McCARTHY’S TRUMAN

Kevin McCarthy, an actor who’s been on a roll for about 40 years now, grinned at his unlikely association with Harry Truman:

“Truman said, ‘I never saw myself as President; I was just in the right place at the wrong time.’ Well, I never saw myself as Harry Truman.”

Yet for the last eight years, McCarthy has played Truman in 48 states--everywhere except South Dakota and Alaska. Tuesday he brings his one-man show, “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry,” to the Pasadena Playhouse (through Sunday).

The Truman political cabaret, as McCarthy impishly put it, “kicks off the Playhouse’s--ahem, you’ll forgive me--’Great Performance Series.’ ”

It also launches a new management team at the Playhouse, Susan Dietz and Stephen Rothman. In a curious twist, they’ve scheduled the actor who originated the Truman character, James Whitmore, to star for them later this season in a new play, “Handy Dandy.”

Whitmore only stayed with “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry” for 15 weeks back in 1975. At first it was hard to find a successor. Actor Ed Nelson tried his hand for a spell. Then playwright Sam Gallu called up McCarthy.

“At first,” McCarthy reminisced, “you think they’re looking at you as some sort of road guy, so it can’t be a plum assignment. But that changed when I realized what a terrific guy Truman was. What he represents is Mr. Ordinary Citizen who can achieve great things. His life should be an incentive to the man who thinks he can’t make it.”

McCarthy comes at Truman from a different direction than Whitmore did. “With Whitmore, the angle was ‘give ‘em hell.’ And he gave them hell. But the attack angle wasn’t as big an attraction for me as the human being was. It’s a different approach. I hope it’s as successful.”

McCarthy was lunching in a Ventura Boulevard bistro not far from his home in Sherman Oaks, which he shares with wife, Kathryn, an attorney-writer, and their two children, Tess, 7, and Patrick, 5. At 72, he’s astonishingly matinee-idol-looking, but his theater stories go back to the 1940s.

He was a founding member of the Actors Studio, even before Lee Strasberg joined it in 1947. It was there that he struck up friendships with Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando. He also appeared with Brando in Harold Clurman’s 1948 production of “Truck Line Cafe.”

“The difference between Monty and Marlon was that Monty shaped his craft by self-education, by teaching himself about movement, technique and light. Marlon didn’t have to do that--Marlon just knew.”

McCarthy drew a similar parallel between himself as Truman and Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain. “Holbrook invented Twain. He is it. With me, I’m not it. I’m just trying to do it. And in eight years no one’s taken exception.”

His biggest challenge was the night Margaret Truman came to see the show in 1982. “I was nervous. I’m leery of playing before people who knew him.” But Miss Truman liked McCarthy’s “illusion” (not impersonation) of her father well enough to give the producers a blurb for their ads.

McCarthy’s sister is Mary McCarthy, the novelist. They lost their parents when they were very young, and were “chambered, cloistered and shunted around foster homes” in Minnesota. He’s fiercely proud of his sister, and on June 21 will travel to Maine to help her celebrate her 75th birthday and the publication of her intellectual autobiography, “How I Grew.”

Meanwhile, the day after he wraps Truman in Pasadena, McCarthy will head to Germany to shoot additional scenes for the jumbo $50-million NBC miniseries, “Poor Little Rich Girl,” starring Farrah Fawcett as late heiress Barbara Hutton. McCarthy plays her father, the brother of E. F. Hutton.

He’ll also be seen in Steven Spielberg’s “Inner Space” and in Chuck Fries’ “Dark Tower.” So the career is whipping right along. But when Oliver Stone recently auditioned him to play Stone’s own, late stockbroker father for a forthcoming film about Wall Street, McCarthy didn’t get the part.

“Stone looked at me and said, ‘Dammit, you look too successful.’ ” And indeed he is.