The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 560

5 JOYCE HABER The Long-Running Heavy spoiled "that any bum rap looms larger than it should." The only "bum raps" Gazzara had recently were a few bad reviews from L.A. critics when he' appeared in Eugene O'NeiU's "Hughie" at our Huntington Hartford Theater. "Hughie" will open on Broadway later this month. Its tryouts in St. Louis and, most in Chicago, brought Gazzara better, even glowing, notices.

The most significant was that of Clive Barnes, who visited Chicago. His New York Times critiques can make or break a show on Broadway. Wrote Barnes: "Gazzara, one of America's most powerful actors, is giving the performance of his life." The versatile Gazzara may move back to his Sicilian ancestry if he takes the role he's considering that of Al Capone in Roger Corman's film biography of the gangster's life. At lunch he wore a denim suit and, for "Hughie" a heavy beard: "I think Hollywood has seen growth before," he said. Of late, he can be seen cleanly shaved on the streets of Beverly Hills and dashing through the shelves at its supermarket Food King.

In a career that has run the gamut from Broadway through movies to television, Gazzara's best-known to the American public through NBC's hit series, Run for Your in which he played Paul Bryan, an attorney with a fatal disease. Gazzara owns 20 of the show, which still runs in syndication. Ben was born Aug. 28, 1930, on Manhattan's. Lower East Side, the son of a carpenter-roofer who dies when he was a child.

He was baptized Biago Anthony, but his nickname was always Ben. He Not very long ago, in the unruffled '50s, newspaper headlines carried Ike Eisenhower's latest golf score. College girls were being "campused" for staying out one minute beyond their midnight permissions and boys were barely getting by with duckfail haircuts. The era's biggest U.S. scandals' were Marlene Dietrich's beaded, see-through dress and Sherman Adams' vicuna coat.

The biggest deal in show business was the contest among Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida and Anita Ekberg as to who had the biggest mammary measurements (Anita Ekberg won). And every star, from Marlon Brando to Audrey Hepburn, had an unmistakable' Image. Ben Gazzara was no exception. Time magazine called him "the most huggable heavy since Bogart" in the role of Jocko de Paris, the sadistic antihero of "The Strange One," which was taken from Calder Willingham's best-seller, "End as a Man." Two decades later, Gazzara, still huggable, slightly heavier, of strictly Sicilian parentage, gave another triumphant performance. Ben played another sadistic-seeming anti-hero, the best-selling Jewish author Abraham Cady, who resembles author Leon Uris himself, in Edward Anhalt's superb TV version of Uris' best-selling "QB VII." That role could win Gazzara, who's one of the most famous graduates of the Actors Studio, an Emmy next spring.

"I have to like the press," Ben smiled, over a lunch of steak and salad at the Beverly Hills Brown Derby. "Seven hundred fifty percent of the time they've been terrific to me. I've been so was making good bread in TV," Ben Gazzara $ayf. 'The fast play I did (before was Anouilh's 'Traveler Without worked hard and loved it and two reviewers put it in the garbage can." graduated form a parish elementary school, enrolled at Stuyvesant High School and disliked it so much that after two years he stopped attending classes without telling anyone. During an eight-week truancy, he spent his afternoons in theaters watching favorite actors like Tracy, Gable, Edward G.

Robinson, Cagney and Garfield. Finally, Ben graduated from still another high school. He attended night classes at the City College of New York, where he specialized in engineering. That lasted for a semester, until he saw a production of Sartre's "The Flies" at Erwin Pis-cator's Dramatic Workshop. Gazzara auditioned and won a scholarship.

In 1951, impressed by Actors Studio students Please Turn to.Page 2S BURT PRELUTSKY How to Stay Popular Even Though Well-Liked shaking my front teeth loose. The trumpet's like any other instrument in that it's basically for singing through. And, best of all, if 'you're good, like Harry James is or Loui3 Armstrong was, age doesn't matter. At the other end, you get a guy like Doc Severinson who has a knack for hitting high notes. That impresses the hell out of people who don't know anything about trumpets.

Musically, though, the guy has nothing to say." i There are, I'm sure you've noticed by now, only two kinds of people in the world. There are those who were popular in high school and, then, there are the rest of us who spend our lives trying to get over the fact that' we weren't popular. It is just possible that in the long run there is nothing quite so debilitating to the human spirit as peaking at the age of 16 or 17 unless, of course, it's not peaking at 16 or 17. I myself, was not one of those precocious peakers. liigh school, so far as I was concerned, was a three-year stretch with no time off for good behavior.

I did what convicts call hard time; I counted days, hours, minutes and, finally, even seconds. I was aware that it wasn't equally hard for body else. There were, say, a score of peers who actually enjoyed themselves. These louts included the first string quarterback, the head cheerleader and those various young smoothies Chuck, Stu and Rick, who must have learned to fox-trot about the time the rest of us were learning to crawl. They were the sort, of nits who made it big with girls because they were dumb or egotistical enough to able to twist without feeling They, were the same ones who.

managed to get by scho-lastically by doing book reports on Classic Comics and majoring in study, hall and lunch. PA academically. That meant that most of us were able to go on to the college of our choice. But when people referred to it as a good school, they usually meant that there a lot of fights taking place at recess, nobody got bullied out of his lunch money and hardly any of the girls had to suddenly drop oU.t of school in their senior year. The only alumnus whose name I recall being dropped with any frequency when I was at Fairfax was Ricardo Montalban.

Subsequently, even Montal ban's fame was eclipsed. For in the graduating class of '53 was one Herb Alpert. Recently I was in Las Vegas and had the opportunity to meet him one afternoon, in the midst of his comeback. I asked him first why he had stopped playing the trumpet in 1969. "It had stopped being fun.

I was dried up musically, and I want to be party to. all the silly sounds coming out of the horn. Actually it all began coming apart for me in '67 and '68; I felt that I was too successful. I had the fame and 1 had the money, and I was miserable. You just wake up one day with too many responsibilities.

You find yourself traveling to too many places too many times and worrying about whether there are four fewer people in the audience than the last time you played that town. All of a sudden, though, I'm feeling free and the horn's fun again." I had to confess to Alpert that the trumpet wasn't my favorite instrument. Too often, trumpet players seem bent on bringing down the house at the expense of my eardrums. "Actually, the trumpet is the most dynamic of all the instruments. It, can be loud or soft, it can scream or be in the '50s, I studied range because I wanted to hit the high notes.

But it was too gimmicky; it had very little to do with making music, It was just abrasive and I began S3 II At 39, Alpert seems content. And, indeed, why shouldn't he be? He's good-looking, he's got his health and I'm sure he gets invited to a lot of neat parties. And even without the trumpet, just being the in Records, he makes more dough than a plumber working weekends. I was, therefore, confident that, like certain other late-bloomers I'd just as soon not mention by name, he had been a wallflower at Fairfax. "No," he replied, chutzpah to burn, "actually I was extremely popular.

I had a band and I was on the gym team, and I would have lettered in baseball, too, except that I didn't get my height until my senior year. Come to think of it, I -was even popular in junior high." There is nothing, I discovered, like some guy's telling me he's been a terrifically popular person for 27 consecutive years to ruin my entire day. High school hot shots are supposed to get their comeuppance. And $40 million: and perfect pitch isn't my idea of just desserts. I have therefore decided to take matters into my own hands.

I am for that reason presently in the market for a set of hair clippers, a sun lamp and a Herb Alpert voodoo doll. I have nothing lethal in mind. But, if things pan out, by the end of the week, the sucker should not only be bald as. a potato, but down with an incurable case of Chapped lips. 0' Is It has been one of my fondest theories that those who thrived in their teens were doomed to wallow in disaster and humiliation in later life while, those of us who never got to wear club jackets were destined to run the world and to eventually clean their clocks.

I attended Fairfax High," It ranked high TWENTY-FIVE totf Sfafirfta meg CALENDAR, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 6, 1974 4.