Here’s What Happened to Jack Klugman Before, During and After ‘The Odd Couple’: The Highs and the Lows

Jim Rosin recalls the time he spent living on the Upper West Side of New York many years ago, and a time he was walking down Columbus Avenue when he encountered Tony Randall, who lived nearby. “I approached him and said, ‘Hi, I’m Jim Rosin. I work with Jack on Quincy and I’m going to be flying out tomorrow to act in an episode that I wrote,’” he says. “We talked for a few minutes and before he left, he put his hand on my shoulder and he said, ‘Jack would eat you, chew you up and spit you out if you didn’t know what you were doing.’ These guys were consummate professionals in that respect, and very demanding professionally. He looked at me with this fatherly gaze and said, ‘I want you to remember something. If Jack ever yells at you, I don’t want you to take it personally. It’s because he wants you to be better than you are.’ I never forgot that and years later, in 2009 when the Quincy book came out, I sent Jack a copy and was talking to him on the phone and told him that story. There was dead silence on the other end of the line, then I heard his raspy voice say, ‘You know, it’s true.’”

Jack was born April 27, 1922 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a hat-maker mother and house painter father. During World War II he served in the United States Army, then attended Carnegie Institute of Technology, which is now known as Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, from which he graduated in 1948. Interested in acting, he wasn’t exactly encouraged by his drama teacher who suggested he become a truck driver instead. “When he was told he wouldn’t make it as an actor,” suggests Bob Leszczak, author of The Odd Couple on Stage and Screen, “that’s exactly what drove him. He wasn’t the normal good-looking leading man type, certainly not a movie idol, but obviously he proved him wrong.”

Geoffrey Mark, pop culture historian and author of The Lucy Book: A Complete Guide to Her Five Decades on Television, muses, “Everybody thinks of a certain kind of performer from the classic era as coming from a certain place, like comedians being Jewish and coming from Brooklyn, New York. Jack Klugman comes from Philadelphia, which produced a lot of comedy people and singers. So his accent is not New York, it’s Philadelphian. He’s also one of those guys who went through World War II and came out the other end wanting to be in show business. It was a magical time where a lot of people got into theater and then into live television. It was a time on television when, if you could walk and chew gum and say a complete English sentence that made sense, you could probably get a job. And it was because nobody else wanted to do it. It paid a 10^th that the same work in film or Broadway would pay.

“You had to work very long hours under very hot lights, and everything was live,” he continues. “There were no second chances. You either had to perform or you didn’t, and that is the gauntlet he ran doing things on Broadway and on television in the early 1950s. Sometimes he played a larger part, sometimes he was the sympathetic hero, sometimes he was the villain. Sometimes he was just standing there, because it didn’t matter. You didn’t become a big star, you worked. So you would do whatever was offered to you and years go by and you’re doing a loop. It’s almost like summer stock. One week you’re the star of the show, the next week you’re fourth guy on the left or the second lead. And while he was doing that, he was also beginning to do smaller things on Broadway. Sometimes the shows didn’t last very long, but he was getting to make a name for himself. Then, in the late 1950s, his career started to shift. He began to get bigger and better dramatic parts.”

Jack, who really did tend to alternate between stage productions and television appearances, first garnered serious attention in the 1957 film 12 Angry Men, a courtroom drama that would actually be given a more humorous take on an episode of The Odd Couple years later. After that, he was brought out to the West Coast where he began shooting filmed TV series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Gunsmoke. “The parts,” says Geoffrey, “got deeper — not on Broadway yet, but on television. He was becoming one of those people that could be counted on as a guest star on shows where you had your regulars and you had that one big guest star.”

All of this caught the attention of Broadway producer David Merrick, who was casting for a new musical. “Ethel Merman had abandoned Broadway,” Geoffrey details, “to get married to Robert Six, who was the president of Continental Airlines. Then she found out that her husband was cheating on her in New York City, so she wanted to come back to Broadway. She did Happy Hunting in 1956 and then there was Gypsy, which wasn’t Miss Merman’s part. She played Gypsy’s mother and they needed somebody who was the right age, meaning that he could reasonably look like Ethel Merman’s lover. He also had to be funny, had to have pathos, be able to handle himself with masculinity, he had to be able to deliver the dramatic moments and he had to do the one thing Jack really couldn’t do, which was sing.

“So Miss Merman knew of him, saw his auditions and the last part of it was that they were going to sing together. Jack said, ‘If she screams in my ear, I’m leaving,’ knowing that he couldn’t possibly duet with her and be heard. So what’s the point? As a result, Miss Merman lowered her voice down almost to the point where it cracked to show him, ‘I’m going to work with you on this.’ So he was cast as Herbie in Gypsy. And besides being an enormous hit — and being one of the most revived musicals in history — it gave us the song ‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses.’ Jack had a very successful run with Gypsy, which made him a Broadway star.”

Whenever he had time off from the show, Jack would still do television, recognizing that he continuously needed to be in front of the public, because he wasn’t a kid. In fact, by the time stardom hit, Jack was almost 40. Not that he had a lot to really worry about as he got to work with Judy Garland, playing her manager in I Could Go On Singing. “So,” laughs Geoffrey, “he’s got these two really high profile musical things, though he doesn’t sing in the second one, but he’s starred opposite Judy Garland and Ethel Merman. It’s very hard not to get noticed when those two things happen back-to-back within a short period of time. He continues to do television both in New York and on the West Coast, and then he really connects with Ron Serling and The Twilight Zone, doing four episodes that are considered classics.”

Those episodes are ‘A Passage for Trumpet,’ ‘A Game of Pool,’ ‘Death Ship’ and ‘In Praise of Pip,’ every one of which is worth checking out. “When he appeared on TV Confidential, as soon as I mentioned Ron Serling, he just lit up,” Ed Robertson says. “I mean, he loved doing that show and counted his episodes in the top five of everything he’d done. He felt delivering the words of Rod Serling was a chance to perform greatness. And this is a guy coming from the Broadway stage, who went on to perform the words of Neil Simon. Just a classically-trained actor who not only recognized good writing, but relished it. Going back to the point of the way he strove for excellence, I know that he was particularly proud of his work on The Twilight Zone, especially ‘A Game of Pool’ with Jonathan Winters. He actually had a framed still from that episode in his bedroom.”

“As splendid as Jack was as Oscar,” says Mark, “I really think his most sublime TV work was in The Twilight Zone, tying Burgess Meredith for the most episodes (four) in a lead role. And as wonderful as he is as down-and-out trumpet player Joey Crown in ‘A Passage for Trumpet,’ I really think his most moving performance is as the loving father in ‘In Praise of Pip.’ This is where he rips your heart out. Jack made an observation about his career that I thought was so spot-on, I used it in my Twilight Zone book: ‘I learned that there are certain playwrights, like Rod Serling, who just suit me. It was a joy to play his characters and to roll his words around in my mouth. What characters he gave you to play! What words he gave you to say! Lovely words. They just seemed to resonate with me. There have been three writers that seemed to most suit me: Rod Serling, Clifford Odets and Neil Simon. With Neil Simon, it was the humor and the rhythms. With Odets, it was the staccato style and muckraking attitude. But with Rod Serling it was the anger, the defiance, and the fire. He brought such fire to everything he wrote.’”

Points out Bob Leszczak, “Before The Odd Couple, Jack was in a 13-week sitcom from 1964 to 1965 called Harris Against the World, which was part of a Monday night block of shows NBC put on called 90 Bristol Court. It was three shows back-to-back, Karen, Harris and Tom, Dick and Mary. All three were set in the same community, which was an apartment complex. They were separate half hours who all shared a handyman character. It was aired against CBS’ big comedy night with shows like The Andy Griffith Show and The Lucy Show, and as a result nobody was watching and it never clicked. In Harris Against the World, Jack was a married put upon guy where everything goes wrong. It was his first sitcom experience and he didn’t want to do another one. Until The Odd Couple.”

After Harris Against the World it was back to Broadway for a show called Tchin-Tchin, in which he performed from October 1962 to May 1963, once again leading to television and then, in November 1965, replacing Walter Matthau in Neil Simon’s iconic tale of divorced sloppy and neat roommates, The Odd Couple, as Oscar Madison playing against Eddie Bracken’s Felix Unger (a role originated by Art Carney).  When that hit show closed, he starred in the less successful The Sudden Accidental Re-Education of Horse Johnson. Says Geoffrey, “He goes back to television, where he just keeps working. He could have made a very nice living for himself just being a guest star on television, which he continued doing through the rest of the sixties to 1970, when The Odd Couple was being turned into a TV show.”

The Odd Couple was being adapted for television by Garry Marshall and Jerry Belson, who, despite pushback from the network, were able to cast Jack as Oscar and Tony Randall as Felix. Explains Bob, “Garry Marshall had seen Jack in a play called Tchin-Tchin, but it was actually his sister, Penny Marshall, who recommended Jack. She had worked with him on a show that I was surprised only lasted a single season called Then Came Bronson. When Garry was deciding who should be cast as Oscar Madison, it was Penny who brought him up.”

“Now here’s where we don’t exactly know the truth and I’ll tell you why,” details Geoffrey. “There are people who claim Walter Matthau was the first choice for the show, but he turned it down and then Jack was the next choice. There are people who will tell you that they were looking for someone to play Oscar and couldn’t find someone. Jack Carter told me that he was in serious negotiations to play Oscar and that his reputation for being difficult soured the deal. But as far as he knew, he was being signed and the next thing he knew Jack Klugman was in — which was very smart of Garry Marshall. Most people who are successful writers and producers will tell you that a show will rise and fall on the casting. Jack had played the part, he knew where the laughs were, he’d already created his version of the character and didn’t have to start from scratch. And, of course, he was paired with Tony Randall, who played Felix Unger and had had a very similar show business background on Broadway and live television. Then when he started to make films at about 40, Tony Randall became a star. For both of these men at this point, film work was starting to go away. They were doing a lot of television and this opportunity comes along to star in a TV series.”

“Jack and Tony Randall had actually worked together once in 1955 on a show called Appointment with Adventure,” Bob says. “It was an hour-long live drama that they worked on, but it aired once, nobody knows what happened to the kinescope and then they went their separate ways, never knowing what would come years later when they were cast on The Odd Couple.”

Comments Mark, “I loved talking to Jack about his career, which I had the honor of doing on three occasions. And I say talk because that’s precisely what it was. Never an interview but an actual talk. One of those talks centered on The Odd Couple, and he was characteristically quick to praise his friend and co-star Tony Randall’s portrayal of Felix, as well as his predecessor in the role of Oscar. ‘Walter Matthau was brilliant as Oscar [in the Broadway and film versions of The Odd Couple],’ he said. ‘You couldn’t touch him. I had only one big advantage over Walter. I was Oscar. Oscar is me. The only difference between Oscar and me is that I cook. Other than that, playing Oscar is like putting on a comfortable old jacket. I love gambling, sports and horse racing. I’m a slob. It is me. I may be like Oscar in a lot of ways, but Tony isn’t Felix. Tony is not fussy or impeccably neat . . . If people think he’s Felix, it’s a testament to how perfect his performance was.'”

Picking up the scenario, Geoffrey states, “One thing about The Odd Couple is that Tony and Jack were very unhappy with the way they were filming it. They were using the original set from the film and were shooting it like the film with one camera and a laugh track. And they hated it. They’d both done theater and both knew what this kind of comedy needed — the audience’s laughter and energy to sort of buoy the comedy. So their first thing was to remove the laugh track and see how that worked, which didn’t. When the show came back for its second season, there was a new set and a studio audience. It was done the same way that I Love Lucy was with three cameras and an audience. And by this time, Paramount owned Desilu and they’d knocked down the wall between the two studios and, so, had these soundstages where they could have audiences, because they were already designed for that. That’s why all of those Paramount sitcoms of the 1970s have studio audiences.”

According to Ed, what Jack loved about working with Tony Randall in particular is that he felt there was no better improvisational partner that he worked with over the course of his career. Muses Ed, “Like most people, when you say improvisation, you probably think, ‘You’re just kind of talking off the top of your head.’ As Jack point out in his book, Tony and Me, and when we spoke in 2010, improvisation is not just talking. It goes back to what acting really is about, which is reacting. He said what made Randall so good at improvisation is that he would provoke a response from his acting partner. Jack cited several examples of how Randall would do that on The Odd Couple. The one that springs to mind immediately is where Oscar teaches Felix how to play football. In the episode, you can see they’re supposed to line up like an offensive player and a defensive player. Tony lined right up, nose-to-nose with Jack, which he wasn’t supposed to do. In real life, Tony Randall was one of the biggest sports fans in New York City and a Giants fan, but as Felix he lined up in his own way and got right into Oscar’s face. And the response he provoked in Jack, which remains in the episode, was him saying, ‘I don’t want to kiss you, Felix.’”

The Odd Couple ran from 1970 to 1975 and by the time it was over Jack had taken home a pair of Emmy Awards for his portrayal of Oscar Madison — as well as a 1974 diagnosis of throat cancer, which he battled and seemed to have been victorious over. From there, he went on to star in Quincy, M.E., which cast him as a medical examiner who solves crimes forensically. The character was featured in four TV movies before being spun off into his own series which ran from 1976 to 1983. “It was a different kind of show,” reflects Bob, “but he was still kind of cranky, still had the cigar and there were definitely elements of Oscar Madison. Again, it was a more serious show, but there were elements of Klugman and Oscar that carried over to the Quincy character.”

“The appeal of the show for Jack,” suggests Jim, “came from the fact that he had had his throat problem. Frank Sinatra sent him to his doctor and the doctor was able to successfully cure him at the time. So he came out of the experience with a very profound gratitude to doctors and was looking to do a dramatic role. He wasn’t anxious to do anymore sitcoms, because he didn’t feel he could top what he and Tony Randall had done on The Odd Couple. He was getting all these comedic scripts, but he wasn’t interested. He was interested in this script by Lou Shaw about a forensic pathologist who would solve crimes forensically. He partnered with Glen Larson, who had a whole different take on the idea. He wanted to do a show that was more in his wheelhouse, about a playboy detective who would run down the beach with girls in bikinis; chase people in cars and try to solve these crimes.

“My understanding,” he elaborates, “is that they first went to Robert Wagner, who was doing the show Switch and was unavailable. Then they approached James Earl Jones. Then Frank Price became the head of television at Universal and was a big fan of Jack and got very much behind the idea of him playing this character. It worked out, because Jack was not interested in playing a guy getting into car chases and running down the beach with girls in bikinis. So Jack came on the show, but he and Glen Larson were like oil and water, so after the first season Jack took more control of the show and Glen Larson left.”

From 1986 to 1987, Jack did move back into the world of sitcoms with You Again?, costarring John Stamos, which, unfortunately, didn’t fare very well. Things got more serious for him in 1988 when he lost a vocal chord to throat cancer surgery, but continued to act even though he now had a soft, raspy voice. The adjustment was difficult for him.  “He wasn’t shy about it,” Geoffrey says. “He was grateful to have survived. He was grateful that the operation worked and he had a high quality of life. He talked funny, but thought that was a small price to pay for adding years to his life.”

He was also genuinely gratefully for Tony Randall, who was the one that, by all reports, really motivated him to get out there and embrace his career and life again, despite the changes. Geoffrey explains, “We can either assume that when Tony Randall lit a fire under Jack to go back to work after his surgery, that that act of kindness and love made them closer friends. Or we could assume that Jack Klugman and Tony Randall already had a friendship based on kindness and love, and because of that kindness and love Tony helped him. Either way, how many costars can you point to from a television series who were that deeply involved in one another’s life? The only other sitcom I can think of where two of the stars of the show ended up deeply caring for one another was I Love Lucy with Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance. Even Jackie Gleason and Art Carney, who each did lovely things for the other, weren’t in constant touch and didn’t have any sort of social life together.”

“Early on,” Bob adds, “when Tony Randall first met Jack Klugman, they were in a limo and going over to do a table read or something for Garry Marshall, and Klugman was smoking. Randall had this major thing about smoking and he was suddenly turned off and almost wasn’t going to do it, because he didn’t want to work with this ‘disgusting’ smoker. It was a little rough early on, I guess, but they bonded during the show and afterwards became much better friends. Klugman was at Randall’s side as he was dying. They really did become best buddies. They were there for each other at the times they needed it the most — which is really nice, because it doesn’t always happen, especially in television where, when your series ends, usually you say you’ll stay in touch, but never do. They did.”

Ed Robertson relates, “When Jack lost his voice, it was Randall who pushed him and kept him from wallowing and who provoked him, for lack of a better word, by saying, ‘No, you’re going to get through this. I’m going to help you, because I need you. We’re going to do The Odd Couple for my national theater and you’re going to star, you’re going to be great and I’m going to help you.’ So he gave him a goal and something to train for, to work for, to fight for. Klugman said in his book, ‘Tony gave me a second life.’” 

While Jack made TV guest appearances during this time (and even co-starred with Tony in the TV movie The Odd Couple: Together Again), he definitely found comfort on the stage with and without Randall. Together they did The Odd Couple a number of times, as well as Three Men on a Horse and Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys.

In his private life, Jack married actress Brett Somers in 1953, the two of them divorcing in 1977, and in 2008 he married Peggy Crosby, who he was with until his death. He and Brett had two sons, Adam and David. Looking back at those marriages, Geoffrey comments, “Brett Somers was so different from him, because Jack was Jewish from Philadelphia and she was from New England. Brett was sharp-witted, but she wasn’t a beauty, she wasn’t particularly a great actress, but whatever the attraction was, it was there. But by the time The Odd Couple began to be filmed, their marriage was already in trouble. They had two sons and Brett had had a daughter before she married Jack, and there was contention between them about how to raise their children. On top of that, Jack had some really large personality quirks. He smoked cigars, he gambled — there was a lot of Oscar Madison in him. It’s why he played the part so well and, same thing with Walter Matthau, they weren’t stretching to play this part all that much.

“Other issues came up between them,” he elaborates. “When The New Match Game premiered in 1973, Jack was ready to be a part of it. He was on the first and second weeks, but then came a time when either the shooting scheduled interfered with The Odd Couple or he wasn’t feeling well and he told the producers, ‘Hey, let my wife do this.’ Brett was currently on The New Perry Mason playing Gertie the secretary. She was a current name, because she was working in television at the moment and Brett clicked on Match Game. After that, Jack was barely on the show. Then, once Brett had her own income and her own career going and he didn’t have to worry about that, they separated. They didn’t divorce for years, but they stopped living together. They didn’t dislike each other — which is why she appeared on so many episodes of The Odd Couple — they just didn’t want to live together anymore.

“He was only remarried for the last four years of of life; he had been single from 1977 to 2008. Why? We can conjecture that he was older, he was cantankerous, he was a gambler, he was a cigar smoker and he was set in his ways. At the same time, I’ve never heard anybody say a bad word about Jack Klugman. I’m talking about coworkers and people who worked with him on sets. Consummate professional, enormously talented, focused on the work. Tony Randall spoke beautifully of him, Garry Marshall spoke beautifully of him. Even Brett did. She made jokes that he was a pain in her neck, but they stayed friends. But I don’t know why, in his personal life, he chose to be such a recluse romantically.”

Unfortunately, cancer came back into his life, this time in the form of prostate cancer, which claimed him at the age of 90 on December 24, 2012. “He lived a long life,” says Geoffrey, “and an extraordinarily successful life in pursuit of his profession. He done good.”

“I believe he was a very versatile, underrated performer,” opines Jim. “He could play a comedic character, someone who was tragically henpecked or a sloppy sportswriter, yet he could also turn around and play a very sinister character, like he did sometimes. Again, versatile.”

Speaking of his profession, it’s interesting that Jack rounded it all off in 2012 with a stage production of the film that first brought him to people’s attention in a major way, 12 Angry Men. It was destined to be his final role. “He was very happy getting that original role,” smiles Bob, “because it really established him and it was quite a movie. There were a lot of names in that who all went on to other things and he certainly went on to a diverse career.”

“There is an irony, or the completeness of a circle, in the coincidence of Jack’s first major role being in the film 12 Angry Men and his final stage role being in 12 Angry Men,” concurs Geoffrey. “Two such powerful performances in the same work, decades apart. All great actors should have such milestone bookends to their careers. Klugman has two of them, the other being his big television breakthrough in The Odd Couple with Tony Randall and his doing the stage version with Tony decades later. The symmetry is fascinating.”

In reflecting on Jack Klugman, Mark is struck by the actor’s earlier statement — quoted above — about Rod Serling bringing such fire to everything he wrote. “Jack,” says Mark, “brought such fire to everything he played. There’s a moment in the Twilight Zone episode ‘A Passage for Trumpet’ when the angel named Gabe tells Joey Crown, ‘That’s an exceptional talent, Joey. Don’t waste it.’ Jack Klugman sure possessed an exceptional talent, and the record shows he didn’t waste it. He did, in fact, make the most of it — to his credit and our great benefit.”