JOSEPH N. BELL -- The Bell Curve

I’m writing this on the morning of the Fourth of July, which also

happens to be my birthday.

It has been a multicultural holiday for me. My wife gave me tickets to

the Bolshoi ballet and my in-laws gave me tickets to the Angels-Seattle

baseball game. The Bolshoi was magnificent, and I’m hoping for a similar

performance from the Angels, whom I will see Wednesday night.

Meanwhile, because on this holiday one should give at least a passing

thought to the founding fathers, it seems appropriate to comment on a

couple of hits the U.S. Constitution has taken here recently.

First, one of my associates at the Pilot chided the most conservative

U.S. Supreme Court since the 1930s for telling a Texas high school and

the football coach at Costa Mesa High that prayer and public education

don’t mix.

The court pointed out that the Christian faith is not embraced by a

good many of our citizens -- it indeed has basic disagreements within its

family -- and should be practiced, as should all faiths, individually and

privately in public institutions.

This is not a new concept, nor will it be 10 years from now when the

same people lodge the same complaint with the same result.

Then school board member Wendy Leece surfaced with her semiannual

reopening of the Scopes trial. She would like creationism taught in

science classes at our public schools.

The creationists have been digging very hard to find people with

scientific credentials to support this thesis, but no matter how far they

reach, it still comes straight out of Genesis. This effort presumably

will alternate every six months with the suggested posting of the Ten

Commandments as long as Wendy is on the Newport-Mesa Unified District

school board.

But to turn to less-controversial matters, I’d like to devote the rest

of my birthday column to a remembrance of Walter Matthau, who died a few

days ago.

During the two decades I covered Hollywood for various New York

magazines and newspapers, I interviewed most of the major entertainment

figures of that time. This is usually a pro forma relationship that

dissolves immediately thereafter. Matthau, however, was one of the

half-dozen or so actors I profiled several times and thus got to know a

little.

Perhaps more than any entertainment figure I can remember, his persona

rather well reflected his image as an actor. He was a man of strong

views, strong impulses and strong addictions who gave curmudgeon a good

and delightful name.

In the years I knew him, at least, his addiction was gambling. He

routinely bet on college basketball point spreads, which is rather like

playing Russian roulette with several bullets in the chamber.

He once told me the Mafia provided him a bodyguard while he was doing

“The Odd Couple” on stage in New York because he owed them so much money

for gambling losses that they didn’t want anything to happen to him until

he had paid them back.

One of the more bizarre experiences of my Hollywood years involved

Matthau -- and caught his flamboyant nature perfectly.

He was making “Plaza Suite,” and I had been on the set with him all

morning with the understanding that we would have time to talk during

lunch. He was playing a fat man, and when the company broke for lunch I

went with Matthau to his dressing room, where he peeled off the padding

he had been wearing and put on a grotesque bathrobe and carpet slippers.

Then we went outside and got into a golf cart.

I assumed we were going to the studio commissary, but instead he drove

out the gates of Paramount several blocks down the street and parked in a

red zone in front of a restaurant frequented by studio people.

The restaurant was crowded and we found ourselves milling about with a

good many other hungry patrons waiting for a table. Matthau in the rig he

was wearing was about as inconspicuous as a chorus girl in a football

huddle.

There was supposed to be a reservation waiting for Matthau, but no

table was available. This irritated him considerably, and when he was

told by a nervous maitre d’ they would clear a place as soon as possible,

Matthau picked up a bowl of tortilla chips from a nearby table and began

passing it around to the crowd of standees, asking each one how long they

had been waiting.

Three members of the crowd were city employees who had been working on

a nearby sewer line, and Matthau was especially concerned about them

because they had a limited lunch hour.

By this time, the restaurant’s management was ready to move someone

bodily to get Matthau seated. Maybe they did. At any rate, when they told

him his table was ready, he invited the sewer workers to join us.

He mostly directed the conversation to them, so during my lunch hour

interview I learned a great deal more about the intricacies of sewers

than I really cared to know. Then we got into the golf cart and went back

to the studio.

It took me awhile to realize that -- in addition to sewers -- I also

learned more about Matthau than I would have picked up from our talk.

Wherever he is now, I suspect he is being seen beneath that grouchy

skin. And I’ll lay 100 to 1 it’s the good place.

*

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.