Ben Casey Outtakes

In 1972, Bruce Dern asked for permission to leave the set of the science fiction film Silent Running, in which he played the lead, for two days in order to shoot a cameo in an upcoming John Wayne Western, The Cowboys.  During those two days, Dern became one of only a handful of actors to earn the dubious honor of killing John Wayne on screen.  (Of Wayne’s Westerns up to that point, only The Alamo saw him die at the end – and, of course, everybody died at the Alamo.)  Supposedly it was Dern’s idea to not only shoot the Duke, but to shoot him in the back.  When they heard that their star was about to become the most hated man in the movies, the producers of Silent Running panicked and declared that their movie had to come out before The Cowboys.  (It didn’t, and it wasn’t a hit.)

The director of The Cowboys was Mark Rydell, and had Dern not been released for those two days, he had a backup plan: Rydell would have used the star of Ben Casey, the television series that launched his directing career, in the small role that Dern ended up playing.  Blowing away John Wayne in a big movie in 1972 ended up as a footnote in Bruce Dern’s ascendant filmography but for the struggling Vince Edwards, it might have been an important career move.  His days as a leading man were over, but it’s easy to imagine an alternate cinema history in which Edwards turned character actor and played Al Lettieri-type roles – hulking, aging thugs, in other words – in some of the many action and neo-noir movies that came out of Hollywood during the late seventies and eighties.

That’s just one of the many tangents that I stumbled across, but didn’t have room to mention, while I was researching these pieces on Ben Casey and on Vince Edwards’s strange career as a TV director.  And because it’s what blogs are good for, I’m going to reheat a selection of this ephemera below.

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One of the things that entertained me about Vince Edwards was that the group of ragtag hangers-on that he cultivated.  Lots of insecure stars had such entourages but, perhaps because they were looking for ways to rake the churlish, interview-averse Edwards over the coals, journalists did an unusually thorough of enumerating and mocking these individuals.

Unlike that other movie star Vince – Vincent Chase, the fictional character (based on Mark Wahlberg) at the center of the recent TV series Entourage – our Vince’s entourage didn’t start with family.  Although he had six siblings, including a twin brother, Bob Zoino, Edwards kept his family at arm’s length.  In fact, one of the ways he managed to look bad during the run of Ben Casey was by exchanging barbs in the press with both Bob (who was a bus driver while Vince was Ben Casey) and their mother, June.

Of the colorful characters who did follow Vince around and keep him entertained between takes and horse races, the closest to him was Bennie “The Fighting Jew” Goldberg, a pint-sized former boxer.  Dwight Whitney, in one of two snide but detailed TV Guide profiles of Edwards, described Goldberg as the star’s “dresser, errand boy and general factotum.”  Born in Poland and raised in Detroit, Goldberg lost the world bantamweight title to Manuel Ortiz in 1943, and died the day before September 11, 2001.  According to co-star Harry Landers, Goldberg was a thug who implemented various small-time cons to keep his boss in gambling money.  His Hollywood career included bit parts, usually as boxers, in John Frankenheimer’s All Fall Down and an episode of Cannon, and at least once on Ben Casey.  Here he is in that episode (“When I Am Grown to Man’s Estate,” 1965):

Along with Goldberg, Edwards’s lackeys included a pair usually described as his “stand-ins”: Ray Joyer and George Fraser.  Joyer’s lasting claim to fame is as the orderly (below) who slams the gurney through the double doors at the start of the final version of Ben Casey‘s opening credits – a role he sought to exploit a year after Ben Casey went off the air, by suing Bing Crosby Productions in both state and federal court for residuals.  Alas, the trades didn’t report on the resolution of his case.  Joyer died young, around age 50, in 1975.  Fraser was an animal trainer who kept lions, and his experiences were the springboard for the Edwards-scripted-and-directed TV movie Maneater.  But, surprisingly for someone in such a colorful line of work, little else about Fraser turns up in the newspaper archives.

But the most fascinating member of Edwards’s circle was one who escaped Whitney’s notice: a jack-of-all-trades named Marcus W. Demian.  Well, actually, his real name was Bernard Schloss, although he claimed at one point that he was a full-blooded Native American from Yakima, Washington – likely an utter fabrication.  Demian was born around 1928, and more than Edwards’s other hangers-on, he seemed to have some artistic aspirations.  Demian was probably the screenwriter Edwards occasionally told the press he had on retainer to work up movie ideas for him when he was riding high.  Demian accrued writing credits not only on Edwards’s projects (Ben Casey, Matt Lincoln, and Maneater) but on Channing, some British TV series, and the movie Little Moon and Jud McGraw.  Demian was also an actor – below is an image of him in his one Ben Casey bit part – with screen credits as recent as 2011’s Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star, in which Demian played “Old Man with Pig.”  Demian was also a restaurateur – a partner, in fact, in the early Los Angeles vegetarian restaurant the Aware Inn – and a master hypnotist.

It gets better: In October 1966, Demian made the front page of the New York Times for menacing his wife with an eight-inch ice pick after she leapt from his red sports car on Manhattan’s First Avenue.  And why was that front page news? Because the fellow who hopped out of his chauffeur-driven limo and took the ice pick away from Demian was Henry Barnes, the city’s traffic commissioner, who was 60 years old and a survivor of several heart attacks.  Demian fled, twice – first by jumping into the sports car and speeding away, and a second time by diving out a window when the police showed up at his nearby apartment.  The cops finally nabbed him a few blocks away and booked Demian on assault and weapons charges.

Oh, and the woman who almost got ice-picked?  According to the New York Times piece, she was a television performer named Diane Hittleman, and she had married Demian in Mexico in June of 1966 and dumped him three months later.  Well … maybe.  Also in 1966, there was a local TV program called Yoga For Health, featuring one Diane Hittleman (who also did yoga with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, and died in May).  At the time that Diane Hittleman, who was the same age as Demian’s Diane Hittleman, was married and had three children with her co-host, Richard Hittleman.  One has to wonder if the Times was giving Hittleman a break, and if Marcus picked up some bad habits from his famous (and famously womanizing) buddy.

Needless to say, I tried to contact Marcus Demian for an interview, but the phone numbers were all disconnected and the letters and e-mails bounced back.  If you’re out there, Marcus, we’d love to hear your Vince Edwards stories.

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Also present in the murky history of Ben Casey is another bizarre true crime story, one with echoes of the Leonard Heideman case that I wrote about early in the days of this blog.

“Wife Held For Murder in Film Editor’s Death,” read the May 8, 1962 headline in the Los Angeles Times, which reported that one Jeane Sampson, 40, had shot her husband to death during a struggle for a revolver.  The dead man, identified in the papers as John E. Sampson, 50, and usually credited on screen as Edward Sampson, had edited the pilot for Ben Casey and been the show’s head film editor during its first season.

According to Jeane Sampson, she was a battered wife, and her husband had interrupted a suicide attempt.  She told the police that she was going to shoot herself because she “got tired of being used as a punching bag.”  The deadly chain of events began when Jeane Sampson called her parents in Palm Springs and told them of her plans to commit suicide.  They begged her to wait, but Jeane locked herself in the bathroom of their home (at 1103 Eilinita Avenue in Glendale) with a revolver and the couple’s only child, ten year-old Terry.  Edward Sampson heard the commotion and went to investigate.  Terry screamed through the bathroom door to her father:  “Go away, Daddy, or you’ll be hurt.”  Daddy should’ve listened.  Instead he broke down the bathroom door and then – blammo.

Jeane Sampson was arraigned for murder the following week and a hearing was set for the fall.  She didn’t make it.  On August 13, Jeane Sampson took a fatal overdose of barbiturates.

Sampson’s credits included the TV series Disneyland and Lassie and several juvie B-movies (one of which, 1955’s The Fast and the Furious, he evidently co-directed).  He also shot some second-unit hospital footage for Ben Casey.  On the same day it published his obituary, Variety noted separately that producer Stanley Kramer’s upcoming feature A Child Is Waiting would include stock footage of a baby’s birth, filmed by Sampson for the Casey episode “I Remember a Lemon Tree” (one of the two written in part by Marcus Demian!).

And yes, I did try to find out what happened to Terry Sampson (whose birth in 1952, when her father was working at Paramount, had been announced in Variety).  But – perhaps for the best – I didn’t succeed.

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Next week, I’ll conclude our Ben Casey coverage with an interview feature.  No, you’ll never be able to guess who the two subjects are – and in fact, I’m still as surprised as I am delighted that I found them and that they remembered so much.  Tune in….

Update, 1/27/2015: Marcus W. Demian died on November 20, 2014, at 86.  The spelling of George Fraser’s name has been corrected above and elsewhere on this blog, thanks to a kind note from his son, Tam O’Connor Fraser.

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