At 5’2″, composer-actor Paul Williams knows well the shortcomings of his size. Horizons are closer, top shelves more distant and crowded elevators claustrophobic. Although born into a tall family (two brothers are six-footers), Williams stands three inches below his wife, Katie, and a full seven inches south of the national average for men. Frequently ignored by casting directors when he tried breaking into movies, he turned to songwriting, composed hits like We’ve Only Just Begun, and eventually collected two Grammys and an Academy Award with Barbra Streisand for Evergreen. What be lacked in height, he made up for in humor as be toured TV talk shows cracking jokes about his “tiny but perfect body.” Williams, 41, is now at work on a screenplay based on Johnny Hart’s comic strip The Wizard of Id; in the film be will portray the mythic kingdom’s diminutive tyrant king. Recently Williams spoke to PEOPLE’S Sue Ellen Jares about his Lilliputian world.

There’s never been a story or a TV interview about me that doesn’t mention my height. Bob Hope told me that when writers come to him with material, they always have two or three Paul Williams jokes. For example, comedy writer Pat McCormick, who is 6’7″, says I look like an aerial photograph of a human being.

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When I was young I was forced to associate with other kids and it was difficult. I don’t think I started to enjoy the company of children until I became an adult. My father was an architect who moved around the Midwest a lot, and I went to nine schools by the time I reached ninth grade. One of the major problems for me was coping with constant change, being the new guy in town and the littlest. I was one of those kids who sang Danny Boy until I was about 14 and suddenly realized it was embarrassing. I decided I wanted to be Montgomery Clift instead—gaunt, non-communicative, incredibly sensitive, worshiped by all women. Things didn’t work out that way. I talked too much, and I ate too much.

I don’t think short people are dumped on. Instead, by their very attitude, they crawl into a hole and pull things on top of themselves. I was never knocked because of my size except in high school. The other students kept stealing my tennis shoes to have them bronzed. I was 4’6″ when I graduated, but then I spurted eight inches. It was the same growth everyone else had, but I started from a lower platform.

My dad was killed in a car wreck when I was 13. For four years after that I lived with an aunt and uncle. Unfortunately, we didn’t get along. I walked away from them when I graduated from Wilson High in Long Beach, Calif. and went to Denver, where I learned to love poverty. I would have gone to sea if I’d been old enough to join the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union. Instead, I tried working at a straight job in an insurance office, but I couldn’t handle it. I also did some skydiving. Since then I’ve been active in aerial sports. I have this fantasy of riding the space shuttle into orbit. They’ve never sent a writer into space, so I think that fact, together with my size, might help move my name up a long waiting list. When you’re putting up a payload like that, it helps to be small.

It’s possible that my height had something to do with my first attempts to get work in Hollywood. I would bang on producers’ doors, but they were Dutch doors, so when the studio executives would open them, they wouldn’t see anybody there.

Since then I’ve used being short to suit my purposes, as a handle for identification. For instance, when I race cars I use the number½. What we choose as our handle—the supposed debit in our makeup that we try to switch into a credit—is something we’re very comfortable having other people talk about. Like Bob Hope’s nose. It really isn’t all that strange. He was smart enough to use it, and he had the talent to back it up. I never used chubby as my identification, even though my weight’s gone up and down many times. It was because chubby was unpleasant to me. Chubby was not sexy. Short can be.

Now short jokes are like my security blanket. Being onstage can be like making love, a free-flowing exchange of energy between myself and an audience. But it can’t be like that unless we’re both relaxed, and there’s nothing like a little laughter to put the audience in the right mood. The short joke is a quick and easy way. For example, Pat McCormick says, “Paul’s very superstitious. He considers it unlucky to walk under a black cat.” I think I give the impression of being a little crazy at times, but I’m not. On the Tonight show, the audience sees a very different kind of person from the one who writes love songs. They have trouble putting the two together. And sometimes so do I.

I think the move from writing songs to screenplays like The Wizard of Id is a normal progression. There’s a time when it may be very “in” to love my songs, and other times when it’s not. The same goes for Paul Williams the producer or Paul Williams the actor, so what I try to do is fill the valleys of one profession with the peaks of another. I think writing songs, which are exercises in editing and economy, is good preparation for writing screenplays. You tend to ramble less, to keep things, shall we say, short.

Co-producer Glen Larson and I are writing a TV movie for Pat McCormick and myself called Rooster. We’re both private detectives, and my character is also a former police psychologist. I’ve always been a frustrated law enforcement officer, and I think if I’d been taller, I’d have been a cop.

Although I take my work seriously, I don’t take myself too seriously. It’s easy to be the angry little guy, like Mickey Rooney in his early movies, because size, or lack of it, becomes a real stereotype. You can get angry over just the height references in our language—”that’s big of you,” “thinking small.” Actually, Lawrence of Arabia wasn’t much taller than I am. I don’t mind that Peter O’Toole, a brilliant [and 6’3″] actor, was cast in the role, but if I can accept that, then people should accept me playing Lincoln. We’re easily misled about height and assume that people with power and charisma are tall. Incidentally, did you know that Gary Cooper was just 5’5″? Only kidding.