By Mark Evanier
June 8, 2021
My God, my friend
Larry Gelman was in a lot of TV shows and movies. I think he guested something
like eight times on Barney Miller as different people and he even got an Emmy
nomination for one of those appearances.
He was Dr. Bernie Tupperman the urologist on The Bob Newhart Show. He was a
member of the weekly poker game on The Odd Couple with Tony Randall and Jack
Klugman. He was on three or four episodes of The Monkees. He was Hubie Binder
on Maude. He was Officer Bernstein on Eight is Enough. He was on Night Court a
half-dozen times.
His IMDB page lists 118 credits for him. I don't think that's even
half-complete but if you look over it, you may notice that most of the shows
that hired him had him back over and over, often playing different roles. That
says something about how reliable an actor he was, about how people liked
having him around and how they knew that no matter what the part was, big or
small, Larry would do something memorable with whatever they gave him.
Larry was this cute little guy — I'm not sure he was even five feet tall — who
always seemed to be happy and pleasant…and working. One reason IMDB doesn't
have all his credits is that he did some real small parts in some movies
without billing. Another is that he appeared in a couple of cheapo R-rated
comedies under other names.
One cheapo R-rated film he did use his real name in was a thing called Slumber
Party '57 which I like to say was "Not the worst movie ever made but
certainly in the bottom two." I would not have made it past the first
three minutes of the videocassette version except that a lady friend of mine
was in it…and she was nice enough to tell me when I could fast-forward through
scenes she wasn't in.
Also in the film were Larry as a cat burglar and Joe E. Ross as a policeman.
Among the many reasons Bridget hated making this movie was that Joe E. Ross,
she said, was unable to be on the set with a woman without touching her and
suggesting they go someplace where he could touch her more and vice-versa. When
she first told me these stories, it was before I'd met Larry and I asked her
how he was. She said, "Thank heaven for him. He was a perfect gentleman.
He even tried to stop the man playing the cop from misbehaving towards
us."
Larry died early yesterday morning at the age of 90. He'd been hospitalized for
a bad fall and there were complications and…well, a friend of his sent out an
e-mail that said that his final audience was his beloved wife Barbara and nine
I.C.U. nurses. I'm sure, no matter how much pain he was in, he made them all
laugh. Just a delightful man.
GELMAN, Larry (Lawrence Sheldon Gelman)
Born: 11/3/1930, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A.
Died: 6/7/2021
Larry Gelman’s westerns – actor:
Nichols (TV) – 1972 (Cronie)
The Frisco Kid – 1979 (rabbi)
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