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Rod Steiger lookalike isn't flattered
By Carl Heintze
One spring day a few years ago while floating in a barge down a canal in Burgundy, France, a woman leaned across the luncheon table and said to me, "Did anyone ever tell you that you look like Rod Steiger?"
"No," I said.
She contemplated me, or rather me as the apparition of Rod Steiger, and then she said, "You look as if you didn't think that was a compliment."
"I don't," I said.
This opened a certain gap in the conversation.
I've never had anything against Rod Steiger, except that he was once married to Claire Bloom, who was once married to Phillip Roth. Both of them treated her badly, or so she said in several books. I always thought Claire Bloom was lovely. I resented that both Phillip Roth and Rod Steiger had treated her badly. I wouldn't treat her that way even if I did look like Rod Steiger.
To think that I looked like such a person put me off.
Rod Steiger's persona always played bad guys (in Doctor Zhivago, for instance, he treated Lara [Julie Christie] badly). That didn't seem the role I wanted to adopt for myself.
But I have to admit that I do look and probably also act quite a bit like Rod Steiger, which is to say, frequently I appear glowering and glum, as if I had eaten something that didn't agree with me for lunch. I don't know why I look this way. I don't usually dislike people, although in the case of the woman on the barge, someone named Katherine, I could make an exception.
On meeting her on the barge trip, among the first things she told me was she was raised as a Catholic, had married a Jew, who had died, and she had recently returned from Cuba.
I'm not sure what these disclosures were supposed to do for our already tenuous relationship. I think Rod Steiger is Jewish, but I'm not. I have never been to Cuba and really have no desire to go there, and as for being a Catholic, well, I flirted with the idea once, but, in the end, gave it up for Methodism, the denomination of Christianity in which I was raised.
If she wanted me to be impressed with the fact that she had been to Cuba, that didn't work either.
In those days going to Cuba was not what average Americans did, unless they worked for the CIA. As it was, she was from New Jersey and I was from California and never, perhaps, the twain shall meet.
And I tend to believe, having been born in California, that those who weren't are unfortunate. I'm afraid I am particularly put off by those who have been born around New York City and who believe the United States stops at the Hudson River.
I have lived at different times in both New York City and New Jersey. Neither times are memories I cherish.
Anyway, Katherine and I did not hit it off. Ever since then I have borne a secret dread of finding someone else, perhaps even a native Californian, who thinks I look like Rod Steiger.
Sometimes I wonder how Rod Steiger would handle this. That is to say, what would he do if someone asked him if he knew he looked like me.
Small chance, I suppose. In my now long life I have only met one other person who I thought looked like me. And his name was Michael Collins. I saw him only once. I've never seen him since. We found nothing in common except our looks.
Indeed, since meeting Michael I have tried not to look like someone else, mostly with success.
But the Steiger moment (if I can call it that) has stuck in my memory or perhaps it is my craw. Someone thought of me as someone I did not think I was and that has bothered me. It also has led me to wonder who I really am or perhaps to put a finer point on it, who other people think I really am.
Not many of us spend time wondering what other people think of us or whether we look like someone else, particularly someone famous.
I must admit, however, that I think my son (who looks nothing like me) resembles Jerry Seinfeld. So far the resemblance has not rubbed off on either my son or me.
My guess is that none of us ever truly see ourselves as others see us. We don't even see ourselves when we look in the mirror. What we do see is what we think we are. We think we see ourselves plainly, but, alas, personal honesty is not easy.
For most of the time, if we are to live with ourselves, we need to think we are all the virtues embodied in the 12 laws of the Boy Scouts of America: trustworthy, loyal, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. And none of the vices or cardinal sins.
Maybe we are at least part of the time.
But we also have to be the Rod Steiger lookalikes of the world, those misty apparitions others recognize, but we can't. We are strangers to ourselves; indeed, to quote the title of the late Robert Heinlein's famous science fiction work, "strangers in a strange land."
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to The Campbell Reporter. He can be reached at feodorh@juno.com.
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Campbell, California
