ROUND-TABLE: Perma-tan Hollywood legend George Hamilton

“Everybody knows who he is, right? He’s so famous. His tan is… so famous.” George Hamilton has decades of Hollywood experience to his name and still the first thing that the actor playing Hamilton in My One And Only can think to mention about him is his tan. In all fairness, however, this is probably true of almost everybody: Hamilton himself is an icon—but his tan is legendary. At the press day for the aforementioned film, which chronicles the cross-country trek on which an adolescent Hamilton (Logan Lerman—seen on this website last week) is taken by his mother Anne (Renee Zellweger), the man himself demonstrates a quality that deserves to be at least as legendary as his tan: his penchant for storytelling.

I imagine you’ve done a million of these roundtables…
It’s actually fun to do it because, first of all, you’re talking about your favorite subject, yourself, and second you don’t have to really move, you know. The trick is not to say the same things because it becomes boring then, you become too pat, so I try to reinvestigate everything I’m saying, to reinvent it so it doesn’t sound like I’ve said it all before. Otherwise it’s deathly boring to do it, and you don’t want to do that.

Is it fun to be an icon?
[laughs] It’s interesting, because automatically at a certain point—I was growing old two weeks ago, and now I’m called an icon, and that’s because I’m 70 years old all of a sudden, and I get a star on Hollywood Boulevard, and my book is out, and my movie is being made about me and my mother. All of a sudden I’m being called an icon where before I was just an aging actor.

Does anyone ever think that the tan is a tattoo?
Yes, I’m sure, or they keep saying “What ethnicity are you?” and I have to pull out my tan line, but I think certainly it’s fashionable now to be this color, don’t you think? I think Obama’s even jealous of me.

That’s right, now you have an even wider political base!
And everybody I know of color will always say to me, “I always thought you were a brother.”

It’s easy to ask whether you prefer to do the comedies or the dramas but I think it’s the comedies.
I adore comedy and I think comedy is so much harder to do that drama because it’s all that you do in drama with split second timing, and I couldn’t for the life of me get anybody to let me play a comedy until I produced it myself. Love At First Bite, Zorro the Gay Blade, I actually put it together, saw the description written, and then got into it. And then they said, “Oh, he’s only good for comedy,” ya know? It’s always that way. And so at this point in my life I don’t get up and think about going to work; I’ve gone through that period where you think your last job may have been your last job and then they wake you and say, “Oh no, there’s still another one.” So, for me, if I didn’t work again from this day on, I would be just as happy as if I did work—except now I have some control. By producing something I can make it like, “There’s only one actor I think who’s right for this role: me.” [laughs] You have some control! But at the same time, I’m producing a movie, it’s a sequel to Love At First Bite, it’s called Batrimony: Love At Second Bite.

[very loud laughter]
And what it is is Birdcage meets Meet The Parents. And it’s terrific, and it’s all about that old school world of Dracula in the Bella Lugosi forties thing against the Twilight Cullens—with humor. And it’s hard to do, but it’s great fun. So that’s what were working on right now, and then I have this other movie about Errol Flynn and his son, who disappeared in Vietnam and was captured by the Khmer Rouge, and it’s a wonderful story, and I have two television things offered, one with my son, who’s doing Dancing With The Stars as we speak. Love it. He calls me up, “Dad, what do I do?” I said, “Well, you can be good for a minute fifty-five always if you get a Red Bull. Just step down those stairs, drink that Red Bull right before you go onstage, and when they say ‘And now, dancing the Cha-Cha,’ you feel that Red Bull kick in, that little ringing in your ears, for a minute fifty-five just smile: you’re on a good ride, pal.”

[laughter]
And he said “What do I do then?” And I said “Find an attractive girl; flirt with her instead of worrying in the green room about what the board says. You just flirt with the girl and they’ll like that.” And he said he had a great time with it. When I went into the show, I had a busted knee—I’d had it replaced already—I had four broken ribs, my shoulders were frozen, and they just looked at me like Seabiscuit. They just thought I was going to go down at some point and they wanted to have it on film. And I didn’t! And then there was Jerry Rice saying “Oh, my back’s hurting, my knees are hurting,” and I said, “Jerry, you are the best football wide receiver we ever had in history, and you’re forty-two years old, pal, suck it up. I’m sixty-eight.”

[more laughter]
And he would laugh and we’d go down and do it. And he won that night and was so happy and I thought I couldn’t go another inch, I didn’t want to do it. The jitterbug was coming up and no way. But my son’s got the energy, and I he asked me what he should do, and I said, “All you need to do in this thing is be yourself. If you make a mistake, make the mistake. People will love you for that. Don’t try to be cool, just go in there, because you’re a wonderful human being. Don’t be slick.” When I did it I said “I know how to be slick,” and every moment I found I was about to fall—I had Edyta as a partner and she said, “Don’t worry, my little prince, if you fall I’ll be there.” And I didn’t believe her until one time I found I was about to fall and this arm of steel came out of the ground and stopped me. She said, “I could spin you on this, my little prince.” I thought, “She knows her stuff.” And, lo and behold, he’s dancing with her! So father had the great Polish princess and now he’s got her, so it’s interesting. And fun, fun to see it.

Unlike Seabiscuit, at least you don’t have to worry about being put down.
It ain’t over yet!

How did your own upbringing prepare you for Dancing With The Stars?
Well, I was about thirteen or fourteen in New York City, and just about two blocks away there was a club called the Colony Club and there was a guy named Willy Durham, and Willy Durham was this kind of forties lothario dancing instructor. And it was important that boys who are in these debutant parties learn how to dance. And the girls too. So they sent me to Dr. Durham and he said, “There’s no way I’m going to be able to teach you dancing; you’re going to have to dance with a chair or a shotgun.” And I thought “What?” And he gave me a chair and he made me dance with this chair all the time and then he would give me a shotgun and I would have to hold it. And I kind of got the idea that I didn’t want to do this, that I kinda liked my arms around the girl, so I got pretty good at it and the dancing was pretty simple. You just learned the box step and the cha-cha and the mambo and the tango and it was all pretty simple. And then when I was about eighteen I was in Palm Beach and I took a job at a dance school being an instructor. And all you needed to do was learn one step above what you were teaching, and all these older ladies whose husbands had gone, all they would want to do was just dance with you or some young man, and the trick was you would wear your watch on the inside of your hand and then you would say “Oh, I’m sorry Mrs. Goldman, our time is up. But if you sign up for the life class we can dance forever!” And they would all say “Well let me think about it.” So I started learning that way, and then there was a place called the Roni Plaza in Miami, and in the summers, in the worst of heat I would go down there and you could dance on the beach. And there was always a dancing instructor, this guy Ramon, he was unbelievable. Ramon was a Cuban dancing instructor, and I would come down and we’d have these ladies, and he would always do the same thing. He would say “Alright, ladies, please come down, we about to dance now,” and he would always say “Mrs. Goldman, tu-ti the cabana, and tu-ti the pool. Tu-ti the cabana, and—Mrs. Goldman, cabana this way, pool that way.”

[mad laughter] I have no idea how I’m gonna transcribe that.
And we’d go through this every day, and the ladies, they loved him, and so I would just get that one step and that’s all I would do. And every day, in those days, I made like a hundred bucks going down there. So I was prepared when I got into it, but it’s a different style of dancing; you have that guy Lynn Goodman who says “You’ve got a lovely smile, but the problem with you is that you got to hold her firm, you got to hold her firm, and your footwork is just a mess.” So I’d go “Okay, Lynn,” and he would always look at me and then Bruno would say “You are furious! You are such a lovely entertainer!” And Bruno Tonoili would go crazy. So every time I went there I thought “The only way to make this work would be to be entertaining. Don’t try to be a great dancer.” And the audience kept me on because I was having fun, I was entertaining.

So what would you give—
I think I’m over speeding from Coca Cola.

[laughter] Maybe someone slipped you some Red Bull.
Could be the Red Bull.

We were told that you guys didn’t get a chance to meet, you and Logan Lerman, the kid playing you, that you met an hour ago. What would you have told him about seeing you on a screen, even if it’s a fictional you? Are you pleased with you?
Well, I am. I would love to be him and start my career over at that age, knowing what I know. I don’t think I would have told him anything, just as I didn’t tell Renee anything. You don’t have to be told that. They got it from the script. And they interpreted it their own way. And it’s interesting. When a director directs a movie he wants an accident to happen that’s not planned. He wants an actor to bring something to it that he hasn’t thought of to do it that way but, by god, that’s the way it should be done. That’s the way I would have done it. George in the film had that tenacity to come back and pretend that he wasn’t going to come back. My mother sent me to my father and she put me on an airplane in Memphis to come to New York and the plane took off and we lost an engine. And we came back and sat on the runway. And I wouldn’t get off the plane. I said “Mom, you wanted me to go to New York, I’m going to New York.” She said, “Well, you’ve gotta get off this plane.” I said “I’m not getting off until they fix this engine.” I had set that in my mind and nothing was going to shake me. And I was supposed to go and spend two weeks with my father and instead I spent a year with him. It saved my life, it saved my sanity, it gave me my masculinity, my understanding of what my mother and father’s relationship had been. And I saw both sides, not just my mother’s. My younger brother never saw my father’s side. I did. So what Logan did was he got it and the director allowed him to do it that way, and what Renee did was just wonderful. I mean, she should get an award. This is movie that she should get an award for. I feel strongly about it. And I can afford to be detached from this in a strange way; as much as I’m attached, I’m not attached. I was not on the set for one day; I didn’t give them one note. And as the producer I am there in a titular way. I didn’t shepherd it. I shepherded the script, that from the very beginning, but now I’m in it because I believe in it now, I think the movie’s wonderful. And I think it’s a sweet movie and so fragile, and in this day and age to have a movie like that come out—last night I was at Tarantino’ movie, Inglourious Basterds, and it was just—I mean, there’s not another twist you could put in a rope. And I went and talked to Quentin about it and I said “God, there’s nothing I’d like to do but work with you, but I was exhausted from the amount of things that went down in that movie.” And I went with my girlfriend, who’s German, and my best friend, who’s Jewish, so I’m sitting between the two of them thinking “God knows this is going to be an evening.”

[laughter] Oh, man.
But I thought the film was really a fine, fine film. But this is a different kind of film. This is a sweet, sweet film. We don’t make films like that. And also the pace of the movie—you know, now they’ve got a very hip cutting technique. They don’t dissolve; they come into the scene deep. They just know how to do it differently. This movie is edited the way movies would have been in the era. There’s an entrance, there’s an exit, there’s a pace to this movie, his very language. And it start out with— “Uh-oh, this is going to be one of those long, tear-jerker movies,” the guys are saying. But you’re caught up in that, in the humor and the outrageousness of it. So many switches come back in this movie. And that has nothing to do with me. I take credit in being involved in the script being written, but that is it.

Why do you think she was perfect to play your mom?
I didn’t think she was perfect to play my mom. At the beginning there were three, four, Annette Benning—my mother was a dark, raven-haired Scarlett O’Hara. And Renee’s played it in a totally different way. But it’s a testimony to her ability to arrive at the same place with totally different equipment. That’s what’s great about acting. I’ve seen people play Chicago; I mean, god knows I played Billy Flynn in Chicago. And everybody has a different way to get to it. It’s really interesting to see—I have to tell you a fast story. I busted my knee onstage in Chicago. I’m in the scene and they said “We’ll bring on your understudy,” and I said, “No, let me finish,” and they said “You can’t; you can’t walk!” and I said, “I know, just let me stand here and we’ll choreograph it all around.” It was a mess. The curtain finally came down at intermission. And my understudy is a guy name Eric Jordan Young, and he’s just wonderful. He’s about five six, and he’s African American and a wonderful performer, he does Sammy Davis in a show, and I thought “God, this guy’s great.” But I didn’t know what he’d be like playing me. And they couldn’t operate on me the next day, they had to wait a week, so I said “I want to go back to the theater tonight,” and I sat in the back and they didn’t change the Playbill to say I was being replaced by Eric Jordan Young. So two ladies were in front of me and I heard them say “Well I knew he was dark but I didn’t think he was that short.”

[laughter] When you wrote the script for Love At First Bite did you think vampires would be in vogue again?
You know, there was a play then that Frank Langella was doing called Dracula. And it was a very fine Broadway play and they made a movie and the movie was a big movie and Frank was coming out with this movie. I had this idea to do a spoof of it and it was Lenny Bruce who made me do that because I remember Lenny had a thing— [in a Transylvanian accent] “Good evening, allow me to introduce myself. We are but a small showbiz group, traveling through Transylvania. You know my son, Bela Junior? Bela, get off the dog.”

[laughter]
And I remember this whole thing that Lenny did and I thought “What if Dracula was alive, and he’s in New York? He’d be the victim!” At that time New York was a disastrous place to be, you remember, and I started playing with the idea. And I thought, “He’s just a wonderful old-fashioned fish-out-of-water gentleman who has one little problem: he needs blood. Otherwise, he’s just a great guy. This would be a great movie!” And we set it up and started working on it and I remember Dracula used to say: [in a Transylvanian accent] “I do not drink vine.” He always had a secret in his eyes. So I said to Susan St. Jane— “Ask me to come in, in that era, in that parlor, and have a glass of wine and maybe smoke a joint—smoke some shit.” And she did and then I said [in the accent] “I do not drink vine, and I do not smoke shit.” So I thought, “There is my character.” He is so out of date that he doesn’t get it, you know? And so it was an era for me that I wanted to get that fish out of water guy into. Because I was a fish out of water. I dressed in forties clothes, I should have been in those movies, I’m not in date. And… please give me the question again.

Did you think vampires would ever be in vogue again?
When Langella was going onstage, it was already in vogue. What was really the shot was “Could I make it funny?” I could make it funny, and I did. I came out a week or two before Langella, and when people went to see Dracula they laughed in the wrong place and ruined the movie. Frank will tell you to this day I stole that movie. Mine cost three million or something to make and his cost twenty-some-odd million, and it just destroyed his movie. And I think Twilight is a wonderful series of books. It’s so important for young girls with hormonal changes and this love that’s beyond giving your life for. But now I have to find a way to bring my character into that and make it funny and not be at all of Twilight, it can’t be that, but I found a way, I think, and that’s why I think it’s in vogue again to do it.

So were you as funny back then as your fictionalized self was in this movie?
Well, I think that the dialogue was funny, and we made it like a suit. It fit. It’s tricky—if you didn’t have a great script, you would really have to have time to play with it.

My One And Only is in theatres now in NYC and LA and will open wide on September 4.