Corrections Department #8: Marion Dougherty, or: Math Is Hard!
December 9, 2011
Yesterday’s New York Times has an obituary for Marion Dougherty, an influential casting director who spent nearly two decades working in television before transitioning into feature films (including many important ones, such as Midnight Cowboy and The Sting).
It seems to be par for the course that television is a minefield even the most experienced obit writers can’t get right. Actually, the Times has already issued a correction with regard to Dougherty’s movie credits – initially the writer, Dennis Hevesi, added two films that she didn’t cast, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, to her resume. But I’m guessing we won’t see a correction addressing the two pretty obvious errors I spotted with regard to Dougherty’s television work.
The first suggests that Route 66 and Naked City, the two shows that really put Dougherty on the map as a discoverer of important talent, ran from 1954 to 1968. If only. The correct dates are 1960 to 1964. (Dougherty didn’t work on the earlier 1958 season of Naked City, which was cast less imaginatively by a West Coast has-been named Jess Kimmel). Although Dougherty had cast Warren Beatty on Kraft as early as 1957, it was on Naked City and Route 66 that she routinely gave early exposure to young Off-Broadway actors who would become some of the superstars of the seventies: Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman, Jon Voight, Cicely Tyson, Christopher Walken, Martin Sheen, Alan Alda, Bruce Dern, Ed Asner.
The second error is an internal contradiction: Hevesi writes that Dougherty was the casting director for Kraft Television Theater beginning in 1950 (I believe this is accurate, although it could be off by a year in either direction) but later claims that she was a casting assistant for six years. Since Kraft was Dougherty’s first job in the entertainment industry, and the series went on the air in 1947, that’s impossible. As far as I can determine, Dougherty started on Kraft in 1948 or (more likely) 1949, and became its chief casting director within two years or less. In any case, she was a woman well under the age of thirty when she started in that job – a noteworthy accomplishment, although there were other women with similar track records. (Alixe Gordin, who was born a year before Dougherty, became the casting director for Studio One around the same time Dougherty ascended at Kraft; Ethel Winant was a casting executive who achieved considerable prominence at CBS a few years later.)
Dougherty enjoyed a certain amount of public attention during this time – the Sunday Mirror Magazine ran a 1955 profile that called her “the nation’s top casting director” and credited her for sending Jack Lemmon, Rod Steiger, and Anne Francis to Hollywood – and her influence at Kraft cannot be underestimated. A blueprint of the offices of J. Walter Thompson, which packaged the anthology, places Dougherty in an office next to those of the two directors, Maury Holland (who was also the producer) and Fielder Cook; the three of them are the only Kraft staffers named on the plans. That Dougherty never received a screen credit on Kraft (her first, as far as I can determine, came immediately afterward, as the “talent coordinator” for the short-lived 1958 incarnation of Ellery Queen) was a noteworthy injustice, and probably one attributable to blatant sexism.
(At first Dougherty’s name was also absent from the credits of Route 66 and Naked City, although the executive producer, Herbert B. Leonard, eventually compensated for that omission by awarding her the humungous single-card credit shown above.)
Reading the Times article, one might get the impression that Dougherty was closeted. Actually the casting director, who kept her personal life very private, married during her Kraft years and later became the companion of director George Roy Hill (most of whose films she cast) after both their marriages ended.
In the interest of full disclosure, earlier this year I worked on a documentary, Casting By, which features Marion Dougherty prominently and identifies her as perhaps the first independent casting director, at least in the sense that that profession exists today. The Times does a good job of explaining her significance, but there is a lot to Dougherty’s story that remains untold. Sometime soon, I’ll write more about her.
Correction, 12/16/2011: An earlier draft of this piece indicated that Dougherty was married to the cult character actor Roberts Blossom; in fact, although Dougherty cast Blossom in several projects, her husband was a non-actor with a similar name. The Classic TV History Blog regrets the error (and acknowledges the irony of its appearance in a post that was itself a correction of another publication’s mistakes).
In my last post, I began a tour of the unbilled actors who lurked on the streets of the sixties crime drama Naked City. Many of whom later went on to become major stars, or at least busy character actors. Now, with the help of the production records on file in the archives of Naked City’s executive producer Herbert B. Leonard, we can identify most of these uncredited performers.
For some reason, Naked City’s third season yields the best crop of soon-to-be-famous bit players. Maybe Marion Dougherty, the show’s legendary casting director, honed her knack for spotting future stars as she went along.
Let’s begin with the one of the tiniest speaking parts you can possibly imagine. Squint at this scene from 1962’s “Torment Him Much and Hold Him Long,” which stars Robert Duvall (in one of four leading Naked City roles) and Barbara Loden (director of Wanda, wife of Kazan, fleetingly a sixties ingenue) as husband and wife, and you’ll see a black couple in the stairwell in the background:
The male half of that couple is one Bobby Dean Hooks, who under the more formal moniker of Robert Hooks would become a fairly important leading man a few years later; fittingly, he starred in the next major New York City police drama, N.Y.P.D. This Naked City episode precedes any other recorded television or film appearance for Hooks.
“Dust Devil on a Quiet Street” takes place in the world of young, aspiring performers. With its scrutiny of a faded acting teacher (Richard Basehart) and a disturbed young actor under his tutelage (Robert Walker), it’s one of the most detailed glimpses of the process of acting ever attempted in a television drama. The original writer of “Dust Devil,” Anthony Lawrence, told me that he struggled with the script, and welcomed the revisions undertaken by Naked City’s legendary story editor, Howard Rodman. Rodman’s wife at the time, Norma Connolly, was a character actress, and I suspect that Rodman’s observations of her work are the source of the authentic-seeming acting exercises in “Dust Devil.”
Ironically, for a text so sympathetic to the plight of the struggling actor, none of the actors we see performing in Basehart’s workshop receive screen credit. However, Dougherty got it right once again: four of the five actors playing actors went on to enjoy noteworthy careers. The first pair to try out a scene (which Basehart decimates) are Penny Fuller (All the President’s Men) and Ken Kercheval (Dallas):
Other students who have a line or two each include Stephen Brooks (front row, looking to the left), soon to co-star in The Nurses and The F.B.I., and character actress Joanna Miles (farthest right), also a Dallas alumna:
Moving on to the extraordinary “King Stanislaus and the Knights of the Round Stable” – the one with Jack Klugman, John Larch, and a meat cleaver all locked together in a butcher’s freezer – I originally thought that this young brunette nurse on the right might be Elizabeth Ashley, who did play an early role on Route 66 (another Herbert Leonard / Marion Dougherty effort) around the same time:
Wrong: it’s actually Broadway actress and director Joan Darling, later of Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law.
A week later, in the episode “Spectre of the Rose Street Gang,” we catch a single glimpse of The Waltons’ Ralph Waite, likely in his television debut, as a chauffeur:
. . . and then in “The Highest of Prizes,” only a slightly longer look at The Stepford Wives’ Peter Masterson (shown with Paul Burke), likely in his television debut, as a ferry boat crewman:
The final episode of Naked City, “Barefoot on a Bed of Coals,” is famous for Dustin Hoffman’s brief but showy role in the teaser, as a two-bit holdup man who gets blasted by a beat cop (Steven Hill). Hoffman made the closing credits – just barely, in the penultimate slot – but a lot of familiar faces around him didn’t. Here’s the great Philip Bruns (The Out of Towners; Harry and Tonto; The Great Waldo Pepper) as a paramedic who grouchily tends to Hoffman’s wound:
And Melvin Stewart (Trick Baby; Scarecrow and Mrs. King) as a witness to the crime:
Soon it’s revealed that Hill’s character isn’t really a cop. Fortunately, there are plenty of real uniformed policemen around, played by the likes of Ramon Bieri (Badlands; Sorcerer):
. . . and future biker movie star Tom Stern, also uncredited:
For the fellow TV junkies in the audience who had watched these Naked Citys before reading this post . . . how many of these actors did you spot?
Naked City, the cop show of the early sixties that nearly every classic TV buff adores, is famous for three things: (1) the beautifully wrought dialogue and wonderfully strange characters created by its chief writers, Stirling Silliphant and Howard Rodman; (2) the extensive location shooting, which makes the show an ever more valuable etching of Manhattan at a specific moment in time; and (3) the roster of extraordinary character actors and future stars who received, in many cases, their first exposure on Naked City, after eagle-eyed casting executive Marion Dougherty spotted them on the Off-Broadway stages that had begun to flourish in the city.
Today’s post will address only the last of those elements of Naked City, one which has always been a source of both joy and frustration for me. Joy, because Naked City frequently offers the thrill of spotting a favorite actor in one of his very first parts. Like Bruce Dern, for instance, who hovers around the margins of “The Fault in Our Stars,” a 1961 episode in which he plays an aspiring theater actor:
(The man standing next to Dern is Alvin Epstein, whom New York magazine recently called “one of the most important classical actors of his generation.” Another facet of Naked City’s historical value is that Dougherty often hired theater actors and acting teachers – including Sanford Meisner and Peggy Feury – who ended up making few, if any, other substantial appearances on film.)
Dern, in “The Fault of Our Stars,” does not receive credit on screen – and therein lies the frustration I mentioned above. Because while Naked City scripts tended to include more speaking parts than your average one-hour drama – the show’s detectives canvassed the city in most episodes, talking to a cross-section of New York types as they sought each week’s wrongdoer – the large, ornate font of the credits left room for only a few of them to be acknowledged.
That stands in stark contrast to the other important New York-based dramas of the early sixties – The Defenders, East Side/West Side, The Nurses – which rigorously credited every bit player in the crawl at the end of the show. (This is just a guess, but I’ll bet that union rules required New York-produced shows to credit every actor with a speaking part; certainly, they had to make room for some crew members, like scenic artists and electricians, whose positions were never credited on Hollywood-based programs of that era. Because Naked City was technically produced in Los Angeles by Screen Gems, it may have been able to evade those rules.)
Let’s take another early episode as an example of how hard it was to snag a screen credit on Naked City. “Button in a Haystack” has ten credited guest stars, beginning with Albert Salmi (a star character actor then) and ending with Mitch Ryan (an unknown then, but a star character actor a decade later). But “Button” also features twenty-one unbilled actors in small speaking roles. One of them (center) is the very recognizable William Duell, who played Sefelt, one of the asylum residents in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest:
Here are the rest of the uncredited cast members of “Button in a Haystack,” and the roles they played: Paul Alberts (Luna), Griff Evans (Man with shovel), Mike Dana (Man in pit), Charles Roy Pritchard (Ballistics Expert), Herbert Ratner (Seymour), Stephen Hart (Beatnik), Vern Stough (Pretty Girl), Bernard Reed (Candy Store Owner), Pete Gumeny (Benevento), Tom Ahearne (Patrolman), Howard Morton (Ivy Leaguer), Jerome Raphel (Man with bucket), Edd Simon (Cop), Ricky Sloane (Martin), Joey Kennedy (Little Boy), Susan Melvin (Little Girl), Mac Munroe (Police Stenographer), Frank Tweddell (Mr. Jassey), Bo Enivel (Truck Driver), and Louis Guss (Counterman).
Recognize any of those names? Neither did I, except for Susan Melvin (briefly a popular child actress, she appeared in the movie Ladybug, Ladybug and starred in an unsold pilot for Naked City’s executive producer, Herbert B. Leonard) and Louis Guss, who enjoyed a long career as a character actor, specializing in surly, swarthy Noo-Yawk types.
But many of the uncredited actors on Naked City do look quite familiar – either because they appeared in a million other TV episodes and movies in small parts, like Louis Guss, or occasionally because they went on to become major stars, like Bruce Dern. When I watched Naked City for the first time, I recognized most of the embryonic stars (but not all of them, as I recently discovered) and some of the character actors. But many of those unnamed faces drove me bonkers. I knew they were somebody, but I couldn’t place the faces. I wanted to identify them, and that information simply hadn’t been published anywhere.
Fortunately, many of the production records for Naked City survive among Herbert B. Leonard’s papers, which now reside in the Special Collections Department of UCLA’s Charles E. Young Library. Recently I had a reason to peruse those papers, and while I was doing so I kept an eye out for the names of some of those uncredited actors that I couldn’t identify on sight. Let’s take a look at some of them. (For the purposes of this post, I’m excluding the earlier, half-hour incarnation of Naked City, because a) there are no DVDs from which to take frame grabs and b) its casting director, Jess Kimmel, didn’t possess the same skill in finding talented unknowns that Marion Dougherty had.)
First let’s go back to “The Fault in Our Stars,” which cast Roddy McDowall as one of several variations on Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov that he played around this time (“Journey Into Darkness,” for Arrest and Trial, was another one). It turns out that the cab driver who fares poorly at the hands of McDowall’s Nietzchean fantasies was played by our old friend Chris Gampel. I never would’ve recognized Gampel without help, since the top half of his face is cut off for the entirety of his only scene:
Later, in a beatnik joint where McDowall and friends applaud the performing poets by snapping their fingers, we catch a quick glimpse of an emcee (on stage, at left):
That’s Harvey Jason, the British-born character actor who appeared in Oklahoma Crude and The Gumball Rally, as well as dozens of TV shows in the seventies and eighties.
Later, we meet another struggling actor:
He’s played by Teno Pollick, who committed suicide in 1991. Pollick had a very minor career as a television actor in the sixties, but he had another claim to fame – as one of Anthony Perkins’s boyfriends during the mid-sixties.
One of the earliest hour-long episodes, “Debt of Honor,” opens on a poker game, in which the dealer is played, without credit, by the familiar character actor Howard Smith:
Later, in one of the series’ most elaborate action sequences, the cops pursue a pair of gunmen who show up just long enough to engage in a fatal shoot-out with Detectives Flint (Paul Burke), Arcaro (Harry Bellaver), and Parker (Horace McMahon). This is the about the best look you get at the faces of the two hoods:
The man on the left is Charles Dierkop, later a familiar face in movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (on which Marion Dougherty consulted, without credit) and a regular on Police Woman, as one of the Mutt-and-Jeff detectives who supported glamorous Pepper Anderson (Angie Dickinson). After his “Debt of Honor” bit part, associate producer Sam Manners sent a memo to Dougherty, praising Dierkop for his helpfulness during the shoot and encouraging her to hire him again. Dougherty must have seen merit in Dierkop as well, because the diminutive character actor turns up in bit parts in about a dozen Naked Citys.
And the fellow on the right in the image above? His name is Jerry Ragni, and as far as I can tell, he is indeed the same Gerome Ragni who went on to co-write Hair.
Moving into the second season, Ernest Kinoy’s delightful, semi-comedic 1961 caper “The Hot Minerva” features Eugene Roche as a plainclothesman:
Someone at the Internet Movie Database noticed Roche’s unbilled appearance here, even though he’s squinting into the sun for all of his twenty seconds of screen time. But Sharon Farrell’s blink-and-you-miss-it bit, as an actress who doesn’t seem to mind bumping into Detective Flint (series star Paul Burke), hasn’t been recorded on the internet until now:
Farrell soon skipped town and was playing leading roles on Hollywood TV shows less than a year later.
“A Case Study of Two Savages,” featuring Rip Torn and Tuesday Weld as a pair of hillbilly psychopaths on a bloody rampage across midtown, earned some notoriety in 1962 for its brutal and unexpected violence. Torn has a scene where he buys a pistol from a cheerful young gun store clerk and then proceeds to wipe the smile off his face:
The clerk has several they’re-grooming-me-as-a-star close-ups and even a name – “Fred!” – so I expected him to turn up in the credits, but no dice. If you’ve been keeping up with recent posts, you’ll recognize Fred’s real name – he is Tom Simcox, a star of Joseph Stefano’s The Haunted pilot. Like Farrell, Simcox played his last bit part on Naked City before heading west and becoming one of TV’s minor leading men of the sixties. (The Internet Movie Database may have scooped me on Simcox, but it also claims that Ned Glass appears in this episode as a bartender. Wrong: the bartender is played by a less familiar character actor named Ken Konopka.)
“Today the Man Who Kills the Ants Is Coming” – perhaps the best of Howard Rodman’s wonderfully opaque episode titles – takes place mostly in the police squadroom. Among the assembled cops there, we can catch quick glimpses of the Tony-nominated Broadway actor Rex Everhart (at right, with Milt Kamen):
. . . and the great African American actor Godfrey Cambridge (Watermelon Man), in the center of this crowd (wearing plainclothes):
Next time, we’ll continue our bit-player tour through the Naked City’s third and final season, which yields an ever more bountiful crop of uncredited young actors.
