Accomplished actor, musician, and singer Hector Elizondo has forged a career playing the supporting role with a vigor and zeal that has delivered scene-stealing performance on stage and film.

By Joe Bosso,
photos by John Russo

It’s 7 a.m. in Sherman Oaks, California. Hector Elizondo is having his first coffee of the morning and doing what he does best - telling a story. The redoubtable character actor has appeared in 80 films (and counting) and derives a profound pleasure in storytelling. Stories about anything at all. If you asked him to discuss a paper clip, in fact, this repository of bon mots, axioms, and yarns would likely make theater out of it.

At the moment, he’s recounting the tale of his grandfather, luxuriating in the sound of his own voice and the images it conjures. His grandfather, it turns out, was a lector in Puerto Rico during the late 1800s and early 1900s - an instant connection to the world of cigars.

“Now, being a lector was an important job,” Elizondo explains proudly. “He was the man who would read to the workers in the cigar factories rolling cigars all day. He would read them the newspaper - this was before radio. Because of the lectors, the cigar workers were the most educated, most intellectual people around. By the end of the day they’d absorbed the entire newspaper - they were up on all the current events. And when the lectors had finished the news, they’d read novels to the workers, all the great classics. It’s amazing to think that the most erudite people in the entire town were the ones performing what many would consider a menial task.”

A family flair for theatrics begins to emerge.

“Lectors were a special breed,” he says. “Not just anybody could be one. They came into town, often dressed in silk suits, and because of their fine manners and elocution, they were considered actors. Eventually, radio supplanted them, but while they were around, they were treated with great honor and respect. So they were part actor, part educator. And the cigar rollers loved them; they depended on them. So, you see, because of my grandfather, cigars are part of my tradition.”

As it turns out, so is acting. But while cigars would play a major role in Elizondo’s adult life, his talent and proclivity for music and theater was apparent at an early age. Born in 1936 to Martin Echevarria Elizondo and Carmen Medina Reyes - emigrants to New York City from Puerto Rico - he grew up in Harlem and New York’s Upper West Side during a time when “music was everywhere. I always seemed to have a song in my heart, as the saying goes. You name the tune and I could sing it.”

During a school play the 10-year-old Elizondo did a little razzle-dazzle with the Doris Day hit, “Put ‘em in a Box, Tie ‘em with a Ribbon, and Throw ‘em in the Deep Blue Sea.”

“I didn’t think anything of it at the time,” he says. “To me, singing was just a way of having fun.” Seated in the audience that night was the blind blues legend W.C. Handy who demanded to meet the young kid. “He reached out to me and said [affects gravelly tone], ‘Son, you’ve got swing. That’s God’s gift to you. And your gift to God is, you have to develop your musical sense.’”

Swing (and Handy’s recommendation) helped Elizondo land a gig on “The Okey-Dokey Rabbitch House,” a 1940’s children’s TV show. “It was pretty much the precursor to ‘The Howdy-Doody Show,’ he explains. “It was kind of fun. I didn’t walk around thinking I was a star or anything.”

Not if his father had anything to do with it. Typically, when show-biz parents become entangled in their kids’ finances, the youngsters wind up getting priced out of the business. Ironically, Elizondo’s father’s protestations didn’t stem from the notion that his son was being shortchanged - quite the opposite, in fact. “I’ll never forget it. My father opened up the envelope and took out my first check from doing the TV show. His face just froze in a look of total displeasure. He showed it to my mother and she said, ‘Oh my God!’ She was horrified. Then my father called me over and showed me the check. It was for $27 - a heck of a lot of money back then, especially for a kid. My father shook his head sadly and said, ‘This isn’t right. A kid shouldn’t make this much money. Working men make this much money.’ He put the money away for me, and just like that, I was off the show. He didn’t want me to get corrupted.”

During his early to mid-teens, Elizondo led a dual life: He enrolled in the New York’s High School of Music and Art (“There was something about singing and theater I just couldn’t shake”) but also Commerce High School, where he excelled in basketball and baseball. He credits his father with developing his athletic prowess.

“For a lot of my childhood, I was a skinny, weak kid, pre-asthmatic, always had stomach problems - not very robust, you know? I wasn’t very aggressive, either. But my father, bless his heart, said, ‘You can’t go cryin’ to mommy if some kid picks on you.’ Now, I loved sports, but I was more of a watcher than a player - I could hardly lift a bat. But thanks to my dad, I learned to become an athlete and social animal. He made me learn how to box. We went down to the P.A.O. [Policeman’s Athletic Organization], and he said to the instructor, ‘Put the gloves on the kid.’ And that was the deal. My father wanted me to learn how to take a punch - metaphorically and literally. I never became a boxer per se, but I gained confidence; I learned how to carry myself.”

His father taught him a lot of lessons, Elizondo reflects, but the biggest one of all - ‘Life ain’t fair” - was probably the most influence lesson. “Your job as a parent isn’t to bubble-wrap your kids,” he notes. “Your job is to teach them to be self-sufficient. You can’t protect them from the bloody noses and the bad kids, the evil-doers. Nowadays we have a generation of kids who don’t know how to take a punch. I feel very lucky I had the kind of old man who taught me that. He wasn’t being cruel; he was doing it out of love, man.”

After high school Elizondo played it fast and loose for a couple of years, jamming with local Latin jazz bands (a natural musician, he had taught himself to play guitar and conga drums) and going to hear music with his friends. “They were exciting times,” he enthuses. “The big guys would say to me, ‘C’mon, kid, we’re takin’ you with us.’ Going to clubs was really just an excuse to go looking for chicks, which I got pretty good at. But what was terrific was, I got to hear all the great jazz musicians, the be-boppers - not knowing, of course, that I was witnessing a musical revolution. I saw John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, Billie Holliday - all the legends. I was in the heart of the renaissance, which spread to all aspects of the arts.”

There seemed to be so much to discover. People were saying new things, writing new things, and Elizondo was eager to take it all in. He discovered poetry and coffee houses. “I drank so much espresso it’s amazing my head didn’t explode. But I’ll tell you, what people were writing at the time was so thrilling, and I got into it because it was connected to jazz. There are photos of me at the Cafe Figaro in New York. I was a beatnik. I had a beret, the books, the whole deal. Of course, I was still just trying to land chicks. What you did was, you’d carry books around with you, trying to look intelligent, like you were figuring out all of life’s big problems. Chicks would come around, check you out, and their eyes would land on whatever book you had with you. Things like Kirkgegaard - I mean, c’mon, who the hell was reading that? But that’s what you had to do - carry big fat books with you, especially if you were playing chess. If you were playing chess and had these big fat books, my God, you were happening; you were an intellectual. It was a lot of posturing, but in spite of the posturing, something seeped in.”

A quickie marriage at age 19 resulted in the birth of Elizondo’s first and only child, a son named Rodd. Elizondo is loathe to discuss the details of the marriage other than to call it an “impetuous mistake - the marriage, not my son,” but in what could be considered a revolutionary ruling for its time, he fought for and was granted sole custody of his child. “We made an arrangement. She was very young. It was a much better situation for my parents and I to raise my son. Because with me, he had an extended family-my folks, uncles and aunts, brothers, and sisters. It was a very healthy, loving, supportive atmosphere.”

Elizondo began studying jazz dancing at the New York Ballet Arts School - although his interest was more of a dalliance than a red-hot love affair. Meanwhile, his father watched - and worried. “He was concerned about me,” Elizondo recalls. “He would’ve preferred that I continued my education and got a degree. Here I was, a young man raising a kid, with apparently no real plans. I had a job - sometimes I had two and three jobs. I was responsible; I paid the bills; I never dropped the ball; but I didn’t have a game plan. I was too wrapped up in music, sports, and the ladies. Those were my interests, in no particular order.”

Until one day, when Elizondo was playing conga drums for a jazz class. He was getting $10 a class - good enough money. “And then the instructor said to me, ‘I’m auditioning a woman for an adagio piece’ - which, if you know anything dance means it’s some pretty hard shit; the man’s gotta lift the woman and do a lot of balancing, and manage to be fluid at the same time. So she said, ‘I know that you dance and you’re athletic; would you mind just moving to the music with this woman and helping out so I can get an idea of what’s going on?’ So I did it, and I wound up getting offered a dancing gig. Only problem was, it wasn’t paying anything, whereas playing congas paid me $10. So I said, ‘Wait a minute - I’m gonna lose a paying gig just to dance?’ So we went back and forth. Anyway, I did the dancing gig and I gave the conga playing job to a friend. But this decision introduced me to the performing arts in a very active way; it introduced me to the theater, and that’s when I was hooked. Hooked for real. Finally, I had a goal in life.”

Elizondo took to acting like a Doberman to a steak dinner. His grace and charm helped him win roles in touring companies and off-Broadway productions. He studied at the Actors Studio, reveling in the craft of theater, which had now become a journey to self-understanding through art. Supporting parts came his way fairly easily; leading man roles, however, seemed beyond his reach. For one thing, he was losing his hair. “Yeah, that can separate the leading men from the other guys,” he says softly. “It’s funny, though - I never minded being a character actor. To me, oftentimes the supporting roles were the ones that drove the story; they were the gears that turned the wheels. I never saw any lack of honor in being a supporting actor.”

It was Elizondo’s sense of honor to his craft and the passion and ballast he brought to his performances that held theater audiences in thrall. Onstage, he didn’t just look at his co-stars; he regarded them. He didn’t simply speak lines; he stirred emotions. In this regard, Elizondo emerged as a rarity among actors: a frighteningly gifted supporting player whose presence elevated even the most stilted productions; whose performances were scene-stealing. The late Sixties were a remarkable period of creative efflorescence for Elizondo, and the best was yet to come.

It arrived in the form of Steam Bath, writer Bruce Jay Friedman’s smash 1970 off-Broadway satire in which the aimless lives of the unconventional were shown in a crude steam bath representing the land of the dead. In a star turn that won him an Obie Award, Elizondo played God as a Puerto Rican steam room attendant. Ironically, he initially balked at doing the play. “It’s true, I didn’t want to do Steam Bath,” he laughs. “I had done all these plays during the Sixties, I’d done my first movie [Valdez is Coming], and I thought the scripts would just start rolling in. So I blew off Steam Bath in a rather uncharacteristic and impulsive way. But all those scripts that were supposed to be rolling in? They didn’t. So I said, ‘OK, let me take another look.’ Thank God I ended up doing it, because that’s the play that really started opening doors for me.”

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