About Fred
Fred in the 1970s
Just after flunking out of university in the mountains of Pennsylvania, and because his parents wouldn’t let him go to school in California, Fred (a.k.a. Fred Jay Gordon) was on his way to an interview at a supermarket for a possible job in a little bug of a car in the middle of a raging snowstorm. His roommate, who swore he knew how to drive the borrowed car, lost control at the top of a steep, snowy mountain road winding down toward a fifteen-ton truck. For the first time in his life, Fred passed out. The tiny car smashed into the truck, was thrown off the road into a tree, bounced back, hit another car, and was demolished. Both young men were thrown out of the car, and Fred regained consciousness several hours later in a hospital elevator surrounded by nurses in white uniforms. He tried to flirt with them, but passed out again. His roommate only suffered a collapsed lung and was annoyed that he lost his glasses. Fred’s face was cut open, sewn back together, and, hours later, when he woke up, his mother was sitting on the edge of his hospital bed. Fred asked, “Now, can I go to Berkeley?”
Fred in 2025
His parents tearfully agreed.
He began writing his first novel while still an undergraduate there, and when he moved back to New York, he lived in a railroad apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen on the Lower East Side above a bakery. He wrote more and, to pay the rent, worked the midnight shifts at the Budweiser Brewery in Newark, NJ., as a salad-boy in a dark Italianate restaurant in the West Village, an NBC Guide, worked casting and raising money with the producers of the original Broadway productions of “Sweet Charity” and “Mame” while at night he was a playwright dreaming in a basement theater with a group of friends determined to change American theatre.
Fred and his first love
Meanwhile, he was sending his first novel out to agents and editors when an actor friend suggested Fred take a two-week vacation and join him in California, where he was going to star in a TV series. Adrift, Fred agreed. After the first day of rehearsals in Los Angeles, Fred’s friend told him there was a part that Fred could play and convinced Fred to meet the casting director.
Fred stayed in Hollywood for five bewildering years doing parts in shows like Rockford Files, Columbo, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Starsky and Hutch, Six Million Dollar Man, the TV pilot of Where’s Poppa?, the TV movie Battered, etc..
Fred with his wife Barbara, 1994
Fred in a photobooth in 1960
Finally, he was rescued by Barbara, a New York woman he later married, and he moved back home. Knowing he really needed to learn the basic, practical craft of playwriting, he began studying acting at HB Studios. He took a real job to support his growing family, joined the Playwrights Unit at EST in New York, and wrote more and more.
Exhilarated, hopeful, he wants his plays and novels to engage, entertain, and move an audience.
And that’s it.
Mostly.
The rest is yet to be written.
Member of Ensemble Studio Theatre, NYC. Full-length play, I AM THE WOLF, staged reading (Austin Film Festival Second Rounder, EST, 2019; subsequently re-written and presented twice at the EST Playwright Unit. Full-length plays, A GLASS OF BLUE (2021) and AMERICAN MU$CLE (2022): both presented at EST Playwrights Unit; AMERICAN MU$CLE was produced at The New York Theater Festival, November 2022; I AM THE WOLF produced as a Showcase at The New York Theater Festival, February 2025; BALANCE OF PAYMENTS, one-act play produced at the Warner Theatre International Playwrights Festival, 2019; Member of The Dramatist Guild, New Play Exchange (NPX), a recipient of a PEN Grant Award, and a three-time Edward F. Albee Fellow. Published novels: BENJAMIN GRABBED HIS GLICKEN AND RAN (Harper & Row); BLOOD NEVER DRIES (Dakepub). A.B., English: UC Berkeley; M.F.A., Film: Columbia University