Door-to-door anecdotes are a specialty of the house at Eli Wallach’s on the Upper West Side. They start the minute you enter the rambling “Hannah and Her Sisters”-like apartment he has shared with Anne Jackson for most of their 57 years together. The presence of a photographer at the interview reminds him of the time he knew (and later, in a TV movie, played) Alfred Eisenstadt, and by the time you reel your way to the exit – many rooms and many stories later – he’s telling you how disconcerting it is to do “The Teahouse of the August Moon” in London and have Winston Churchill arrive late.

Always the raconteur, Mr. Wallach is now deep into his anecdotage. In fact, “In My Anecdotage” is the subtitle of his autobiography, published earlier this month with the title his publisher insisted on: “The Good, the Bad, and Me” (Harcourt, 320 pages, $25). Ugly he isn’t, and never was. Charming he is, in spades – and that quality translates perfectly to the printed page. The sentences are short and punchy, delivered with his usual rat-a-tat-tat directness and occasionally punctuated with a curlicue of wry wit to make sure you’re paying attention.

“Initially, they said, ‘Do you want “as told to”? Do you want “with”?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t want that. I want it to be my own voice. I don’t know how to write very well, but I do write.’ Edward Albee said, ‘Listen, Eli. Old Jews tell great stories. Just tell your story.'”

And tell it he did, with a breezy modesty and matter-of-factness that doesn’t even pretend to be a tell-all. “The first publisher of the book said to me, ‘Eli, the book’s not commercial. One marriage over 50 years. No drugs. No scandal. No prison.’ Anne said, ‘Call him up. Tell him we want the manuscript back. Tell him you’re going to put back everything your wife made you take out.’ So I tell him, and he says, ‘That would help.'”

Needless to say, Mr. Wallach moved on to a publisher who appreciated his special perspective on making it in the acting world during the last half of the 20th century, rubbing elbows with the greats -“Charles Laughton, Eva LeGarlienne, Margaret Webster, Cheryl Crawford, Henry Fonda, Walter Hampden – all those people we met were great treasures for us in growing up as young actors.” It was a world worth holding onto.

What was it Lord Byron, that character in Tennessee Williams’s “Camino Real,” said that covered this situation? Mr. Wallach remembers it well and recited it intact: “Lately, I’ve been listening to hired musicians behind a row of artificial palm trees instead of the single pure, straight instrument of my heart. What is the heart but an instrument that turns chaos into order and noise into music? Make voyages, attempt them, there’s nothing else.”

Those are the words that conclude Mr. Wallach’s 312-page story – words he intends to live and work by. His next professional stop will be a Spike Lee movie with Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster called “Inside Man.” His last was a quick, uncredited bit in “Mystic River” for Clint Eastwood, the “Good” of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” but the bit was big enough to draw cheers when the picture premiered at the New York Film Festival. Mr. Wallach has reached that emeritus plateau where he gets applause for just showing up.

Ms. Jackson has been with him for almost the entirety of this half-century career climb. They met as co-stars at Equity Library Theater, doing Tennessee Williams (“This Property Is Condemned”), then she did her Williams (“Summer and Smoke”) and he did his (“The Rose Tattoo,” “Camino Real”), and then they did theirs together, on tour (“The Glass Menagerie”), and, when he debuted in films, it was in 1956’s “Baby Doll,” from Williams’s “27 Wagons Full of Cotton.” He could have made his movie bow three years earlier, but he chose “Camino Real” over “From Here to Eternity,” and some guy named Sinatra got the Oscar for a Wallach reject. “There was never any question about it,” Mr. Wallach insisted. “To me, I wanted to do plays. I didn’t do movies. My career was theater.”

Of the 80-odd movies he has done, Mr. Wallach elaborates on maybe a half-dozen – two in particular. Forty-five years after the fact, he is the lone survivor of “The Misfits” and he is almost all that remains of “The Magnificent Seven.” “Six of the seven are dead. Robert Vaughn is the only one left. I wasn’t one of the seven,” he said. “I was Calvera, the head bandit. Originally, I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to play the crazy samarai. ‘No,’ they said, ‘that’s the love interest.’ The head bandit in the Japanese version wore an eye patch, rode in on a horse, rode out, and came back at the end. I said, ‘What the hell is that?’ Then, I thought, ‘Wait a minute. All they do is worry if he’s coming back.’ I said, ‘I’ll do it!'”

Arthur Miller’s last play, “Finishing the Picture,” recounts the problematic filming of “The Misfits,” which once ground to a halt (and near abandonment) because of the emotional meltdown of his soon-to-be-ex, Marilyn Monroe. Lee and Paula Strasberg are comic villains in the play, and Mr. Wallach’s hand shot up to play the Actors Studio guru.

“I said to Arthur, ‘I knew Lee. I was with him 45, 50 years. I can play it.’ He said, ‘They think you’re too old.’ Now, they got a good actor to play him – Stephen Lang – but they made him up to look old so I thought to myself, ‘What the hell sense does that make?'”

Clark Gable outlived the “Misfits” filming by 12 days, and Monroe never made it through another movie. “John Huston was very gentle with Marilyn. He understood her plight. And so did Gable. Gable was a darlin’, gentle man about her. ‘Why did you allow all this?’ I said to him. He said, ‘If I reprimanded her, what would happen? It would tighten her up.’ She felt the camera was an X-ray machine that revealed what she really felt, and she was terrified. What she was terrified about was that she had just had an affair with somebody else and the relationship was breaking up. She couldn’t face the camera.”

Films provided Mr. Wallach the financial freedom he needed so he could return to the theater with commendable regularity. Then, there were the dubious rewards of television.

“The most mail I’ve gotten for anything I’ve ever done is for one episode of ‘Batman.’ I played Mr. Freeze. I got $350. Eight years ago, Arnold Schwarzenegger played Mr. Freeze and got $20 million. I said to Annie, ‘You see! You see!’ She said ‘Lift weights.'”

Apparently, there are anecdotes, and there are Anniedotes.