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The Love Story of The Odd Couples

Lemmon & Matthau (left) and Randall & Klugman (right) as Felix Ungar and Oscar Madison

The Odd Couple offered an especially trenchant yet humorous depiction of late 1960s masculinity. Directed by Gene Saks and released in 1968, the film — adapted from Neil Simon’s 1965 Broadway hit — cemented the Jack Lemmon/Walter Matthau pairing as the definitive buddy duo of the era and even inspired an ABC sitcom (1970–75). Lemmon’s Felix Ungar, a fastidious accountant with uncanny domestic prowess, clashes with Matthau’s slovenly Chicago sportswriter Oscar Madison, whose mounting exasperation drives Felix from their shared apartment. The television show has become one of the great classics of television history, as legendary in its under-appreciation in its own time as Star Trek, which similarly found eternal fame and a huge fan base in the blessed afterlife of syndication. Jack Klugman and Tony Randall were uncannily similar in many ways to the characters they played on their show, which laid the foundation of both a highly successful ongoing professional relationship and a long-term friendship. The Odd Couple represented a vision of the male couple that, while not designated homosexual as such, was a comfortable feature of American iconography, one into which the actual homosexual couples of the period and in the decades that followed might be easily slotted — in fact, ABC was so worried that viewers would think Oscar and Felix were gay that the show’s intro stressed that the roommates were “divorced men.” The idea that these two men belonged together was evoked again and again through the various reiterations of the pair.

Jack Lemmon & Walter Matthau

In 2001, reporter Jeff Strickler reminisced over the time the two stars spent in Minnesota shooting Grumpy Old Men (1993): “It's fitting that Lemmon and Matthau, who died last year, were best known for the comedy The Odd Couple. Frequent collaborators, they were a real-life odd couple. Matthau was loud, gruff and always looking for a punch line, while Lemmon was soft-spoken, polite and took time to give thoughtful answers.” If contemporary depictions of gay couples in popular American television programming such as Desperate Housewives (ABC, 2004–2012) and Modern Family (ABC, 2009–2020) seem familiar, it is probably because they draw upon the odd couple tradition that Lemmon and Matthau so spectacularly represented. The newspapers of the time and later accounts of the men’s lives emphasized that they died almost within a year of each other, cementing a public image of the two men as a couple, though both left grieving widows, marriages of several decades, and adult children. “You’ve got to think a lot of that was [my father's] broken heart,” declared Lemmon’s son, Chris. “It doesn’t get any more difficult than having your best friend die.” Blogger and film reviewer Bob Westal elaborated, highlighting the actors’ status as a couple for twenty-first century viewers: “Matthau and Lemmon not only made a number of films together over the years, including the Grumpy Old Men pictures — they became inseparable in real life, as well as death. They are buried next to each other.” Adding to the legend, in 1992 Matthau confessed to Premiere magazine that he considered Lemmon “the most marvelous fellow in the world to work with and hang around, so bright and so decent, a helluva guy. I mean, it sounds a little bit like a homosexual relationship. If I were homosexual, I’d marry him in a minute.” “They adored each other,” concluded Chris Lemmon. “It was a true love affair.”

Jack Klugman & Tony Randall

Klugman and Randall also came to realize that they were a highly effective collaborative duo, both well trained in their craft and simpatico creatively, gifted at the fine art of adlibbing and dedicated to character-driven rather than shtick-driven comedy. While the two main characters struggled week after week to learn how to get along, the actors who played them were working out their own odd-couplesque personality differences to forge strong ties that would change both their lives forever: "We argued like cats and dogs for five years," Klugman once declared, "but only ever about how to make the show better. We never, ever had a personal argument in all that time." Klugman would not allow an episode to be cast in stone without its key element. “Where’s the love scene?” he’d demand. What he wanted was the moment where, after all the screaming and fighting between Felix Unger and Oscar Madison stopped, Oscar said that no matter how crazy or mad Felix made him, he still loved him as his best friend. It had to be there. And acccording to Klugman, it always was: "The Damon and Pittheus story has always been appreciated, even Brokeback Mountain. Two guys, whether they're or whatever, that love each other, that's the secret of the play." "I'll never know what makes us work so well together," said Randall. "It's like falling in love. It's all to do with chemistry. Ask me why I fell in love with my wives and I could never explain it, and I feel the same way about Jack!" Shortly after Klugman was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1989, the pair began working together again: "Tony and I share a love relationship. When I got sick, he was at the hospital the next day, telling me I had to come and do a play, even though I wasn't sure if I'd work again. That's how the one-night Odd Couple [1991 revival] happened. He thinks he did it selfishly to raise money, but I don't care, I know he it did for me."

Adapted excerpts from Hilary Radner's "Grumpy Old Men: 'Bros Before Hos'", PopMatter's "Tony and Me: A Story of Friendship by Jack Klugman (with Burton Rocks)" and The Independent's "How We Met; Jack Klugman and Tony Randall".

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