Roy Scheider as Police Chief Martin Brody in Jaws (Universal Pictures; MCA, Inc.)
The 50th anniversary of the first public screening of Steven Spielberg’s film Jaws will be celebrated on June 20, 2025. For many, this anniversary will trigger the return of sub-rational fears of swimming in the ocean. For me, I am left thinking about a private lunch I shared with Roy Scheider, who played the police chief in Jaws, and wanting to commit these memories of the great actor to the public record.
I was the plus-one of a guest to a group lunch at the bungalow of the Doctorows in the Hamptons. That is as in E.L. Doctorow, author of Ragtime, and his wife, Helen Henslee, though his wife called him “Edgar.” Their bungalow did not have any one dining room of scale where a group could gather, so they seated people cabaret-style at two-tops and three-tops scattered about the house. Mrs. Doctorow placed name tents at each seating, to excuse everyone of making the awkward choice for whom to sit with and to compel their guests to sit with people they did not know and maybe make new friends.
I found my name tent on a two-top opposite the name tent of Roy Scheider. Our table, like most of the tables, sat a little off to itself, making for essentially a private lunch. I have spent brief personal time with a handful of genuinely famous people, and they all displayed some strategy for disarming strangers from asking the same handful of obvious things based upon that person’s particular arc of fame. As for Roy Scheider, he spent our entire lunch conducting a searching interview of me.
If he had wanted to go into journalism as a talk show host or feature reporter, he had all the skills. He put me at ease and got me talking and kept me talking throughout the lunch. This made it basically impossible for me to be starstruck in his presence or to ask him the same stupid things about the filming of Jaws. I did not think for a moment that I was having a unique experience or that I was especially interesting to this talented and accomplished actor. I could tell he was proactively avoiding answering trite questions about a long-past role acting alongside a mechanical shark puppet (or one of his other signature roles, but I’m a Jaws guy). I could see how each time he deflected his fame in this way, he had a chance to direct the study of a new human being, which should be of value to any actor.
I happened to be at a charged moment in my personal life when Roy Scheider interviewed me, so he heard a lot about my personal life and pried into it skillfully. Living in New York as a St. Louis boy was still new to me, and I was thinking about moving in with a woman I did not know very well, who happened to be from West Africa. Not so long before that summer day in the Hamptons I had left a previous marriage to a woman in Augusta, Georgia, who happened to be African American. I must have told Roy Scheider about those two relationships that were much on my mind and soul at the time, because I will never forget that he exclaimed, “So, you’re like Bobby? Bobby De Niro? You prefer the company of Black women.”
I sat through the rest of that lunch in a daze. Roy Scheider had just compared me to his friend Robert De Niro, or “Bobby.” While not an achievement worthy of having chiseled on your tombstone, I thought it was pretty cool.
When Mrs. Doctorow freed us from our assigned seats and encouraged us to socialize more broadly, Roy Scheider grabbed me physically and marched me over to an elegant, tall, blonde woman who struck me as a kind of superbeing; she was so well put together and so gloriously beautiful and so tall. She was his wife, Brenda Siemer Scheider.
Apparently, Roy Scheider had also pried out of me that I was passionate about yoga and practiced it regularly to work out some issues with chronic pain, because he introduced me to his wife as his new friend who comes out to the Hamptons with some regularity and also practices yoga. Roy Scheider’s wife taught yoga on the beach in Montauk; he thought that she should invite me out. She took down my email address, and for years Roy Scheider’s wife invited me to come out to Montauk to do yoga with her.
Because of this intimate moment that showed Roy Scheider in such a positive human light, I was sad when I heard that he died (on February 10, 2008, from a staph infection during a battle with multiple myeloma), more sad than I would have been otherwise. I thought about his beautiful widow and mourned her loss. I even thought briefly of tunneling back through my emails and finding a way to send her a message, but then realized that would be gratuitous and more about me than her or the loved one she had lost.
But I did think a long time about doing yoga on the beach at Montauk, wondering why in the world did I never make it out to Montauk to do yoga on the beach with the beautiful wife of my new friend Roy Scheider?
Jaws at 50: https://www.jaws50th.com.
