Jack Lemmon

By Joel Stein

Jack Lemmon stars in Tuesdays with Morrie, which airs Dec. 5 on ABC.

Q. In Tuesdays with Morrie you play Morrie. Whom does Walter Matthau play?

A. Matthau is on the outside looking in. He's not in this one.

Q. How much grumpier can you old men get?

A. I don't know. But they've got another one in the works.

Q. Your first apartment in Manhattan was $8 a month. My God, you're old.

A. Well, it was 1890something.

Q. Hey, that Marilyn Monroe dress went for millions. What can I give you for your dress from Some Like It Hot?

A. She stole it. I don't have it. She was looking through the wardrobe, and she spotted that thing and said, "What's that?" And someone said, "That's Jack Lemmon's." And she said, "It was."

Q. You must have a trim and girlish figure.

A. She wasn't all that trim and girlish either. She was pretty zaftig.

Q. Where do you keep the Golden Globe award that Ving Rhames won and gave to you?

A. Along with the other paperweights that I've picked up: on a shelf in my office. I got something engraved on it. Something like, THE VING RHAMES AWARD PRESENTED TO JACK LEMMON.

Q. In your 34 years of trying to make the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, what's the closest you've come?

A. Goddammit, a couple of years ago, when they canceled it because of rain, we were four strokes back of the leader when they blew the whistle on us.

Q. You once hit a ball into your own hotel room. Did you take a mulligan on it?

A. I wanted to, but they said no. My wife was in the john at the time. She said, "It sounded like a machine gun. I thought terrorists had taken over Carmel."

Q. I'm loving trading golf stories with Jack Lemmon.

--By Joel Stein