pop driving about 3 miles per hour in his thunderously huge, old Mercedes, and me sitting on the hood yelling ‘Walter! Virgil!’ Then it occurred to us that they’d gone to the same place they always went to: James Coburn’s house next door. (laughs) So we parked the car, snuck onto Coburn’s property, thrashing about the place, falling into puddles and pools, falling into cacti, again in typical Lemmon form, because I’m just like my dad, in that I’ve got that whole bumbling, bewildered fall over the finish line head-first thing. Finally, we were just a mess by the time we got to the back of the house, covered in dust and ripped to shreds. We finally see them and they start running from us and we chase them, and finally we stop, and are gasping for air. My dad is bent over with his hand on my shoulder and he suddenly stops, and says “I think somebody’s looking at us.” And we both stopped and turned around, and there’s Coburn, God bless him, all six feet-four inches of him, standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling window of his bedroom in this huge, long robe. He looked like this fierce lion, with his arms crossed over his chest, staring at us. Pop and I then both pointed to each other simultaneously and said ‘He did it.’ (laughs) True story.

Chris and Jack enjoying dinner at Seattle's iconic Space Needle, 1962.

You got to spend a fair amount of time on your dad’s sets as a kid. Was there one shoot you remember most fondly?
I have tremendous memories of The Great Race, which to this day is one of my favorite films of Jack Lemmon. I was about ten or eleven when that film was made, so going to that wonderland was just amazing. I remember riding around in the Fatemobile with Pop. I have memories of Tony Curtis giving me fencing lessons when he was in the famous scene with his shirt off with Ross Martin. So I was there fencing with The Great Leslie. Blake Edwards made golf carts that looked just like all the cars they drove in the race, and he insisted that everyone race to lunch every day from whatever location they were on in the golf carts. So I remember racing in Pop’s Fatemobile golf cart against Blake, whose golf cart was, of course, the Pink Panther. That was one of the classic moments of my life because Pop, as you may remember from the book, was a horrible driver.

Lemmon (L) and Tony Curtis in Blake Edwards' The Great Race (1965).

Yeah, it sounded like he trashed ¾ of the exotic cars ever made.
Yeah, pretty much. He took ‘em all out. He literally did back a Jag XKE over the back of a parking structure. He took Bill Bixby’s old MG-TC and wrapped it around a tree up in the Hollywood Hills. And the underlying element of all those car anecdotes in the book was to give you a chronology of Pop’s films. It was basically giving his credits because he crashed one car per film. Basically the final line of the book was, he may have been a lousy driver, but boy was he a great actor.

Lemmon and Mike Connors (aka Mannix) in Good Neighbor Sam (1964).

In looking at your dad’s credits on the IMDb, he has 97 credits just as an actor. I don’t think we’ll ever see, at least given the way the business is now, another actor that has as large, or varied, a body of work again.
Maybe not. It’s tough these days to compare the industry in those days, because it’s so much tougher to get films made today, for a lot of different reasons. Again, one of the themes of the book: things change, loss of innocence, and that’s just the way it is. I think there are certain comparisons that can be made, again going back to that question about whether there are any actors of the same ilk today as there were in my dad’s generation. I certainly think Kevin Spacey belongs in that category, but there are a few out there that have the class, and the distinction and the great taste that my Pop had, and as a result, I think most if not all of them will have a list of credits like that at the end. So even as we move on and march to a different beat, we still have all those great actors that will live on in their films, in all their shining glory.

Jack Lemmon and Chris Lemmon playing father and son in Blake Edwards' That's Life (1986).

Tell us about your dad’s mantra of “magic time.”
As Kevin so eloquently says in the forward to the book, and I tried repeating throughout the book, when pop would say “Magic time” before each take or before going out on stage, it was more than just a calling to his muse. It was a real statement of his character. He was a human leprechaun. He was a Munchkin. Being around him was a magical experience, so when people ask “What is the most important thing your father ever gave you?” it was exactly that: those wonderful memories we shared together. And that’s what he’s given to anyone he’s ever touched in person or on screen, in equal amounts: magic. That’s who and what Jack Lemmon was.