Ray Walston The Apartment (1960)

Ray Walston (1914–2001) played Mr. Joe Dobisch in The Apartment — one of the four mid-level managers who borrows C.C. Baxter's apartment for after-hours assignations. Dobisch is the manager who phones from a bar at 11 p.m. claiming to have a date who looks like Marilyn Monroe, the manager who later betrays Baxter's address to Karl Matuschka, and one half of the petty corporate revenge that drives the falling action of the film.

Before The Apartment

Walston was born Herman Walston in New Orleans, raised in Texas, and trained as a stage actor in the 1930s and 1940s. His Broadway breakthrough came in 1955 as Mr. Applegate — the devil — in the original production of Damn Yankees. He won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical for the role and reprised it in the 1958 film adaptation, which preserved most of the original Broadway cast.

By 1960 he was an established stage and screen character actor with a particular gift for unctuous charm — the smiling functionary who wants something from you. The Dobisch role drew on exactly that register.

Dobisch in The Apartment

Dobisch is one of the four "managers" — Kirkeby, Vanderhof, Eichelberger, and Dobisch — who run the informal apartment-time-share that opens the film. He gets the second-most screen time of the four. His three structural functions are:

  • The 11 p.m. call (beat 5). Dobisch phones Baxter from a bar, having found a woman who looks "like Marilyn Monroe — in fact, with the lights out, she could be Marilyn Monroe." He needs the apartment for forty-five minutes. The price is the monthly efficiency rating, top ten. The call is the second time the audience sees the arrangement in operation, and Walston plays it with a wheedling salesman's confidence that Baxter will fold.

  • The mother ruse (beat 6). Dobisch arrives at the apartment with his date, who pays the cab fare. He has told her this is his mother's apartment. The ruse is reflexive — Dobisch lies about apartments the way most people lie about traffic — and Walston's delivery makes the lie sound like routine professional grease.

  • The betrayal (beat 30). When Karl Matuschka shows up looking for Fran, Dobisch and Kirkeby exchange a look — "we don't owe Buddy-boy anything" — and give Karl the address. The betrayal is petty, immediate, and exactly proportional to the affront of being locked out of the apartment.

Walston's Dobisch is a small role that does heavy structural work. He embodies the corporate ecosystem that Baxter has been serving — the network of low-level mediocrities who hold real power over a junior employee's career. The casting was crucial: Walston could be funny without losing the menace.

My Favorite Martian and the long career

Walston's most famous post-Apartment role was the title character in My Favorite Martian (1963–1966), the CBS sitcom in which he played Uncle Martin, a Martian anthropologist stranded on Earth and posing as the uncle of a Los Angeles newspaper reporter. The show ran 107 episodes over three seasons and made Walston a household name to a generation of Americans who had never seen The Apartment.

"My Favorite Martian paid for everything I did for the next thirty years. But the work I'm proud of is The Apartment and Damn Yankees and the Cannery Row films. The sitcom kept the lights on." — Ray Walston, Television Academy Foundation (1997)

After My Favorite Martian, Walston worked steadily as a character actor for another thirty-five years. The notable later roles included:

  • The Sting (1973) — Singletary, the bookmaker
  • Popeye (1980) — Poopdeck Pappy (Robin Williams's father)
  • Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) — Mr. Hand, the history teacher
  • Picket Fences (1992–1996) — Judge Henry Bone, for which he won two Emmy Awards (1995, 1996)

The Mr. Hand performance in Fast Times at Ridgemont High — particularly the Spicoli pizza scene — became one of the iconic supporting performances of 1980s American teen comedy and introduced Walston to a third generation of viewers.

Walston's specific gift

Walston's career bridges three distinct eras — the postwar Broadway musical, the 1960s television sitcom, and the 1980s/1990s ensemble drama — without his persona ever quite settling into one of them. He was a working character actor who could land Tony-winning Broadway lead, beloved sitcom star, and award-winning supporting player in serious drama, all within the same career. The Dobisch performance is a small but vivid early-career instance of what he would do for the next forty years.

"Walston had the rare gift of being entirely believable as both a corporate weasel and a kindly judge. He could play the same surface — pleasant, professional, attentive — in service of opposite moral content." — Television Academy Foundation, The Interviews (1997)

Awards and legacy

Walston won the Tony Award for Damn Yankees (1956), two Emmy Awards for Picket Fences (1995, 1996), and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1980. He died in 2001 at eighty-six.

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