I spoke to Jerry Stiller on the phone early one morning, Australian time. A couple of hours later, when I was at the office, I received a call from the publicist who arranged the interview. “Brett, what did you say to Jerry Stiller?” I was immediately on the back foot, “Nothing, why? What’s wrong?” She replied: “He just told me it was the best interview he’d ever done.” In retrospect, I think it was because, while I knew people wanted to know about his famous son, Ben, I showed Jerry some respect for his own achievements. We spoke a lot about his early career because I was generally interested in that. Of course, Ben was hot back then, so the story for the Sunday Mail (published November 8, 2007) had to reflect the readers’ interests more than mine.
WHEN Hollywood superstar Ben Stiller was 14, he came up to his father, Jerry, with a very serious look on his face.
“He said, `Dad, I’d like to recite to you the parts of the body in Latin’,” says Stiller Sr (pictured). “And he did just that.”
It was the only hint, ever, that Ben — now the star of blockbusters including Reality Bites, Zoolander, Meet the Fockers and Night at the Museum — might not follow his parents into showbiz.
Jerry admits there were times he wished his son hadn’t wanted to become an actor.
“This is a tough business,” says the veteran star, who has enjoyed the highs and lows of a 60-year career. “Who would put their kids into it?”
But at the same time, it was Jerry who gave Ben a Super 8 camera when he was a teenager, allowing him and his sister Amy to make their own films — including a mini disaster epic.
“When I did Airport ’75, they did their own version,” Jerry says. “It took place in a bathtub. Amy made a paper plane and she set fire to it with matches, while Ben became (Airport ’75 star) Charlton Heston.”
Ben went on to appear in the musical Cabaret at high school, and a career in showbiz was inevitable.
Jerry says he and his wife Anne Meara were encouraging, but both Ben and Amy made it on their own.
While Stiller and Meara made it big as a comedy double act in the 1960s — including a record-breaking 36 appearances on TV’s The Ed Sullivan Show — Jerry’s now in the midst of a late-in-life career revival.
It began when he was cast as Frank Costanza, father of George (Jason Alexander), on the mega-sitcom Seinfeld, and continued with a nine-year stint on The King of Queens.
This year, he’s appeared on the big screen in the musical Hairspray and alongside Ben in The Heartbreak Kid, a gross-out comedy from sibling directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly (of There’s Something About Mary, Shallow Hal and Dumb and Dumber fame).
“It seems to me that I’m on some kind of a roll, but I just happen to be 80,” Jerry says. “I just wish I was 20 years younger.
“I think I’m just about learning how to act — and I’m getting better.”
Admittedly Jerry didn’t have to stretch too far to play the father of Ben’s character, Eddie Cantrow, a 40-year-old who despairs that all his friends — including his former fiancee — are getting married.
Eddie meets a woman he thinks is Ms Right and gets married in a hurry. On their honeymoon, in Mexico, he meets the woman of his dreams and tries to work out how to ditch his wife.
“It’s a wonderful picture,” Jerry says, adding that — as well as being very funny — it’s a reasonably accurate reflection of the changing rules of the dating game.
“These days young people have a heck of a time trying to find the right person because values have changed so much.”
While Ben has most of the funny moments in the movie, Jerry’s character Doc has an hilarious scene in a hot tub with an amply proportioned naked woman.
“It was a shocker for me,” he admits.
Although he insists that “what happens in the tub, stays in the tub”, he reveals that his wife gave him some advice about fielding media questions.
“She said, `When people ask you what you did between takes in the hot tub, tell them you talked about your grandkids’.”
