3/8/98

Why did the old lady cross the street?

Clara Rimon was on a train going to Haifa. A young man took the seat next to her. His shirt was dirty. He removed it, placed an inflatable tub on her lap, poured in a bottle of water and some detergent, scrubbed the shirt clean, and put it back on before arriving in Haifa.
    Even for a New York native like Clara, this was bizarre behavior.
    Old timers might remember that scene: it was a commercial for Textil detergent that ran in cinemas in the 1970s.
    By now, just about everyone in the country knows Clara Rimon's face -- she is the classic sweet-little-old-lady of numerous ads on TV, in theaters and in the press, including the Post.
    The country is crawling with sultry, willowy, breathtaking young beauties, but sometimes you just gotta have a cute, moon-faced, 80-year-old granny type, barely five feet tall and with a range of expressions that runs from carefree and prim to impish and devilish.
    That's when Clara gets the call.
    In fact, just as our interview ended, the phone in her Holon home rang. The Transport Ministry needed Clara. In a few weeks you'll see her -- safely getting on and off a bus, then safely crossing the street at a crosswalk.
    She was not exactly groomed from childhood for an acting career.
    “I was born a socialist, a Laborite, a unionist,” she says, guiltlessly admitting that she now works in the teeth of capitalism. “Oh, I know it's terrible. What I'd really like to do is advertise socialism.”
    She came here in 1946 from Brooklyn with her Toronto-born husband Nahum, both of them firebrand Zionists committed to the humble ideologies of the day. Urging the public to buy, buy, buy would come much later, when she was at an age when most people wind down toward retirement.
    Occasionally, her politics intrude on her work. “I hated it at first. This was not what I made aliya to do. Years ago, I was asked to do a still for Kupat Holim. It never occurred to me to ask which one. And I ended up doing a commercial for Maccabi, or Meuhedet -- I was furious! Oh my God, I'm doing a commercial for the competition! I'm a member of the Histadrut!”
    Her most recent job was a Channel 2 ad for Bank Hapoalim, in which she stands under an umbrella while lots of people sing in the rain. The client may be ideologically kosher, but, like most Israelis, she hates the banks.
    “There should be a law against those banks,' she says hotly. Ah, but Clara, you promoted it, no? Was there no moral dilemma?
    She thinks about that for a long moment, then smiles sweetly. It's the kind of smile little old ladies use to get away with just about anything.
    “I sold my soul. But I got paid for it.”
    But there is a line she will not cross. “I would never advertise the Likud.”
    She brushed her teeth for Elmex, sipped cappucchino for Kapulsky's, ran around with a camera at a birthday party for Agfa, drank instant soup “for Telma or Osem, I forget which,” stepped into a rowboat for Clal Pharm, leaped onto a waterbed for Tambour paints. Oh yeah, and she parachuted for Osem cakes.
“Oh, my best commercial! I had to come down in a parachute. You know, somebody drops in on you unexpectedly... so there's a couple sitting on the sofa, and I come right down in between them. I was really parachuted, there was a harness underneath my dress. They pulled me up to the ceiling, and then they dropped me down. They did that about 50 times, and each time I took a bite of cake; another take, another piece of cake.”
She wrinkles her nose at the trend in ads these days. “It's all  flash-flash-flash-flash. It's worthless, you don't even remember what the product is. It doesn't leave an impression.”
She prefers longer commercials that tell a little story. “The one I like is the Electric Corporation ad, because it's the only one in which I have a speaking part. I say, 'There's somebody at the door.' He says, 'Oh, it's just the guy from Hevrat Hahashmal.' And I say, 'Oh, maybe you'd better ask him' -- because you're supposed to be suspicious of people poking around pretending to be from the Electric Corporation.”
They don't usually let her open her mouth because there's still a negligible trace of an American accent. But she has acted in two Hebrew plays. She also appeared in a film, shot in Berlin and never shown here, playing a withered old peasant at a Russian abortion clinic.
Recognition is a fun byproduct of the work. Her daughter once entered a darkened cinema, with the advertisements already under way. The first thing she saw on the big screen “was me. She was with her boyfriend, and she shouted “That's my mother! That's my mother!''
She loves acting, and doesn't mind being typecast a sweet little old lady -- well, she can hardly object. What do you expect, that she'd be one of the infamous Grapefruit Ladies?!
Actually, she was.
It was perhaps the most famous -- and notorious -- commercial in Israeli history. The grapefruit ad was eventually junked in response to widespread cries of sexism. It was designed to, uh, tart up the image of the forlorn grapefruit, but the wave of breasty beauties bouncing about in tight yellow T-shirts rankled as many people as it excited.
Clara was the ad's punchline. She was sitting on a