He'S Not Rappaport

Walter Matthau isn't rude - he just puts his viewpoint out where everyone can see it'

IT IS A RAIN-SODDEN FOOTBALL Sunday, and Walter Matthau, who has been known to place a bet or two, appears more interested in the current point spreads than in the flurry of obtuse questions he must field from a motley crew of C-list - with one obvious exception - print-media types.

"What inspires me?" he snaps at a comely young Aussie writer who later plants a big kiss on his lips despite his abuse. "What kind of a question is that?! Everything inspires me. Even you."

"You'll have to speak up… I don't hear so good anymore," he barks, when asked if he ever met anyone like Nate Moyer, the Walter Mittyesque Jewish firebrand he portrays in the new film adaptation of Herb Gardner's prize-winning play, "I'm Not Rappaport."

"Yeah, I've met people like him over the years. Sometimes I've said hello to them, sometimes we just nod. But no, he's completely different from me."

"And no," he insists firmly, dismissing my own query as to whether his trademark crankiness, reminiscent of the amusing misanthropy of W.C. Fields, may have something to do with his Jewishness. "If a Jew is loud, he's a loud Jew. If a Protestant is loud, he's a colorful chap. There are a lot of cranky Baptists, and I know a great many Catholics who are cranky. And a few Jews. One has nothing to do with the other."

In Matthau's jaundiced opinion, it seems, anti-Semitism, subtle or in-your-face, is ubiquitous, and no one - not even a universally adored Jewish curmudgeon with a face like a mackerel and a mouth like a razor - ever beats the rap. "Twenty years ago," he recalls, "I met L.A. Times owner Dorothy Chandler at a function, and I asked her why the Times was so anti-Semitic. She stared at me and said, It sells papers, dear.'"

Although he and Nate would both cop to being old Jewish socialists - "the government," he says, "should look after its citizens, and not punish them for not being able to make a decent living" - Matthau is adamant that he isn't Nate.

We know, too, that he's not Rappaport. (There is, of course, no "Rappaport" in the story; he's just the name of a character in a joke Nate likes to tell.) And as long as the point spread isn't too wide, he isn't always quite the Oscar-winning grouch he has embodied in so many of his recent movies. What he is, so far as I can tell, is a 76-year-old man of increasing physical frailty and indomitable spirit who, at the absolute pinnacle of a wondrous career, feels free to put his "viewpoint out where everyone can see it." That viewpoint, alas, may best be epitomized in a widely recounted anecdote that has Matthau shuffling past producer John Davis, who was shmoozing on his cell-phone.

"Hey, Walter, I'm on the phone with… " Davis called out, mentioning the name of a young studio exec.

"Tell him to go f--k himself," Matthau replied, slouching past.

Matthau is not sparing when it comes to spreading disparagement. To a journalist who once irritated him by asking dumb biographical questions, the irascible star once recounted that his father was a Russian Orthodox priest who left his wife and family in New York, where the children were educated at the Daughters of Israel Day School.

In truth, Matthau, n Matuschanskavasky, grew up in the cold-water flats of the Lower East Side. His father, a Russian immigrant, ran a concession stand at Coney Is-

land, selling corn-on-the-cob, knishes and lemonade. "Then he was a photographer, an electrician, and finally, a processor," Matthau told The Jerusalem Report. "I only saw him once or twice a year - he died at 43."

The writer, however, was taken in by the fictional account, and this bit of apocrypha found its way into several ostensibly reliable tomes, including David Thomson's "Biographical Dictionary of Film."

"I told the guy he had been expelled from the Russian Orthodox Church for preaching hateful supremacy," Matthau recalled with satisfaction. "It was all horseshit."

Matthau initially followed in his father's footsteps - commercially if not theologically. At 11, he began selling pop at a Second Avenue Yiddish theater. Unlike his father, he was eventually asked to perform bit parts, earning 50 cents an appearance.

"In those days," Matthau recounts, "they used to do King Lear' in Yiddish on the Lower East Side at least once a year. The story goes that Louis Calhern, who was a fine actor, got into a cab in New York, and the driver said, Aren't you Louis Calhern, the actor?'

"He said Yes.'

" So what are you in New York for, to do a play?'

" Yes,'" said Calhern.

" Which play?'

" King Lear.'

" Oh - you think it'll go in English?'"

AFTER HIGH SCHOOL, Matthau took up a number of menial jobs, including floor-scrubbing and cement-bag-hauling. During World War II, he served as a gunner aboard Army Air Force bombers. Studying acting at the New School's Dramatic Workshop after the war, he worked in summer stock, and went from bit to supporting parts, ultimately winning recognition as a seminal character actor, not to mention as the director of a 1960 low-budget feature, "The Gangster."

Matthau's earliest roles were as a heavy. In 1965, though, he found his niche in Billy Wilder's "The Fortune Cookie." In that film, Matthau portrayed "Whiplash Willie Gingrich," a (now especially aptly named) lawyer who cons his brother-in-law, played by Jack Lemmon, into faking an injury for the insurance money. He received an Oscar for supporting actor for that role, and even some back-handed approbation from Wilder himself. The German-Jewish emigr used to say of Matthau, "Wonderful actor - but likes to humiliate directors."

"The reason," explained Matthau, "is that I used to ask questions. Billy,' I would say, why should I do this?'

" Because I tell you,' he would say."

Film stardom came to Matthau with his performance, in 1967, as Oscar Madison, the memorable ur-zhlob charged with tormenting the compulsively prissy Felix Ungar in Neil Simon's "The Odd Couple." That part, which Simon wrote specifically for him (first for the stage, in 1965, opposite Art Carney), bagged another Oscar, again for best supporting actor.

Matthau and Lemmon have done seven other films together since. One of them, "Kotch," was directed by Lemmon, and won Matthau another Oscar nomination. Although Matthau has been devotedly married to wife Carol Wellington-Smythe Marcus (who had been twice betrothed to novelist William Saroyan, and served as the model for the volatile, loopy Holly Golightly in Truman Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's") for 37 years, people still think it is Matthau and Lemmon who are joined at the hip.

During the 1970s, Matthau appeared in a number of dramatic roles, including "Charley Varrick" and "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three," movies now regarded with special fondness and respect by many film critics. He also starred in the film version of Simon's "Sunshine Boys" and in a remake of "The Front Page." His career slid during the 80s, however, and rebounded only recently, propelled into mega-stardom by cakewalks in broad comedies like "Dennis the Menace" and two "Grumpy Old Men" films.

MATTHAU SUFFERED A HEART attack in 1966, the inevitable result of heavy drinking, smok-ing and serious gambling. In 1976, he underwent a quadruple bypass, and, last year, was operated on for a colon tumor. The tumor proved benign, but Matthau almost succumbed to a bleeding ulcer and double pneumonia. Today, reputedly in good health, he drinks only beer, places bets he can well afford to lose, and no longer smokes.

Matthau says that playwright Herb Gardner had wanted to cast him as Nate Moyer in the theatrical version of "I'm Not Rappaport." "I said I don't want to do a play where I have 10 million words every night for a week, and twice on Saturdays and Sundays.

" If you do a movie,' I said, call me.'

"Ten years later, he did."

The story of an old-school New York Jewish radical with an overactive imagination and compulsive mouth who befriends and bewilders an aging black janitor about to lose his job in a yuppie co-op, the play enjoyed a three-year run on Broadway, and has been performed around the world, not to mention in Israel. Israelis in particular enjoyed Nate's invention of an Israeli daughter spawned from an imagined union with a suicidal Jewish seamstress he loved in his youth. Hoping to keep his real daughter, Clara (played in the film by Amy Irving), from putting him in a home, he tells her that her Hebrew half-sister has decided to give up a career in the army to care for him in Israel. This is the same fellow, of course, who gleefully impersonates a Cuban CIA informant, a police detective, a Mafioso and any number of other invented personalities called upon to serve what he perceives as the cause of justice.

"I was one person for over 80 years," Nate tells Midge the janitor, played in the film by veteran actor Ossie Davis. "Why not a hundred for the next five?"

Matthau says he is aware that the movie posters depicting an obviously Jewish Nate dancing the horah with Davis (who portrayed Midge on Broadway as well), plays off a general awareness among American audiences that blacks and Jews are not normally expected to get along. "I've known Ossie for 46 years," he says, "and I don't think of him as black, white or green. Frankly, I don't think of myself as white. I'm sort of a greenish-gray."