‘I DID 105 PICTURES AND I WAS KILLED 85 TIMES. HOW UNLUCKY CAN YOU GO?’
George Raft didn’t want to give the name. Interviewed in 1980, his final television appearance, the then 85-year-old actor, dressed stylishly in a charcoal peak-lapel suit over a black polo neck, was asked about his habit of giving money to those struggling to break into his fickle industry. The interviewer pushes him and he declines. He pushes again; again, Raft declines. The interviewer jokingly lets slip that the recipient in question went on to become the biggest name in television. Raft smiles. Still he won’t name her. Raft is, the interviewer says, too much of a gentleman. The interviewer takes another approach. How about all the famous women he’d dated? Would he name them? Raft smiles. “You can name them,” he says.
“I’ll do what I do, and if my work is satisfactory, you pay me. And if it isn’t, then you don’t owe me anything.”
Other men of his era — James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper — entered the annals of cool. But the muchless- famous Raft embodied it. tough. They played gentlemen; Raft one. “I respect women,” Raft once noted in another interview. “In one movie I was asked to hit Marlene Dietrich. I said I didn’t want to. That’s not something I would ever do in real life. And, of course, they said, ‘Well, you must’. Marlene said, ‘You have to hit me’. And I said no. So [filming was held up] for a couple of days. And I finally did hit her.” Years after the event, Raft was still not happy with it.
