By George Fels
[Reprinted from February 2005]
In the eyes of the masses, he may well have been the best-known male pool player in America, if not the world. Far more than any other show-business figure since the late Jackie Gleason. Jerry Orbach was the guy who, each and every time you glimpsed him, made you think, “Pool.” But Gleason made a great to-do over his golf (at which he as not even mediocre, and his drinking (at which he was world class). Jerry Orbach, whom we lost to cancer last December, never muddied the waters.

While he originated the role of El Gallo in the original off-Broadway production of “The Fantasticks,” Orbach also starred in the same production in Chicago. That’s where I met him, more than 40 years ago, when he would visit the new Bensingers’s room semi-regularly. Everybody called him “Jerry the Actor” — it was almost unheard of to be a poolroom regular without a moniker of some sort back then, although I somehow managed — and the shortstops were eager, if not actually standing in line, to play him. It’s not that he was any kind of sucker; at his best, his game at either 9-ball or straight pool would probably be the equivalent of a 4 or 5 handicap at golf. But he would lose his $12 to $18 in gentlemanly fashion without fail, and that alone made him a rara avis in that room.

I sought him out to play, too, if the shortstops queue was not too daunting. While I had not yet fully graduated from punkhood at that point, his meager bankroll was not particularly attractive to me; it was rather that I recognized another straight pool lover, and I had far more patience for it than the shortstops ever would. So, we played a few times, on both 9-foot and 10-foot tables, and I usually won, but never more than $2 or $3. The other kick I got out of playing him, and it dwarfed the few bucks, was that I had been enchanted with show biz all my life and had done quite a bit of acting in college myself. So, I flattered myself that we were kindred spirits, and when I told him what little I did about myself, he was not patronizing or condescending in the least — not then, early in his career, nor ever, as far as I can tell.

In fact, a great deal of his showbusiness success can be traced to just how nice a guy he really was. He was good to look at, but well-removed from conventional handsomeness. He sang and danced decently, but no better than that. He was an actor above all else, and it was the combination of abilities that got him such consistent work. Besides introducing the song “Try to Remember,” his was the first version the world ever heard of Burt Bacharach’s popular “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.” He also appeared in “Carnival,” “Chicago,” “42nd Street,” and, of course, “The Threepenny Opera,” in which he met his first wife, actress Marta Curro. His films included “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” “Prince of the City,” “Dirty Dancing,” and Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

But it was his pool, after all, that interested us most. He played on-camera four times that I can remember during his long-running role as Detective Lennie Briscoe on TV’s “Law and Order”; happily, only two of those four scenes included buddying up to bad guys. No New York pool fundraiser or pro-celebrity event was ever held without him. We renewed acquaintance at an American Cuemakers Association show in the late 1990s, then again at the 2001 U.S. Open 14.1 Championship and the BCA Trade Expo in 2004. Because he had better things to do while I did not, my knowledge of pool on TV and in the movies, and actors who played, exceeded his, and he was always delighted to talk about that or anything else that was pool related. He retrieved his personal shimmed-pockets table from his first marriage, and had it installed at a club to which he belonged in New York City. I can’t say his love exceeded mine — to his credit, after all, he had other priorities while I was blind to mine — but it didn’t miss by much.

There are other pool-playing celebs of whom we might be far less proud. We wish, for example, that actor Robert Blake, currently on trial for killing his wife, had a passion for parcheesi instead. Sean Penn, another self-acclaimed pool freak, wins awards for his acting but not his social grace. And some of the game’s least attractive advertising came from a man who was actually a good friend of Jerry Orbach’s: noted gangster “Crazy Joe” Gallo, who was not only married in Orbach’s home, but dined with them on the night he was later murdered. The friendship would have to have included pool; Crazy Joe and his two brothers were all highly accomplished players who regularly ran four to five racks and gambled with such feared money players as Philadelphia’s Nicky Vacchiano.

Show business has never had, and probably never will have, a shortage of people who blow hard about their devotion to pool. (Bob Hope and Milton Berle, for instance, both claimed to be every bit as good as Gleason was; Berle played half-assed billiards, but otherwise there is not the slightest bit of evidence of this.) But Orbach made good on the talk. We have featured Paul Sovino (who, ironically, immediately preceded Orbach in the lead detective role on “Law and Order”) on our cover; we have written on Orbach’s friend and fellow actor James Tolkan. But neither man was anywhere near as synonymous with pool as Jerry Orbach was. And as he conducted both his career and his life with total dignity, he made our game look mighty good in the process.

Thank you for everything, Jerry. I’m just not sure we’re going to find another rep like you.