Before They Were Kings: Part Five

The fifth installment of the Vanity Fair 2004 article that highlights the early days in the careers of Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman and "Bobby" Duvall>>>>


New York in the late 1950’s and 1960’s was a simpler, cheaper world. Hoffman’s share of the apartment he lived in was $10 a month. Hackman paid $22 a month for his East 20’s cold water flat. Nevertheless, he says, “in those days it was a question of which of us was most broke right then, and the other two would help him out.” The three supported themselves with survival-level jobs. Hoffman was a typist for the Yellow Pages, along with some 80 girls. He strung Hawaiian leis, checked coats at the Longacre Theater, helped move the Time Inc morgue to the company’s new building. “I’d do any job anywhere,” he says. “I had no shame.” Hackman, who was a relief man at Whelan Drugstores, says the customers “treated you like crapola.” Once, while he was employed as a doorman at a building in Times Square, on of his former Marine officers walked by and muttered “Hackman, you’re a sorry son of a bitch.” He sold women’s shoes at Saks 34th Street to annoyingly fussy women, but, he says “I managed to steal enough so I could retire from that.” For a few dollars, he would slip shoes to actress friends. Earning a princely $10 an hour, Hackman moved furniture for the Padded Wagon in Greenwich Village, hauling refrigerators into walk-up apartments, and he has no memory of being tired. He included Hoffman on one job and handed him a carton of books to carry up six floors. “I lasted about an hour,” says Hoffman. Once, Hackman and another actor were moving a valuable art collection, including a Picasso lithograph. The other actor went up to check the apartment and returned with a broom, which he tossed into the truck. “It went right through the Picasso,” says Hackman, “Like a spear. The owner was standing there, and he just about shit his pants.”

Duvall, who occasionally went job-hunting with Hackman, moved boxes at the Gertz department store and delivered messages for a dollar an hour. He pushed clothing racks in the garment district for a day and never went back. After three days he quit washing dishes at the Mary Elizabeth restaurant and, embarrassed, sent Hackman to pick up his paycheck. He got a night job at the post office in the Broadway district and quit after six months. He says he decided, I don’t want to be here 20 years from now. Returning from the post office early one morning, Duvall woke up Hoffman, who relates the scene: “‘Dustbone,’ he says, ‘you’re gonna here this. AGES OF MAN. I saw John Geilgud. He was drunk. They were dragging him out of the theater. I swear to God. It was freezing. The steam coming out of the manholes. Nobody on the street. He must have been in there all night, and they’re hailing a cab. Fuckin Geilgud! Just before he gets in, he puts his arms out to the empty street and he yells out, “Does anyone want to fuck an actress?”’ Duvall was like he had witnessed the Second Coming.”

The trio relished regaling one another with what they had seen and heard, sometimes by accident, on the street. They would demonstrate the walks they had witnessed that day. Duvall reported hearing a woman passerby say, “No Harry, it’s not the egg foo young; it’s the whole last six months.” Hoffman assembled an entire cast of characters from his job as an attendant at the New York Psychiatric Institute. Duvall would say, “Do the cop, Dustbone,” referring to a violent ex-cop who had had a frontal lobotomy and would stand with his legs apart, “Hey, Mr. Hoffman, my wife is coming today. She’s a real Dutch cleanser.” Hackman would spend parts of days alone on seedy, anything may happen 42nd Street, going to the cheap movie theaters that doubled as flophouses. He came away with oral dramas he had heard in the darkness, such as the man who yelled in a heavy New York accent, “You’re SORRY! You piss all over my wife and you say you’re SORRY?”

Unlike Hoffman, who could be serious and moody, then extroverted and explosively funny, Hackman and Duvall harbored an interior privacy. Something of a loner, Hackman would go for weeks without seeing his friends. Describing himself, Duvall says, “I liked meeting people, but you always had your own visions of the future, so you cut yourself off from being wholeheartedly social.”

All three young men were hyper perceptive and compulsively preoccupied with studying human activity. “As an actor,” says Hackman, “you become so alive in terms of being aware of other people and their behavior. In the early days it became – what’s the French word?- a RAISON D’ETRE. I’d get up in the morning, wanting to go, you know, out in the streets and just watch. It’s obsessive. That’s why actors are nuts. They’re different because their interests are different.” Duvall says, “You just see the way a guy walks; you’re looking for it, but you’re not looking for it. Something will grab you.” Hoffman adds, “Someday… if it’s in a community theater in Oshkosh and I’m 50 fucking years old, I will use it there.

Mitigating boredom, they turned their subsistence jobs into seminars on humanity. Working as a counterman at Howard Johnson’s, Hackman wondered, “What kind of improvisation could I do with this person?” He says “There was always somebody who was a pain in the ass. There was a crippled guy who cam in every day, and it was interesting because he knew he was difficult and he enjoyed being difficult. He’d leave a quarter or 15 cents tip and always say, ‘Gene, to the bank. To the BANK!’” Hoffman used a waiter job in a French restaurant to practice his French accent. If somebody spoke French to him, he would say that he needed to practice his English. During a newspaper strike, dressed as Paul Revere and wearing a sandwich board advertising the retail store Modell’s, he shouted out the news in Times Square. “That was acting!” he says.