Mazel Tov: Celebrities' Bar and Bat Mitzvah Memories (6 page)

For more than three decades, his on-screen roles have made us want to hug him, slap him, but certainly watch him….

And what a diverse career Charles Grodin has had. From dumping the sweet nebbishy wife on their honeymoon for the WASP princess in
The Heartbreak Kid
, to cracking us up as a con conning Robert De Niro in
Midnight Run,
to speaking his mind (for better or worse) as a commentator on
60 Minutes II
and as host of his own CNBC show, which earned him the nickname “the Perpetually Angry Talk Show Host.” Well, one thing’s for sure—he has done it his way.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1935, he was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household. His maternal grandfather, a Russian Jew, came from a long line of rabbis. Grodin attended the University of Miami but left to study at the Pittsburgh Playhouse and then went on to New York to study with Uta Hagen and eventually Lee Strasberg. He is a member of the Actors Studio. Grodin’s big acting break came in 1968 when he played the obstetrician we all love to hate in the horror film
Rosemary’s Baby.
Grodin jokes how to this day people are still “furious” with him that he did not help Mia Farrow’s character, and tell him so openly on the street.

In the nineties, his career “went to the dogs,” literally, with films
Beethoven
and
Beethoven’s 2nd
, which were his two biggest-grossing movies. He left the movies at the peak of his career to be a stay-at-home dad when his son entered first grade. He began his talk show on CNBC after that. It was nominated as best talk show on cable every year there were awards.

He returned to the movies in 2007. Currently, he is a commentator for CBS News, where he is heard all across the country. He is also working on a book that will be published in the fall of 2007. His play,
We 3,
opens at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven in 2007. I caught up with him at a very quaint West Side theater where he was rehearsing one of his plays and we talked about the day the boy “became a Man.”

CHARLES GRODIN ANYTHING BUT A HEARTBREAK KID

I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, but I wouldn’t call myself a dedicated Jew today. What I would call myself is someone who is dedicated to the principles that every religion would espouse. And I really do trace that back to my religious upbringing, although it doesn’t manifest itself in Jewish rituals or anything else. However, if I sense any anti-Semitism, I become more Jewish.

I was thrown out of Hebrew school when I was eleven because I asked the rabbi what the Hebrew words meant on the blackboard too many times for his comfort level, and he resented it. (This wasn’t the first time I got into trouble at school—a year earlier I was impeached as president of my fifth-grade class. That was just for talking incessantly, which I still do, but now I get paid to do it.)

YOU CHALLENGED THE RABBI?

Well, sort of. I just said, “What do the words mean that we’re reading?” It seemed to be a good question to me. And he thought it was rude or something. I said, “Why can’t we know what we’re saying?”

It seemed like a logical thing. And he actually kicked me out of the Hebrew school, which was good because I then went to a smaller place where the father of my closest friend at that time, a man named Rabbi Morris Kaplan, took me under his wing. And then I went and studied some with my grandfather, who was a Talmudic scholar in Chicago. I was part of a triple bar mitzvah in Chicago, even though I’m from Pittsburgh. I was bar mitzvahed with my cousin and somebody else.

A THREE-FOR-ONE DEAL? DID YOU GET A BETTER PRICE?

Yeah, it was a three for one. I wasn’t involved in costs at that time. The rabbi wrote my speech. It got applause in an Orthodox synagogue, which I don’t believe is allowed. The applause was not for my delivery, but it was 1948, the year the state of Israel was founded, and the rabbi had crafted a brilliant speech around the founding of Israel. I think the applause may be what encouraged me to think about show business, although it quickly left my head pretty much after the bar mitzvah. Also, after my bar mitzvah I stopped doing every religious ritual except being guided by the principles of how to be a good person, which guide me today.

SPEAKING OF SHOW BUSINESS, YOU WERE AWARE OF IT AT YOUR BAR MITZVAH, BUT WHAT FIRST TURNED YOU ON TO PERFORMING?

This happened at the Hebrew school I went to before I was kicked out. I was wandering around in the basement, and I opened up a door. And there was a girl singing…I think it was “The Man I Love.” “Someday he’ll come along/The man I love.” I was just transfixed. It felt magical; a person is standing on a stage performing. It was a magic moment, the first time I saw somebody perform live. I was eight years old…and I remember standing there and just staring, thinking I had never seen anything like that before.

YOU WERE RAISED IN AN ORTHODOX HOME. WHAT ABOUT YOUR OWN FAMILY. WAS YOUR SON BAR MITZVAHED?

No, he wasn’t. My wife signed him up for something, but he never went. He doesn’t really believe in any kind of ritualistic religion. He’s nineteen. My daughter, who’s older, also doesn’t formally practice any religion, but both consider themselves Jewish. They both have reputations as being very nice people. This is what I’m most proud of.

CONSIDERING YOU WERE ALWAYS AN INCESSANT TALKER, I BET YOU WELCOMED THE MOMENT TO ADDRESS THE CROWD—NOT NERVOUS AT ALL, RIGHT?

I don’t remember being nervous. I remember my grandfather just saying to me that he liked what I was doing. I was just trying to do it as best I could. Sometime either just after that or before that, I played the lead in the grammar school graduation play. And I remember that I learned my lines and everybody else’s, too, and I’d whisper the lines to them when they forgot them. So it’s just this kind of diligence thing.

But I don’t remember being nervous. I’m usually so focused on the job at hand that it’s one of the things that has really served me. This is not to say that I don’t know the difference between a Broadway opening night and sitting at home on my sofa. But I’m so focused on the job at hand that I don’t really get as nervous as you might think people would get.

If you just concentrate on what you’re supposed to, and don’t worry about what anybody else thinks, that’s the best thing you can do.

Advertising guru and TV host Donny Deutsch doesn’t shrink away from the limelight. His first major appearance was on November 22, 1957, the day he was born in Queens, New York. His second was at his bar mitzvah, also in Queens, on November 14, 1970. Most recently, he can be seen on his own successful show
The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch
on CNBC, and as guest host from time to time on
Squawk Box
and
Kudlow & Cramer.
Because he is not short on energy, Deutsch also has independent film projects in the works and collaborated on a book with Peter Knobler,
Often Wrong, Never in Doubt
, published in 2005.

Donny Deutsch grew up in New York City and went to Van Buren High School in Queens Village. He graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and then started his career at advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather, about which Deutsch says, “They should have fired me.” In 1983, he went to work in his father’s advertising agency. In 1984, he was running the agency and had changed its name to Deutsch, Inc. Attracting big accounts with his very creative team, the agency developed and launched award-winning campaigns. Among his clients: Pfizer, Tanqueray, Coors, Bank of America, Mitsubishi, and IKEA, for which he designed a groundbreaking campaign featuring a gay couple. Besides being proud of his bar mitzvah, Deutsch is also proud to have worked on the 1992 Bill Clinton for President campaign.

DONNY DEUTSCH THE BOY WITH “THE BIG IDEA”

I don’t think anybody ever remembers their tenth birthday, but the bar mitzvah is a milestone in your childhood. I remember all the planning that went into it and how it brought my family together. I had one grandfather and one grandmother there, and they’ve since passed on. I can remember what they were wearing. My grandfather cut the challah. His name was Leo, and he actually got drunk. He’d recently lost his wife, my grandmother, maybe a year earlier. He got pretty lit up that day, I remember. He was having a good time. And I remember the look on my dad’s face; he just couldn’t be prouder, you know, just watching me read the Torah. It was nice.

I remember being nervous about reading my portion of the Torah, even though I knew that everybody gets through it. I remember my bar mitzvah as a wonderful party. My mother jokes to this day that when we came walking in, they played music, and they played “Mister Wonderful,” or something like that, and I got a big smile on my face.

I just remember being with all my friends. It was a long time ago, over thirty years ago, but it stays with you. You live with the pictures over the years. And what staggers me now is when I see my parents in the photos, and my dad was forty-one, six years younger than I am now. And I still have a lot of my childhood friends. It was just a wonderful, wonderful time.

CONSIDERING YOU HAD SO MANY FRIENDS, DID YOU HAVE A LARGE PARTY?

It was probably two hundred people, which was a decent size. Today there are these huge extravaganzas. Bar mitzvahs then didn’t have
Star Wars
themes, and entertainers showing up, or whatnot. It was a celebration on a Saturday afternoon. Just the typical band, and in those days you did the bunny hop, and it was fun. It was just a good time.

DID YOU FEEL THE TRANSITION FROM BOY TO MAN AT THAT MOMENT?

No! I go to a lot of bar and bat mitzvahs now, of my friends’ kids. Most of the girls at that age have gone through puberty already, and they look five years older than the boys. Most of the boys are still boys, and I was also. Technically, I was, in the Jewish religion, going through the rites of manhood. But I don’t think I had gone through the physical changes so I was still a real little kid, with the true cherub face.

CLEARLY, YOU’RE VERY OUTGOING AND ENGAGING. WERE YOU LIKE THAT AT THIRTEEN?

I always had a lot of friends. That came easy to me. I was very popular. And I remember, I can see looking at the pictures now, my closer friends were the ones next to me on the dais. Now that seems very funny. My best friend since first grade, Perry Schorr, was there. My other closest friend was not there, Cindy Mangano. Now she’s an attorney. I must have been in a fight with her, because she wasn’t at my bar mitzvah, and to this day we still bust balls about that. Nadine Whiteman was my girlfriend. She was my first love in sixth grade, and we were still together in eighth grade, when I had my bar mitzvah. It was November 14, 1970, and Nadine was my girlfriend. She’s somewhere in North Carolina now.

HOW DID YOU FEEL ABOUT BEING THE CENTER OF ATTENTION? LOVED IT, I BET?

My mother will, to this day, talk about how happy I was. I clearly don’t mind being the center of attention, you know, and I like the spotlight, that’s kind of fun. And look, that’s your first day as a young man. I was excited. I just remember being so excited; the buildup to it…I remember having just a really good time.

HOW WAS IT STUDYING THE TORAH?

Difficult. They had a guy, a sexton, at my temple named Frank Strauss. He’s probably since passed on. And his main thing was getting all the bar mitzvah guys prepared. We would take the lessons with him, and we got through it. I remember the first sentence of my Torah portion. It’s something that just sticks in your head. But I can’t really read Hebrew that well today. I went to Hebrew school for five years, but it didn’t stick, unfortunately.

ARE YOU A RELIGIOUS PERSON NOW?

No, not really. I mean, I go to synagogue on the high holy days. Actually, I still go to the place where I was bar mitzvahed, which is the Hollis Hills Jewish Center in Queens. I go back there for the high holy days. What’s happening there now is what’s happening in a lot of Jewish neighborhoods in the city—the neighborhood is changing. It used to be half Jewish and half Irish. Now it’s a tremendous melting pot, and you don’t have enough of a generation of Jews coming in. The temple is getting very old. So, I helped them out, and paid off their mortgage, and now it’s the Deutsch Hebrew School. So I go back, and I always celebrate the high holy days there. I have a tremendous affection for it and connection to it.

IS IT REFORM, CONSERVATIVE?

Conservative. When you go to some of these Reform ones, they’re doing folk songs. I like the more traditional. The cantor from the shul where I grew up, who was the cantor then at my bar mitzvah, officiated at my last wedding. So, you know, I like to stay close to my roots.

In
The Goodbye Girl,
Richard Dreyfuss played an out-of-work actor (and won an Oscar for his efforts), but unlike his character in the movie, the leading man has worked steadily as an actor for more than forty years in some forty films, starting with an un-credited part in
The Graduate
in 1967.
American Graffiti
in 1973 earned him well-deserved praise and a paycheck of $480 per week. His memorable performances in the Steven Spielberg films
Jaws
and
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
still keep movie watchers on the edge of their seats today. In
What About Bob?
he plays a psychiatrist who runs out of patience with a patient who is driving him crazy. In the 1995 film
Mr. Holland’s Opus,
he returned to the screen on a more serious note as a dedicated music teacher struggling with family issues. In 2006, he was one of two lucky people to survive in
Poseidon.
Richard Dreyfuss has the distinction of being the only actor who starred in films directed by both George Lucas and Steven Spielberg that were not part of the
Star Wars
or
Indiana Jones
series.

Richard Dreyfuss began acting at the West Side Jewish Community Center and at the age of nine, played Zionism founder Theodore Herzl. At fifteen, just before his confirmation, he got a role in the center’s production of
In Mama’s House.
He attended San Fernando Valley State College for a year and then got parts in several television shows, including
Bewitched, The Big Valley,
and
Peyton Place.
Then along came
The Graduate
….

His work as a political activist is noteworthy, including his efforts to bring peace to the Middle East. He’s determined to bring civics back into our classrooms. His feelings on politics mirror his philosophy on religion: don’t take any information for granted. Ask questions and do some investigating until you find an answer that satisfies you.

During the Vietnam War, Richard Dreyfuss was a conscientious objector, but these days he participates in Civil War reenactments in his spare time.

Richard Dreyfuss married Svetlana Erokhin in 1996 and has three children from a former marriage.

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF RICHARD DREYFUSS

When I was eight, my family moved from New York to L.A. In New York we had lived in a progressive Jewish neighborhood. Everyone was Jewish. There were no Christians; it was a “Jewish progressive red diaper baby” area. When I would ask my father, “Why don’t we practice Judaism?” He would answer, “I don’t have to practice. I’m very good at it.”

He told my brother and me that he had been visited by elders from the synagogue. They said that Dad owed us an introduction to Judaism. Then our dad told us, “I may not practice Judaism. But I want you to understand it and so I’ll give you a choice. I’ll allow you to choose between a bar mitzvah and confirmation. You may have one or the other, whichever you prefer. It doesn’t matter to me which way you go. I’ll describe what both are like, bar mitzvah and confirmation, to help you make a choice.” In confirmation there are questions and answers and epics and you discuss what’s right and what’s wrong.” And I said, “I’ll be confirmed.” It was clear that he had no patience for the other one. I was nine or ten years old.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my Jewish education could have ended at thirteen. But since my father didn’t point that out, I stayed in Jewish education classes for years and was confirmed at sixteen. Luckily, by that time, I was in love with confirmation class. There was a lot of discussion of what is right and wrong and what is good and evil and why is Judaism important and who are the Jews and who are they not. Every week, the class was loaded with debates on Judaism and history. It was more than memorizing Hebrew. We could discuss incredible issues, and my rabbi, Isaiah Zeldin, would say something to the class like “Moses was the epitome of truth.” And my hand would shoot up and I would say, “Why?” Nothing gave me more joy that saying to the rabbi, “I disagree with you.”

He would talk to me about what these stories meant. I would tell him what I thought these stories meant and I was always arguing with him. And so at confirmation, Rabbi Zeldin made a speech saying there’s “one in every class” and that I was a dissenter from the way he had presented the ethics of Judaism but not a dissenter from the ethics. I would say that I took pride in asking questions, and I learned during the course of that time to fall in love with being Jewish.

I was faced with what is great and wonderful about being Jewish. I believed that we were the chosen people and we were chosen to illuminate mankind. I had never for a moment had any self-loathing or self-hatred or anything like what people talk about. I only had a kind of pride and affection for my history. So when I was about eleven or twelve, I remember saying to my mother one day, “I’m the luckiest kid in the world.” And she said, “Why?” And I said, “I’m white, Jewish and American.”

And she, being a socialist, communist, and progressive Jew, decided to take my education in hand a bit. I was introduced to politics, and the only thing that happened to me during the next forty years was that I became more proud of being American and more proud of being Jewish and that being white is a nonissue to me.”

YOU WERE SO EVOLVED AS A TEENAGER. I WOULD IMAGINE THAT THE MAJORITY OF YOUR FRIENDS HAD TO HAVE BEEN BAR MITZVAHED. DID YOU START TO WONDER, WHY DIDN’T I DO WHAT THEY DID?

No, I felt like I had been given a free pass. I went to all my friends’ bar mitzvahs and I ate a lot of cake and watched one friend start to pee in his pants in front of the congregation, which was really horrifying.

Aside from that incident, I guess the kids getting bar mitzvahs enjoyed it and were proud of it. But I was interested in something else and, for me, it had no appeal. I would have had trouble with every moment of the experience, starting with learning the language. I would have hated it because I would not have been learning the answers to my questions. Who are we and who are we meant to be and what is our ambition? Getting the answers didn’t seem to be part of the bar mitzvah experience.

I did go to a whole bunch of bar mitzvahs and I thought they were all as boring as going to temple, and as far as prayer goes, I was never a person of ritual. I was never a person of prayer. I was always kind of irritated by God. I hated going to temple and participating in the ritual. But I loved listening to the rabbi pontificate because I loved the idea of, you know, getting up and telling people how to live. Apparently, I had a rabbi lurking in me and I didn’t know it until I started to get into Jewish politics and Israeli politics and I started to write speeches, and I found myself possessed by the spirit of a Reform rabbi from New Jersey.

SO OBVIOUSLY YOU DIDN’T FEEL THE NEED TO HEAR THAT MEMORABLE EXPRESSION “TODAY I AM A MAN.”

No, I never felt that I would be a man because I memorized a passage of Hebrew text, and I never thought that I would need to get a really great silver candle or a TV from my uncle to make me a man. It never occurred to me that the gifts were of any importance whatsoever. I came from a middle-class family. I had no desires that couldn’t be acquired. So it was never put to the test. What I wanted in those days were books, and I got books.

DID YOU HAVE A CELEBRATION AT YOUR CONFIRMATION?

We had a graduation ceremony and that’s when the rabbi made a speech that included mention of me, because I was the “rebel in the community.” Other than that, no. Given what I think about rituals, it would have been silly. I realize now as we’re talking that I didn’t get confirmation gifts. I mean pens or ties or anything. There was nothing.

CONSIDERING YOU WERE THE “REBEL IN THE COMMUNITY,” DID YOU HAVE A LOT OF FRIENDS OR WERE KIDS INTIMIDATED BY YOU?

I was popular. But more than that, I was vivid. A lot of people liked me, a lot of people didn’t. When you move into a new school and you’re short and all the guys are bigger, you have to immediately develop a skill that will keep them off you. My skill was my mouth. They always knew that there was no reward for beating me up because I was going make them feel like shit anyway. I would say to them, “So what—you’re going to hit me? You’ll still be wrong.”

My kids were the product of a mixed marriage—she was Protestant and I was Jewish. We’re divorced now and so they never really got the dose of Jewishness that I had. Now that they’re mostly grown—my daughter’s twenty-two, my son is twenty, my youngest son is sixteen—they are curious about it. I wasn’t there, so I couldn’t help them.

And that was a tragedy for me. I, who had never thought of ritual and tradition and going to temple (and I still don’t), was bereft. I felt terrible that I couldn’t give them what I call the Jewish home.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN FROM YOUR CONFIRMATION? HOW LONG DID YOU PREPARE FOR IT?

I started when I was eight or nine and I graduated when I was sixteen. So where I came out was that to me Judaism was some six hundred laws about how to live on the planet Earth together, and how to live in a community and how to be separate and isolated as the Jews have been, especially in the fifties and sixties, when there was proof that people wanted to kill every Jew on earth, and why was that? I was so proud of being Jewish. My confirmation led me into pondering the process of thought and being Jewish. Being Jewish meant thinking. Judaism has a great meaning to me. It’s about right and wrong and that you don’t treat Jews better than other people, in fact, we are other people. That we represent all of mankind, the best and worst of men, so we can only learn from the Jews by the Jews being virtuous. I’ve always hated rituals because it absolves people of the responsibility of being good. Does the bar mitzvah really give us an understanding of who we are and who we are in the world as Jews? I don’t think so. Really, Judaism is about behavior. It isn’t about heaven and hell. It’s about your behavior as a good person, and that’s the great opportunity of Judaism.

AS AN ACTOR, ESPECIALLY AN OSCAR WINNER, YOU HAVE ALL THESE OPPORTUNITIES TO PLAY DIFFERENT ROLES. DO YOU THINK THAT YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT JUDAISM CONTRIBUTED TO WHO YOU ARE AS AN ACTOR?

You know that in Canada
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,
the book and the film, are iconic. It’s one of the most important books ever written. It was the first time that anyone had ever taken a character like Duddy and held him up to the world. He was a guy who became a pusher, all of the clichés the gentiles called the Jews. The Jewish communities were saying, “Oh, but we shouldn’t wash our dirty linen in public.” And I thought, Now there’s a great controversy and people will go to see the movie and it’ll be a big hit.

But it was a small controversy and people didn’t go to the movie and it wasn’t a big hit, although it has a cultural space. I wanted people to go to see the movie.

DID YOUR PARENTS SUPPORT YOUR DOING THAT FILM?

They supported me in whatever I wanted to do. Don’t you think that’s very Jewish? My parents said, “You know, life is about passion.”