The Odd Squad

In Televisionland, inspiration seldom soars higher than a flying nun and quality is usually borrowed, not born. Thus it should be no surprise that the season's liveliest new situation comedy is an ABC adaptation of Neil Simon's five-year-old play, The Odd Couple. The success is not simply Simon's; the only writing he does for the weekly program is his name on the back of a weekly royalty check. The real source of the Odd Couple's life is the most empathetic team of situation comedians since Gleason and Carney. They are Tony Randall and Jack Klugman, and they combine total understanding of the play (in which they both performed) with contempt for the accustomed mechanical slickness of most TV comedy.

The stars' prime concern has been to avoid defamation of characters. Both of them are friends of Simon's brother, Danny, a TV writer whose divorce gave Simon the idea for Odd Couple. Danny became Felix, the fussy journalist who, after splitting with his wife, moves in with Oscar, an untidy sportswriter-divor-cee; the two, in turn and in caricature, unconsciously re-enact their failed marriages. Klugman once kidded Danny Simon: "Jesus, actors are ashamed to play the part of Felix." Replied Danny: "I was ashamed to live it."

Randall can play Felix almost by reflex action. The big problem is to keep the series' scriptwriters from turning the neurasthenic homemaker into a Mr. Belvedere, a kind of prissy know-it-all. "I must remain a kind of male Jewish mother, manipulating others as hysterical people do," says Randall. At the same time, he adds, Klugman has had to resist a depiction of Oscar as "excessively crass and vulgar, an unattractive middle-aged girl chaser. In the play, he is really a sensitive man. His sloppiness is merely neurotic."

Randall and Klugman thus spend the first day of work on every episode repairing the writing. When one script, in the latest TV mode, made a cynical and token pass at the nation's racial troubles, the stars gagged and turned the circumstance into parody: the black athlete became a token Eskimo. Randall and Klugman also lose battles. They were embarrassed by the third segment in the series, which lost bits of subtle humor to give more time to a leering portrayal of Oscar hustling an airline stewardess. The actors condemn the use of canned laughter as "an atrocity" and fume at the network's excision of the characters' children from the story. Randall complains that "ABC Standards & Practices says that divorced people don't have children. In the play, the fact that the men had children placed the beam of heartbreak under the structure."

The pair's passionate involvement with characterization suggests, rightly, that each sees himself in his part. About the only discrepancy is that both are long and apparently happily married. Randall, 46, like Felix, is compulsively neat; he is never without a Chap Stick ("a touch of security") and preaches against smoking. "You'll hate me for it," he explained to Klugman after ordering him to douse his cigar. "But you'll be a much better man." Randall's other causes are opera, ballet and peace politics. He was a friend of Jack and Bob Kennedy, campaigned for Eugene McCarthy, and is now working for such antiwar candidates as New York Congressman Allard Lowenstein. Fans should not be misled by his old Doris Day movies, his recordings of "mothball music" just this side of Tiny Tim, and his nutball performances on TV talk shows. Tony Randall is a serious actor whose dream is to wind up in a good repertory company.

Gidget's Vibrator. Klugman, 48, like Oscar, claims to be a slob. But, says Randall, "he really isn't," although his dressing room does look like a locker room, and his dress is sloppy. After Lyndon Johnson "let me down," Klugman's major commitments have been apolitical --playing the horses and his work. Long a highly regarded character actor (he and Randall first met in the cast of a Philco Playhouse drama 20 years ago), Jack became more widely known in films following his role as Ali McGraw's father in Goodbye, Columbus.

Like so many of their New York-trained colleagues, Randall and Klugman loathe Hollywood and were overjoyed to be back East last week, after wrapping up their 15th show. As has often been proved, the good usually die young on TV, and the shaky ratings so far give no guarantee that Klugman and Randall will be recalled to the Coast to shoot No. 16. But the show is climbing and should continue to move up once the opposing CBS movie series runs out of blockbuster films (Butterfield 8, The Dirty Dozen so far). "Just watch us," says Randall, "when CBS is down to Gidget Buys a Vibrator.'"

Klugman, though admitting that "if I'm ever going to get rich, it's going to be in a series," is philosophical about the ratings sweepstakes. "I wouldn't want a success doing a cockamamie show I couldn't respect," he says. "If Tony and I fail, we have failed first-class."

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