The Beautiful Why of Timothée Chalamet: Three Generations of a Successful Showbiz Family

In this, the winter of my discontent, I escape political despair by browsing films on my TV. One evening I landed on Beautiful Boy and discovered Timothée Chalamet. Chalamet’s  portrayal of a young addict was nuanced, complex and mesmerizing. A quick look at other performances revealed his enormous charm and virtuosity and although he failed to win an Academy Award for his work in the film, Call Me by Your Name, he has been nominated this year for his role as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. A few days ago, the Screen Actors Guild named him best actor of the year for that role. He not only learned to play harmonica and guitar in six months, but captured Dylan’s voice so perfectly that it was hard to believe that he was not lip-synching. Curious, I googled him and discovered that he was the grandson of two old friends, Harold and Enid Flender, and the youngest member of a hard-working, creative, intellectual, showbiz family. 

His grandfather, Harold had been a writer of comedy, and a serious director, and filmmaker. His grandmother, Enid, was a professional dancer and actor who later became a public school teacher. They had two children: Nicole and Rodman. Nicole, a Yale graduate, dancer and actor is, today, a successful real estate broker and writer. She is married to Marc Chalamet, a journalist and editor for the UN’s Children’s fund, and a New York correspondent for Le Parisien–a newspaper established by the French underground in World War II. Her younger  brother, Rodman, entered the theater as a child actor, and has successfully navigated the tricky and often fickle film business as a writer, director, producer and filmmaker. (Rodman’s wife, Amy Lippman, is also a writer best known for shows exploring women’s issues and immigrant problems such as Sisters, In Treatment, and the Party of Five spin-off Time of Your Life.) Their son Haskell, also attended Harvard, and has been thinking about a film career. The next generation also includes Nicole’s daughter, Pauline, also an actor, currently taking time off after recently giving birth to a daughter, Chloe, in France. And then, of course there is Pauline’s brother, Timothée Chalamet…  

I was fascinated by their story which begins with immigrant great grandparents from Austria, Poland and Russia, and who produced talented and successful children–Enid Rodman and Harold Flender. These, in turn, parented other creative offspring. Just how unusual they are can be seen in the following (admittedly approximate) statistics. About 2 percent of actors actually make a living from their profession. Writers–at least novelists–do a bit better, with 13 percent managing to live on their earnings. I have no statistics on film writers or playwrights but suspect that their numbers are equal, or more dismal. Creative families often fall victim to financial and marital instability, loss of self esteem, and a paralysis that rises from their fears of and actual rejection.Those who succeed confront other problems: loss of privacy, competitor’s envy, brickbats from the press, imposter syndrome and the emotional turbulence accompanying fame and success that often leads to drugs, depression and decline. So, how did the Flenders do it?

I met Harold in 1950 at Tamiment, the Pocono resort whose summer theater had nurtured dozens of  Hollywood talents from the 1930s to the 1950s. My soon-to-be husband, Mike, and I were about to take a walk on the hotel grounds, when a slender young man with startling blue eyes and a kind of elfin charm, tapped me on the shoulder and introduced himself as one of the writers for the hotel’s weekly shows. He had overheard us planning a walk and asked to join us. We readily agreed, then waited while he ran off, on what he said was an important errand. Half an hour later, Harold returned from what had obviously been a quick trip to the theater’s Wardrobe, and was now wearing jodhpurs, a flamboyant shirt and pith helmet. With a staff in one hand and a pair of binoculars in another, Harold was ready for a safari—and a safari is what we got as we ambled across the hotel’s sylvan grounds—doubled over with laughter as Harold regaled us with wild  stories of life on the veldt—spoken in what may have been his idea of a South African accent.

Harold had been hired as a comedy writer. But we soon learned  that his quirky humor concealed a serious side. One of his first productions—I can’t remember if he wrote it before or after leaving Tamiment—was a record, Candid Telefun, made up of recorded phone pranks. The pranks turned out to be a cover for the writer’s deeper concerns with human suffering and hypocrisy. I remember one call he made to a pet shop asking to buy some monkeys. After a few minutes discussing monkey intelligence and their human-like qualities, the shop owner asked why he wanted  to buy a monkey. She gasped momentarily when Harold asked ”Can one monkey feed ten people?” but quickly recovered and eagerly gave him a price. He phoned a bank which gave out millions in loans but whose manager was unable to figure out how to lend two dollars to the poor man Harold pretended to be. We wondered if these were real calls—but it didn’t matter. They served to underscore Harold’s concerns with hypocrisy and inequality which seemed to fuel so much of his later work.

Although not an observant Jew, Harold’s interest in Judaism and its values was obvious in much of his later work. He won a Christopher Award for An Act of Faith—a TV show based on his book Rescue in Denmark, which described how, in 1943, the Danes had saved 8,000 Jews  from the Nazis. A later book, Paris Blues, made into a motion picture in 1961, contrasted French and American attitudes towards race and attempted to portray the humanity that characterized both groups. His dramatization of John Brown’s Body—based on Stephen Vincent Benet’s epic poem depicting the Civil War, won him the B’nai B’rith Human Rights award. Harold wrote numerous episodes of Car 54, Where Are You?, and scripts for Sid Caesar and Woody Allen. There were dozens of educational films as well–which, like many of his TV shows, were  destroyed in the 1970s when licensing changes, and cost- cutting  made them expendable. 

Beneath Harold’s humor, lurked a depth of concern for human suffering that may have reflected his own demons. Harold’s son, Rodman, remembers his father as being warm and funny. “My friends loved to visit when Harold was working at home.” he says. “My father took us seriously and was never condescending to me or my friends. He treated everyone as his equal and was as comfortable talking  to the apartment house janitor as to his intellectual friends— among whom he counted Isaac Bashevis Singer and Elie Wiesel. Rodman, who bears a strong physical resemblance to Harold, then added as if he had just remembered…“and he gave ME my first camera.”

Nicole’s memory of her father, who died when she was seventeen, focused more on his intellectual influence. “My love of reading came from him.” So, apparently, did her writing–Nicole has written many articles for a number of dance magazines, and she is the author of a book Cool Careers Without College For People Who Love Movement. When I asked her about Judaism, she said the family was culturally Jewish but not religiously observant.

Enid, whom we met a few months after we met Harold, was a dancer whose beauty, delicacy and dancing ability passed on to Nicole—and both of Nicole’s children, Timothée and Pauline. Her air of other-worldliness deceptively cloaked a sharp mind, enormous common sense, and a fierce work ethic. Both as mother and grandmother, she was incredibly supportive of her children’s and grandchildren’s ambitions. When seven-year-old Rodman wanted to act, she enrolled him in a local child’s theater group and took him to dozens of auditions. She also helped further his ambitions, by insisting that he write directly to director Roger Corman, whose work in horror films Rodman admired, and ask for a meeting in Los Angeles. Rodman was living in New York, but she gave him the money to fly to Los Angeles where the meeting with Corman launched his career as a filmmaker and director.

In her eighties, Enid did something similar for Timothée—who adored her. She often accompanied him to out-of-town film sites when his busy parents were unable to do so. Enid lived most of her life a few apartments away from Nicole in Manhattan Plaza–a subsidized housing development for performing artists on West 43 Street. Perhaps her most telling contribution to the family–right up there with being a hands-on grandmother—was her optimism. “She was always upbeat,” Nicole says, “and urged us to look ahead rather than back at events we couldn’t change.” Did this strength come from Russian immigrant parents? I don’t know, but it was a survival mechanism for many such families.

In the late 1950s, Harold received a Fulbright and he and Enid spent a year in France. When they returned, Enid appeared thin and wan.  She was clearly ill and we worried that she had cancer. As it turned out, she had tuberculosis. Her illness, from which she fully recovered, was kept under wraps as diseases so often were in many Jewish migrant families. And greater problems were to come when Harold died at 50 and the family had to give up their costly Riverside Drive apartment. What seemed like a blow at the time, was actually a blessing. The family moved into Manhattan Plaza– subsidized housing designed for performing artists, where they were surrounded by creative people and a supportive community. 

Nicole’s daughter, Pauline, a dancer as well as an actor, injured her leg and had to give up what may have been the most meaningful part of her early life. And while Timothée seems to have had nothing but success, he has often spoken about his own fears and misgivings. He admits to having struggled with his identity as a teenager, and wondering if he was on the right path. He was occasionally an indifferent student and was almost refused admission to New York’s La Guardia High School (which had joined the city’s High School of Performing Arts with the High School of Music and Art to become a famous cradle of artistic creativity and where  Rodman and Pauline had also honed their talents). Rejected initially, he was admitted to La Guardia only after Harry Shifman, a former drama teacher  at that school who had given him perfect grades at a school audition, interrupted a meeting with its principal to say that the school “NEEDED” Chalamet as a student. Timothée entered Columbia University at 17, planning to major in anthropology, but dropped out after a year. Did he feel that he had failed the intellectual side of the family? 

There were, of course, many other factors shaping the Flenders’ lives. They were beautiful, talented, hard-working and smart. They lived in New York–a city which offered dozens of opportunities for creativity including acting and dancing classes, access to Broadway shows and dance performances, and multiple moviehouses. Under Enid’s guidance, and at their own insistence, the children sought out and seized these experiences. Life in Manhattan Plaza surrounded by performing artists provided them with a supportive community, but sometimes, both Timothée and Rodman noted, their proximity to the other creative artists could be frightening–as professional competition seemed daunting, and they could observe, first hand, just how hard-won success in any of the arts could be. Nicole who had joined the New York City Ballet as a child, and later danced with Joffrey, had her mother’s common sense and realized that the life of a dancer was short. Teaching dance was an option that she practiced even as she turned to a career in real estate. Timothée admits that he, too, had his doubts about acting, but in the end he couldn’t resist

A friend, whose daughter attended LaGuardia with Timothée, reported overhearing her say, “Timothée was the best actor in the school. He got all the leading parts. But no one ever resented him—because he really was the best  and he was such a nice guy.”

I have never met Timothee but feel that I know him because of his physical resemblance to his elfin grandfather, and the grace and dancing ability he inherited from his grandmother. His exuberance and prankster  humor resonate with my memory of Harold’s hijinks. And his versatility as an actor may rest, at least partly, on his ability to call up Harold’s duality—the humor and the concern, the light and the shadow. 

If I had to describe the family, I would use the words grounded and unpretentious. They may be an acting family but the sweetness and vulnerability that Timothée exudes is real.