Requiem for a liver-eating gangster/actor

Recently I attended a memorial service for an actor friend at the Players Club in lower Manhattan’s Gramercy Park area. The club is in the magnificent 19th-century brownstone mansion that was the home of a thespian (aka actor) named Edwin Booth.

Edwin had the bad luck to have been the brother of John Wilkes Booth, who (you know this) assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. After the crime, Edwin split for England until things calmed down over here; he returned, reopened his mansion as a private club for actors and then, because actors (a la Rodney Dangerfield) “don’t get no respect,� he decided to raise the club standards by offering membership to (gulp) journalists?! There’s a joke in there somewhere.

Anyway, my friend, the actor Val Avery, had passed away last December and the club offered up its stage for a proper memorial commentary by the likes of Eli Wallach, Ben Gazzara, Sylvia Miles, etc., all sincerely commenting on their affection for Val, who was well liked in the industry.

Val Avery was a really good guy and he’d appeared in over 100 films, the first of which was a 1950s classic with Humphrey Bogart called “The Harder They Fall.� It was Val’s first film and Bogart’s last. They hit it off well, so to speak, and since this was Val’s first trip to Hollywood, he asked Bogart about the Academy Awards. “Are they really on the up and up?� Bogart’s response was, “If they were [Spencer] Tracy would win every year.�

In addition to his film work Val had more than 300 TV appearances, and if I posted a photo of him with this writing the reader would say, “Oh, yeah, I’ve seen him a hundred times, but the name …� Fact is he (yup) got killed in a lot of films and I asked about seeing him die violently on the screen. He’d laugh, “Hey, the money’s good.�

He was a talented actor with brilliant scenes in John Cassavettes’ films and, as an Armenian-American, he was active in attempts to force Turkish acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide.

He was also a wonderful cook. Actor Ben Gazzara, onstage at the Players Club, offered a story about driving with a car full of actors out of their upscale Hollywood digs to Val’s small apartment in the San Fernando Valley to enjoy Val’s cooking and a televised Sunday football game. His gourmet cooking was mentioned often by people I’d met in the film industry.

Much of his film work used his tough-guy image for casting him in gangster roles, mob guys, Mafioso, you get the picture, and it had a strange effect on his private life. On more than one occasion, actually many, many occasions, while he was seated at a bar or in a restaurant in an “under the influence� condition, he’d gain eye contact with a hapless tourist and suddenly shout, “I’LL EAT YOUR LIVER!!!�

Now, at this point, you figure that I’m making this up, yankin’ your chain, etc., but the fact is he became well known among other actors for this “liver� shouting. Eli Wallach referred to it onstage at Val’s memorial service, and when I interviewed the actor Rod Steiger (who was also in “The Harder They Fall�) some years ago and mentioned my acquaintance with Val, Steiger’s smile broadened, approaching laughter.

“He likes to shout, ‘I’ll eat your liver,’� said Mr. Steiger. The on-screen gangster was alive and well off-screen.

Val enjoyed giving, and I suppose part of my life story always returns to the (now out of business) writers’ bar in Greenwich Village, The Lion’s Head, because Val owned the apartment building across the street from that pub.

Reaching back for my own most personal memory of him does not include the “liver� outburst (although it’s far too memorable to forget). I recall a late evening at the bar, a few final beers and a conversation about fishing. He smiled, touched my arm: “Wait here,� he said, then walked across the street to his building. He returned with a beautiful surf-casting rod and reel. It was huge, linked together in two pieces. Val was smiling broadly as he handed it to me. I had some fishing gear of my own but nothing as grand as this surf-casting rod. “Keep it, it’s for you,� he said.

I eventually used that beautiful gift while fishing on the north shore town of Greenport with my little kid, a precocious girl named Jennifer (J.C. Lee). We caught fish, my kid was laughing, happy. Warm moment, great Kid-and-Pop moment, and I thought about Val and to hell with that Rodney Dangerfield gag line. Actors do get respect!

Bill Lee lives in New York City and Sharon, and has drawn cartoons for this newspaper, and many other publications of note, for decades.