Theodore Bikel is almost 80 years old. His voice and face have become synonymous with the part of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof - he has played the beloved character more than 2,000 times. He has worked with Olivier, Hepburn and Bogart. He was direct witness to the rise of the Nazis, the birth of Israel, the McCarthy witchhunts and the turmoil of the '60s… but he doesn't really want to talk about any of that. For Theodore Bikel, the past has passed. The future, however… who knows what it holds?
by Debbie Sklar
"Someone asked me once if I was going to retire and I had to look up the word in the dictionary to see if it existed," says the veteran of dozens of recordings, more than 30 movies and literally thousands of stage performances. "I do too many things to retire."
"If I Were A Rich Man"
It is a smoggy day when I meet Bikel at his apartment in a West Hollywood high-rise. He answers the door clad in simple khaki-colored slacks and a faded shirt adorned with worn red suspenders. I'm not sure which is more intimidating: his unmistakable bellowing voice or his towering appearance.
Before we sit down for the interview, I had already gotten a clue that Bikel marches to the beat of his own fiddle. Unlike most actors with a fraction of his résumé, Bikel does not have a publicist. I called him directly to set up the interview - no secretaries, agents or PR firms required. As for being seen at all the premieres and parties, he could care less.
"I knew early on it was dangerous to get caught up in all of that. My agents that I had for movies and TV kept on telling me 'you gotta be here in the scene' - whatever that means - but I said life is too short and I have too many things that I do and want to do," Bikel said. "I had a PR guy I fired years ago because he planted items in publications that I was with this woman and that woman and in places that I'd never be."
For Bikel, it seems the work is all that matters, although you'd be hard-pressed to even get the man to admit that. He is reticent about personal details, and is reluctant to offer the names of friends who know him well.
But dig a little - in his autobiography, on the Internet - and you find that this man has done even more than you thought. Did you know, for example, that his first film was with Bogart and Hepburn? Or that his first play was with Olivier and Vivien Leigh? Or that he was a delegate at the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention?
Neither did I.
"Anatevka"
Bikel was born in 1924 in Vienna, and reached his teen years just as the Fascists came to power. In his book, he remembers the days before the Nazi's annexation of Austria on March 12, 1938.
"March 1938," he writes in Theo: An Autobiography. "For weeks now there have been rumblings. For weeks also, the handful of Jews in my class were beset by increased jeering and taunting from 'them.' It was always 'them' - I do not recall friendships between Jewish and gentile students, hardly even anything close to camaraderie…
"None of this was lost on the 13-year-old boy I was then. While I may not have been able to make political assessments, I was adult enough to perceive the scope of the threat. Some of my Jewish classmates, influenced by their parents' wishful thinking, argued with me. 'It will blow over,' they said. 'Don't exaggerate.'"
It of course did not blow over. But Bikel's family quickly perceived the threat, and his father, a Socialist and Zionist, took the family to Palestine in September 1938.
"Sunrise, Sunset"
Bikel and his family left Europe via Venice. Their original destination was the thriving port of Haifa, but they ended up in Tel Aviv instead. "Why the switch was made I never found out. It was the first day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, but that should have made little difference…"
It was an appropriate arrival point for a young Zionist, though, for this was in the days before Tel Aviv was a city. As Bikel recalls in his book, there was scarcely a harbor at all.
What Bikel found when he stepped foot was a country "at once alien and strangely familiar…. At least we had arrived in a place where Jews were free. Indeed they wore their freedom on their sleeves openly, almost defiantly."
As a young man, Bikel spent two years at Mikve Israel Agricultural School outside of Tel Aviv attempting to learn about agriculture. When he was finished, he joined a kibbutz.
"I loved life in the kibbutz," he writes in his autobiography. "The cultural life especially, where I could make a genuine contribution. The festivals, the pageants, the stage events, and the frequent song evenings - there I was in my element. The late evenings made working in the daytime a little harder but I compensated. As I had occasion to remark from time to time, I often stood on heaps of manure leaning on a pitchfork, singing at the top of my voice, Hebrew songs extolling the beauty and nobility of work - work of the calloused hands which I was not doing too well."
Bikel did earn the honor of being a member of the Jewish Settlement Police, wearing a "brownish uniform" and a hat with a badge and carrying around a Lee Enfield rifle he had learned to shoot at agricultural college. "There was some glamour attached to training with them and doing para-military exercises" he recalls in his autobiography. "[The uniform] looked good, especially when you were on horseback. I was glad, however, that I never had to fire a shot, except in training - my notion of glamour did not extend to such serious and dangerous undertakings."
Bikel and his entire family knew his talents lied elsewhere. Just what those talents were, however, was a point of disagreement.
He was fluent in Hebrew, Yiddish and German with a respectable command of English and French, and his father pushed him towards academia. But Bikel had performed on stage as a child in Austria and as a young man with the Habimah Theater in Palestine.
"Yes, my dad originally opposed the notion that I should go into the theater because you can't make a living out of it," he tells me. "Someone once said you could make a killing in the theater, but you can't make a living - but I am doing OK.... I am not the rule but more of the exception to the rule."
Bikel did what he was told though, and passed all the prerequisites and tests just in case he may have to fall back on academia one day. But Bikel left Palestine in 1946 for London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art from which he graduated with honors two years later. He again was faced with staying or leaving. He considered returning to war-torn Palestine, but for admittedly "selfish," career-driven reasons, he stayed in London… where soon, his path would cross with none other than Laurence Olivier.
"Miracle of Miracles"
In 1949, Bikel was performing in You Can't Take It with You at the Embassy Theatre. His friend and fellow actor Michael Redgrave saw the appearance, and passed Bikel's name along to Olivier. "Olivier was in the process of casting for Tennessee Williams' Streetcar Named Desire and I was soon called - summoned, I guess to meet with the great man," he writes.
Bikel read some lines for Olivier, who noticed Bikel didn't have a problem with foreign accents. Olivier immediately cast him as one of the poker players at Stanley Kowalsky's apartment. "He also gave me the understudy plum of the year: both Stanley and Mitch…. Frankly, I could not wait to play either of them." He soon got his break: he filled in as Mitch (a part immortalized by Karl Malden in the 1951 film version).
At the time, Bikel also began to develop a serious interest in guitar and folk music.
"Music was my first love," he recalls. "It was never meant to be a career, because I sang for my own enjoyment, my friends, the family and it wasn't until I got to America that it became an additional career."
"Far From the Home I Love"
With stage performances and the beginnings of a music career going strong, Bikel was about to enter a new arena - Hollywood.
"My career has always been multifaceted, not just one-dimensional. I wear a lot of hats or yarmulkes," he joked.
But of all those hats does he have a favorite? "It's like people asking me what my favorite song is, I can't," he said. "It's like asking a man with 10 children which is his favorite."
In 1950, while he was still in England performing on stage, he received a call from his agent who wanted him to audition for the role of an officer on a German naval vessel. The role was for The African Queen with Hepburn and Bogart, and to be directed by John Huston. "You can only go downhill from there," he said.
There is a picture of Bikel with the three icons during a film break in his book. "Kate was… very helpful when we were shooting at night on the water in England," Bikel recalled. "She appeared on a boat with rum and brandy so people wouldn't get cold."
On Bogart: "I had a great time with him, we played a lot of chess together," he said. "He had a sense of humor that the Brits never got a handle on which delighted me."
Bikel's career rocketed after The African Queen as many other roles followed suit, among them: the Southern Sheriff in The Defiant Ones (1958) for which he received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor, My Fair Lady (1964), The Blue Angel (1959), The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1965) and Shadow Conspiracy (1996).
In these and numerous other roles Bikel's flexibility of characterization is amply demonstrated: a Chinese crook, a Scottish police officer, an American university dean, a Russian submarine skipper, a Jewish refugee, a Greek peanut vendor, a Hindu doctor, an Austrian nobleman and a Hungarian linguist, among others.
One of his closest friends is Fyvush Finkel, who stars in Fox's Boston Public. "I've known Theo for 36 years. We met in Las Vegas when we were both in Fiddler on the Roof and he was playing Tevye," Finkel, 81, said. "We became friends then and started going out for dinner afterward. I think he is one of the finest actors around and he is so well versed. He is a great centurion with an enormous range and a man with so many great talents."
"Tradition"
As for Fiddler, Bikel has played the Tevye role more than 2,000 times since 1967 (having recently completed the 30th Anniversary tour). And it is one that continues to garner the highest praise from audiences and critics nationwide.
Joan Simmons, a booking agent for various venues throughout southern California, recalled working as an associate producer on a production of Fiddler in L.A. with Bikel about 10 years ago. "He was a pleasure to work with and he is not difficult at all," she said.
Simmons added that for the role of Tevye, she can think of no other person to play the part quite like Bikel. "I can't imagine it, he is Tevye. Even though he has been doing the role for years, each time it's like the first time. To me, that's amazing. He draws the audience into the role and I have to tell you, I've seen others play the part, but he is the best."
Bikel initially did not want to say much about his performance as Tevye, but he eventually opened up. Bikel fashioned his Tevye after his own grandfather, Reb Shimon Bikel, whom he was quite close with growing up. "Whatever sources other Tevyes may have drawn on, I was playing my own grandfather. I remember him quite well, even though I only met him a few times during my summer vacations before he died. Reb Shinon Bikel was very much like Tevye, a mixture of piousness and irreverence."
"Now I Have Everything"
Even though he was already acting in movies when he came to America in the 1950s, he kept up with his music, but found that playing in this country wasn't like playing in Europe. "In America they won't tolerate it if you do anything well without forcing you to accept money for it, so I had this brand new additional career - I was okay with it. I still derived a lot of pleasure from singing and I used to go to parties and sing for nothing with as much enthusiasm as I did in great concert halls."
Today, he is a world-famous folk singer and one of the founders of the Newport Folk Festival. Bikel maintains an active concert schedule throughout the U.S. and abroad, with some 50 to 60 concerts per year, performing alone or with large symphony orchestras. He has recorded 16 albums for Elektra Records, including an album of Soviet Jewish freedom songs smuggled out of the former Soviet Union.
"Theo's voice is so pure and crystal clear, it sounds better than it did 25 years ago," said Simon Rutberg, owner of L.A.-based Hatikvah Music International, the world's largest seller of Jewish music. "He believes in the songs, the music and yes, he is perpetuating that tradition, but he is also preserving it. He has always said that the music is not to be preserved and just put up on a shelf, but to be played over and over again.
"I have met him many times over the years, and I always see him as a real Renaissance man, not just a one-trick pony," he continues. "Frankly, I've met everyone from Elvis to you name it, and not many people have awed me, but Theo has."
"To Life"
Bikel is also known for being active in the civil rights movement. He was an elected delegate to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, he served as president of the Actors' Equity Association (1973-82), as a board member of Amnesty International (USA), and, by Presidential appointment, as a member of the National Council on the Arts (1977-82). He is currently the president of the Associated Actors and Artistes of America (4A's), a board member of Americans for the Arts (formerly ACA) and a senior vice president of the American Jewish Congress. "It seems that I have conducted my life on two different emotional planes: one lighthearted, gregarious, even frivolous, the other politically and socially involved and following a serious social and moral commitment. The activism based on this commitment was not limited to union work or even to the arts," he writes. "My involvement with politics in America started almost from the day of my arrival at the airport in New York, possibly even earlier than that."
And with that, he clams up and doesn't want to "deal" nor delve anymore into talk of politics or activism.
"Sabbath Prayer"
Despite his seemingly deep connections to Jewish tradition, Bikel's confesses that he is not religious. "Yes, I take it seriously as a cultural aspect, an ethical aspect, and as an aspect of tradition," he said. "I'm a very secular Jew, but one that is steeped in Jewish law. I'm well read, versed in it, and I can daven, but if you ask me if I am Orthodox, no.
"I go to shul every now and then because I like being around Jews and I like the rituals," he continues. "It gives me something emotional. I can't tell you that it lifts me, as a religious person would tell you. I don't how that works, but it connects me to something that I would call soul. It enriches me more than anything else. I've always been like that, my father was a Zionist and a socialist, but he also hankered after tradition.
"He used to schlep me to synagogue on High Holidays and we had a great Seder always, a full Seder, which I do to this day," he said. "I feel that tradition is important."
As for his personal life, Bikel divides his time between California and Connecticut, where he resides with his wife Rita. Their two sons, Robert and Daniel, live in Los Angeles and Boston, respectively. He said he is close with both sons, and one can see his face light up at their very mention.
One of his greatest pastimes is listening to his Apple iPod, a device that holds up to 15,000 tunes, given to him by one of his sons. "Yes, I have some of my recordings stored in it," he laughs. "Sometimes, I need to refresh them if I haven't played that particular song in a while."
As one can see Bikel is a man of many talents and wears many yarmulkes, as he is the first to admit. But it appears that he is relatively happy with the way his life has panned out. For, in his own words, he is not a "specialist but a general practitioner in the world of the arts." So what's next? A string of book fairs in November, a run of Potok's The Chosen at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Florida in December, a special Chanukah fundraiser in Palm Desert and too many other engagements to list in this article. The future may hold as much as the past for this prolific polymath.
"I think about the past, sure, but mainly as a frame of reference," he says. "I'm not obsessed with the past, but it makes you aware of where you have been so you know where you are and where you are going…. That's what the past serves, that's the purpose if you use it that way."
Theodore Bikel
When: Saturday, Nov. 8, 8 p.m.
Where: Lawrence Family JCC, Jacobs Family Campus, 4126 Executive Drive, La Jolla
$16. For information, call (858) 362-1348.
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