How Jerry Adler Got His Start as an Actor: “This Sounds Exactly Like My Best Friend’s Father”

How Jerry Adler Got His Start as an Actor: “This Sounds Exactly Like My Best Friend’s Father”

Jerry Adler, the celebrated character actor best remembered as Hesh on The Sopranos, died Saturday in New York at age 96. A veteran Broadway stage manager, the Brooklyn native didn’t turn to acting until he was 62. Here, writer-director Howard Franklin writes how he came to hire Adler for his first job in front of the camera.— Mike Barnes

In 1991, I was directing The Public Eye, a neo-noir starring Joe Pesci about a shutterbug modeled on the 1940s photographer known as Weegee. The casting director, Donna Isaacson, had credits that included 10 years of Coen brothers movies and would soon be named head of casting at Fox. In other words, she was an ace.

Donna and I, though, were having trouble filling the key role of the photographer’s longtime friend, Arthur Nabler, a Daily News columnist in his 60s who has recently had his writings adapted into a hit Broadway show.

Nabler is not handling late success well. When we first meet him, he’s drunk, bitter and with an age-inappropriate date in a Stork-like nightclub called Café Society. In his drunkenness, he says brutally truthful things to Pesci’s character, Leon Bernstein. Later, however, when he’s sober, we can see he’s perhaps the only one who “gets” Bernzy, whom many regard as a night-crawling pariah. There’s a true bond. Nabler has several key scenes that cover a range of behaviors and, among actors of a certain age, this was a coveted role.    

I can’t remember how many actors over 50 auditioned for the part or at least came in for a get-to-know-you session. More than 40. Not just eminent actors like Rip Torn but personalities that Donna thought might fit the bill like Eddie Fisher, who told us his daughter, Carrie, had assured him it was a good script, worth him making the trip from the Bay Area to meet with the filmmakers.

Sometimes an actor would get close — very close — but none of them felt quite like the character I had in mind, who was in some ways the emotional fulcrum of the film.

When we had exhausted all the usual subjects in Los Angeles, with our start date just weeks away, Donna and I flew to New York to meet with or audition East Coast actors. In New York, we fared no better. One well-known character actor left a 35-minute message on my answering machine to tell me why he had to have this part — he wasn’t even drunk — but this only served to scare the hell out of me.

Back in L.A., Donna said, “You’re driving me nuts. We’ve met everybody who’s right for this in L.A. and everyone who’s right for this in New York. I’m running out of ideas, and we’re running out of time! I need you to tell me about this guy, what he looks like, what he sounds like, his apartment, his clothes, where he grew up … ”

I began to describe the person I’d had in mind writing the script. When I was less than a minute in, Donna smiled and giggled. “What’s so funny?” I asked. “This sounds exactly like my best friend’s father,” she said. “Is he an actor?” “No. But I’m gonna bring him in. What’ve we got to lose?”

The next morning, I walked into our underwhelming casting offices, a pair of connecting rooms in a faded, pink-stucco motel in Burbank, circa 1965 (we were on a tight budget, very). When I saw the 60ish man sitting on the rented sofa in our de facto waiting room, I was taken up short. Passing through the room I found myself staring at him. He smiled pleasantly. 

“You look pale, are you OK?” Donna asked me as I entered the room where we conducted the auditions. “He’s exactly who I pictured,” I said, closing the door behind me. “I mean, exactly. My heart’s beating. Can you imagine if he could actually act?”

“It’s a long shot — a guy in his 60s and he’s never acted?” Donna said. “But stranger things have happened. He was really tickled when I called him. It’d be a hoot if we actually gave him a part!”

Jerry Adler came in, a through-and-through New Yorker who had Arthur Nabler’s tough-yet-vulnerable affect — and an extremely expressive face. Moreover, he had Nabler’s air of somebody who’d been around the block and knew where the bodies were buried — but whose cynicism is tempered by a menschy warmth.

I learned Jerry wasn’t a complete civilian, like an insurance broker, say, or a garment center guy. He’d been in and around show business his whole life. His late father had been a manager for the legendary Group Theatre (Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, et al.). Another late relative was the venerated acting teacher and founding member of the Group Theatre, Stella Adler, whose students had included Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty and Robert De Niro.

Jerry had also been a stage manager on Broadway when he was in his prime, then a production manager and, for a time, a producer and director. Now, in what seemed to be the waning days of his career, waiting out his pension, he was a stage manager on Santa Barbara, a soap opera taped not far from our shabby casting offices.

I can’t imagine this didn’t feel like a step down — from the Great White Way to beautiful downtown Burbank — but the man was upbeat.

“Donna’s gonna read with you, she’ll be Bernzy. Is that OK?” I asked him. Iwas being solicitous, assuming it must be tremendously challenging for a man Jerry’s age to be having his first professional acting audition. I needn’t have bothered.

Jerry was not just instantly accomplished in the technical sense; he miraculously managed to hit all the right emotional notes. He inhabited the character as written, but with extra layers and added dimensions. Jerry Adler was a natural actor in both senses of the word.We had him read four scenes. When he left, Donna and I stared at each other speechlessly for a moment before grinning, then smiling, then laughing like mischievous kids who had just gotten away with something. “This,” said Donna, “is a new one.”

We called our producer, Sue Baden Powell, who admonished us that we would be getting resistance from Universal. A studio wasn’t going to invest millions of dollars in a motion picture just to have some director cast an old guy in a major role who was literally an amateur.

We decided it would go down easier if our executive producer, Bob Zemeckis, informed the studio of our casting choice. With the exception of Steven Spielberg, there was no director more prominent on the lot, or as successful. If not for Bob’s backing and support, we would never have gotten the film financed in the first place.

Universal told Bob Zemeckis that Jerry could be cast, but only if subject to a screen test. We all agreed it was a good idea. Who knew how the guy would hold up when the cameras were rolling? Universal wanted Jerry to test with Joe Pesci.

I wasn’t looking forward to telling Joe this. For one thing, he had been pushing various friends of his — character actors who ran the gamut from famous to obscure — to play the part, several of whom I had already read and rejected.

I also worried that, if Jerry were to bomb at the test, it would undermine Joe’s confidence in my judgment before we shot even one frame of film.

However, I don’t think it ever occurred to Donna or me not to test Jerry; he was just too good.

On the phone (I think he was on a golf course), Joe was incredulous. Then angry. “How can you do this to me? It’s insane,” he said. “I can get Gene Hackman to play the part. You’re gonna hire some fucking guy off the street over Gene Fucking Hackman?”

This was the first time I’d heard Joe invoke the name of Gene Hackman — who doesn’t regard Gene Fucking Hackman as one of the great actors of all time? I was fairly certain this claim was just Joe’s bluster — a completely understandable bluster born of desperation since I was obviously making a mistake that was going to tank both our careers.

“That would be great! If Gene Hackman says yes before the screen test, we’ll cancel it,” I said. “Meantime, let’s just play this out. I know it’s not the usual thing. But just read with him. If there’s a problem, we’ll know it right away.”

For the test, we decided to film Nabler’s three biggest scenes in chronological order. The first was the Café Society scene. Drunkenness is a notoriously difficult thing for even experienced actors to pull off without coming off cartoonishly. This would be Jerry’s test by fire.

While it’s true for this screen test there was minimal scenery, no props, no hair, makeup, wardrobe or extras, we did have a cinematographer, a camera operator, a gaffer, a sound mixer, a boom guy and a first A.D. — i.e., a lot of eyes.

Additionally, Jerry had no way of knowing if the various strangers milling around on the cold soundstage were from the production (supportive, hopeful) or from the studio (skeptical, judgmental). Not to mention the fact he was doing his first acting scene with a star who two-and-a-half months earlier had won an Oscar for his terrifyingly convincing portrayal of an easily triggered homicidal sociopath named Tommy DeVito in GoodFellas.

Not a pressure-free environment. Yet Jerry seemed unfazed — smiling, affable, along for the (unexpected) ride.

Joe may have resented the whole enterprise, but he welcomed Jerry warmly when I introduced them. He himself had been a late bloomer (though not by Jerry standards) — employed, at 36, as a restaurant manager in the Bronx on the day Martin Scorsese and De Niro — who happened to see him in an obscure indie film called The Death Collector — plucked him from obscurity and cast him in Raging Bull.

As a guy who’d been kicked to the curb both as an ignored jazz singer and as a can’t-get-arrested actor, Joe was sensitive to the feelings of any and all performers on a movie set, not just his co-stars, but the day players and the extras, too. And so, as much as Joe resented having to be a part of this screen test, he most certainly did not blame Jerry Adler. He blamed me.

I can see how Joe would wonder: Why would a young director choose such a weird hill to die on? Hiring a 60-something non-actor to be No. 3 on the call sheet? The only people who it really made sense to were Donna Isaacson and me, because we were the only two people in the world who’d seen Jerry act.

Still, giving a performance in a shabby motel room with your daughter’s best friend and a young director with just one credit when you had so little at stake (it was ludicrous to think you might actually get the part) was nowhere near as challenging as giving a performance with 30-plus pairs of eyes focused on you on a cavernous soundstage on the Universal backlot when there’s really something at stake (you must be at least kind of close to landing the part if they’re bothering with all this!).

The camera assistant slapped the slate, I called “Action!” and the two men performed the scene. The script called for Arthur Nabler to somehow remain a sympathetic figure even while, in his inebriated state, insulting and attacking the film’s protagonist:

NABLER: “Nobody could love you. Nobody could love a shabby little man who sleeps in his clothes and eats out of cans and cozies up to corpses so much that he starts to stink like one.”

After Take One, Joe said, “Howard? If I could have a word with you? In private?”

I thought Jerry had done well, at least as well as he had back at the motel, but Joe’s request sounded awfully ominous. Following him to the far corner of the stage, I steeled myself for whatever lacerating, profanity-laced, Tommy DeVito-like tirade was coming my way. Of course, I would never be able to coax Joe to do a second take.

In the dim corner, Joe leaned into me and spoke quietly: “Fuck you. This guy’s better than I am.”

For scheduling reasons, Jerry’s first scene in The Public Eye — his first scene as an acting professional — turned out to be the last one in the movie. It was a night scene, set outside a hospital with 350 extras. Bernzy is being released mostly recovered from the bullet wound he had incurred taking photos of a shootout that have brought him the fame he so craves.

In a continuous Steadicam shot, Nabler must walk arm-in-arm with Bernzy — lending literal support to his wounded friend, all the way down the hospital steps, onto a sidewalk and contining on to Nabler’s coupé parked at the curb — a distance of some 30 yards. To do so, the men must plunge into and wend their way through a mob.

Flashbulbs fire in their faces. They must stop on a dime at a few crucial intervals: first, to speak to an art-book publisher wooing Bernzy, then to have their picture taken by a Time magazine photographer, then to get into the car. And Jerry’s character must “carry” the scene — he has probably 80 percent of the dialogue.

Our producer, Sue, felt terrible about the scheduling. How was a newcomer even supposed to hit his marks under the circumstances, much less give a coherent performance? But, as often happens in a production, the availability of the location was dictating that this scene coincide with Jerry’s arrival in Cincinnati, our main location, doubling for New York City in the 1940s.

Because it was summer, the nights were short, and we had a small window to get in all our shots before sunrise. An added challenge: the extras were not professionals (as they would have been in L.A.) but folks from a radius of about 100 miles who had answered newspaper ads and were staying up all night — a surprising number of children included — for a tiny stipend and the chance to be in a Hollywood movie.

There was a lot riding on Jerry’s ability to be a quick learner.

While we were waiting for it to be dark enough to shoot, I visited him in the makeup trailer, to welcome him but also to gauge just how nervous he might be. Sitting in the chair before the lighted makeup mirror, holding a cardboard coffee container, he was chatting away to the young woman trimming his hair, as nonchalant as a guy who was about to go watch a movie of a summer’s eve in Cincinnati, not act in one.

“In all my years taking shows on the road as stage manager,” Jerry was explaining to the coiffeuse, “I was never put up in such a big, beautiful suite. And with a gift basket to boot. I could get used to this ‘above the line’ stuff.”

He chuckled richly, plainly aware there was a certain absurdity to this entirely unexpected turn of events.

When Take One commenced, my heart was in my mouth every step of the way — especially each time the actors approached the marks taped to the sidewalk. I had shot enough scenes as a director to know stars hit their marks almost as second nature from doing so with regularity, but day players sometimes struggled to find them because acting jobs are so few and far between for all but the most privileged.

Eventually, however, as Jerry walked and talked, getting farther along the sidewalk and into the dialogue, five feet behind a backward-walking Steadicam operator, it started to become apparent that being at the center of a giant crowd scene wasn’t going to throw Jerry Adler any more than playing drunk had. It was as if he had done this 100 times before. A thousand times before.

At the end of the long walk and talk, I yelled “Cut!” Joe didn’t even bother to pull me aside this time. “What the fuck’s with this guy?” he asked, grinning, tickled: “How’s he so fucking good?”

Joe was particularly impressed that Jerry had ad-libbed the words “So fine” at the beginning of one of his lines. “I love that. So perfect. So Jewish,” said Joe, himself a world-class improviser (“I’m funny how? I mean, funny like a clown? I amuse you?”).

Word got out and, even before The Public Eye was released, Jerry was cast as Paul House, the murderer in Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery — a role every bit as big as Diane Keaton’s, Alan Alda’s or Angelica Huston’s.

It may be hard to remember how esteemed Woody was at the time — how stars lined up to score a role in one of his films without even reading the script, at a fraction of their usual pay. Really, he could’ve had his pick of famous actors to play Paul House.

Maybe even Gene Fucking Hackman.

During the filming of Manhattan Murder Mystery, I ran into Woody’s longtime production manager, Joe Hardwick (whom I had known since Woody’s producer, Bobby Greenhut, produced my movie Quick Change two years before all this). I asked Joe how Jerry was doing.

“Well of course Woody never gives the actors the whole script — just their sides on the day — which we all figured might be brutal for a guy with so little acting experience. Just as we were about to start Jerry’s very first scene, which is one of the phone calls he has with his mistress, Jerry asked Woody, very politely, ‘Would it be possible for you to tell me if I’ve already killed my wife when this phone call takes place?’

“Since Jerry was such a newbie, we all leaned in to hear Woody’s answer, wondering if he was gonna cut the poor guy a break. Woody took a long beat and then answered, ‘Possibly.’”

Less than a month after The Public Eye was released, an article ran in The New York Times with the headline, “FILM: An Acting Career That Began as a Lark.”

“It’s some kind of a fairy tale,” said Howard Franklin, the director of the new film, The Public Eye. The fairy tale is that at 62 years of age, nearly a decade after he went to California to stage-manage soap operas and be near his children, Jerry Adler has found a brand new career … “I was really getting into the twilight of a mediocre career,” [Adler] said of the days before he became a movie person.

The New York Times was jumping the gun. While scoring two major movie roles was a coup, it was hardly a hefty enough résumé to be considered a career. Who knew if these roles were flukes — one-offs, novelties — or if Jerry Adler would defy the odds stacked up against any actor, much less a sexagenarian new to the game, and continue to find work in his newfound profession. I just hoped the Times hadn’t jinxed the guy.

At the time of his death, Jerry Adler had — according to his IMDB page — 60 acting credits. So yeah, no jinx. He played the full spectrum, from avuncular grandpas to dark villains. Most notable, of course, the thing he will surely be remembered for, was the role of Hesh Rabkin on The Sopranos — Tony Soprano’s Jewish, mob-adjacent retired record producer who now lives on a horse farm in North Jersey.

Jerry also made movies with filmmakers like Curtis Hanson and Charlie Kaufman and had recurring or regular roles on such TV shows as Rescue Me, Mad About You and The Good Wife.

In interviews, Jerry explained he was only able to do The Sopranos, shot in New Jersey and New York, because he had one week off a month on Mad About You in California. This is what’s known as a working actor. This is not to mention the roles he landed in Broadway plays written by Elaine May and Larry David.

Allen, May and David are all comedy icons, aren’t they? The Sopranos is probably the greatest piece of filmed entertainment in the last quarter of the last century, isn’t it? It is not unreasonable to assume none of this would have happened — in fact it’s a certainty it would not have happened — if Donna Isaacson hadn’t started giggling and said, “This sounds exactly like my best friend’s father.”