Elliott Gould, Born a Rambling Man

Less than a minute into a phone interview with Elliott Gould, it's clear that I've lost control of the conversation with the man Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman called, in an April profile, "voluble and free-associative."

In response to a polite inquiry about Cannes, where Gould was about to jet off to the premiere of "Ocean's Thirteen" (see review on Page 30), the 68-year-old actor abruptly shifts gear from a reference to Jerry Seinfeld's recent publicity stunt there for "Bee Movie" -- in which the comedian zip-wired through the air over the Croisette in a giant bee costume -- to the ecological crisis in the beekeeping world known as colony collapse disorder.

It all went downhill (or maybe uphill) from there.

Over the course of a rambling, 40-minute chat -- monologue is more like it -- examining a career spanning more than 40 years, the veteran showman (who, in this third installment of "Ocean's," clearly savors the more pivotal role his clownish con man Reuben Tishkoff has taken) ricochets like a pinball from topic to topic, with little prompting from his interviewer. One minute we're in Cannes, the next Coney Island (whose Luna Park amusement park was a favorite boyhood haunt), then Broadway (on whose stages he spent his formative years as a song-and-dance man), then Sweden.

It was there that Gould, fresh from his success in Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H" (1970), went to work with director Ingmar Bergman on 1971's "The Touch," a disastrous experience from which he would return to the States only to encounter months without work, the collapse of his production company and the humiliation of being asked to submit to a sanity test by United Artists. Asked to revisit those notoriously rocky years, the man whose face once appeared on the Sept. 7, 1970, cover of Time magazine under the banner "Star for an Uptight Age" waxes both philosophical . . . and slightly goofy.

"Ingmar said to me, after my free fall, 'It was that little thing in life. You got blown away.' " Suggesting that he may have been too immature to handle Bergman's emotional intensity, Gould says that "nothing blows Ingmar Bergman away. He's just too brilliant. He's fine. He's too good." Then, after a pause, he adds, like the punch line to a corny joke, "I wouldn't want to blow anything away -- unless I had to play the Big Bad Wolf."

That propensity for segueing from the heavy to the light gets to the heart of Gould, who seems just as proud of his work on the animated kids' cable series "Kim Possible" (for which he voices a buttoned-down actuary) as he does of his Oscar-nominated turn in 1969's "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice." He switches from soul-searching introspection -- "One of my problems has been, and is, that I let myself be known, in the process of my breakthrough in motion pictures, before I understood myself," he says -- to sophomoric humor without warning. "What do you do with an elephant that has three balls?" he quips, dropping that non sequitur into the middle of a discussion of dinner at Warren Beatty's house. "You walk it, and pitch to the rhinoceros."

How did we end up in Beatty's house? Don't ask. Gould is an indefatigable name dropper, giving shout-outs to such bold-faced names of yesterday and today as Conrad Veidt, Bert Lahr, Ben Stiller, Ryan Gosling, Tom Hanks, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Frank Langella, Sacha Baron Cohen, Laurence Olivier, Ralph Nader, Norman Lloyd, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, James and Abe Burrows, Frank Yablans, Adam Sandler and Graham Greene, to cite just a few.

At the same time, he seems refreshingly unencumbered by the trappings of movie stardom. Gould returns his own calls, without the buffer of a handler interrupting to remind him that he has another one lined up, and it's his voice on the answering machine message you hear when he steps away from his Los Angeles apartment. "Please leave a message, and I will return your call. Thank you," says the voice, whose careful enunciation betrays more than a hint of what Gould calls the suppressed "dese and dose" of his Brooklyn, N.Y., roots. His down time consists of regular guy stuff: trips to the gym and the grocery store.

Part of that may be traced to what he claims is a notably un-Hollywood work ethic: "I don't come to it with ego," Gould says of his approach to his chosen field.

That was not always the case, he's quick to admit, noting that he and his "M*A*S*H" costar Donald Sutherland at first bristled under the famously improvisatory -- one might even say chaotic -- filmmaking style of Altman, with whom Gould went on to make several films, including "The Long Goodbye" (1973) and "California Split" (1974), and whom the actor now calls his muse. Back then, however, Gould balked at being left to his own devices in front of the camera. "I said, 'You [expletiving expletive], I'm not going to stick my neck out for you again! You tell me what you want, and that's what you'll get.' I was a tap dancer. I know precision, and I know repetition. 'Tell me what you want, and that's what you'll get.' And Bob said to me, 'I think I made a mistake.' I said, 'I think so.' "

Gould says he went so far as to complain to the studio, nearly getting the director fired. In hindsight, the actor describes that episode as little more than a ripple in a long career that has included a recurring role as Monica and Ross's father on the popular sitcom "Friends" (a job he took, by the way, against the advice of his agent, but which he believes introduced him to a new generation of fans). Gould says the repercussions of that ripple and the implications of the lesson Altman ultimately taught him about the value of "watching life take its course" -- on-screen and off -- have had lasting value.

"I'm delighted to have endured," he says, "to have survived, and to still be here and be capable of doing more work."