Bud Cort, Snubbed by Oscars, Deserved More From Hollywood
'Harold and Maude,' Bud Cort, 1971.
Courtesy Everett Collection
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It was a startling omission. An actor barely out of his teens when he burst onto the scene in Hal Ashby’s 1971 cult black comedy Harold and Maude, Bud Cort made such an indelible impression that both he and the film he starred in (as Ruth Gordon’s decades-younger acolyte/lover) were catapulted to iconic status almost overnight. His was the kind of success story Hollywood lives for—yet this year, on the heels of his death in February, the Oscars telecast did not see fit to acknowledge Bud Cort in its In Memoriam section. Despite his place in the hearts of millions who continue to treasure Harold, he didn’t even merit a split-screen cameo.
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If Bud were still alive, I can picture him responding to the snub with a casual mention of the telecast’s poor ratings, a twinkle in his eye.
It was 1984. A decade and change after the performance that first set his professional life ablaze, Bud wanted to write his memoirs.
I was an editor at a small press, and a writer we both knew told him I was the person he should meet. I can still picture him walking into my office, sitting across from me, talking in his soft voice.
He told me he had been rear-ended on the L.A. freeway.
“I physically left my body,” he said. “I could look down and see my body in the car from where I was hovering from above, and I remember I had to make a conscious decision whether or not to go back to it. I made the decision to go back. I didn’t have to. I’m still not sure I made the right decision.”
Although the driver who rammed into him was clearly at fault, and the law in L.A. was on the side of the rammee, the other man sued Bud, painting him as a profligate entitled celebrity. Somehow the driver won — his lawyer brought up the Conehead characters from Saturday Night Live to argue that the damage Bud was left with from the accident was makeup, a disguise, some sort of fancy special effect — and he was forced to pay an obscene amount of money to the man who had nearly killed him.
His delicate beauty was altered by a receding hairline and a long scar on his forehead he immediately pointed out to me, evidence of that accident on the freeway.
He thought he had the makings of a good memoir, he said. I was surprised to learn he had been born in Rye, New York; he seemed to me a pure California creation. Out West he was an orphan of sorts, he told me, barely in his twenties when he’d basically moved in with Groucho Marx and his wife. He found not only new family and shelter but a bonus: the Marxes entertained continuously, so in the years he lived with them, Bud met practically every celebrity in Hollywood.
At the time he was radiantly young, even more innocent than his years. He told me about sitting by the pool when someone came over and started talking to him and he knew he was in love, for the first time madly in love.
It was Barbra Streisand. She loved him too, he said.
***
I’d had a minimal impression of Bud before we met. He’d been a pale wide-eyed boy in a few fraught scenes in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, his film debut. I remember his ghostly pallor, his Beatles-mop dark dark hair, his painful bespectacled innocence. From the start he was apparently an actor who felt he should be the star of whatever movie he was in, and he got his wish in his second turn with Altman, the oddity Brewster McCloud, playing a boy obsessed with birds and convinced he could fly (and also possibly a murderer). I can’t say it really worked.
Nor did I particularly enjoy Harold and Maude, the movie that made his fame. Though it pains me to admit it, I can’t watch anything with Ruth Gordon in it, even with Bud at her side. But meeting him altered something. The second time I saw M*A*S*H*, it landed differently as I watched Bud: the complicated nature of his actual being seemed to fight against the tiny role, as if there were a whole other movie his character was in, and the movie I was watching was missing it.
My second viewing of Harold and Maude was even stranger — all I could do the entire time I watched was try not to cry. I felt everything roiling inside that moonfaced boy, the one I now knew as a fragile, complicated adult. He wasn’t simulating emotions, pretending, covering; he was raw.
***
I hadn’t expected to find hi